Yoshie kindly responded:
E.g., most famously in the Communist Manifesto, "The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to _an immediately following proletarian revolution_" (emphasis added, <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04.htm>). ******************* Thanks! BTW, this link comes up 404 at this end.
Anyway, I know what you mean. Seems that Marx and Engels were a trifle ;P too optimistic about the possibilities for working-class conscious praxis in the middle of the 19th Century. I think this has a lot to do with what Ted Winslow was saying in an earlier post about the lack of a psychoanalytic link in M&E's analyses. The fact it that the discipline just hadn't been developed sufficiently in the 19th Century to identity social forms of sadism and conformist automatonism. The social psychological analysis associated with the neo-Freudian thinkers around Frankfurt School had not yet developed e.g. Fromm, Reich, Adorno, Horkeimer and so on. It hadn't even been developed by 1917!
The wave of revolutions which followed publication of the The COMMUNIST MANIFESTO in late 1847 were bourgeois, not proletarian. The next time the proletariat was to raise its head was in 1871 with the Paris Commune, which Marx and Engels called an example of "the dictatorship of of the proletariat"--a conceptual term for which they had been taken to task by anarchists and conservatives alike. See "The Civil War in France" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/index.htm
As for the subject line above...Marxism can become like a religion too; it can become an ideology to be applied like a map to the material of ever changing reality e.g. Stalinism. In his critique of the inadequacies of the idealistic world view, Marx wrote that he wanted to stand Hegel on his head, a funny way of saying that he wanted to put Hegel right, with his feet on the ground. The dialectic had developed to a higher standard was a useful tool, but left in the hands of people who's premises were based on a reversal of the subject/object relationship, they could lead up so many blind alleys. Hegel was a Lutheran. Not that EVERYTHING Hegel thought or did or stood for was totally wrong. Heck, the guy supported the French Revolution (then had a change of heart). The fundamental problem is that the idealist/religious world view puts an abstraction, created by human beings, into a controlling position in their lives e.g. the Eskimo who prays to the totem pole for a good catch and then thanks the gods for the fish on return. In more developed forms of class society, these idealist/ideological notions and set of god-concepts are made use of by religious and other ruling class bureaucracies. As a social spill over, the workers thank the capitalists for their jobs as opposed to seeing beyond the fetishizing fog of social realtions to realize and become class conscious i.e. that they are the ones producing social wealth by using what exists in nature.
Best,
Mike B)
http://happystiletto.blogspot.com/
Skype mike.ballard66
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