Ted Winslow
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And, in fact, the Russian revolution was not a socialist revolution in this sense. For instance, it wasn't a revolution in which the great majority of the population had, as individuals, the developed capability and will that, when combined with the further development made possible by revolutionary praxis itself, would enable them to "appropriate" capitalist means of production developed elsewhere and to imagine and create through this appropriation a higher communal form from which all barriers to full human development had been eliminated.
Marx's claim that such a revolution would create a labour process that would allow for the kind of individual development that would make it possible to eliminate "the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor" is not applicable to the labour process created in Russia. Among other things, those who controlled production took Taylorism as appropriate to its "socialist" organization (which didn't work out as it had in the original capitalist context where it had been developed because, among other things, the subjectivity of Russian peasants was very different from the subjectivity of wage labour in the original context). See, for instance, Zenovia Sochor, "Soviet Taylorism Revisited", in Soviet Studies, April 1981
^^^^^^ CB: Ted, does this imply that the current U.S. population, unlike the Russian back then, does have the developed subjectivity to make the leap ?