>> There's something both tragic and comic about Lenin. He ended his
>> days despairing over the catastrophe that was his revolution but he
>> never once seemed to grasp that it was the logical consequence of
>> his lifelong worldview,
>
> Easy to say that now. Not so easy in 1912 or 1917. You just never
> know.
This is true if there's no way of knowing what "socialism" would be and what kind of "individuality" its creation and functioning would require.
But, for Marx at least, it's possible to know both what it would be and what kind it would require.
So, if you start from his developmental view of "individuality", it's possible to know whether particular social contexts - e.g. those constituted by the Russian peasant commune in 1917 or by the modern world's slums (Zizek) - are consistent with what's required to develop the degree of "free individuality" necessary to initiate a transformative process that would create "socialism".
Marx's 1881 mistake in the case of the Russian peasant commune derived from a mistaken view of its consistency with the conditions required for this development.
Ted