> Marx and Engels and their revolutionary and reformist followers correctly adjudged the unionized workers, strategically concentrated in the key sectors of the economy, as the only social force capable of leading a struggle against capitalism and reorganizing production on the basis of need rather than profit. The centrality of the organized working class was integral to Marxism in both theory and practice.
The problem with this as an interpretation of Marx and Engels is that, as I've been trying to demonstrate with a great deal of text, it omits the essence of historical materialism, namely, the idea of history as an educational process working through self-estrangement within the labour process to develop enlightenment elaborated as "integral development."
Thus Marx characterizes the capitalist labour process as "giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer."
In this way it unintentionally creates the pre-conditions for "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."
So the role assigned to the working class in the transition to a "form of economy" that will ensure "the most complete development of man" derives from the idea of the self-estrangement that is capitalist wage labour "giving the greatest impulse ... to the integral development of every individual producer."
Marx's understanding of the requirements for "integral development" is, however, mistaken as is demonstrated, among other things, by the consistency of wage labour with the persistence of widespread superstition and prejudice.
This mistaken understanding of the requirements for integral development is also demonstrated by his mistaken 1853 analysis of the possible positive consequences of British rule in India and his mistaken 1881 analysis of the consistency of conditions in the Russian peasant commune with those required for such development.
In the latter case, he speculated that the existence in the commune of private property similar to the petty property of the English yeomanry (prior to its destruction by primitive accumulation) had facilitated the same development of "free individuality" as that characteristic, he claimed, of the yeomanry. This, he claimed, would enable commune members to appropriate the productive powers of social labour developed by capitalism outside Russia and use them to move directly to "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" without having themselves to pass through capitalism.
The main feature of the commune inconsistent with the conditions needed for the required integral development was isolation, the condition he repeatedly emphasized as the main barrier to enlightenment and as responsible for the superstition, prejudice and despotism in mid-nineteenth century India, France and Germany. The basis of this was the claim in the German Ideology that "the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections."
The Russian peasant commune, however, was characterized by extreme superstition and prejudice and, in contrast to the kind of individuality required for the creation of "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," proved to be the kind issuing in extreme despotism.
Ted