Concerned about Capitalist Development: Karl Marx and Max Weber on the Fate of Russia

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe scholarship devoted to the Marx–Weber relationship has so far neglected to compare the attitudes of the two thinkers about Russia. This paper seeks to fill that gap, focusing in particular on Marx’s late writings from the 1870s about the revolutionary prospects in Russia and Weber’s essays on the Russian Revolution of 1905. Marx and Weber’s approaches to Russia reveal significant similarities: above all, a radically critical view of capitalist development. The study of the Russian situation, marked by the surviving village commune, drove Marx to question the positive assessment of capitalism’s historical role, which had been his firm belief for a long time, and to welcome the possibility that a backward country might move directly to socialism, skipping the capitalist stage. Not surprisingly, such conclusions were ignored by Marx’s Russian followers such as Plekhanov and Struve, who regarded capitalist industrialisation as an essential precondition for social revolution in Russia. As for Weber, the events of the First Russian Revolution, which he followed with a particularly intense interest, confirmed a crucial argument of his sociological theory, namely that advanced capitalism hindered the achievement and preservation of civil liberties and constitutional rights.