Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

611
“Jove is wrathful” . . . . This has long been known as a
very amusing sort of spectacle, and actually the anger of
the stern Thunderer merely calls forth laughter. Further confirmation
of this old truth has been supplied by Mr. P. Skvortsov,
who has let loose a host of the choicest “wrathful”
remarks against my book on the process of the formation of
a home market for Russian capitalism.
I
“To depict the process as a whole,” Mr. Skvortsov grandly
instructs me, “one must set forth one’s understanding of
the capitalist mode of production; to confine oneself to
mere references to the theory of realisation is quite superfluous.”
Why references to the theory of the home market
are “superfluous” in a book devoted to an analysis of data
on the home market, remains the secret of our stern Jove,
who by “setting forth one’s understanding,” “understands” . . .
giving extracts from Capital, half of which are irrelevant.
“The author may be reproached for the dialectical (a specimen
of Mr. Skvortsov’s wit!) “contradiction that, having
set himself the aim of examining a problem” (of how the
home market is being formed for Russian capitalism), “he
comes, at the end of his references to theory, to the conclusion
that no such problem exists at all.” Mr. Skvortsov is so
pleased with this remark of his that he repeats it several
times, not seeing, or not wishing to see, that it is based on
a gross error. At the end of the first chapter of my book I