<< By the 1870s, he had become thoroughly disgusted with capitalism and wrote to the Russian populist movement that they were correct in fighting to defend the rural communes against capitalism. He said that the accumulation model set forward in V. 1 of Capital was not meant to be a universal model. >> 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. Marx's take on the question of how and when the revolution would arrive is contradictory at best. If Marx indeed had given up hopes for the revolutionary potential of capitalism (which is not, as you imply, the same the disgust for the German bourgeiosie), he had much more to question in his own theories and prognositications. His projective sociology of progressively increasing class polarization, the an immense proletarian majority would face off an embattled bourgeois, was already beginning to look fishy. As I have posted before, Marx was always suspicious of revolution in the backwards countries because of the scarcity problem which had a long pedigree in political philosophy. It is not a problem he could (or should have) have ignored easily, to some extent it is by the recognition of the scarcity problem in Marx's thought, that he can call himself a "materialist" rather than a "utopian". And to the extent he believed that you can't socialize poverty (without producing dictatorship), the evidence turned out NOT to be on Lenin's side. -Paul Meyer "Russia is a peasant country, one of the most backwards of European countries. Socialism cannot triumph there directly and immediately. But the peasant character of the country, the vast reserves in the hands of the nobility, may, to judge from the experience of 1905, give tremendous sweep to the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia and may make our revolution the prologue to the world socialist revolution, a step toward it." - Lenin, 1917
