The landless rural workers movement (MST) in Brazil

This translation of the 1912 preface by Karl Kautsky to Salvioli's book about captalism in the ancient world confirms the centrality to his interest of the way in which economic history informs the present and maps out the future. It reveals a concern not only with pre-capitalist and capitalist systemic transition but also economic development in turn prefigures socialism. Accordingly, kautsky's focus is on the connections between yet the distinictiveness of historically specific modes of production, their forms of property and propertylessness, and the links between production for consumption and for exchange, plus the resulting patterns both of the social relations and the forces of production and of surplus appropriation licensed thereby. For Kautsky, therefore, the value of understanding the economic conditions preceding capitalism itself, and thus also the reasons for its transcendence.