[Revolutionary Samizdat of 1880s - Schäffle, Albert Eberhard Friedrich. Sushchnosti sotsializma d-ra A. Sheffle (i.e., The Quintessence of Socialism.)

€ 15.000,00

The text of the brochure is translated from the eighth edition (Gotha: F. A. Perthes, 1885) as it stated on the first page. The brochure contains nine chapters. Every leaf is numbered starting from the first chapter (44 numbered pages). With introduction to the first and the second editions. This manuscript book was created by Russian underground Marxists as they tried to spread their ideas. This kind of books were banned in the country at the time and a person cought distributing them would had faced arrest. This is an interesting historical evidence of the most revolutionary time in Russian history. The Quintessence of Socialism by a German economist Albert Schäffle (1831-1903) was mostly interpreted as an unbiased presentation of socialism but outside of Germany it was used as a basic introduction to socialism. It was a strictly scientific yet popular and easy to understand account of socialism. Among other things the author analyzes socialist idea of the public organization of production and the role of collective property in the process of production and sharing. It's not surprising that the book attracted a lot of attention of Social Democrats because Schäffle based a lot of his brief exposition of socialist economics on the theories of Marx. He concentrated solely upon economic theory and inadvertently emasculated Marxism of its political and truly revolutionary implications. Marx responded negatively to Schäffle's work claiming he had never built a socialist system in his works and called Schäffle's views on socialism fantasies but these fantasies became very popular among certain groups of revolutionaries including Narodnaya Volya in Russia. Schäffle's book was widely read by interested Social Democrats cannot be doubted, for it was admirably brief, clearly written, and easily available. Obviuosly the Social Democrats could not accept Schäffle without some modifications. Nevertheless, some of them imbibed a sufficient dosage to set up a tension within the movement between the traditional democratic-political principles and what they took to be their socialist-economic principles as defined by Schäffle. For example, a member of Land and Liberty group (Zemlya i Volya) Osip Aptekman wrote in his memoirs: ''[...] Marx's Zur Kritik and The Quintessence of Socialism by Schäffle were going the rounds. Plekhanov importuned me to scrutinize these two books. I constantly read it outloud and translated while Plekhanov was catching it on the fly and capturing it in his memory'' (Aptekman, O. Obshchestvo Zemlya i Volya of 1870s). First Russian translation was published in Geneva in 1881 (from the 7th German edition). In 1906 were published first Russian editions in Odessa and St. Petersburg.