Pathways of Social Development: A Brief Against Suprahistorical Theory

Abstract

The chapter on primitive accumulation² does not claim to do more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist economic order emerged from the womb of the feudal economic order. It therefore presents the historical movement that, by divorcing the producers from their means of production, converted the former into wage workers (proletarians in the modern sense of the word) and the possessors of the latter into capitalists. In this history “all revolutions³ are epoch-making that serve as levers to the emergent capitalist class, above all those that, by stripping great masses of people of their means of production and traditional existence,⁴ suddenly hurl them onto the labor market. But the basis of this whole development is the expropriation of the agricultural producers. It has been accomplished in a radical manner thus far only in England … but all countries of Western Europe are going through the same movement,” etc.⁵ At the end of the chapter, the historical tendency of production is summed up thus: that it “begets its own negation with the inexorability that governs the meta-morphoses of nature”; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order by giving the greatest impetus at once to the productive forces of social labor and to the complete development of every individual producer; that capitalist property, already resting de facto on a collective mode of production,⁶ cannot but be transformed into social property.

This is the concluding section of a letter Karl Marx wrote (but never sent) to the editors of Otechestvennye Zapiski (Fatherland Notes), a journal published in St. Petersburg. Marx composed the letter to explain his views on how Russia might develop, and to correct the interpretation of Capital given—prophetically, it turned out—by N. K. Mikhailovskii (1842–1904), a positivist philosopher and prominent theoretician of later-day populism. It has usually been assumed that the letter was written in November 1877 but recent research would assign it to 1878, i.e., after the collapse of hopes that Russian defeat in the war with Turkey would be followed by revolution (H. Wada, “Karl Marx and Revolutionary Russia,” in T. Shanin, Latt Marx and the Russian Road [to be published in 1983]). The letter is Marx’s clearest statement of the scope and limits of the historical analysis in chap. 24 of Capital, as well as his sternest warning against overgeneralizing that sketch of how capitalism emerged in Western Europe.