From: Ted Winslow
Charles Brown wrote:
> Actually, I have a hard time distinguishing between Marx and
> Leninism,too.
Why is it hard to distinguish Marx's claims about what, at a minimum, would have to be done to win peasant support for the political and economic arrangements pointed to in the Civil War in France from what was actually done to Russian peasants (the vast majority of the Russian population) after 1917?
^^^^ CB: If there hadn't been mass peasant support for the Russian Revolution , it would have failed. The Leninists succeeded in winning peasant support in practice, Marx's test of theory.
On the other hand, Marx's hypothesis on getting peasant support for the Communards in France was never tested and proven in practice. ^^^
Marx didn't recommend cutting peasant incomes in half by intensifying economic exploitation and then meeting resistance to this by enlarging peasant land allotments and using a standing army both to extract the product and to suppress the resistance, did he? The eventual collectivization wasn't one "the peasant arrived at ... of his own accord, from economic reasons," was it?
^^^^^ CB: Marx never participated in a successful insurrection or actual running of the economy and state of a giant country, with the responsibility to feed everybody, etc. Finding "government ... measures through which the peasant finds his condition immediately improved" can be easier said than done. With the imperialist wolf at the door, the socialist state doesn't necessarily have time to wait for "the" peasant to arrive at the necessary conclusions "of his own accord" and at his own pace. Speculation based on French peasants in 1870 does not necessarily work with Russian peasants in 1917.
Marxism and especially Marx's recommendations at this level of generalization are not dogma , but guides to action. Leninists in Russia were being good Marxists when they did not treat Marx's statements in _The Civil War in France_ as holy writ.
^^^^^^
> where the peasant exists in the mass as private proprietor, where he
> even forms a more or less considerable majority, as in all states of
> the west European continent, where he has not disappeared and been
> replaced by the agricultural wage-labourer, as in England, the
> following cases apply: either he hinders each workers' revolution,
> makes a wreck of it, as he has formerly done in France, or the
> proletariat (for the peasant proprietor does not belong to the
> proletariat, and even where his condition is proletarian, he believes
> himself not to) must as government take measures through which the
> peasant finds his condition immediately improved, so as to win him for
> the revolution; measures which will at least provide the possibility
> of easing the transition from private ownership of land to collective
> ownership, so that the peasant arrives at this of his own accord, from
> economic reasons. It must not hit the peasant over the head, as it
> would e.g. by proclaiming the abolition of the right of inheritance or
> the abolition of his property. The latter is only possible where the
> capitalist tenant farmer has forced out the peasants, and where the
> true cultivator is just as good a proletarian, a wage-labourer, as is
> the town worker, and so has immediately, not just indirectly, the very
> same interests as him. Still less should small-holding property be
> strengthened, by the enlargement of the peasant allotment simply
> through peasant annexation of the larger estates, as in Bakunin's
> revolutionary campaign.
Ted