-- Now, Marx's (few and unpublished) remarks about crude communism may be regarded as prescient with respect to the kind of "communism" that emerged in poor countries in the 20th century. I put "communism" in scare quotes because Marx would have regarded Stalinism, Maoism, the Khmer Rouge not as communist at all.
^^^
CB: Well sure he would consider the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China as communist. Those were expressions of "crude" communism, just like he predicted. And they were the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, as he predicted. That's you who doesn't consider them communist at all. They make Marx look, as you put it, prescient.
^^^^^
However the failure of crude communist regimes and their collapse, or collapse into capitalism, may be argued to offer support for Marx's idea -- treated as stagist or not, it doesn't have to be -- that capitalism is sociologically prior to communism;
^^^^^ CB: Exactly. The step backward to capitalism in Russia and China mean that actual history supports a more stagist conception of historical materialism. China tried to by pass capitalism to socialism, skip a stage, and now they had to fall back. Even in Russia there were debates in the early 20th Century as to whether Russia had enough capitalist development to have a socialist revolution. The current step back to capitalism might be interpreted in part as a result of the Russian Revolution being premature. However, it is not the "internal" conditions but the worldwide context of these "premature" socialist revolutions battered and beaten by imperialism, and unable to compete militarily and industrially with advanced capialist nations, external conditions, the global whole of capitalism that caused the steps back.
^^^^^^
hic Rhodus, hic salta (here is Rhodes, jump here) (Capital I.v) [should be saltus, no?], but not that far, or you have to ask where the hic is.
--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk> > wrote:
>
>
>
> andie nachgeborenen
>
> Marx has an attack on "crude communism in the Paris
> Manuscripts, "the consummation of this envy [shades
> of
> Nietzsche] and of this leveling down proceeding from
> the preconceived minimum." EPR, ME Reader at 83
> (Tucker, 2d ed.). This leads to the Cultural
> Revolution and at its worse to the Khmer Rouge.
> Surely
> you don't advocate this!
>
> ^^^^^
>
> CB: I always read this as , not an "attack", but a
> statement of a sort of
> objective stage that will be gone through, like the
> revolutionary
> dictatorship of the proletariat, or "to each
> according to work" not yet to
> each according to need. Not pretty ,but
> unavoidable. Marx doesn't see the
> revolutionary process, especially the first phases
> of socialism, as all
> sweetness and light.
>
>