I think it's hard to argue that Marx did not view "advanced," urbane (and urban), industrial peoples as superior to others. It is behind his and Engel's negative views of Jews and Slavs (and basically everybody who wasn't a Brit, German, or French). Bakunin wrote about this, since it kind of pissed him off, being a Slav. And no I am not saying he was a racist.
I have a whole book of quotes of this stuff, since finding them was kind of a cottage industry in Russia in the 1990s. ;)
--- On Thu, 11/6/08, Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:
>
> Perhaps this is a matter of opinion. It's not
> entirely clear to me that coal miners in
> 19th-century England were definitely better
> off, as a group, than their smallholding or
> even tenant-farming great-grandfathers.
>
> Regardless of what either of us may think, though,
> I don't know of any statement by Marx that they
> *were* better off.
>
> Marx, as far as I know, doesn't address this
> question directly and doesn't seem to have been
> very interested in it. The whole thrust of the
> historical parts of the Manifesto, in particular,
> at least as I read it, is about something quite
> different -- namely, the way in which each social
> order hatches or incubates the forces that are
> destined to destroy it. This for me is perhaps
> the deepest and most powerful insight that Marx
> bequesthed us (among many others, of course).
>
> This vision of history seems to me much richer,
> more detailed, clearer-eyed, and dare I say
> more scientific, than what Carrol called the
> "ever-upward" narrative of "progress".
> More
> scientific in the sense that Marx actually shows
> us the *forces* that are at work. The Whig
> version -- the story of steady incremental
> improvement -- has no such dynamical component
> at all, other than a generous gaseous necessity,
> immanent in human nature or the cosmic order,
> for things to be getting better all the time,
> as the song says.
>
>
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