> Chris Doss writes:
>
> > By the way, I agree with you completely that the
> > Soviet era should be understood as a modernization
> and
> > industrialization project, and not as an attempt
> to
> > "build communism."
> >
> =======================
> As should the Chinese revolution. But in fairness to
> those who led these
> revolutions, they didn't separate the two but, like
> Marx, saw the
> development of a modern industrial economy - in
> these cases, under public
> ownership - as laying the material foundations for a
> future communist
> society. We won't know whether Marxism was wrong or
> just early in its
> understanding of the historical direction.
>
>
But in Marx capitalist "relations" of production are understood as ultimately creative of a "subject" with the developed capabilities required to become the architect and builder of the penultimate social form. Developed "forces of production" are an aspect of this because they express the degree of development of human capabilities.
This developmental aspect is ignored by the idea that the social relations of peasant Russia (about which there is a great deal of evidence, see for instance Catherine Worobec's "Peasant Russia" and "Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia")were, by way of the kind of "revolution" that created the Soviet Union, transformed into relations in which the development envisaged by Marx could occur.
That it (and the Chinese "revolution") could not and did not do so is confirmed by the the kind of society that finally emerged from it. The kind of "subject" that Marx envisaged as the developmental end point of capitalism is inconsistent with and would not create that kind of society.
Ted