ABSTRACT
In the fifty years after Marx’s death, evolution became a matter of increasing political importance. An understanding of the social evolution of particular nations and the characterization of the current situation in evolutionary terms was considered the theoretical precondition for formulating an appropriate national and international strategy. Plekhanov’s ‘Our Differences’ is his stock-taking of the divergences between ‘scientific socialism’ as advanced by Marx and Engels, and the Narodniks’ Utopian fantasies. Plekhanov had shared in these fantasies as a member of the populist movement before he went into exile in 1880. Lenin, like his teacher Plekhanov, dedicated his early writings to a critique of Russian populism and to a Marxist analysis of nineteenth-century Russia. He emphasized the increasing dominance of capitalist relations of production and circulation which had effectively dissolved pre-capitalist relations within the Russian commune.
