In the 1990s, Russian reformers vainly sought to discover a bourgeoisie committed to democracy, productive economic behaviour, and an ever more elusive ‘civil society’. Their quest constituted the latest chapter in a centuries-long struggle that began with the challenge posed by economists like N. F. Daniel’son (Marx’s foremost disciple) to ‘Orthodox’ Marxists and to state capitalists of the tsarist regime. The latter two groups agreed to discount Daniel’son’s data on the state-dependent, risk-averse and politically undemocratic behaviour of Russia’s bourgeoisie, as well as the statistical and economic evidence that had led Marx to reconsider his skepticism about the role of peasantries in the development process. In the past and in the present, even-handed and unsentimental comparative research on the bourgeoisie as well as other, less privileged economic actors in the development scenario remains – regrettably – quite rare.

Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks were among the last of his writings. They comment upon class and state formation in a range of precapitalist contexts. The argument presented here is that after Capital, Marx turned to problems of class formation in socialism, examining the conflict between communities of producers and state agendas, on the one hand, and the entrenchment of bureaucracies and state functionaries, on the other. The commentaries distance Marx from state theories of social evolution: certain social forms may persist and change in opposition to the state, at the same time defending more egalitarian practices.

It’s many years since I last fully engaged in discussion with convicted creationists. A pair of elderly Jehovah’s Witnesses detained me on the doorstep, at least at first. I’d just read The Blind Watchmaker and I was keen to exercise my new powers. So instead of the usual excuses I told them I was a Darwinist and that I didn’t believe in God.

In his 1891 preface to the fourth edition of his work, Family State and Private Property, Friederich Engles notes the following about Lewis Henry Morgan’s work, Ancient Society (1877), upon which his own study was based:

Morgan’s discoveries are now generally recognized, or rather appropriated, by prehistorians in England, too. But scarcely one of them will openly acknowledge that it is to Morgan that we owe this revolution in outlook. In England his book is hushed up as far as possible, and Morgan himself is dismissed with condescending praise for his previous work; the details of his exposition are eagerly picked on for criticism, while an obstinate silence reigns with regard to really great discoveries. The original edition of Ancient Society is out of print; in America there is no profitable market for books of this sort; in England, it would seem, the book was systematically suppressed, and the only edition of this epoch-making work still available in the book trade –the German translation.

by Franklin Rosemont

There are works that come down to us with question-marks blazing like sawed-off shotguns, scattering here and there and everywhere sparks that illuminate our own restless search for answers. Ralegh’s so-called Cynthia cycle, de Sade’s 120 Days, Fourier’s New Amorous World, Lautremont’s Poesies, Lenin’s Notes on Hegel, Randolph Bourne’s essay on The State, Jacque Vache’s War letters, Duchamp’s Green Box, the Samuel Greenberg manuscripts. These are only a few of the extraordinary fragments that have, for many of us, exerted a fascination greater than that of all but a very few “finished” works.