Ethical Socialism

Drahomanov often speaks of himself as a socialist, but without giving al­legiance to any of the schools or sects of socialism. There are few con­cepts which have so many varied and contradictory meanings as does “socialism.’’ Therefore it is necessary for us to investigate more exactly Drahomanov’s definition of socialism.

I have always been a socialist, ever since I was given Robert Owen and Saint-Simon to read in the gymnasium. But I have never thought of trying to put into practice in our country any stereotyped foreign socialist program.⁴⁷

We shall probably not be mistaken in the thesis that socialists who do not themselves spring from the working classes are usually socialists for reasons of ethics. However, only a few admit this. Usually the intellec­tual socialist has the tendency to cloak his resentments and hopes with scientific reasons. The commonest rationalization is the idea of a histori­cal determinism which, inevitably, is leading mankind from a capitalist to a socialist epoch.

It is not the fact that Drahomanov became a socialist because of ethical motives which distinguishes him, but the fact that he himself realized it.

In Russia, up to the present, the socialist movement has depended chiefly on men who do not personally belong to the work­ing classes and who become involved because of moral motives, be­cause of the need to strive for the realization of social justice, and not because of economic needs or class ambitions.⁴⁸

But what is “social justice’’? Many socialists live in the conviction that as long as capitalism exists, there can be no social justice, but that when a socialist order is victorious in the future, all imaginable social justice will automatically be assured. Drahomanov could not accept any such fatalism, just as he was not convinced by the bourgeois liberals who whitewashed the evils of the present system as the regrettable but un­fortunately inevitable by-products of the great economic and technical progress of the nineteenth century.

I have expressed an idea that has always seemed heretical to many of my socialist friends, i.e., that in the social movement of our time, and even in the labour movement in the narrower sense, the question of communism [i.e., the future collective economic or­der] does not have a large place. For this movement the primary questions are ones such as the length of working hours, the stan­dardization of wages, social insurance for the workers, etc. The im­portance of these is quite independent of the question of commu­nism. Moreover, there are radical, and even revolutionary, agrarian movements (e.g., in Ireland) which have no communist elements at all.⁴⁹

Drahomanov gave a Galician friend the following advice:

You [the Galician Radicals] need European socialist ideas, and perhaps also something of the Russian sympathy for the peasants. But all this must be adapted to Austrian and specifically Galician conditions. I would advise you to pay special attention to Ireland and Belgium. The former is interesting to us because of its agrarian problems and the skillful organization of the peasantry; the latter because of the linking of social agitation with political demands, because of the co-operation of the Walloons and the Flemings in the labour movement, and also because of the parallel between the development of social agitation and that of the co-operative move­ment.... I would advise you to pay attention to all of the move­ments of workers and peasants, and not only to those which label themselves socialist and collectivist. In practice socialism has taken on the nature of social politics. Such things as the eight-hour working day are of more importance than any quarrels over the form of collectivization (state or communal), or even over collec­tivism itself. Moreover, the political and cultural conditions neces­sary for socialist policy, such as the general franchise, technical ed­ucation, etc., are very important.

Naturally, a far-reaching and systematic policy of social reform cannot be based on the forces of organized labour alone. Drahomanov names three elements which contribute to social progress. The intellectual socialists are the theoreticians, critics, and propagandists. Then there are the mass movements of workers (unions, co-operative societies, etc.), similar peasant movements, and the political campaigns of the socialist and populist parties, such as the struggle for universal suffrage. Finally, we must include the measures of the ruling classes and the existing gov­ernments, even conservative ones, for the abolition or alleviation of so­cial injustice (e.g., the English factory laws).⁵¹ All three factors contrib­ute toward social progress, and a common denominator must be found. An interesting attempt to find one for Russia is represented by Drahomanov’s social and political program in “Free Union.”⁵² As the author explains in his commentary, this program is the result of a com­parison and synthesis of the maximum reform program of the zemstvo constitutionalists and the Russian liberal bourgeois press on the one hand, and the minimum demands of the European socialist and labour movements on the other. The soundness of Drahomanov’s judgment is indicated by the fact that, since these ideas were enunciated, almost all the more important points of his social and economic programme (legal limitation of the working day, public arbitration between employers and employees, progressive income taxes, etc.) have been adopted by most civilized states.

That Drahomanov was free from the prejudices common to most of the socialists of his time is demonstrated by his realization that everywhere in Europe it is not the poorest, but the culturally and economically strongest, workers who lead in the labour movements.⁵³ At the same time he warned the socialists against lumping the stable and productive busi­nessmen together with speculators and adventurers on the stock ex­change, even though in practice it may sometimes be difficult to dis­tinguish the various groups in the bourgeoisie.⁵⁴

Drahomanov was convinced that in principle a socialist collectivism was preferable to private enterprise.

In our time it would be enough if each progressive party would really strive to do for the cause of progress what it promises in its program. With this the time of socialism would also come much more quickly.⁵⁵

Drahomanov was not a specialist in national economy. Compared to constitutional questions and problems of nationalities and foreign policy, economic questions take a relatively subordinate place in his writings. Various passages in his articles, particularly his strongly expressed inter­est in co-operatives, give grounds for the assumption that Drahomanov desired guild socialism (to use a later term) rather than centralized state socialism. It is doubtful whether he was fully aware of the problems created by the complexity of modern economic life. But all his works are impregnated with a strong social ethic, which is the more commendable as Drahomanov’s longing for social justice never caused him to forget—as did so many socialists—the value of political freedom and personal independence. The following definition is noteworthy.

The socialist ideal is not Arakcheev’s military settlements but, on the contrary, a brotherhood of well-rounded (integral, as the West European socialists say), developed individuals.⁵⁶

This comes from one of Drahomanov’s polemics against a group of Russian socialists. Arakcheev was Minister of War under Alexander I (tsar from 1801 to 1825). While in office he established military settle­ments where soldiers performed agricultural labour combined with mili­tary exercises and military discipline. In the Russian and Ukrainian lan­guages these colonies have become synonymous with insane despotism and gruesome regimentation. It is noteworthy that, as early as the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Drahomanov was keenly aware of an Arakcheevian spirit among Russian socialists.

We cannot summarize Drahomanov’s opinion of individual leaders and theoreticians of the Russian revolutionary and socialist movements, such as Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, Lavrov, Plekhanov, and others. Let us only remark that Drahomanov always testified to his respect and admira­tion for Herzen, although he criticized a number of his views. Herzen was perhaps the only leading man in the Russian revolutionary move­ment in whose humanism and liberalism Drahomanov had implicit trust.

The Russian socialist movement of the second half of the nineteenth century, of which Drahomanov was the contemporary, critic, and in part participant, had two stages of development, populist and Marxist. The term populist covers various leading individuals and groups from Herzen and Bakunin to theNarodnaia volia (People’s Will) Party—roughly from the middle of the century to the 1880s. In spite of divergences on various points, all had certain basic convictions in common, one of which was the belief that, thanks to the institution of the mir (a form of agrarian community), Russia would be able to bypass the purgatory of Western capitalism and proceed straight into the socialist paradise. Hand in hand with this went a general idealization of the Russian peasant as the sup­posed vessel of the highest social and moral values.

This romantic idealization of the muzhik (peasant) was completely for­eign to Drahomanov’s nature.

At the present level of education of the masses, many valuable interests of civilization, which someday may be useful to the demos, are simply unavailable to the demos of today. The people may betray them or, even worse, simply trample on them.... In a word, thou shalt not set up for thyself any graven image, either in heaven, or on earth, or in the “people.”⁵⁷

The traditions on which the socialists of the populist persuasion drew were those of the great Cossack and peasant rebellions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, led by Stenka Razin and Pugachev.

Russian society lacks the conditions necessary for socialism, which are to be found in urban, industrialized, educated, liberal Europe, where one can see unbroken progress since the tenth-eleventh centuries.⁶⁰

Drahomanov hoped, however, that with the development of the economy, city life, and education, the socialist movement in the Russian Empire would finally also enter the “natural’ ’ (general European) path.

One sees that in our lands too we already have an embryo of a better society. We dare to say that the beginnings of an urban edu­cated working class, which combines manual labour and reading, are the foundation of all foundations.⁶¹

Since the expected general peasant revolt did not materialize, the Rus­sian populists, or rather the most active and courageous of them, turned in the 1870s to individual terror in order to force concessions from the tsarist regime. This terror reached its peak with the assassination of Alexander II on 1 March 1881. Drahomanov never rejected revolutionary methods as such, but felt that they should be only one part of the many­sided political battle against the existing regime. However, he considered that individual terror was a decidedly pathological phenomenon.

[In the given circumstances of lawlessness, for which tsarism is responsible], one can excuse political terrorism and seek to under­stand its causes. As historians we must recognize the good it has brought: it has forced all of [Russian] society to reflect on the rea­son for these assassinations. But it is inadmissible to glorify assas­sination, to present it as a pattern to be imitated, or to elevate it to the rank of a system....

Even if we leave aside the moral aspect of the matter, these kill­ings have a negative political effect. They strike the government, but do not overthrow it, and offer nothing new in its place.⁶²

The death of Alexander II was followed by the rapid disintegration of the populist movement. The most courageous participants were dead, the organization was smashed, and its members were scattered, their faith shaken. In the 1880s a new form of the Russian revolutionary and socialist movement, Marxism, began to rise on its ruins. Drahomanov lived through the rise and fall of populism, but he saw only the beginning stages, the incubation period, of Russian Marxism. Drahomanov died before the (Marxist) Social-Democratic Party had crystallized organiza­tionally in Russia. Nonetheless, he was able to define clearly his position in regard to this movement.

We must remember that the point of departure for Russian Marxism was criticism of the preceding stage, populism. The attacks of Ple­khanov, the father of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, were directed against the same populist illusions—belief in the mir, in peasant revolts, and in individual terror—that Drahomanov had already criticized. Thus there is a certain parallel between Drahomanov’s posi­tion and that of the early Russian Marxists. This gives some verisimilitude to the claims of those later authors who tried to present Drahomanov as a forerunner of Russian Marxism.⁶³

Certain Ukrainian authors, particularly some Ukrainian communists of the 1920s, were eager to construct a national, non-Great Russian geneal­ogy for Ukrainian Marxism; Drahomanov had a place of honour in this family tree.⁶⁴ This thesis could be buttressed by Drahomanov’s personal associations with certain Marxists or semi-Marxists, such as his friend Mykola Ziber (1844—88), professor of national economy at the Univer­sity of Kiev, who resigned and went into exile as a protest against Drahomanov’s dismissal from the University. Ziber, who was prominent in Ukrainian circles in Kiev, was one of the first men in the Russian Empire to take an active interest in Marxism, and there is no doubt that through Ziber Drahomanov early became acquainted with the basic ideas of Marxism.

In spite of these points of contact, Drahomanov must not be counted as a predecessor, but rather as a decided opponent, of Marxism. Indeed, he took a premeditated and conscious stand; within the limits of his influ­ence he made every attempt to combat Marxist influences among the Ukrainian and Russian socialists. In this he had some success in Galicia.

Drahomanov had serious reservations about Marxist theories. He was ready to accept historical materialism only as an heuristic hypothesis, not as a dogma.

You know that I cannot agree to an exclusively economic philos­ophy of history and politics; this I regard as a sort of metaphysics. Human life is too complex to be explained by only one element. I have nothing against a one-sided theory if it makes easier the dis­covery of new facts. Unfortunately the followers of Marx, or rather those of Engels, seldom investigate anything; they rather draw a priori and often completely arbitrary historical and political fig­ures.⁶⁵

Drahomanov endeavoured to show that the political revolutions of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Holland, England, America, and France were by no means the work of only one class, the bourgeoisie, and to point out that they could not be reduced to purely economic terms.⁶⁶

Drahomanov also had serious practical grounds for his opposition to Marxism, and these were perhaps decisive. He did not believe that sec­tarian methods, which he imputed to the Marxist German Social Demo­crats, were suited to Eastern Europe.

The conditions necessary in order that German-style sec­tarianism may progress are not only the existence of a homogeneous and compact mass—the factory workers—but also the spirit of military discipline, to which the Germans are ac­customed even before they become socialists. Such sectarianism is ineffective even among the French workers; for us, a scattered peasant people, it would be even more so. Thus the English system of organizing on the basis of a practical task, and not of a catechism, suits us better.⁶⁷

The spread of Marxism was undoubtedly a form of German cultural penetration into Russia. Drahomanov feared that this influence would strengthen the Russian socialists’ inclination toward sterile dogmatism in theory and toward centralism in practical politics.

Of all the West European socialist parties, the German has had the greatest impact on Russia. This is to be explained by the strong personalities who have belonged to it recently, such as Marx, Engels, Lassalle. Their writings have become the substratum of the ideas of the Russian socialists. Moreover, their geographical near­ness to St. Petersburg plays a role, as does the fact that the Jews have an important place in the socialist movements of Germany and Russia and, particularly in the north-western provinces, pre­sent the natural link between the two socialist movements.⁶⁸

So far we have considered separately Drahomanov^,s stands on the two phases of Russian socialism, populism and Marxism. He also criticized certain features which, to a greater or lesser degree, were com­mon to almost all the leaders and groups of Russian socialists. The chief of these was the lack of a sense of political freedom in the Western mean­ing of the term.

The social and revolutionary theories [of the populists] are in es­sence much closer to absolutism or to any other dictatorship than to liberalism.⁶⁹

In this respect Marxism was no better than populism. Drahomanov said that the doctrine (developed by its publicists, Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich) of the dictatorship of the proletariat was a farce in a land in which, at that time (1884), factory workers made up only about one per cent of the population.⁷⁰

An example of the dictatorial tendencies of the Russian socialists was to be found in the fact that each individual group, instead of speaking only in its own name, considered itself the sole representative of the whole revolutionary movement. Where in reality there were merely little circles of conspirators, parties and committees were spoken of. Revolu­tionary hierarchies, which behaved as if they were already the potential government of the Russian state, were set up.

The Executive Committee [of Narodiiaia volia] is far from being a government. Nonetheless, in certain circles one can observe symptoms not dissimilar to those of courtiers: the fear of contradict­ing the Executive Committee in anything... the effort to draw profit from its fame, etc. Such customs... make the Russian revo­lutionary and the Russian governmental milieus similar.⁷¹

Drahomanov was particularly indignant over the cynicism of the Rus­sian socialists in tactical methods. He felt that the Jesuitical theory that the ends justify the means would lead ultimately to the complete despotism of one person.⁷²

One indication of the amorality of the Russian socialists was the fact that they called their acts of individual terror executions of the judgments of underground tribunals. Drahomanov considered such an attitude a per­version of justice and legality.⁷³ He considered equally improper the use of “pious frauds,’’ such as falsified tsarist manifestoes, to incite the peasants to rebellion.⁷⁴ Drahomanov, who believed that “to an honest man, speaking the truth is as natural a necessity as is breathing fresh air,’’⁷⁵ was revolted by such intentional lies and by the whole un­scrupulous Machiavellianism of the Russian revolutionaries.

Russian socialists of all stripes had an extremely intolerant and chauvinistic attitude toward the oppressed nationalities of the Russian Empire. At times an exception was made for the Poles, who were counted as a power factor and wooed with concessions, often at the ex­pense of the Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Lithuanians.⁷⁶ The Russian socialists and revolutionaries systematically ignored the existence of the plebeian peoples, who, unlike the Poles, had no aristocracy of their own. In their proclamations the Russian revolutionary parties always spoke of a “Russian people’’ as if the population of the Empire were homogeneous and the Russians (Great Russians or Muscovites) not one nationality among others. At a public meeting of Russian political emigrants, and in a pamphlet,⁷⁷ Drahomanov proposed that a publishing house be created to edit socialist publications in the languages of all the peoples of the Russian Empire, from the Estonians to the Armenians and from the Romanian Bessarabians to the Tatars. Like other similar proposals, this was rejected with scorn;⁷⁸ anything which deviated from the centralist line was rejected by the Russian revolutionaries as “narrow nationalism,” or at best as “an unnecessary splintering of forces which should be united against the common enemy, tsarism.” No Russian socialist took the trouble to study Drahomanov’s arguments that, without the participation of all the peoples of the Empire, the struggle against tsarism could not be successful, and that if such collaboration was to be achieved, the legitimate cultural and political interests of the non­Russian peoples had to be considered. These Russian socialists, who per­petuated tsarist bigotry against the subjugated nationalities, nevertheless considered themselves the most perfect internationalists.

These peculiar internationalists refuse to see that instead of a socialist pan-humanity, they propose to us an aristocratic, bour­geois, bureaucratic, and necessarily one-sided, nationally dyed state. Their pseudo-cosmopolitan sermons against nationalism are not directed against those who oppress other nationalities, but rather against those who seek to defend themselves against this pressure. They seek to substitute denationalization for internation­alism.⁷⁹

Drahomanov thought that the cause of this pathological state of affairs was easy to explain. The anti-tsarist opposition was burdened with the tradition of the Russian state. This might serve as an example of the well-known sociological rule that the opposition often forms itself ac­cording to the pattern of the regime it opposes.

Just look more closely at the genealogy of these claims that in Great Russia we find the best conditions for the victory of demo­cracy, anti-capitalism, socialism, the search for truth, etc. At the root of the genealogical tree you will find old Muscovite reaction­ary chauvinism and the doctrine that “Moscow is the third Rome and there will never be a fourth.”⁸⁰

[The Russian revolutionaries] do not desire to shake the idea of an absolute and centralized state, but only to transfer the power to other hands.⁸¹

Drahomanov’s struggle against the Russian socialist factions of his time was a foreshadowing of the split, a generation later, of the world socialist movement into a democratic and a totalitarian wing.