Leaping Over the “Caudine Forks”

A historical allusion quoted by Marx from ancient Roman history. In 321 BC during the Second Samnite War, the Samnites defeated the Roman army in the Caudine Forks [“Furcae Caudinae”] near the Roman city of Caudium and forced it to pass under the “yoke”. This was considered the greatest humiliation that could be imposed on a defeated army. “Passing through the Caudine Forks” means suffering greatest humiliation.

Regarding the meaning of the word “Caudine Forks” quoted by Marx, it is generally held that it refers to the process of development of capitalist production and the capitalist economic crises and disasters inevitably connected with the capitalist system. The so-called without passing through the “Caudine Forks” of the capitalist system means that it is possible to transcend the developed phase of the development of capitalist production and directly enter the phase of socialist mode of production based upon public property from the pre-capitalist mode of production. Marx’s vision of leapfrogging in his later years, though not a definite conclusion, is of great theoretical and practical significance.

The question of the “Caudine Forks” arose during a polemic between Marx and Engels and the Russian Narodniks Tkachev, while examining the future historical course of the Russian rural commune. Marx first mentioned the “Caudine Forks of capitalism” in his Reply to V.I. Zasulich (First Draft). Marx said: “In Russia, thanks to a singular combination of circumstances, the rural commune, still established on a national scale, can gradually extricate itself from its primitive characteristics and develop directly as an element of collective production on a national scale. It is only thanks to the contemporaneity of capitalist production that it can appropriate from it all its positive acquisitions without passing through its hideous vicissitudes.” “Without passing through the Caudine Forks of capitalism” put forth by Marx refers to the possibility for the Russian rural commune, under certain historical conditions, to bypass the phase of capitalist development on the basis of communal property in land, thus avoid the suffering and the disaster brought about by capitalist development to the people. On how to leap over the “Caudine Forks” of capitalism in Russia, Marx said: “If the Russian admirers of the capitalist system deny the theoretical possibility of such an evolution, I would put to them the question: In order to exploit machinery, steamships, railroads, etc., was Russia forced, like the West, to pass through a long period of incubation of machine industry? Let them further explain to me how they managed to introduce in their midst, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole mechanism of exchange (banks, credit societies, etc.), whose elaboration cost the West centuries?”. Marx’s train of thought on this question was that, given that the Russian revolution takes place timely and given the assistance of the proletariat which achieved revolutionary victory in the advanced countries of the West, Russia could enter a new society without passing through capitalist development, without undergoing the process that “one form of private property is transformed into another form of private property”. In 1877, Marx pointed out: “I have arrived at this conclusion: If Russia continues to pursue the path she has followed since 1861, she will lose the finest chance ever offered by history to a nation, in order to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.”  Marx held that so long Russia pursued the capitalism path, the Russian people would inevitably undergo all kinds of horrors and sufferings. In the Afterword to On Social Relations in Russia, Engels clearly put forth that, given the support and the assistance of the West European proletariat, “the countries which have only just succumbed to capitalist production and have salvaged gentile institutions, or remnants thereof, have in these remnants of common ownership and in the corresponding popular customs a powerful means of appreciably shortening the process of development into a socialist society and of sparing themselves most of the suffering and struggles through which we in Western Europe should work our way”, “and this is true of all countries in the pre-capitalist stage, not only Russia.”

In the Reply to V.I. Zasulich (Final Draft) of 8 March 1881, Marx did not mention the word “Caudine Forks”, but only said that “the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia”. As early as 1877, in his Letter to the Editorial Board of Otechestvenniye Zapiski [Notes on the Fatherland], when refuting his critic, Marx said, “He feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labor, the most complete development of man.” Marx held that such an assessment by his critic “is both honoring and shaming me too much”. Marx’s remarks show that he was quite sure that the application of the theory of the path of social development to the development of the backward countries of the East was different from its application to the developed countries of the West. He did not believe that the model of social development appropriate to the developed countries of the West was necessarily applicable to the backward countries of the East. In the finally drafted letter, he did not clearly put forth that Russia was capable of not passing through the “Caudine Forks” of the capitalist system.

The theory of leaping over the “Caudine Forks” has been confirmed in the process of establishing a socialist system in many backward countries in the 20th century, and is of great significance in guiding the present-day path of modernization of socialism with Chinese characteristics.