Abstract
The makers of Marxism, Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), came to their interest in China through the scholarship of G. W. F. Hegel and those Europeans who began to write extensively about the Central Kingdom at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. While historians had written accounts of the ancient kingdoms of the East, China, as a reasonably well-defined cultural entity, still remained largely unknown to Europeans. When the overseas expansion of Europeans brought China more insistently to their attention, Hegel was sufficiently impressed to suggest that human history seemed to have begun with the Chinese. He identified China as the oldest of the Asiatic riverine civilizations with which he was to concern himself in his universal history.2
The [Chinese] government is based on the paternal management of the Emperor, who keeps all departments of the state in order…. Despotism is necessarily the mode of government…. On both rivers, the Huanghe and the Yangzi, dwell many millions of human beings…. The population and the thoroughly organized state arrangements, descending even to the minutest details, have astonished Europeans.
—G. W. F. Hegel1
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Notes
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956), section 1, “China.”
Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen ökonomie (Rohentwurf) 1857–1858 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953), 376–77.
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1904), 13.
In a letter to Marx, Engels maintained, “The absence of property in land is indeed the key to the whole of the East…. But how does it come about that Orientals did not arrive at landed property, even in its feudal form? I think it is mainly due to the climate, taken in connection with the nature of the soil…. Artificial irrigation is here the first condition of agriculture and this is a matter … of the central government.” To which Marx replied that British parliamentary reports described the whole of “Asiatic empires” as divided into self-sufficient villages dependent on the public works managed by the central government for the timely and competent delivery of water. “I do not think,” Marx concluded, “anyone could imagine a more solid foundation for stagnant Asiatic despotism.” See the exchange provided in the Marx and Engels correspondence of June 6 and 14, 1853, in Marx and Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1963), vol. 28, 254, 259, 267–68. The relevant parts of this correspondence are made available in
Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, ed. Shlomo Avineri (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1968), 278–81.
The unabridged draft materials were published for the first time in 1939 as Grundrisse d Kritik der politischen ökonomie. Selections from the Rohentwurf have been translated as Karl Mar Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (New York: International Publishers, 1965), with an introdu tion by Eric J. Hobsbawm; see also
Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, ed. and trans. David McLellan (New York: Harper & Row, 1961).
Engels, Anti-Dühring (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 247–48.
The three drafts are available as Marx, “Entwürfe einer Antwort auf den Brief von V. I. Sassulitsch,” Marx and Engels, Werke, vol. 19, 384–406. An abbreviated English account of the drafts is available as Marx, “Letter on the Russian Village Community (1881),” in Marx and Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, eds. Paul W. Blackstock and Bert F. Hoselitz (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1952, 218–26. Marx never sent any of the drafts to Zasulich.
Cf. A. James Gregor, A Survey of Marxism: Problems in Philosophy and the Theory of History (New York: Random House, 1965), part 2, “Marxism as a Theory of History.”
Marx, Capital (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), vol. 1, 8–9.
“The middle class dwells upon a soil that is honeycombed, and may any day collapse, the speedy collapse of which is as certain as a mathematical or mechanical demonstration.” Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1950), 18.
Marx applied his analysis to both India and China. See the account in Marx, “The British Rule in India” and “The Future Results of the British Rule in India,” in On Colonialism, 36–37, 76–82; Marx, Capital (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), vol. 3, chap. 20, 328–31. See Engels’ discussion concerning the results of British railway construction in China. It echoes that of Marx concerning India. Engels letter to Nikolai Danielson, September 22, 1892, Werke, vol. 38, 470. A partial translation of the letter is found in On Colonialism, 311.
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© 2014 A. James Gregor
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Gregor, A.J. (2014). China, Marxism, and the Background in Time. In: Marxism and the Making of China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137379498_1
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