1881 Letters of Vera Zasulich and Karl Marx

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank Tsegaye Moreda for re-encoding the text into digital format.

Notes

1 To avoid confusion the designation of drafts as ‘first’, ‘second’, etc. follows the usage of ·the original publication of 1924 (and since repeated by all the other publications to date). We actually present them in a different order, that in which they were most probably written, i.e. ‘second’, ‘first’, ‘third’ and ‘fourth’. For the discussion on which that re-ordering is based, see S. Hinada, ‘On the meaning in our time of the drafts of Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich (1881)’, Tokyo, 1975. Also, see the article by H. Wada in T. Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road, London, Routledge, 1983, pp. 64–5.

The division into text and page footnotes follows that of the original 1924 publication. The square brackets in the text indicate passages deleted by Marx. An arrowed bracket indicates shorter passages deleted first within sections which were then deleted in total.

2 Translated directly from Marx's own quotations which follow the French edition of Capital, Volume 1 (published in 1872). The equivalent passage in the broadly available Penguin edition of Capital (which follows, however, the 4th German edition of 1890 and which differs from the text Marx had preferred) can be found in Karl Marx, Capital, Harmondsworth, 1976, Volume 1, p. 876.

3 K. Marx, Capital, Harmondsworth, 1976, Volume 1, p. 876.

4 K. Marx, Capital, Harmondsworth, 1976, Volume 1, p. 927.

a This sentence is heavily corrected. The original text reads as follows: ‘Thus the process of which I speak eventually transforms private, fragmented property – into capitalist property, transforms one kind of property into another.’

b This paragraph reappears later in the draft in the following form: ‘From a historical point of view, there is only one serious argument in favour of the inevitable dissolution of Russian communist property. It is as follows: Communist property existed everywhere in Western Europe, and it everywhere disappeared with the progress of society. Why should it escape the same fate only in Russia?’

5 Artel (Russian): a team working jointly, usually under an elected leader and sharing out its net proceeds. A pre-industrial work-association, a co-operative run along traditional lines, often used by the Russian rural craftsmen and by the peasant-workers’ gangs operating outside their villages, e.g. a group of seasonal construction workers, coming from the same place, under a contract to build a house in the provincial town. The term ‘artel relationship’ is used broadly to refer to all types of traditional co-operation in production, ownership and landholding, inclusive of the peasant land commune (obshchina).

6 See Note 1 above.

7 K. Marx, Capital, Harmondsworth, 1976, Volume 1, p. 874–5.

8 K. Marx, Capital, Harmondsworth, 1976, Volume 1, p. 874–5.

9 K. Marx, Capital, Harmondsworth, 1976, Volume 1, p. 928.

10 Marx is here referring to L. Morgan, Ancient Society, London, 1887, p. 552.

c At this point, the following section is appended to p. 13 of the draft:

The history of the decline of the primitive communities has still to be written (it would be wrong to put them all on the same plane; in historical as in geological formations, there is a whole series of primary, secondary, tertiary and other types). So far, only very rough sketches have been made. Still, the research is sufficiently advanced to warrant the assertion that: (1) the primitive communities had incomparably greater vitality than the Semitic, Greek, Roman and a fortiori the modern capitalist societies; and (2) the causes of their decline lie in economic factors which prevented them from going beyond a certain degree of development, and in historical contexts quite unlike that of the present-day Russian commune. [A number of bourgeois writers – mainly of English extraction, like Sir Henry Maine – above all seek to demonstrate the superiority and sing the praises of capitalist society, the capitalist system. People enamoured of this system, unable to understand the … ].

One has to be on one's guard when reading the histories of primitive communities written by bourgeois authors. They do not shrink [from anything] even from falsehoods. Sir Henry Maine, for example, who enthusiastically collaborated with the English government in its violent destruction of the Indian communes, hypocritically tells us that all the government’s noble efforts to maintain the communes succumbed to the spontaneous power of economic laws!

d These considerations reappear in only slightly altered form on p. 12 of the draft: ‘[Apart from any action by a hostile environment, the gradual development, the growth of movable property belonging not to the commune but to individual members – e.g. wealth in the form of livestock, and sometimes even serfs or slaves … . The ever more marked role of movable property within the rural economy, such accumulation may alone serve to dissolve … . ] Apart from the reaction of any other harmful element, of a hostile environment, the gradual growth of movable property in the hands of individual families – e.g. their wealth in livestock, and sometimes even slaves or serfs – such private accumulation is in the long run sufficient by itself to dissolve the primitive economic and social equality, and to foster at the very heart of the commune a conflict of interests which cuts into communal ownership, first of the arable land, and ultimately of the forests, pastures, waste ground, etc., having already converted them into a communal appendage of private property.’

11 Sec Note 5 above.

12 Marx referred here to the city-states of Russia, of which the Great Novgorod in the North West was the most prominent by its riches and by an elaborate self-government.

13 Volost (Russian): in the period in question, a territorial subdivision of specifically peasant rural administration, incorporating a number of peasant communes. A volost was run by peasant elders and local magistrates closely controlled by the state officialdom. Only the peasants came under its jurisdiction.

e An illegible word: perhaps cul-de-sac. In the ‘Third Draft’, the word impasse appears in the corresponding place.

14 See Note 5 above.

15 A Russian measure of land area = 1.09 ha = 2.7 acres.

16 See Note 7 above.

17 K. Marx, Capital, Harmondsworth, 1976, Volume 1, p. 928.

f Using a blue pencil, Marx corrected the last sentence and the beginning of this sentence to read as it does above. The original text is as follows: ‘These organisms have the structure of a genealogical tree. By cutting the umbilical cord which attached them to nature, the ‘agrarian commune’ became etc … .’

18 An additional footnote was introduced here by D. Ryazanov, attempting to decipher a single deleted passage, but failing to establish any consistent sentences within it.

19 Marx refers to the Executive Committee of the People's Will organisation. For an interpretation which doubts that this approach to Marx by the Executive Committee was actually made, see the article H. Wada in T. Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road, Routledge, London, 1983, p. 68. B. Nikolaevskii has suggested that the ‘first’ and ‘second’ drafts presented were actually unrelated to Marx’s letter to Zasulich and formed part of preparations for a separate pamphlet concerning the Russian peasant commune at the request of the Executive Committee of People’s Will (B. Nikolaevskii, 'Legenda ob 'utaenmom pis'me' Marksa', Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, 1957, vol. 37, no. 5 (705), p. 96), but the evidence available seems to negate that view.

20 See Note 19 above.

21 See Note 7 above.

22 See Note 9 above.