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According to the universal law of historical development, Marx and Engels envisaged in the nineteenth century that a socialist revolution launched by the proletariat would first take place in the advanced countries, but they did not negate the possibility that under special circumstances it could happen in the undeveloped countries. Particularly after the 1870s, Marx and Engels focused their research on the oriental backward nations. In his letter to the editorial board of Otechestvenniye Zapiski in 1877, his reply to Vera Zasulich in 1881, and in a number of other manuscripts and works such as the preface to the second edition of the Communist Manifesto, written by him and Engels, Marx definitely raised the possibility of transcending the chasm in the capitalist development of economically and culturally backward countries.
In fact, Marx and Engels had this view even as early as 1845. In the German Ideology, they pointed out that "all collisions in history have their origin, according to our view, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse." For the conflicts occurring in some countries, it is absolutely unnecessary to wait until the conflicts of those countries develop to their extremity. The competition resulting from the broad exchange among the relatively developed industrial countries leads to the appearance of similar contradictions in the relatively undeveloped countries (competition with British industry gives birth to the German proletariat). Engels also said, "It is too bad for us to realize this transformation if we have to wait until capitalist production in every place develops to its extremity and the last small handicraftsman and the last small farmer become the sacrifices of large capitalist production." From Marx and Engels's idea of historical transcendence, we can clearly see that under certain historical conditions countries with a backward economy and culture can transcend the chasm resulting from a lag in capitalist development-that is, they can be directly transformed into socialism from capitalism. Here the crucial factor is that when the revolutionary conditions are matured, the working class should not abandon the historical opportunity and wait for the matured development of capitalism.
The practice of the world socialist movement in the twentieth century completely proved the scientific foresight of Marx's theory of transcendence. During the First World...