Scientific study depends upon being able to produce a hypothesis, and then to test that hypothesis, but if the phenomenon being studied is always unique in its own own specificity it becomes difficult to test the hypothesis for validity, because of the role of these different variables. If we study the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a moth, or a tadpole ino a frog, it only becomes possible to recognise the connection between one and the other when the process of metamorphosis is largely complete.
If we witnessed it for the first time, there would be no reason to connect a tadpole with a frog or a caterpillar with a moth. These are two different creatures, in both cases. We only recognise the connection of the tadpole to the frog when it begins to grow legs, and take on other characteristics of the frog. The same is true of the caterpillar though its transformation is hidden within the cocoon. However, we have seen the metamorphosis of tadpoles into frogs, and caterpillars into moths so frequently that we can assert that one necessarily implies the metamorphosis into the other.
But, unlike tadpoles or caterpillars, no two societies are identical. Even when they share many common features, as with feudalism, there are always variations. So, to conclude that, because feudalism in country A, followed some given historical course that resulted in its replacement by capitalism, means that every feudal society must follow this same course of development cannot be hypothesised in the same way. Hence Marx and Engels comments to Zasulich and Danielson, respectively, about the development of capitalism in Russia. Or, as Plekhanov noted, the question of whether it must pass through that stage of development, in the 1890's, was the wrong question, because it already was doing so.
Similarly, in Capital and elsewhere, Marx identified not that capitalism was inevitably going to give way, at some point in the future, to Socialism, but that it was, already, metamorphosing into it, even then. The development of socialised capital, in the form of the cooperatives and joint stock companies, was the transitional form of property between the two – capital but not capital. The nature of this large-scale capital, as oligopolies, involved planned production, not production determined by the planless nature of the market and competition. It required the removal of the constraints of the nation state, as later Lenin and Trotsky and others were to more fully elaborate, as the imperialist stage of capitalism. All of these are the features and characteristics of the socialist future, not the capitalist past, just as much as the legs sprouted by the tadpole are the characteristics of its future existence as a frog, and signify the inevitable and imminent transition to that future existence.
Its useful to compare and contrast the evolution of biological species as against the metamorphosis of a species, as part of its life-cycle, with the evolution of social organisms, as against a similar metamorphosis. A given species, say a chimpanzee does not metamorphose into some other species, such as a human being. Both are primates, and evolved from a common ancestor. But that is not the case with the metamorphosis of tadpoles into frogs or toads, or caterpillars into moths and butterflies. Each of these former metamorphoses into each of the latter, as part of its own individual life-cycle, the frogs and toads producing tadpoles, and moths and butterflies caterpillars.
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