Andrej:
>Actually, Marx wrote in the late 1870s that the best prospects for
>revolution anywhere in the world were in the Russian countryside and that
>the peasants would be in the vanguard.
>
>Perhaps you would like to suggest to me where, and on which page, I can find
>this?
>I would appreciate this, and I think that it is going to be a nice
>contribution to socialist history.
>Ha, ha, ha!
It can be found in the letters to Vera Zasulich, dated February-March 1881.
In the final draft, he states that the rural peasant commune is the fulcrum
for revolution in Russia. There is also the letter to the editorial board
of the populist newspaper "Otechestvennye Zapiski" from around the same
time in which Marx disassociates himself with certain Marxists who believe
that industrialization is a precondition for socialism. He states that the
version of economic development found in Capital was geared only to England
and similar countries and did not necessarily apply to countries like
Russia. His words for this view are apt: "a historico-philosophical theory
of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples". It is a view he
rejects. In general the notion that socialism is not possible without
establishing industrial capitalism beforehand is typical of Kautsky and
Plekhanov, not Marx or Lenin for that matter.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
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