Marx and Engels on an Alternative Russian Option

Of high interest in the light of Engels's “unavoidable developmental path” or Marx's “tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results” are prospects for a transition to communism in Russia based upon the peasant commune (the obshchina), rather than upon capitalist development. The possibility that Russia might achieve communism without passing through a capitalist stage has been attributed to Marx (see, e.g., Howard and King 1989: 138; also 1985: 233). This attribution is based in part on a letter of 1877 (responding to a critical review of Capital) opining that “if Russia continues along the path it has followed since 1861” – an allusion to incipient capitalistic progress – “it will miss the finest chance that history has offered to a nation, only to undergo all the fatal vicissitude of a capitalist system” (“Letter to Otechestvenniye Zapiski”; MECW 24: 199). By implication, the “finest chance” relates to the commune option, and this is how it has often been understood in the literature. This remark is actually crossed out in Marx's manuscript (199n.), and it is not clear why or by whom; however, what follows immediately makes much the same point. Thus Marx points out that his Chapter 26 (“The Secret of Primitive Accumulation”) concerned specifically Western European experience, and it had concluded in the following terms: