In a message dated 2/11/1999 9:16:19 AM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << 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: >> Alright, it is not a selective interpretation of Marx, but rather an ideological one. Marx's despair about the coming revolution in Europe was not a rejection of the important role capitalist modernization would play so much as a recognition that many parts of Europe, including Germany, were not modernizing quickly enough. In any case, the issue of scarcity can't be overlooked, no matter how many quotations one wants to marshall for evidence. Lenin recognized the problem himself and thought that it was a European-wide revolution that would save Russia from its poverty. Marx's entire intellectual legacy comes tumbling down if something as central as the relation between material advancement and the prospect for socialism is so easily ignored. At that point he has no value as a social scientist, only as a cult leader. -Paul Meyer come
