> such a concept
> is incompatible with the element of contingncy in human life implict and
> explicit in Marx's historical writings (such as the 18th-Brumaire or the
> chapters on primitive accumulation).
What Marx makes somewhat "contingent" is the relation between stages.
Thus he claimed in 1881 that Russia might be able to move directly to socialism without passing through capitalism if conditions in the Russian peasant commune were consistent with those required to develop the necessary degree of "enlightenment," the necessary degree being that required to enable Russian peasants to "appropriate" the degree of "universality" of the development of mind embodied in the productive forces of social labour developed in capitalism outside Russia and by means of this "appropriation" imagine and build socialism.
Both the developed degree of "enlightenment" and the degree of development of the productive forces were "necessary."
Thus, where, as in the case of English "petty property," the required degree of "free individuality" might have been present but the required degree of development of the productive forces was missing, "progress" necessitated the "annihilation" of "petty property" by means of "primitive accumulation."
Alternatively, where, as in mid-nineteenth century France, the conditions of masses of French peasant were inconsistent with those required for development of the necessary degree of "enlightenment," the result, as claimed in the 18th Brumaire, was the "despotism" of the Bonaparte dynasty.
In the article on British rule in India, the British are imagined as the "unconscious tool of history" in possibly bringing an end to the conditions in the Indian peasant commune that '"restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies."
The 1877 letter to the editor of Otecestvenniye Zapisky elaborating "contingency" in the above sense, i.e. denying that "historical materialism" is "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," still makes it necessary that the historical process end in "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."
It also claims "capitalism" works to create the necessary preconditions for this "form of economy" "by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer."
Why is "contingency" in this sense, a sense that leaves intact the idea that a significant degree of "enlightenment" is necessary for the creation of "socialism," less reasonable than your sense which, if I understand it correctly, makes "socialism" practicable in any social context no matter how riddled with superstition and prejudice?
Ted