Did Marx change his position?

[The Man]

Marx, at first, thought that revolution could only happen in developed nations, (Like Great Britian, United States, etc) correct? If so, did he ever change his opinion about that, and think that revolution could happen in undeveloped countries as well?

[Revolutionair]

I'll post this from an other thread since it suits your new thread more:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2102183&postcount=5

[The Man]

I'll post this from an other thread since it suits your new thread more:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2102183&postcount=5

I'm just trying to make sure by other people on this forum.

[Rafiq]

Read 'Marx on the Margins'. It has a lot of info on Marx's opinion on underdeveloped nations.

Actually screw that, here's the actual quote.

The Structure and tone of Marx's argument shift subtly, becoming more dialectical. He begins for the first time to refer to the need for social revolution in britian to change the colonial policy. More strikingly, he also points to the possibility of an Indian national liberation movement:

K.Marx:

The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British Bourgeoisie, till in Great Britian itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether. At all events, we may safely expect to see, at a more or less remote period, the regeneration of that great and interesting country(India), whose gentle natives... have astonished the British officers by their bravery, whose country has been the source of our languages, our religions, and who represent the type of the ancient German in the Jat, and the type of the ancient Greek in the Brahman



So as you can see, Marx, in his early days, had a very Eurocentric view of the world, and a very ignorant opinion on India, but around the 1850's he started to change his opinion (based on experience) on the subject.

[Desperado]

Marx, at first, thought that revolution could only happen in developed nations, (Like Great Britian, United States, etc) correct?

No, he didn't believe this in the first place. He thought it was in these developed countries that the (communist) revolution was most likely to occur, but in 1877 criticised Mikhaliovsky who "absolutely must metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historical-philosophical theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself...". He also wrote in 1881 to Vera Sassoulitch (another Russian Marxist) that through revolution empowering the Russian peasant commune Russian society could avoid capitalist slavery. The emphasis of course was always on world revolution, if it was to be successfully in the long term, and this naturally meant revolution in both developed and undeveloped countries.

Marx's historical ideas were far more flexible than realised. He was in essence an instrumentalist (judged theories on their usefulness), he did not have a "master key" to history and understood his theories to be Eurocentric. Even the concepts like base and superstructure were not half as rigorous as espoused by Marxists today - sometimes the one "determined" the other, sometimes one was a "condition" of the other, sometimes just "corresponded to". Engles later explained "we had to emphasize the main principle vis-a-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction".