Paul Meyer: >This is a fairly selective rendering of history. By the 1870's was up to his >neck in involvement with mass worker's movements and parties in the >industrializing >world. No, it is not a "fairly selective" rendering of history. Teodor Shanin characterizes Marx's interest in Russia as directly related to his pessimism about near or intermediate term possibilities for revolution in Western Europe, which was already in the opening stages of imperialism. >From Lenin's "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism," written in 1916: ==== In a letter to Marx, dated October 7, 1858, Engels wrote: "...The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable." In a letter to Sorge, dated September 21, 1872, Engels informs him that Hales kicked up a big row in the Federal Council of the International and secured a vote of censure on Marx for saying that "the English labour leaders had sold themselves". Marx wrote to Sorge on August 4, 1874: "As to the urban workers here [in England], it is a pity that the whole pack of leaders did not get into Parliament. This would be the surest way of getting rid of the whole lot." In a letter to Marx, dated August 11, 1881, Engels speaks about "those very worst English trade unions which allow themselves to be led by men sold to, or at least paid by, the bourgeoisie." In a letter to Kautsky, dated September 12, 1882, Engels wrote: "You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers' party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals. and the workers gaily share the feast of England's monopoly of the world market and the colonies." Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
