Re: timescale question

From: Steve Gabosch (bebop101@comcast.net)
Date: Thu Oct 23 2003 - 04:54:36 PDT


Very good point about the advent of imperialism, and Trotsky's role in
giving the concept of uneven and combined development definitive form,
Andy, thank you. And thanks for the leads to the Marx archives. I only
skimmed the articles on the page your url goes to enough to search for the
word "uneven" and get a sense of their contents. (Incidentally, I found no
instances of the key word uneven, in an effort to find instances of that
terminology - I have found one instance so far in Grundrisse).

However, an article by Engels caught my eye. The last lines in this
article seem to dovetail so well with the quote I posted the other day with
Trotsky critiquing Stalin's "socialism in one country" that I thought I
would post Engels, too. The parallel between Engels and Trotsky's remarks
- they both state that the future of socialism in Russia depends on the
international working class revolution - is an interesting continuation of
some of Victor's points about Marx and the prospects for revolution in
Russia.

Trotsky's quote is from his 1937 assessment of the growth of a "parasitic
beauracracy" in the Soviet Union - his seminal work, The Revolution
Betrayed, page 294. Engels' quote, from volume 27 of MECW, p 432-433, is
from an afterword he wrote in 1894 to an 1875 article entitled "On Social
Relations In Russia." In the quote below, the "commune" Engels refers to
was the tendency of serfs in Russia and other countries to share property
communally, a remnant of pre-feudal property relations. The 1875 article
that this article was an afterword to was the last of five articles on
Russia, anarchism, and other topics under a series Engels wrote called
Refugee Literature, published in Der Volksstaat in 1874 and 1875. Both
quotes are copied from marxists.org.

Trotsky, 1937, speaking of the Soviet Union:
>>"The isolated socialist state" has long ceased to be a hypothesis, and
>>became a fact ­ in Russia to be sure, not in Germany. But this very fact
>>of isolation is also a precise expression of the relative strength of
>>world capitalism, the relative weakness of socialism. From an isolated
>>"socialist" state to a socialist society once for all done with the state
>>remains a long historic road, and this road
>>exactly coincides with the road of international revolution."

Engels, 1894, speaking of Russia:
"So if the government wishes to meet the payment of interest to foreign
countries by some other method than new foreign loans, it must ensure that
Russian industry rapidly expands to the point where it is able to meet
domestic demand in full. Hence the requirement that Russia must become an
industrial nation that is self-sufficient and independent of other
countries; hence the frantic efforts of the government to bring the
capitalist development of Russia to a peak in the space of a few years. For
if this does not take place, there will be no options but to draw on the
metallic war funds accumulated in the State Bank and the State Exchequer,
or else state bankruptcy. In either case Russian foreign policy would be
finished.

"One thing is clear: in these circumstances the fledgling Russian
bourgeoisie has the state completely in its power. In all economic matters
of importance the state must do its bidding. If for the time being the
bourgeoisie continues to put up with the despotic autocracy of the Tsar and
his officials, it is only because this autocracy, mitigated as it is by the
venality of the bureaucracy offers it more guarantees than would changes
even of a bourgeois-liberal nature, whose consequences no one could
foresee, given the present internal situation in Russia. And so the
transformation of the country into a capitalist industrial nation, the
proletarianisation of a large proportion of the peasantry and the decay of
the old communistic commune proceeds at an ever quickening pace.

"Whether enough of this commune has been saved so that, if the occasion
arises, as Marx and I still hoped in 1882, it could become the point of
departure for communist development in harmony with a sudden change of
direction in Western Europe, I do not presume to say. But this much is
certain: if a remnant of this commune is to be preserved, the first
condition is the fall of tsarist despotism ­ revolution in Russia. This
will not only tear the great mass of the nation, the peasants, away from
the isolation of their villages, which comprise their “mir”, their “world”,
and lead them out onto the great stage, where they will get to know the
outside world and thus themselves, their own situation and the means of
salvation from their present distress; it will also give the labour
movement of the West fresh impetus and create new, better conditions in
which to carry on the struggle, thus hastening the victory of the modern
industrial proletariat, without which present-day Russia can never achieve
a socialist transformation, whether proceeding from the commune or from
capitalism."

<end>

Andy wrote:
>It is possible to follow Marx's thinking on this subject through the
>subject archive of Marx on Russia:
>http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/russia/index.htm
>The concept as known to both Marx and Hegel had to undergo fundamental
>change with the advent of imperialism, as described by Lenin. I think that
>though the genesis of the concept is traceable through Marx and Lenin, it
>was really only Trotsky who was in a position to give the concept of
>"combined and uneven development" a definitive form.
>Andy



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