Letter to the Editorial Board of Otechestvenniye Zapiski [Notes on the Fatherland]

An article by Marx expounding on the path of social development in Russia and the scientific method in the study of social history, a letter written in French by Marx to the editorial board of the Russian journal Otechestvenniye Zapiski (Notes on the Fatherland). Written from October to November 1877. The letter is also called Letter to Mikhailovsky because it was also a response to Mikhailovsky’s article in the Otechestvenniye Zapiski. The letter was published twice in Russia in 1885, but most of the publications fell into the hands of the police; later, it was published in the Geneva Vestnik Narodnoi Voli (Herald of People’s Will), Year 1886, No. 5, and the Russian legal journal Yuridichesky Vestnik (Legal Herald) in October 1888.

In the 1870s, the growing influence of Marxism in Russia brought about a synchronous increase in reproaches and attacks on it. The Vestnik Yevropy, No. 9, 1877, published a review, Karl Marx and His Book on Capital, by the vulgar economist and publicist Zhukovsky, which, from the standpoint of anarchism, made a vicious attack on Marxism. In the face of this kind of reproach, Russian Narodnik thinker N.K. Mikhaylovsky, based on his article, Karl Marx Before the Tribunal of Mr. Zhukovsky, published in October 1877 in the Otechestvenniye Zapiski [Notes on the Fatherland], defended Marx from a Narodnik standpoint, but made an erroneous interpretation of Capital. And Marx’s Letter to the Editorial Board of Otechestvenniye Zapiski [Notes on the Fatherland] was a response to this misunderstanding. However, the letter was not sent for public publication after it was written, for two reasons: first, because Marx thought that the relevant views expressed in the letter were not mature enough to reach the level of concluding the study for publication; second, because Marx considered the possible dangers to the journal in which the letter was published. As Engels later mentioned, the letter “bears the imprint of something written for publication in Russia, but he never sent it off to Petersburg for fear that his name alone would be sufficient to jeopardise the existence of the journal that would publish his reply.” After Marx’s death, Engels found the letter accidentally while sorting out his remaining manuscripts. The Letter to the Editorial Board of Otechestvenniye Zapiski [Notes on the Fatherland] has two parts and six paragraphs, and the main contents are as follows:

First, Marx objected in his letter to turning his theory into “a universal passport” for explaining the historical development of nations and peoples. According to Mikhaylovsky’s interpretation of Capital, the socio-historical development of each country should follow the same rigid formula, rather than depend on the particular historical circumstances and conditions of each country. Marx pointed out that this interpretation was a distortion of his ideas by imposing ideas that did not belong to him. In response to this erroneous view, Marx pointed out that in the chapter “On the So-Called Primitive Accumulation” in Capital, he did make a historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe. However, it could not be absolutized and universalized, and it could be deduced from this that every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, is destined to follow this path. On the contrary, he believed that the process of development of individual peoples and nations had great differences, and that some nations could even leap over given stages of history. For this reason, Marx cited the example of the plebeians in ancient Rome. When the plebeians in ancient Rome were expropriated of cultivating their own piece of land, they became not wage-laborers but a mob of do-nothings. At the same time, in ancient Rome, there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but based on slavery. Therefore, the same historical phenomenon of expropriation of small producers produced different historical results depending on the concrete historical circumstances. “Events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results.”

Second, the letter replied to the question raised by the Russian Narodniks whether Russia could leap over the phase of capitalist development. In the 1870s, Marx read and studied various documents on social and economic development in Russia after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, based on the objective reality of the changes in economic and social development taking place in Russia. After that, he “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 capitalism”. Obviously, Marx held that if Russia continued to develop along the capitalist path that it had begun in 1861, it would inevitably fall into the misery that the capitalist countries of Western Europe had suffered and were suffering from. “If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction—she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples.”

Letter to the Editorial Board of Otechestvenniye Zapiski [Notes on the Fatherland] is an important work on the theory of Oriental development of Marx in his later years. It reflects Marx’s concern in his later years for the Oriental society and its path of development, indicating that the path of social development of a country depends on the historical context in which it is situated and the conditions provided by history and that the historical succession of social formations always manifests itself as the unity of unity and diversity. Therefore, this document greatly enriched historical dialectics and theory of social history, and provided methodological guidance for an accurate understanding of Marxism and Capital.

Anti-Dühring

The full title is Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, Philosophy—Political Economy—Socialism. A classic by Engels criticizing German petty-bourgeois thinker Eugen Dühring and systematically elaborating on the fundamental principles of Marxism. Written from September 1876 to June 1878, published in Vorwärts and its supplements from January 3, 1877, to July 7, 1878. In 1878, a single edition was published in Leipzig under the title Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, and in his letter to A. Bebel of November 14, 1879, Engels began to call it Anti-Dühring. The Chinese version was first translated by Wu Liping, and it was published by the Shanghai Jiangnan Bookstore in 1930, and in the same year, Qian Tieru’s translation of Anti-Dühring was published by the Shanghai Kunlun Bookstore.

The unification of Germany in 1871 greatly accelerated the development of capitalism, and the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, associated with it, intensified. Germany gradually replaced France as the center of the European workers’ movement. Faced with the increasingly intense class struggle, in order to fortify its dominance, the German bourgeoisie, on the one hand, actively supported the cruel suppression of the proletarian revolutionary movement by the bourgeois government, and on the other hand, it spread all kinds of vulgar economics and eclecticism in theory, and launched a massive crackdown on Marxist theory in the country. Especially after the reunification of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAP), under the influence of Lassalleanism, all kinds of opportunist and anti-Marxist ideas became popular, among which the petit-bourgeois ideologue Eugen Dühring in particular was the most representative. Eugen Dühring at first openly opposed Marxism and made a “review” of Volume 1 of Capital in 1867. In the 1870s, however, he declared his conversion to socialism, styled himself an “adept” and a “reformer” of socialism, and successively published works such as Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Socialismus (Critical History of National Economy and Socialism), Cursus Der National Und Socialökonomie (Course in National and Social Economy) and Kursus der Philosophie: als streng wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung (Course in Philosophy as Strictly Scientific World View and Life Plan). In these works, Dühring criticized the real society in Germany with a radical rhetoric, and actively sold his petty-bourgeois theory of “socialism”, which for a time deceived many people, including the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and formed a small sectarian clique within the party with him as the core. Dühring’s theory not only did serious harm to Marxist theory, but also directly threatened the solidarity and unity of the newly-unified Social Democratic Party of Germany.

In order to defend Marxist scientific theory, refute and liquidate all kinds of erroneous views of Dühring, avoid the influence of Dühring’s erroneous views on the correct direction of the German workers’ movement, and unify the Social Democratic Party of Germany under the banner of Marxist scientific theory, Engels, with the support of Marx, wrote Anti-Dühring, which comprehensively and radically criticized Dühring’s erroneous viewpoints and systematically elaborated the fundamental principles of Marxism such as Marxist philosophy, political economy and scientific socialism. The whole book Anti-Dühring was mainly written by Engels, and only the tenth chapter of the Part II. Political Economy (“From Kritische Geschichte”) was written by Marx. Engels divided Anti-Dühring into three parts, Philosophy, Political Economy, and Socialism. It begins with a targeted critique and exposure of Dühring’s ignorance, fallacies and lies in these fields, followed by a positive exposition of the fundamentals of Marxism.

First, in the Philosophy part, Engels criticized Dühring’s erroneous viewpoints from three aspects: the fundamental principles of materialist dialectics, the laws of dialectics and the dialectical process of knowledge, and systematically clarified the fundamental viewpoints of Marxist philosophy. Engels criticized Dühring’s erroneous viewpoints in ontology and the conception of motion, and expounded the fundamental principles of materialist dialectics. Dühring put forward the ontological viewpoint that the world is unified in being, and Engels pointed out that this view of Dühring was an eclectic one, and that true Marxist ontology explicitly asserts that the world is unified in matter. Engels also criticized Dühring’s fallacies about matter, motion and time, and demonstrated the indivisibility of motion from matter, the indivisibility of space and time from matter, and the absoluteness of motion. Next, on the basis of criticizing the above-mentioned metaphysical fallacies of Dühring, Engels pointed out: “Dialectics is nothing more than the science of the general laws of movement and development of nature, human society and thought”, and its three most important basic laws are: the law of unity of opposites, the law of mutual interaction and transformation between quantity and quality, and the law of the negation of the negation. Further, Engels criticized Dühring’s erroneous viewpoints in epistemology and expounded Marxist viewpoint of epistemology and the truth. Dühring put forth that man’s knowledge started from certain “principles”, and Engels pointed out that this point of view was a classical idealist apriorism, whereas Marxist epistemology, as a materialist theory of reflection, holds that human thinking, consciousness, and cognition are reflections of matter, and that “the principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result”. Finally, Engels criticized Dühring’s idealist and metaphysical fallacies on morality and law, expounded the Marxist conception of truth, and elaborated the dialectical relationship between truth and fallacy. Engels went on to point out that morality, freedom and equality are historical categories, and and that true morality, freedom, and equality will only emerge after classes have been abolished in a communist society.

Second, in the Political Economy part, Engels criticized the erroneous viewpoints of Dühring’s vulgar economy and comprehensively and accurately expounded the fundamental principles of Marxist political economy. First of all, Engels pointed out the object (subject matter) and method of political economy, elaborated the relations and processes of production, exchange and distribution in political economy, and criticized Dühring for confounding the two essentially different, though also mutually dependent, processes of production and circulation: “After just lumping together production and exchange into one, as simply production, Herr Dühring puts distribution alongside production, as a second, wholly external process, which has nothing whatever to do with the first.” Next, Engels profoundly criticized Dühring’s distortion of the relationship between economy and political force. Dühring advocated that “it is clear that all economic phenomena must be explained by political causes, that is, by force.” Engels pointed out that the decisive factor of social development is not force, but economic preconditions. “Force may be able to change the possession of, but cannot create, private property as such.” Further, Engels criticized Dühring’s erroneous viewpoint that confounded price with value. Dühring confused value and price. He held that value is the price, and that the difference between value and price was that one is expressed in money and the other is not. In this regard, Engels pointed out that value is undifferentiated human labor congealed in the commodities, that the magnitude of value of commodities is determined by the socially necessary labor expended in their production, while the price is only the monetary expression of value, the price will fluctuate up and down around the value due to changes in supply and demand. Again, Engels criticized Dühring’s erroneous viewpoint that indiscriminately used “labor-time”. Engels pointed out that labor can be divided into simple and compound labor in terms of its complexity. In measuring the value of commodities, the same labor-time makes a difference because of the distinction between simple and compound labor. Finally, Engels criticized Dühring’s distortion of Marx’s theory of surplus-value. Dühring distorted Marx’s views on capital, erroneously stating that Marx advocated that capital was born of money. Engels pointed out that Dühring’s distortion and misunderstanding concealed the essential difference between capital and money, and pointed out the essential difference between money as the general equivalent and money as capital: the formula for the circulation of the former is Commodity–Money–Commodity, while that of the latter is Money–Commodity–Money.

Third, in the Socialism part, Engels revealed the essence of Dühring’s “socialism”, pointing out that Dühring’s petty-bourgeois socialism did not start out from analyzing the actual economic conditions of capitalism, but was based on the imaginary entire equality of two men and founded on the “universal principle of justice”. Dühring’s “socialism” was a petty-bourgeois egalitarian utopia, and none of his visions for the future society went beyond the model of Prussian capitalist society. First of all, Engels proved the historical necessity of the replacement of capitalism by socialism from the fundamental principles of historical materialism. Engels has exhaustively analyzed the fundamental contradiction of capitalism—the contradiction between socialized large-scale production and the capitalist private appropriation, and pointed out that this fundamental contradiction is concretely expressed in the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as well as between the organized character of production in the individual factories and the social anarchy in the production as a whole. The cyclical economic crises that erupt in the capitalist world are a concentrated expression of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. Accordingly, Engels pointed out that could only be resolved by the seizure of state power by the proletariat and the realization of social appropriation of the means of production. Next, Engels criticized Dühring’s erroneous views on social division of labor and the distinction between town and country, pointing out that establishing a socialist system and realizing socialized large-scale production can eliminate the old social division of labor and the antagonism between town and country. Further, Engels pointed out that the production of commodities is a historical category. It has not always existed, nor does it exist forever. When the communist society achieved the social appropriation of the means of production and the socialization of production, the production of commodities characterized by exchange disappeared naturally. Finally, Engels elaborated on the Marxist conception of state. For the purpose of defending the bourgeois state, Dühring pointed out that the state existed from eternity. Engels emphasized that the state is a class and historical category, and it is a product of the development of history to a certain stage, a product of the development of class contradictions to an irreconcilable stage, and a tool of class struggle. The state, therefore, has not existed from eternity, and in a communist society, with the withering-away of classes, the state is bound to ultimately wither away.

Anti-Dühring is the most outstanding and glorious work of Marxism in the 1870s, as it summarized and expounded on the latest achievements of philosophy, natural sciences and social sciences in the 30 years since the publication of The Communist Manifesto, it is also a classic work combining revolution and scientificity. While criticizing Dühring’s erroneous viewpoints, Engels, for the first time, comprehensively and systematically elaborated the three components of Marxist doctrine and their inner connections in the form of an encyclopedia, pointing out that the teachings of Marxism are an indissoluble complete system with scientific socialism as its core and philosophy and political economy as its theoretical basis, and that materialist dialectics and the materialist conception of history as a scientific world outlook and methodology run through Marxist political economy and scientific socialism, that the founding of the materialist conception of history and the theory of surplus-value transformed socialism from utopia into science. “These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries socialism became a science.” Lenin once said that Anti-Dühring was “like The Communist Manifesto, [a] handbook for every class-conscious worker”.