MARX TO MAXIM KOVALEVSKY°” 

[London, April 1879] 

Mr Kareyev’s work*” is excellent. However, I do not quite share 
his view of the Physiocrats.”” I take the theory of capital, i.e., of 
the contemporary structure of society. From Petty to Hume, this 
theory was developed only piecemeal—a bit here, a bit there— 
according to the requirements of the period when the author 
lived. Quesnay was the first to put political economy on its real, 
i.e., capitalist, basis, and the curious thing is that he did so 
apparently as a landowner’s tenant. Mr Kareyev is definitely 
wrong in saying that the Physiocrats opposed only one social 
occupation, namely agriculture, to others, i., industry and 
commerce, but never went, unlike Smith, so far as to oppose social 
classes to each other. If Mr Kareyev had recalled the main idea of 
Ricardo’s Preface to his famous creation,* in which he examines 
three classes of the state (landowners, capitalists, and workers, the 
latter tilling the soil by their labour), he would have seen that the 
first invention of the three classes in the economic sphere and 
their mutual relations could find a place only in the system of 
agriculture, where Quesnay put it. In addition, a writer should 
distinguish between what an author really gives and what he gives 
only in his own imagination. This is true even of philosophical 
systems; thus, what Spinoza considered the cornerstone of his 
system and what actually constitutes that cornerstone are two 
entirely different things. It is not surprising, therefore, that some 
of Quesnay’s adherents, such as Mercier de la Riviére, saw the 
essence of the whole system in its paraphernalia while the 
English Physiocrats writing in 1798 were the first to demon- 
strate—on the basis of Quesnay’s concepts and contrary to Adam 
Smith’s—the need to abolish private ownership of land.°%