On 2010-02-20, at 5:29 PM, Ted Winslow wrote:
> Marv Gandall wrote:
>
>> The goal of those who made the French and Russian revolutions - including their leaders, let it be added - was not to replace the Bourbons and Romanovs with another unaccountable tyranny of the party or of the bureaucracy or of the supreme leader. Why and how these revolutions evolved in this direction is another question, whose answer lies in the social and economic and international context in which they were situated rather than in mass political psychology
>
> Marx, in contrast, derives despotism from the "superstition" and "prejudice" of the masses, i.e. from "mass political psychology."
>
> [...]
> In fact, superstition and prejudice were characteristic of the individuality of both Russian and Chinese peasants.
>
> Marx's understanding of the requirements for the development of enlightenment is mistaken. Among other things, superstition and prejudice are much more securely anchored than he imagined...
==================================
Then how to explain the Russian and Chinese revolutions which each rested on mass peasant support? Social conditions promoted changes in peasant consciousness which was reflected in their abandonment of the old order and ancient prejudices. These latter proved to be not as "securely anchored" as Ted supposes. The new peasant recruits, to be sure, were generally not as politically sophisticated as the urban intellectuals and worker cadres who belonged to the Russian and Chinese communist parties. But they had a degree of political understanding which enabled them to recognize their class interests and to distinguish between those parties which supported them and those institutions which oppressed them - unlike previous peasant generations weighed down by old habits and superstitions. Their cultural level was further enhanced by their participation in the Communist party and the revolutionary struggle and the subsequent literacy and other programs introduced in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic. Neither was peasant support of the Stalinist and Maoist regimes so blindly and securely anchored that it extended even to the programs of forced collectivization in the 30's and 50's which worsened their conditions.