> No, I think Charles has it better, your telling elides the
> difference between Hegel and Marx. Marx is a materialist. He sees
> the development of man arising out of the greater possibilities that
> come with the development of the forces of production. Without a
> surplus, there can be no 'self-development'. Without modern
> industry, there can be no class struggle, and no possibility of
> overcoming the 'self-estrangement' - which in Marx's account is not
> merely psychological, but a social conflict between the class that
> gains by its estrangement (the capitalists) and the class that can
> only experience that estrangement as misery (the working class).
> That conflict can only come to a head where the material conditions
> (i.e. productive forces) are developed enough to satisfy generalised
> plenty, or it will fall back into a mere peasant Jacquerie (take
> Engels' example of German peasant uprisings, or for that matter,
> Mao's Cultural Revolution, where the material conditions for
> overcoming self-estrangement fell short of the subjective ambition,
> dragging the revolutionaries down into barbarism).
"Forces of production" are objectifications of ideas; they are, as Marx puts it, "the power of knowledge objectified."
So their development objectifies the development of mind.
Relations of production both condition and express this development.
Thus, according to Marx, the relations constitutive of the Indian peasant commune "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 political expression of this was "Oriental despotism."
Marx's 1881 examination of the possibility of Russia moving directly to "socialism" without passing through capitalism is explicitly an examination of the consistency of relations in the Russian peasant commune with the development of individual minds such a move, on Marx's understanding of it, requires.
The main obstacle in the way of such development to which he points is "isolation." This follows from the role his understanding of the development of individual minds gives to the "wealth" of the individual's "real connections," i.e. "the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections."
As he had done in the Indian case and in making the "isolation" of masses of mid-19th century French peasants responsible for the Bonaparte dynasty, he again connects this to despotism.
"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."
The reason the creation of "socialism" requires the development of individual minds is that it requires the "appropriation" of the ideas objectified in developed forces of production.
In the German Ideology, "revolutionary practice" is itself tied to this requirement by making it developmental of the "powers" "appropriation" in this sense requires since it is an appropriation of the "powers" objectified in these forces.
In the Russian case, the "powers" Russian peasants must be able to appropriate are those objectified in the forces of production developed by capitalism outside Russia so the move to "socialism" in that context is not prevented by a lack of development of the productive forces, i.e. Russia "is the contemporary of Western capitalist production and is thus able to appropriate its fruits without subjecting itself to its modus operandi." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm
This was also true of China.
So in the cases of both Russia and China, an explanation of the resulting despotism consistent with Marx's "materialism" can't point to a lack of developed forces of production.
What it can point to is the "superstition" and "prejudice" of Russian and Chinese peasants, i.e. to the same "cause" pointed to by Marx to explain "Oriental despotism" and mid-19th century Prussian and French despotism, to conditions inconsistent with those required for the development of "the real intellectual wealth" of individuals.
Ted