Letter to Maxim Kovalevsky, April 1879

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written April 1879


First published, in Russian, in the magazine Byloye (The Past), No. 20, Leningrad, 1922
Published in English for the first time in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979
Published in English in full in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


MARX TO MAXIM KOVALEVSKY[1]

IN MOSCOW

[London, April 1879]

Mr Kareyev's work 577 is excellent. However, I do not quite share his view of the Physiocrats.[2] I take the theory of capital, i.e., of the contemporary structure of society. From Petty to Hume, this theory was developed only piecemeal—a bit here, a bit there— according to the requirements of the period when the author lived. Quesnay was the first to put political economy on its real, i.e., capitalist, basis, and the curious thing is that he did so apparently as a landowner's tenant. Mr Kareyev is definitely wrong in saying that the Physiocrats opposed only one social occupation, namely agriculture, to others, i.e., industry and commerce, but never went, unlike Smith, so far as to oppose social classes to each other. If Mr Kareyev had recalled the main idea of Ricardo's Preface to his famous creation,[3] in which he examines three classes of the state (landowners, capitalists, and workers, the latter tilling the soil by their labour), he would have seen that the first invention of the three classes in the economic sphere and their mutual relations could find a place only in the system of agriculture, where Quesnay put it. In addition, a writer should distinguish between what an author really gives and what he gives only in his own imagination. This is true even of philosophical systems; thus, what Spinoza considered the cornerstone of his system and what actually constitutes that cornerstone are two entirely different things. It is not surprising, therefore, that some of Quesnay's adherents, such as Mercier de la Rivière, saw the essence of the whole system in its paraphernalia while the English Physiocrats writing in 1798 were the first to demonstrate—on the basis of Quesnay's concepts and contrary to Adam Smith's—the need to abolish private ownership of land.

  1. ↑ The present extract was written down by the Russian historian Nikolai Kareyev on the basis of Maxim Kovalevsky's oral translation from English into Russian and published by Kareyev in the Byloye (The Past) magazine, No. 20, 1922 in the article 'Karl Marx's Letter to M. M. Kovalevsky on the Physiocrats'. The letter was published in English for the first time in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979.
  2. ↑ The Physiocrats—followers of a trend in the classical bourgeois political economy that arose in France in the mid-18th century. The Physiocrats held Nature to be the only source of wealth, and agriculture the only sphere of the economy where value was created. Although they underestimated the role of industry and commerce, the Physiocrats made an important contribution to economic science by shifting the search for the origins of surplus value from circulation to production, thereby laying the basis for the analysis of capitalist production. Advocates of large-scale capitalist farming, they exposed the moribund nature of the feudal economy, thus paving the way ideologically for the bourgeois revolution in France. Marx gave a critical analysis of the Physiocrats' views in the Theories of Surplus Value, the central section of the Economic Manuscript of 1861-63 (see present edition, Vol. 30, pp. 352-76).
  3. ↑ D. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation.