Karl Marx: The chapter on primitive accumulation [in Marx's Capital] claims no more to 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 which, by divorcing the producers from their means of production, converted the former into wage-labourers (proletarians in the modern sense of the word) and the owners of the latter into capitalists. In this history 'all revolutions are epoch-making that serve as a lever for the advance of the emergent capitalist class, above all those which, by stripping great masses of people of their traditional means of production and existence, suddenly hurl them into the labour-market. But the base of this whole development is the expropriation of the agricultural producers. Only in England has it so far been accomplished in a radical manner...but all the countries of Western Europe are following the same course' etc. (Capital, French edition, p. 315).. At the end of the chapter, the historical tendency of production is said to consist in the fact that it 'begets its own negation with the inexorability presiding over the metamorphoses of nature'; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, giving the greatest impetus both to the productive forces of social labour and to the all-round development of each individual producer; that capitalist property, effectively already resting on a collective mode of production, cannot be transformed into social property. I furnish no proof at this point, for the good reason that this statement merely summarizes in brief the long expositions given previously in the chapters on capitalist production. Now, what application to Russia could my critic make of this historical sketch? Only this: if Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation like the nations of Western Europe--and in the last few years she has been at great pains to achieve this-- she will not succeed without first transforming a large part of her peasants into proletarians; subsequently, once brought into the fold of the capitalist system, she will pass under its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all. But it is too little for my critic. He absolutely insists on transforming my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historical-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed, in order to arrive ultimately at this economic formation which assures the greatest expansion of the productive forces of social labour, as well as the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. That is to do me both too much honour and too much discredit. Let us take an example. At various points in Capital I allude to the fate that befell the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each tilling his own plot on his own behalf. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement that divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of large landed property but also of big money capitals. Thus one fine morning there were, on the one side, free men stripped of everything but their labour-power, and on the other, ready to exploit their labour, owners of all the acquired wealth. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage-labourers, but an idle mob more object than those who used to be called 'poor whites' in the southern United States; and what opened up alongside them was not a capitalist but a slave mode of production. Thus events of striking similarity, taking place in different historical contexts, led to totally disparate results. By studying each of these developments separately, and then comparing them, one may easily discover the key to this phenomenon. But success will never come with the master-key of a general historico-philosophical theory, whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical. [Karl Marx: a letter to the Editorial Board of Otechestvennye Zapiski. This appears in "Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and 'The Peripheries of Capitalism" by Teodor Shanin, Monthly Review 1983] Louis Proyect
