ABSTRACT
It is not easy to give the time divide between early and late Marxian thought. The division may depend on the issues involved. With regard to the possibility for the Russian rural commune to “leap over” the Caudine Forks of capitalism, the so-called late thought of Marx refer to those formed after his “Letter to Editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky.” Those before that time are considered his early and middle-aged thought. Some scholars in China contend that the early Marx insisted that all countries and nations, regardless of their specific situations, were destined for capitalism, and that the late Marx, on the other hand, believed that some countries and nations could avoid capitalism by “leaping over” the Caudine Forks of capitalism. In 1867, Marx pointed out in the preface to the first German edition of Capital:Intrinsically, it is not question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from natural laws of capitalist production.
