The author” of the article “Karl Marx Before the Tribunal of 
Mr. Zhukovsky” is obviously an intelligent man and, had he found 
a single passage in my account of “primitive accumulation” to 
support his conclusions, he would have quoted it. For want of such 
a passage he considers it necessary to seize hold of an annexe, a 
polemical sortie against a Russian “belletrist”“ printed in the 
appendix to the first German edition of Capital. What do I there 
reproach this writer for? The fact that he discovered “Russian” 
communism not in Russia but in the book by Haxthausen,* the 
adviser to the Prussian Government, and that in his hands the 
Russian community serves only as an argument to prove that the 
old, rotten Europe must be regenerated by the victory of 
Pan-Slavism. My appreciation of this writer may be correct, it may 
be wrong, but in neither case could it provide the key to my views 
on the efforts “pycckHxb alogeH HaliTH AAA CBOero OTeYeCTBa NyTb 
Pa3BHTiA, OTAHYHDIM OTb TOTO, KOTOPbIMb WiAa WH HAeTb Ganagnan 
Espona etc.” © 

In the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital— 
which the author of the article about Mr. Zhukovsky knows, 

because he quotes it—I speak of “a great Russian scholar and 
critic’* with the high esteem which he deserves. In_ his 
noteworthy articles” the latter dealt with the question whether 
Russia should start, as its liberal economists wish, by destroying the 
rural community in order to pass to a capitalist system or whether, 
on the contrary, it can acquire all the fruits of this system without 
suffering its torments, by developing its own historical conditions. 
He comes out in favour of the second solution. And my 
honourable critic would have been at least as justified in inferring 
from my esteem for this “great Russian scholar and critic” that I 
shared his views on this question as he is in concluding from my 
polemic against the “belletrist’”” and Pan-Slavist that I rejected 
them. 

Be that as it may, as I do not like to leave anything to 
“guesswork”, I shall speak straight out. In order to reach an 
informed judgment of the economic development of contempor- 
ary Russia, I learned Russian and then spent several long years 
studying official publications and others with a bearing on this 
subject. I have arrived at this result: if Russia continues along the 
path it has followed since 1861, it will miss the finest chance that 
history has ever offered to a nation, only to undergo all the fatal 
vicissitudes of the capitalist system. 

II 

The chapter on primitive accumulation does not pretend to do 
more than trace the road by which in Western Europe the 
capitalist economic order emerged from the entrails of the feudal 
economic order. It thus describes the historical movement which 
by divorcing the producers from their means of production 
transforms them into wage-workers (proletarians in the modern 
sense of the word) and the owners of the means of production into 
capitalists. In this history, “every revolution which acts as a lever for 
the advancement of the capitalist class in its process of formation 
marks an epoch; above all that which, by stripping great masses of 
men of their traditional means of production and subsistence, 
suddenly hurls them on the labour market. But the basis of this 
whole development. is the expropriation of the agricultural 

producer. To date this has not been accomplished in a radical 
fashion anywhere except in England ... but all the other countries of 
Western Europe are undergoing the same process etc.” (Capital, 
French edition, p. 315). At the end of the chapter the historical 
tendency of capitalist production is summed up thus: That it “itself 
begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the 
metamorphoses of nature”; that it has itself created the elements of a 
new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the 
productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of 
every individual producer; that capitalist property, which actually 
rests already on a collective mode of production, can only be 
transformed into social property. 

I do not give any proof at this point for the very good reason 
that this assertion itself is nothing but a summary recapitulation of 
long developments previously set out in the chapters on capitalist 
production. 

Now, in what way was my critic* able to apply this historical 
sketch to Russia? Only this: if Russia is tending to become a 
capitalist nation, on the model of the countries of Western 
Europe,—and in recent years it has gone to great pains to move in 
this direction—it will not succeed without having first transformed 
a large proportion of its peasants into proletarians; and after that, 
once it has been placed in the bosom of the capitalist system, it will 
be subjected to its pitiless laws, like other profane peoples. That is 
all! But this is too little for my critic. It is absolutely necessary for 
him to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of 
capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory 
of general development, imposed by fate on all peoples, whatever 
the historical circumstances in which they are placed, in order to 
eventually attain this economic formation which, with a tremen- 
dous leap of the productive forces of social labour, assures the most 
integral development of every individual producer. But I beg his 
pardon. This does me too much honour, and yet puts me to 
shame at the same time. Let us take an example. In various places 
in Capital I allude to the destiny of the plebeians of Ancient 
Rome. They were originally free peasants cultivating their own 
plots of land on their own account. In the course of Roman 
history they were expropriated. The same movement which cut 
them off from their means of production and subsistence involved 
not only the formation of large landed property but also the 
formation of large money capital. Thus, one fine morning, there 

were on the one hand free men stripped of everything except 
their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this 
labour, the owners of all the acquired wealth. What happened? 
The Roman proletarians became not wage labourers but an idle 
“mop”, more abject than the former “poor wurres” of the 
southern states of America; and alongside them there developed a 
mode of production that was not capitalist but based on slavery. 
Thus events strikingly analogous, but occurring in different 
historical milieux, led to quite disparate results. By studying each 
of these evolutions on its own, and then comparing them, one will 
easily discover the key to the phenomenon, but it will never be 
arrived at by employing the all-purpose formula of a general 
historico-philosophical theory whose supreme virtue consists in 
being supra-historical.