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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