Club Dutt

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed, and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.*

• Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism

Certain Marxists in our country are known to have thought otherwise in the autumn of 1905. They considered a socialist revolution possible in Russia, since, they claimed, the country's productive forces were sufficiently developed for such a revolution. 38

• Plekhanov, footnote to the same

1. This assertion is typical of Plekhanov's Menshevik conception of the character and motive forces of the Russian revolution. Since he thought that in Russia the revolution would follow the pattern of the bourgeois revolutions in the West, Plekhanov, like most leaders of the Second International, held in the mistaken view that an entire period of world history must always separate the bourgeois revolution and the proletarian revolution. Lacking an understanding of the conditions of the new epoch - that of imperialism - Plekhanov thought that in Russia, a predominantly peasant country whose industrial development came later than elsewhere, the time was not yet ripe for a clash between the productive forces and the capitalist production relations. He therefore alleged that there were no objective condition for the socialist revolution.

• Editor James S Allen - International Publishers, 1969

Who was right in the end?