> In a series of texts written over the last decade of his life, Marx modified, and in some cases repudiated, his earlier praise for imperialism as a progressive force. In a preface to a Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto written the year before his death, for example, Marx deplored the way that capitalist 'development' was leading to the destruction of Russia's communally-owned peasant farms, and suggested that Russia did not need to experience all the horrors of capitalism before it could become socialist. For the late Marx, the communal forms of property that existed in societies like Russia, the Iroquois Federation, and Java could become the building blocks of an agrarian, indigenous socialism. But Marx never quite managed to reconcile his late enthusiasm for pre-capitalist societies with his early praise for imperialism, and his magnum opus, Capital, remained an unfinished, fragmentary work.
As I've pointed out before, Marx's late writings on the Russian peasant commune don't do what this claims.
They are based on the same ontological and anthropological assumptions as those underpinning his early writings and Capital. These constitute history as a set of "different stages in the development of mind."
What's rejected in the late writings on Russia is the idea that this involves "an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/date/index.htm#1870
However, for individuals in any social context to be able to imagine and build "the form of economy which will insure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man," that context must be consistent with the development of the required degree of "free individuality."
The 1871 draft letter to Vera Zasulich is an examination of the consistency of the conditions of the Russian peasant commune with this requirement.
"To assess the possible outcomes from a purely theoretical point of view, that is to say, assuming normal conditions of life, I must now point out certain characteristic features which distinguish the 'agricultural commune' from the more archaic types.
"Firstly, previous primitive communities are all based on the natural kinship of their members; by breaking this strong but tight bond, the agricultural commune is better able to spread and to withstand contact with strangers.
"Next, in this form the house and its complement, the courtyard, are already the private property of the cultivator, whereas long before the introduction of agriculture the communal house was one of the material bases of previous communities.
"Finally, although arable land remains communal property, it is divided periodically between the members of the agricultural commune, so that each cultivator tills the fields assigned to him on his own account and appropriates as an individual the fruits thereof, whereas in more archaic communities production took place communally and only the yield was shared out. This primitive type of cooperative or collective production resulted, of course, from the weakness of the isolated individual, and not from the socialisation of the means of production. It is easy to see that the dualism inherent in the 'agricultural commune' might endow it with a vigorous life, since on the one hand communal property and all the social relations springing from it make for its solid foundation, whereas the private house, the cultivation of arable land in parcels and the private appropriation of its fruits permit a development of individuality which is incompatible with conditions in more primitive communities." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm
So, the key point about the conditions is that, in contrast to "more archaic types," they "permit a development of individuality which in incompatible with conditions in more primitive communities."
In Capital and elsewhere, Marx makes the "petty property" destroyed by "primitive accumulation" (motivated by "passions" in Hegel's sense, i.e. "under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious ") "an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the laborer himself."
"The private property of the laborer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the laborer himself.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm
According to Marx, as he claims in Capital (and reiterates in the Ethnological Notebooks), in "more primitive communities" "individuality of persons was lost in the gens.” (Marx, Ethnological Notebooks, p. 150)
"Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.
“The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.” http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
As I've pointed out before, Engels quotes this in 1884 in the context of reiterating Marx's claim that the destruction of the primitive community by action motivated by the "lowest interests -- base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth" was "progressive," a claim again sublating the role Hegel assigns to the "passions" in his treatment of history, which Marx and Engels also sublate, in accordance with "the higher dialectic of the conception."
One reason a developed degree of "free individuality" is required is that, in order to imagine and build "socialism" in Marx's sense, individuals must "appropriate," in the sense specified in, among other places, the German Ideology, the productive forces of social labour developed in capitalism outside Russia. In the draft letter, Marx makes the existence of these forces, treated by him as the objectification of developed mind, one of the conditions necessary for the existence of the possibility of individuals moving directly to socialism without passing through capitalism.
"It is precisely thanks to its [Russia's] contemporaneity with capitalist production that it may appropriate the latter’s positive acquisitions without experiencing all its frightful misfortunes."
The main obstacle to the development of the required "free individuality," to which Marx points, is "isolation," a claim that reiterates the German Ideology idea the "the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely of the wealth of his real connections."
"There is one characteristic of the 'agricultural commune' in Russia which afflicts it with weakness, hostile in every sense. That is its isolation, the lack of connexion between the life of one commune and that of the others, this localised microcosm which is not encountered everywhere as an immanent characteristic of this type but which, wherever it is found, has caused a more or less centralised despotism to arise on top of the communes."
Ted