> Marx's original insight about capitalism was that it was the most
> revolutionary and creative force ever to appear in human history. And
> though it brought with it enormous attendant dangers, [the
> revolutionary nature] was the first thing to recognize about it. ...You
> sort of know it's true, and yet it can't be, because it doesn't
> compute in the way we're taught to think.
Oh, come on, Hitchens. Isn't this commonplace to the point of banality? Of course Marx thought that capitalism was revolutionary, and of course he respected its undoubted achievements. There is a lyrical passage somewhere by Edmund Wilson which goes on at considerable length about Marx's admiration for the achievements of bourgeois civilization--which also, as I recall, does justice to Marx's horror at what underlaid those achievements. (I thought the passage must be in _To the Finland Station_, but I am paging through it now and damn if I can find it).
Any more than it computes,
> for example, that Marx and Engels thought that America was the great
> country of freedom and revolution and Russia was the great country of
> tyranny and backwardness.
And isn't this what all 19th century European democrats and radicals thought?
Some may have had their doubts about America, but Tsarist Russia was indubitably the very citadel of backwardness and blackest reaction. Everybody knows that. Where's the great contrarian insight here?
A dimly remembered anecdote: Russia was so reactionary that, during the Franco-Russian entente, when a French naval squadron paid a port call at St. Petersburg, *all of Europe* was astonished when a Russian military band welcomed the French by playing the "Marseillaise."
Jacob Conrad