35. K. Marx. Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich
1) In dealing with the genesis of capitalist production I stated that it is founded on "the complete separation of the producer from the means of production" (p. 315, column I, French edition of Capital) and that "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" (I.e., column II).a
I thus expressly limited the "historical inevitability" of this process[399] to the countries of Western Europe. And why? Be so kind as to compare Chapter XXXII, where it says:
The "process of elimination transforming individualised and scattered means of production into socially concentrated means of production, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, this painful and fearful expropriation of the working people, forms the origin, the genesis of capital... Private property, based on personal labour ... will be supplanted by capitalist private property, based on the exploitation of the labour of others, on wage labour" (p. 341, column II).b
Thus, in the final analysis, it is a question of the transformation of one form of private property into another form of private property. Since the land in the hands of the Russian peasants has never been their private property, how could this development be applicable?
Second Draft[4 0 8]
1) I showed in Capital that the metamorphosis of feudal production into capitalist production had its starting point in the expropriation of the producer, and more particularly that " the basis of this whole development is the expropriation of the agricultural producer" (p. 315 of the French ed.). I continue: "To date this (the expropriation of the agricultural producer) has not been accomplished in a radical fashion anywhere except in England ... all the other countries of Western Europe are undergoing the same process" (I.e.).
So I expressly limited this "historical inevitability" to the "countries of Western Europe". In order to eliminate the slightest doubt about my thinking, I state on p. 341:
"Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where ... the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals are labourers or not labourers, private property changes its form."
Thus the process which I analysed has replaced one form of the private and parcelled property of the labourers with the capitalist property of a tiny minority (I.e., p. 342),(1) caused one kind of property to be substituted for another. How could this be applicable to Russia, where land is not and never has been the "private property" of the agricultural producer? So the only conclusion which they would be justified in drawing from the progress of things in the West is this: to establish capitalist production in Russia it would be necessary to start by abolishing communal property and exprop-riating the peasants, i.e. the great mass of the people. This, by the way, is the wish of the Russian liberals,(2) but does their wish prove any more than the wish of Catherine II to transplant into Russian soil the Western guild system of the Middle Ages?[409]
1) Thus the expropriation of the agricultural producers in the West served to "transform the private and parcelled property of the labourers" into the private and concentrated property of the capitalists.[410] But none the less it is the substitution of one form of private property for another form of private property. In Russia, on the contrary, it would be a question of substituting capitalist property for communist property.
2) From the historical point of view there is only one serious argument in favour of the fatal dissolution of Russian communist property. It is this: communist property existed everywhere throughout Western Europe; everywhere it has disappeared with social progress. Why would it escape the same fate in Russia alone?
Certainly! If capitalist production is to establish its sway in Russia, the great majority of the peasants, i.e. of the Russian people, must be converted into wage-earners and consequently expropriated by the advance abolition of their communist property. But in any event, the Western precedent would not prove anything at all!(3)
2) The Russian "Marxists" of whom you speak are quite unknown to me.[411] To the best of my knowledge, the Russians with whom I am in personal contact hold diametrically opposed views.[412]
3) From the historical point of view the only serious argument in favour of the fatal dissolution of Russian communal property is this: communal property existed everywhere throughout Western Europe, yet everywhere it has disappeared with social progress; how would it be able to escape the same fate in Russia?
In the first place, in Western Europe the death of communal property and the birth of capitalist production are separated from one another by an immense interval(4) embracing a whole series of successive economic revolutions and evolutions, of which capitalist production is merely the most recent. On the one hand, it has resulted in a wondrous development of the social productive forces(5); but on the other hand, it has revealed its own incompatibility with the very forces which it engenders. Its history is henceforth no more than a history of antagonisms, crises, conflicts and disasters. In the last place, it has revealed to the entire world, except those blinded by self-interest, its purely transitory nature. The nations in which it has attained its highest peak in Europe and America aspire only to break its chains(6) by replacing capitalist production with cooperative production, and capitalist property with a higher form of the archaic type of property, i.e. communist(7) property.
If Russia were isolated in the world, if it therefore had to work out for itself the economic conquests which Western Europe has only acquired by passing through a long series of evolutions, from the existence of its primitive communities to its present state, there would be no doubt, at least in my eyes, that its communities would be fatally condemned to perish with the progressive development of Russian society. But the situation of the Russian commune is absolutely different from that of the primitive communities of the West. Russia is the only country in Europe where communal property has kept going on a vast, nationwide scale, but at the same time Russia exists in modern historical surroundings, it is contemporary with a higher culture, it is linked to a world market dominated by capitalist production. By appropriating the positive results of this mode of production, it is thus in a position to develop and transform the still archaic form of its rural commune, instead of destroying it. (Let me note in passing that the form of communist property found in Russia is the most modern form of the archaic type, which has itself passed through a whole series of evolutions.) If the supporters of the capitalist system in Russia deny the feasibility of such a plan, let them prove that to exploit machines Russia was forced to pass through the incubation period of mechanical production! Let them explain to me how they succeeded in introducing in their own country in a few days, so to speak, the mechanism of exchange (banks, credit institutions, etc.), which it took the West centuries to devise.(8)
4) What is threatening the life of the Russian commune is neither historical inevitability nor a theory; it is oppression by the State and exploitation by capitalist intruders, who have been made powerful at the expense of the peasants by the very same State.
4) The archaic or primary formation of our globe itself contains a series of layers of differing ages, one superimposed on the other; in the same way, the archaic form of society reveals to us a series of different types, marking progressive epochs. The Russian rural commune belongs to the most recent type of this chain. Under it, the agricultural producer already has private ownership of the house in which he lives and the garden which forms the complement to it. This is the first element of decay in the archaic form, an element unknown in older forms. On the other hand, the latter are all based on the natural relations of kinship between the members of the commune, whereas the type to which the Russian commune belongs, released from this tight bond, is thereby capable of further development. The isolation of rural communes, the lack of connexion between the life of one and the life of another, this localised microcosm is not encountered everywhere as an immanent characteristic of the last of the primitive types; but everywhere it is found it always gives rise to a central despotism over and above the communes. In Russia it seems to me an easy matter to do away with this primitive isolation, imposed by the vast extent of the territory, as soon as the government shackles have been cast off.
I am now coming to the heart of the matter. There is no denying that the archaic type, to which the Russian commune belongs, conceals an intimate dualism which, given certain historical conditions, might entail ruin. The ownership of the land is communal, but each peasant tills and uses his field on his own account, just like the small peasant in the West. Communal ownership, parcel farming of the land — this combination, useful in more distant times, becomes dangerous in our own age.(9) On the one hand, the possession of chattels, an element which is playing an increasingly important part in agriculture itself, progressively differentiates the fortune of the members of the commune and there gives rise to a conflict of interests, especially under fiscal pressure from the State; on the other hand, the economic superiority of communal property, as the basis of cooperative and combined labour, is lost. But it should not be forgotten that in farming the undivided grasslands the Russian peasants already practise the collective method, that their familiarity with the contract of artel would greatly facilitate the transition from parcel farming to collective farming, that the physical lie of the land in Russia encourages combined mechanised farming on a large scale, and that finally Russian society, which has so long lived at the expense of the rural commune, owes it the first advances necessary for this change. Of course, it is only a question of a gradual change which would commence by placing the commune on a normal footing on its present basis.
5) Leaving aside any more or less theoretical question, I need not tell you that today the very existence of the Russian commune is threatened by a conspiracy of powerful interests. A certain kind of capitalism, nourished at the expense of the peasants through the agency of the State, has risen up in opposition to the commune; it is in its interest to crush the commune. It is also in the interest of the landed proprietors to set up the more or less well-off peasants as an intermediate agrarian class, and to turn the poor peasants — that is to say the majority — into simple wage-earners. This will mean cheap labour! And how would a commune be able to resist, crushed by the extortions of the State, robbed by business, exploited by the landowners, undermined from within by usury?
Third Draft[41]
Dear Citizen,
To deal thoroughly with the questions posed in your letter of February 16 I would have to go into matters in detail and break off urgent work, but the concise exposé which I have the honour of presenting to you will, I trust, suffice to dispel any misunder-standings with regard to my so-called theory.
I. In analysing the genesis of capitalist production I say: "At the core of the capitalist system, therefore, lies the complete separation of the producer from the means of production ... 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" (Capital, French ed., p. 315).
Hence the "historical inevitability" of this process is expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe. The cause of that limitation is indicated in the following passage from Chapter XXXII: "Private property, based on personal labour ... will be supplanted by capitalist private property, based on the exploitation of the labour of others, on wage labour" (I.e., p. 341).
In this Western movement, therefore, what is taking place is the transformation of one form of private property into another form of private property. In the case of the Russian peasants, their communal property would, on the contrary, have to be transformed into private property. Whether one asserts or denies the inevitability of that transformation, the reasons for and against have nothing to do with my analysis of the genesis of the capitalist system. At the very most one might infer from it that, given the present state of the great majority of Russian peasants, the act of converting them into small proprietors would merely be the prelude to their rapid expropriation.
II. The most serious argument which has been put forward against the Russian commune amounts to this:
Go back to the origins of Western societies and everywhere you will find communal ownership of the land; with social progress it has everywhere given way to private property; so it will not be able to escape the same fate in Russia alone.
I will not take this argument into account except in so far as it is based on European experiences. As for the East Indies, for example, everyone except Sir Henry Maine and others of his ilk realises that the suppression of communal landownership out there was nothing but an act of English vandalism, pushing the native people not forwards but backwards.
Primitive communities are not all cast from the same die. On the contrary, taken all together, they form a series of social groupings which differ in both type and age, marking successive stages of evolution. One of these types, which convention terms the agricultural commune, is also that of the Russian commune. Its counterpart in the West is the Germanic commune, which is of very recent date. It did not yet exist in the days of Julius Caesar, nor did it exist any longer when the Germanic tribes came to conquer Italy, Gaul, Spain, etc. In Julius Caesar's day there was already an annual share-out of the arable land between groups, the gentes and the tribes, but not yet between the individual families of a commune; farming was probably also carried out in groups, communally. On Germanic soil itself this community of the archaic type turned, by natural development, into the agricultural commune as described by Tacitus. From that time on we lose sight of it. It perished obscurely amidst incessant wars and migrations; perhaps it died a violent death. But its natural viability is proved by two incontestable facts. Some scattered examples of this model survived all the vicissitudes of the Middle Ages and have been preserved into our own day, for instance the district of Trier in my own country. But, more importantly, we find the imprint of this "agricultural commune" so clearly traced on the commune that succeeded it that Maurer, in analysing the latter, was able to reconstruct the former. The new commune, in which arable land belongs to its cultivators as private property, at the same time as forests, pastures, common lands, etc., remain communal property, was introduced by the Germanic peoples in all the countries which they conquered. Thanks to the characteristics borrowed from its prototype, it became the sole centre of popular liberty and life throughout the Middle Ages.
The "rural commune" is also found in Asia, among the Afghans, etc., but everywhere it appears as the most recent type and, so to speak, as the last word in the archaic formation of societies. It is in order to emphasise this fact that I went into the Germanic commune in some detail.
We must now consider the most characteristic features distinguishing the "agricultural commune" from more archaic communities.
1) All other communities are based on blood relations between their members. One cannot enter them unless one is a natural or adopted relative. Their structure is that of a family tree. The "agricultural commune" was the first social grouping of free men not held together by blood-ties.
2) In the agricultural commune, the house and its complement, the courtyard, belonged to the agricultural producer as an individual. The communal house and collective dwelling, on the other hand, were the economic basis of more primitive communities, long before the introduction of the pastoral or agrarian way of life. True, one finds agricultural communes where the houses, despite having ceased to be collective dwelling places, periodically change owners. Individual usufruct is thus combined with communal property. But such communes still carry their birthmark: they are in a state of transition between a more archaic community and the agricultural commune proper.
3) The arable land, inalienable and communal property, is periodically divided between members of the agricultural commune in such a way that everyone tills the fields assigned to him on his own account and appropriates the fruits thereof as an individual. In more primitive communities the work is carried out communally and the communal product is shared out according as it is required for consumption, excepting the portion reserved for reproduction.
One can understand that the dualism inherent in the constitution of the agricultural commune is able to endow it with a vigorous life. Freed from the strong but tight bonds of natural kinship, communal ownership of the land and the social relations stemming from it guarantee it a solid foundation, at the same time as the house and the courtyard, the exclusive domain of the individual family, parcel farming and the private appropriation of its fruits give a scope to individuality incompatible with the organism of more primitive communities.
But it is no less evident that in time this very dualism might turn into the germ of decomposition. Apart from all the malign influences from without, the commune carries the elements of corruption in its own bosom. Private landed property has already slipped into it in the guise of a house with its rural courtyard, which can be turned into a stronghold from which to launch the assault on the communal land. That is nothing new. But the vital thing is parcel labour as a source of private appropriation. It gives way to the accumulation of personal chattels, for example cattle, money and sometimes even slaves or serfs. This movable property, beyond the control of the commune, subject to individual exchanges in which guile and accident have their chance, will weigh more and more heavily on the entire rural economy. There we have the destroyer of primitive economic and social equality. It introduces heterogeneous elements, provoking in the bosom of the commune conflicts of interests and passions designed first to encroach on the communal ownership of arable lands, and then that of the forests, pastures, common lands, etc., which once converted into communal appendages of private property will fall to it in the long run.
As the last phase of the primitive formation of society, the agricultural commune is, at the same time, a transitional stage leading to the secondary formation, and hence marks the transition from a society founded on communal property to a society founded on private property. The secondary formation, of course, includes the series of societies resting on slavery and serfdom.
But does this mean to say that the historical career of the agricultural commune must inevitably come to such an end? Not at all. Its innate dualism admits of an alternative: either the property element will gain the upper hand over the collective element, or vice versa. It all depends on the historical environment in which the commune is placed.
Let us discount for the time being all the miseries besetting the agricultural commune in Russia and consider only its capacity for further development. It occupies a unique position, without precedent in history. Alone in Europe, it is still the predominant organic form of rural life throughout an immense empire. The common ownership of land provides it with the natural basis for collective appropriation, and its historical setting, its contemporaneity with capitalist production, lends it — fully developed— the material conditions for cooperative labour organised on a vast scale. It can thus incorporate the positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine Forks. It can gradually replace parcel farming with combined agriculture assisted by machines, which the physical lie of the land in Russia invites. Having been first restored to a normal footing in its present form, it may become the direct starting point for the economic system towards which modern society tends and turn over a new leaf without beginning by committing suicide.(1)
The English themselves attempted some such thing in the East Indies; all they managed to do was to ruin native agriculture and double the number and severity of the famines.
But what about the anathema which affects the commune — its isolation, the lack of connexion between the life of one commune and that of the others, this localised microcosm which has hitherto prevented it from taking any historical initiative? It would vanish amidst a general turmoil in Russian society.
The familiarity of the Russian peasant with the artel would especially facilitate the transition from parcel labour to cooperative labour, which he already applies anyway, to a certain extent, in the tedding of the meadows and such communal undertakings as the land drainage, etc. A quite archaic peculiarity, the pet aversion of modern agronomists, still tends in this direction. If on arriving in any country you find that the arable land shows traces of a strange dismemberment, lending it the appearance of a chessboard composed of small fields, you need be in no doubt that it is the domain of an extinct agricultural commune! Its members, without having studied the theory of ground rent, perceived that the same amount of labour, expended on fields differing in natural fertility and location, will give differing yields. To spread the fortunes of labour more evenly, they therefore divided the land first into a certain number of areas, determined by the natural and economic divergences of the soil, and then broke up all these larger areas into as many parcels as there were labourers. Then each man was given a plot of land in each area. It goes without saying that this arrangement, perpetuated by the Russian commune into our own day, is at odds with the requirements of agronomy. Apart from other disadvantages, it entails a waste of energy and time. Nevertheless, it favours the transition to collective farming, with which it seems to be so much at odds at first glance. The parcel...[3]
Endnotes
[9] 9 On February 6 (17), 1772, on the initiative of Prussia, a convention was signed in St. Petersburg, soon joined by Austria, defining preliminary terms for the partition of Poland. The final version was signed on July 25 (August 5) of the same year. This partition undermined the national independence of Poland, which was in a state of deep social and political crisis (see Note 72). By the fourth state, Engels probably meant Rzecz Pospolita, which was left with about two-thirds of its territory (on the role of the Polish nobility in these events, see this volume, p. 55).
[399] An allusion to the following passage from Zasulich's letter to Marx of February 16, 1881: "... the theory of the historical inevitability for all countries of the world to pass through all the phases of capitalist production" (see Note 397).
[408] 4<>8 See Note 398.
[409] The reference is to the general statute on the organisation of cities passed by Catherine II on April 21, 1785. Among other things, it included the regulations concerning the organisation of the trades into guilds and the rights and obligations of the craftsmen and apprentices.
[410] Marx is probably referring to a similar passage from the French edition of his Capital, p. 341: "Private property, based on personal labour, this property which welds, so to say, an isolated and autonomous worker to the external 43-1317 conditions of labour, will be supplanted by capitalist private property, based on the exploitation of the labour of others, on wage labour."
[411] Marx replies to the following passage in Vera Zasulich's letter: "Recently we have often heard the opinion that the rural commune is an archaic form which history, scientific socialism — in a word all that is the most indisputable— condemns to death. The people preaching this call themselves your disciples par excellence: 'Marxists'. Their strongest argument is often: 'Marx says so.' " 'But how do you deduce this from his Capital? In it, he does not deal with the agrarian question and does not speak about Russia,' the objection is put to them. "'He would have said this if he had spoken about our country,' your disciples reply, possibly just a bit too boldly."
[412] Marx is referring, above all, to Pyotr Lavrov, Hermann Lopatin and Nikolai Danielson, with whom he kept in touch for years, as well as Lev Gartman, Nikolai Morozov and others, with whom he became acquainted in 1880-81.
[41] 41 Engels is referring to the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the Greek leader in the Trojan War. It is described in Book I of Homer's Iliad, p. 24
[3] 3 A reference to the assassination attempt on the Russian Emperor Alexander II made by Antoni Berezowski in Paris in 1867. Berezowski was sentenced to twenty years of hard labour.