c b quoted Marx:
> "What we have to deal with here [in analyzing the programme of the
> workers' party] is a communist society, not as it has developed on its
> own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from
> capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically,
> morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the
> old society from whose womb it comes."
This has to be interpreted within the framework of ontological and anthropological ideas that constitute full individual development as the end of the process that is human pre-history (where human being is defined as the potential for such development so that, as long as the process is incomplete, human being is not yet fully actual).
So, however incomplete relative to this ultimate end individual development is at the point of transition from capitalism to socialism, it must at least have attained the level required to "appropriate" the productive forces developed within capitalism and use them to build "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."
The Russian revolution did not build such a form. Russian peasants did not "appropriate" capitalist productive forces and, in this sense, "socialize" them.
Had they had the developed "individuality "required for this, Russia could never have regressed back to the capitalist form since the latter, on Marx's assumptions, is necessarily associated with a lower level of developed individuality than the former.
It isn't true that Marx at some point abandoned the developmental ideas involved in this approach to understanding what occurred in Russia.
He and Engels always analyzed Russia in terms of "the Asiatic mode of production" and its associated "oriental despotism." Here, for instance, is Engels in the 1875 pamphlet "On Social Relations in Russia."
"The Russian peasant lives and has his being only in his village community; the rest of the world exists for him only in so far as it interferes with his community. This is so much the case that, in Russian, the same word 'mir' means, on the one hand, 'world' and, on the other, 'peasant community'. 'Ves’ mir', the whole world, means to the peasant the meeting of the community members. Hence, when Mr. Tkachov speaks of the 'world outlook' of the Russian peasants, he has obviously translated the Russian 'mir' incorrectly. Such a complete isolation of individual communities from one another, which creates throughout the country similar, but the very opposite of common, interests, is the natural basis for oriental despotism; and from India to Russia this form of society, wherever it has prevailed, has always produced it and always found its complement in it. Not only the Russian state in general, but even its specific form, tsarist despotism, instead of hanging in the air, is a necessary and logical product of Russian social conditions with which, according to Mr. Tkachov, it has 'nothing in common'!" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/refugee-literature/ch05.htm
In speculating in 1881 about the possibility of the individuality constituted by the Russian peasant commune possessing the developed "individuality" required to appropriate the productive forces developed in capitalism outside Russia and use them to build the above form without having first to pass through capitalism, Marx pointed to the differences between that commune and the more archaic "Asiatic" type.
He speculated that the Russian commune, particularly the role within it of private property, was more consistent with the development of the required individuality than the archaic.
His main qualification concerned its "isolation," a characteristic which, as in the archaic, was, he claimed, the main obstacle in the way of such development and which he here, as elsewhere, identified, as does Engels in the passage above, with "despotism" (which, from 1843 onward, he explained as anchored in the "prejudice" and "superstition," as opposed to the "enlightenment," of the individuality constituted by "the ensemble of the social relations" with which it was associated).
The developmental idea involved here is found in the German Ideology claim that "the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections."
That "despotism" rather than "socialism" in Marx's sense was the outcome of the Russian revolution means, when analyzed in terms of these ideas, that Marx's speculations about the consistency of Russian peasant commune relations with the development of the individuality required for building "socialism" in his sense were mistaken.
Ted