Doug quoted Lenin:
> "Of all the socialists who have written about this, I cannot recall the work
> of a single socialist or the opinion of a single prominent socialist on
> future socialist society, which pointed to this concrete, practical
> difficulty that would confront the working class when it took power, when it
> set itself the task of turning the sum total of the very rich, historically
> inevitable and necessary for us store of culture and knowledge and technique
> accumulated by capitalism from an instrument of capitalism into an instrument
> of socialism."
He's not accurately recalling Marx.
Socialism, according to him, can't by created for individuals; it has to be
created by them.
To do this, they have to be individuals with the degree of integral development
required both to imagine and will it and to "appropriate," in Marx's particular
sense, the productive forces of social labour developed in capitalism. They
use their sublation of these forces to erect in reality what they have
accurately imagined and willed.
He claimed, mistakenly as it has turned out, that wage labour in capitalism
would work to develop the degree required to initiate the particular
revolutionary praxis that would then "educate" them to the further degree
necessary to build socialism.
Conditions that "restrained the human mind within the smallest possible
compass," riddling it with "prejudice" and "superstition," failed to develop
the required degree. The resulting individuality was not only incapable of
creating socialism; it was the foundation of "Oriental despotism."
Contrary to what he concluded in 1881, conditions in the Russian peasant
commune turn out, in their developmental consequences, to have been restraining
in this way. Moreover, the other condition he made necessary to Russian
peasants being able to move directly to socialism, a socialist revolution in
capitalism itself, was not met.
Ted
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