Louis Proyect wrote: > I recommend that you read Theodor Shanin's "Late Marx", which makes a > convincing case that Marx rejected the notion of universal models of > development.
I haven't read Shanin's book. But reinterpreting Marx has been the fashion ever since the socialist revolution he foresaw in the heavily proletarianized industrial West did not occur, but broke out instead in primarily peasant societies outside the advanced capitalist heartlands. The claim that Marx never developed a "schema" whereby societies necessarily progressed from feudalism to capitalism to socialism was invoked to lend his authority to the revolutions which were carried out in the name of socialism and the working class in Russia, China and other predominantly peasant societies. For Western Marxists like Louis who still see their societies as "rotten ripe" for socialism -- and predicate their political behaviour on that assumption -- it can be demoralizing to acknowedge that Marx may have been a good analyst of capitalism, but wrong about its staying power. I suspect Shanin's book may belong to this genre. > Lenin returned to the late Marx when he drafted > the April Theses, which rejected the notion of a capitalist stage for > Russia. Contemporary Russia indicates Lenin was wrong to dismiss this possibility. In fact, he was more prescient about the long term movement of Russian history before the April theses. Prior to 1917, he foresaw an extended period of capitalist development in a parliamentary democracy dominated by the workers' and peasants' parties -- encapsulated in his formula of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Kautsky, whom Lenin admired until the former became a "renegade" supporter of the German war effort and critic of the Bolshevik Revolution, held a similar view. In 1917, understandably excited by the prospects of a socialist revolution in Russia and the West, Lenin called for a government based on soviets of workers and peasants rather than on a multi-class parliament, and effectively embraced Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution", which called on it to construct socialism. The 70 year experiment with public ownership and a planned economy followed. What would the classical Marxists say today with the power of hindsight? Even Trotsky admitted he would be forced to revise his views if WWII did not result in the long-delayed socialist revolution in the West and the overthrow of Stalinism in the USSR. Neither Marx nor Lenin nor Trotsky ever anticipated that post-capitalist societies would revert back to capitalism, the central political development of our time. > I see that you omit Cuba in this...panorama of the last 100 > years. Highly revealing. Revealing of what? I still regard the Cuban Revolution as one of the most heroic episodes of our lifetime and respect and admire Fidel as much as I ever did, but to suggest that the socialist characteristics of this small island are more significant to our understanding of historical trends and Marxism than the collapse of the USSR and China and the absence of socialist revolution in the West is ridiculous. Moreover, it doesn't take into account the increasing concessions which the Cubans have reluctantly had to make to markets, petty enterprise, and the dollar. I wouldn't exclude the possibility that the next generation of Cuban leaders may take the same measures with respect to the nationalized economy, the monopoly of foreign trade, the constraints on capital flows and labour mobility etc. that have been taken in the past 15 years by their former ideological allies. Such is the pressure of the ever-widening global capitalist economy. Might I suggest that instead of referring me to academic works by others and implying I am a Kautskyite enemy of Cuba, it would be better to identify the precise formulations of mine to which you object, and for what reasons. Marv Gandall
