Karl Marx manages to comment substantially on…

Karl Marx manages to comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly in Germany and Russia, during the last decade of his life, though his health has declined and he has become incapable of the sustained effort that had characterized his previous work.

His Critique of the Gotha Programme opposed the tendency of his followers Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel to compromise with the state socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle in the interests of a united socialist party.

This work is also notable for another famous Marx's quote: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

In a letter to Vera Zasulich dated March 8, 1881, Marx contemplates the possibility of Russia's bypassing the capitalist stage of development and building communism on the basis of the common ownership of land characteristic of the village mir.

While admitting that Russia's rural "commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia", Marx also warns that, in order for the mir to operate as a means for moving straight to the socialist stage without a preceding capitalist stage, it "would first be necessary to eliminate the deleterious influences which are assailing it (the rural commune) from all sides." (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works Volume 46 (International Publishers: New York, 1992) p. 72.)

Given the elimination of these pernicious influences, Marx allows that "normal conditions of spontaneous development" of the rural commune could exist.

However, in the same letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx points out that "at the core of the capitalist system ... lies the complete separation of the producer from the means of production."

In one of the drafts of this letter, Marx reveals his growing passion for anthropology, motivated by his belief that future communism would be a return on a higher level to the communism of our prehistoric past.

He writes that "the historical trend of our age is the fatal crisis which capitalist production has undergone in the European and American countries where it has reached its highest peak, a crisis that will end in its destruction, in the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type — collective production and appropriation".

He adds that "the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies". (K. Marx, First draft of letter to Vera Zasulich [1881]. In Marx-Engels 'Collected Works', Volume 24, p. 346.)

Before he dies on March 14, 1883, Marx asks Engels to write up these ideas, which will be published in 1884 under the title The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.