Re-Read Marx’s Two Letters About the Development Path of Russia in His Later Years

Abstract

Marx’s two letters on the path of Russian social development in his later years clearly reflected Marx’s vision for the development path of Eastern society. Through a careful analysis of the texts of the two letters, it can be found that Marx believed that Russian society should not repeat the old way of Western Europe, which stripped peasants from the land and developed capitalist cities and industries. Instead, Russia should preserve the land ownership foundation of rural communes, feed agriculture with industry, import advanced technology and productivity from Europe, and transition to communism without going through the Caudine Forks of capitalism. Marx’s conception of Russia’s development path has a theoretical enlightening significance for our understanding of the Marxist social development model. This assumption provides a new enlightenment for the study of the regularity problem of social history and has a methodological guiding significance for the development of the Chinese model.