> Chris Doss wrote:
>
>> There's no way to know how much of what they did was out of
>> ideological fervor and how much out of being backed into a corner.
>
> Which is the story of much of the Soviet experience, no? A couple of
> world wars, a civil war, a cold war, international isolation, etc. It
> wasn't an environment in which DSA types could calmly make policy in a
> peaceful democratic setting.
The feature of the "environment" relevant to comparing Marx and Lenin is peasant self-consciousness. This characterizes not only the 85% or so of the 1917 Russian population actually living in peasant conditions but also a substantial part of the "proletariat," namely the part made up of peasants ("the peasant proprietor does not belong to the proletariat, and even where his condition is proletarian, he believes himself not to").
Marx underestimates the difficulties involved in transforming this self-consciousness into the kind required for socialist economic and political arrangements (i.e. the kind of arrangements pointed to in the Civil War in France).
Here's an example. Russian peasant agricultural practice included a taboo against participation by women in the activities of ploughing and sowing. These activities were understood as intercourse with mother earth. The understanding appears to have come close to what, in psychoanalysis, is called "concrete" versus "symbolic" thinking e.g. the difference between someone for whom violin playing is masturbating and someone for whom it symbolizes masturbating. This matches the idealized phantasy of the "mother" embodied in the Virgin Mary "icon corner" found in peasant households. This protects the household from, among other things, the "evil eye" of demon possessed actual women (representing the demonized part of the split "mother"). (One source for discussions of these aspects of peasant Russia is Catherine Worobec's _Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period_ and _Possessed: Women, Witches and Demons in Imperial Russia_.)
The policies pointed to by Marx (which do recognize irrational aspects of peasant attitudes to "land") wouldn't have been sufficient to develop the degree of rational self-consciousness "socialist" arrangements require.
By the way, Russian peasant attitudes to land point to a psychological basis for Keynes's claim that "it may be that in certain historic environments the possession of land has been characterised by a high liquidity-premium in the minds of owners of wealth." (General Thelory, p. 241)
Ted