What Marx and Engels are clear about in the passages from the Theses on Feuerbach and the German Ideology I just again reproduced is that a "vanguard" - the "Bolsheviks" - can't "educate" the masses in the way required.
^^^^^ CB: This doesn't sound like Marx and Engels of _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_ or The International , at all. It doesn't sound like Marx in the Theses on F , either. Nor Marx on the Gotha Programme. It just doesn't sound like them at all. It definitely isn't Lenin, who was extremely faithful to Marx and Engels on all critical issues. _The German Ideology_ has lots of youthful errors, and they left to the knawing of the mice, though it gives an idea of their early creative early direction.
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What "educates" them in the required way is a particular kind of "revolutionary practice," the kind required to bring about the "all-round development of individuals."
^^^^ CB: Yes, they say things like practice in struggle is worth 100 programs, but why would they write 100 volumes of essays and books on revolution if they didn't want to "educate" the working class masses ? Because they were not relying entirely on practice in struggles to raise working class consciousness. As Lenin said, the working class can only reach trade union consciousness spontaneously without an injection from the outside by the vanguard party, revolutionary theory for the revolutionary movement. Of course, Lenin passed the test of practice (Theses on Feuerbach) better than Marx and Engels.
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The "all-round development of individuals" is the development of "the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production."
This development is required for the "appropriation" by individuals of these instruments "because the existing form of intercourse and the existing productive forces are all-embracing and only individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion can appropriate them, i.e., can turn them into free manifestations of their lives."
^^^^^ CB: Where have I heard this before ? (smile) . Ted, Marx wrote a lot of other stuff besides this. And he stopped describing his theory in these terms fairly early on, no ? I don't think his later writings get trumped by this stuff from his younger , more ...petit bourgeois stuff.
It's this "appropriation" that's required to create "socialism" as "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," Marx describing it in this way in an 1877 letter speculating, as he does in the 1881 draft letter to Vera Zasulich, about the possibility of Russian peasants initiating the required "educative" kind of "revolutionary practice."
^^^^^^^ CB: This doesn't sound like it addresses the consciousness necessary to take state power, which is what this discussion is more on. This is the consciousness for socialist production, not so much the "final conflict" with the bourgeoisie.
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These speculations were mistaken.
^^^^^ CB: So, according to you, Marx and Engels were wrong that is was not necessary to "verbally" educate the masses and just rely on "practice"
?????
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Not only did the Russian revolution not end in an "appropriation" in the above sense of the productive forces developed within capitalism outside Russia, it left in place a peasant "individuality" characterized by the incapacity for such "appropriation" illustrated by the following account of the reaction of peasants to a science based understanding and approach to brucellosis in cattle.
"In 2000 the newspaper Duel published excerpts from the very instructive memoirs of the lawyer B.G. Menshagin from Smolensk about how trials against 'enemies of the people' took place in their regions in 1937. He simply relates, without embellishments, cases from his practice in which he was appointed as a lawyer in such trials. In one instance, eight people -- leaders in the regional cattle-breeding administration, veterinarians, and the secretary of the raikom -- were accused of sabotage. Three confessed; the others did not. One, a science employee of the Moscow VNII or experimental veterinary science, had been sent to the region to diagnose brucellosis. Animals that have recently become sick show no external symptoms, and the diagnosis is made on the basis of a reaction of the immune system – upon injection with antiserum, an abscess forms, like that in the case of smallpox inoculation.
"This employee and the others were accused of infecting livestock. The witnesses at the trials were milkmaids; in their eyes, these saboteurs had killed the best cows, which they had infected themselves and then sent to the knacker’s yard. One milkmaid said the following at the trial: 'She is such a good cow! He stuck her and the next day she fell sick! The abscess is big.' The other milkmaids spoke in the same vein: 'Oh, she was such a good cow, I’m so sorry for her. He stuck her and she died. He killed the cow.'
"General meetings were called in all the collective farms and sovfarms and the court was presented with a veritable tome of demands. They were all approximately the same: 'We ask the proletarian court to kill the bastards!' How was it possible in such circumstances for a lawyer to be asked for his expertise! All eight people were sentenced to be shot. The peasants were genuine in their belief, and the judge and prosecutor were afraid to move against the clearly expressed 'will of the people,' which had obtained such an effective strength. The sentence is subject to no appeals! In the given case the wives of the condemned gathered money and sent lawyers to Moscow, where they were received by an assistant of Vyshinsky and quickly received a pardon, but this happened in far from all instances." http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2006/2006-October/020858.html
Ted