Date: Wed, 10 Aug 1994 16:11:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alex Trotter <uburoi-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Russia, Marx, Stalin



One more thought about Marx and Stalinism, if anyone is still interested: 
I think the answer to the question as to whether Marx can be blamed for 
Stalin is, in true dialectical fashion, yes and no. Marx looked at the 
primitive accumulation of capital and the early Industrial Revolution in 
Britain and described how horrible it was that humans were being 
sacrificed to develop the forces of production. But then he came to the 
conclusion that this process was inevitable and necessary, because it was 
laying the groundwork for socialism and communism. This fit in with the 
teleogical vision of unilineal stages of historical development that Marx 
maintained in most of his 'mature' work. From that it's easy to see how 
Stalin could justify a similarly brutal (and telescoped) period of 
primitive accumulation in Russia.
	However, in his last years, Marx began to change his mind to some 
extent, and this in regard to Russia. With his work on the 
_Ethnological Notebooks_, he started paying more attention to the 
communistic life of 'primitive' (non- or precapitalist) societies, 
including the Russian *obschina,* or rural peasant commune. Whereas once 
Marx had believed that all human societies would come to experience 
capitalism, he now (in this case at least) thought that communism in 
Russia could come out of the institution of the *obschina* without having 
to pass through a stage of capitalism. Following this new thinking, Marx 
was scornful of his own followers in Russia and sympathetic to the 
Populists including Chernyshevsky.

--AT


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