Was socialist revolution to way to capitalism for feudal China and Russia?

[Weezer]

When I read In Praise of Marx by Terry Eagleton (http://chronicle.com/article/In-Praise-of-Marx/127027/), this paragraph made me question my belief in Orthodox Trotskyism and in particular the Permanent Revolution:

For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China. If it did, then the result would simply be what he called "generalized scarcity," by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor. It would mean a recycling of "the old filthy business"—or, in less tasteful translation, "the same old crap." Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people. It is not a program by which nations bereft of material resources, a flourishing civic culture, a democratic heritage, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions, and a skilled, educated work force might catapult themselves into the modern age.

What I inferred from this: the notion that societies can't skip capitalism. They have to go through it and then towards socialism.

Now, I believe that the Chinese and Russian revolutions were proletarian revolutions, but in an odd kind of way, could the proletarian revolution paved the way for the bourgeoisie? The Soviet Union has reverted back to capitalism completely and China is also heavily influenced by the bourgeoisie, would it be in the spectrum of historical materialism to believe that historical materially that China and the Soviet Union went from: Feudalism -> Socialism in backwards societies -> Capitalism. It would seem like skipping an entire biological process to skip an economic stage. And the whole argument of state capitalism rather than genuine socialism in China, the USSR, and other defunct socialist states, I think would help strengthen this theory.

I don't claim to be an expert in Marxist theory or that I really believe this theory. But it's a thought that has been going through my head recently.

[Weezer]

Goddammit, someone change the title to:

Was socialist revolution the way to capitalism for feudal China and Russia?

[Leftsolidarity]

I think the same thing

[Aurora]

I think it's a big mistake to think that Feudalism existed in Russia or China before the revolutions, both were capitalist but underdeveloped compared to say German or British capitalism.


For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China.
No he wouldn't, Marx wrote about the conditions that could lead to revolution in Russia, the fact that their was a revolution in Russia shows that the country was ripe for it.

If it did, then the result would simply be what he called "generalized scarcity," by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor.
Wrong, i really don't know how he got this but it needs some marxism injected into it, "Law can never be higher than the economic structure and the cultural level conditioned thereby", simply put it's impossible for society to work according to "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" if their isn't enough produced for each to take freely. The practical basis of communism is the massive expansion of the productive forces and increasing the productivity of labour, it's only when the economic structure has increased can it be possible to surpass bourgeois law and complete communism.

It would mean a recycling of "the old filthy business"—or, in less tasteful translation, "the same old crap."
Recycling is the wrong word here, if we take the original Marx quote, Marx is much more correct when he uses the word "revive".

Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people.
This sounds incredibly liberal, 'justice' 'prosperity' 'people' but more importantly it has no basis in marxism.


What I inferred from this: the notion that societies can't skip capitalism. They have to go through it and then towards socialism.
Your right, it is impossible for feudalism to more towards socialism because the necessary conditions for socialism are developed by capitalism most important of which is the working class.
It's lucky for us that feudalism has been wiped of the face of the planet by capitalism, even a 100 years ago Russia had a small but well organised working class capable of overthrowing the weak bourgeoisie, the revolution in Russia showed not that we could skip capitalism but rather that the bourgeoisie was no longer capable of carrying out their own democratic tasks and these had to be brought about by the working class who moved beyond the democratic tasks to their own socialist tasks.

I think the confusion around feudalism that alot of socialists get is because today we have no practical experience of what feudalism was like so some tend to assume that if a country isn't as advanced as N.American or European capitalism that it must be feudal, this isn't the case, capitalism develops unevenly around the world some countries reached capitalism before others and as is the nature of capitalism, it expanded to find as much profit and new markets as it could.

[chegitz guevara]

I think it's instructive to look at what Marx had to say on the subject. In his letters to Vera Zasulich and his forward to the Russian edition of the Manifesto, Marx concluded that the peasant communes in Russia could establish the basis for socialism and that a Russian revolution could skip capitalism IF it led to a workers' revolution in the West and that workers revolution then helped develop Russia.

What can we mine from this? One, Marx's general stages of history were not, fixed, immutable laws, but general descriptions. History and society is more complex than that.

As Anarion points out, capitalism already existed in Russia at the time of the revolution. Indeed, twenty five years before the revolution, Lenin wrote, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. By the time of the Revolution, Russia was already the site of much of the most advanced capitalist development, as France was pouring billions of Francs into new factories and railways there.

Now, I will veer away from orthodoxies on this point. Feudalism in China was largely intact, but when they made their revolution, a workers revolution already existed in the USSR. Although Stalin was not terribly helpful to the Chinese Communists in their war against the Nationalists, once the revolution had been made, the USSR provided aid and development to the Chinese revolution, for about ten years, before they broke relations. It wasn't enough to completely develop China, but it helped them through the period when they were stabilizing the revolution and abolishing the old ruling classes. History doesn't put itself into the neat little categories we create, and I doubt any of the earlier Marxist theorists ever considered a situation like this arising.

[Sixiang]

What I inferred from this: the notion that societies can't skip capitalism. They have to go through it and then towards socialism.

Now, I believe that the Chinese and Russian revolutions were proletarian revolutions, but in an odd kind of way, could the proletarian revolution paved the way for the bourgeoisie? The Soviet Union has reverted back to capitalism completely and China is also heavily influenced by the bourgeoisie, would it be in the spectrum of historical materialism to believe that historical materially that China and the Soviet Union went from: Feudalism -> Socialism in backwards societies -> Capitalism. It would seem like skipping an entire biological process to skip an economic stage. And the whole argument of state capitalism rather than genuine socialism in China, the USSR, and other defunct socialist states, I think would help strengthen this theory.

I don't claim to be an expert in Marxist theory or that I really believe this theory. But it's a thought that has been going through my head recently.
Anarion and chegitz guevara pretty much covered it all on the USSR.

As far as the PRC, I can tell what the Maoist view of the matter is. The view is that the bourgeois-democratic revolution began in China in 1911, but for various reasons, the reactionary bourgeoisie was not able to properly carry out democratic reforms and all the other things that previous capitalist revolutions had done in opposition to feudalism. And in 1919, New Democracy took hold. New democracy is the the united front of the revolutionary proletariat, peasantry, petty-bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie under the leadership and control of the proletariat through the communist party to carry out the necessary measures of bourgeois-democratic revolution (destroying feudal property forms, establishing an independent national state, cultural revolution of an antifeudal and anticolonial kind, etc.). Socialism began in China in 1949 after the revolution against the reactionary KMT and all their imperialist supporters.

[scarletghoul]

Its worth pointing out that Terry Eagleton is a nob. The extent of his Marxism is that he was an oxford trot and that he now writes the occasional left wing piece, from the comfort of his high academic lifestyle. Aside from that he just does shitty lectures where he makes unfunny attempts at jokes and says "erm" as a cue for people to laugh so its as if he is still casually speaking and he wants people to interrupt him with laughter, even though he's not fuckiing funny, and all his talks and writings are filled with superfluous words and literary fucking around, its so annoying. This man seems to have led an entirely comfortable upper class existance and he is only marxist to the extent that he agrees with some of the theory; he is certainly not engaged in any real peoples struggle and he does not seem to have known oppression first hand

(feels good to get that written down lol)

[scarletghoul]

For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China. If it did, then the result would simply be what he called "generalized scarcity," by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor. It would mean a recycling of "the old filthy business"—or, in less tasteful translation, "the same old crap." Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people. It is not a program by which nations bereft of material resources, a flourishing civic culture, a democratic heritage, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions, and a skilled, educated work force might catapult themselves into the modern age.
This quote exemplifies his stupid abstract mechanical understanding of Marx. Communism is about the emancipation of all peoples, the doing away with exploitation.. Only someone from a position of completely detatched speculation could say that russia and china cant have socialist revolutions because they havnt fully developed capitalism..


Now, I believe that the Chinese and Russian revolutions were proletarian revolutions, but in an odd kind of way, could the proletarian revolution paved the way for the bourgeoisie? The Soviet Union has reverted back to capitalism completely and China is also heavily influenced by the bourgeoisie, would it be in the spectrum of historical materialism to believe that historical materially that China and the Soviet Union went from: Feudalism -> Socialism in backwards societies -> Capitalism. It would seem like skipping an entire biological process to skip an economic stage. And the whole argument of state capitalism rather than genuine socialism in China, the USSR, and other defunct socialist states, I think would help strengthen this theory.
Thing is there was already a lot of capitalism in China and Russia, in the cities and in China's case in the form of imperial control. The countries were only semi-feudal, and often this semifeudalism is complementary to the capitalism. Its not so simple that you can just classify each country as feudalist socialist or capitalist and then arrange those words in a timeline to illustrate the country's development. Things are more complicated than that, which is why our materialism has to be dialectical and not just historical (ie, we have to understand that the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and China was not just because of some magical historical necessity, it was because the new bourgeoisie arose within the state and were able to implement capitalist economics due to lack of mass democratic control and, ironically, the belief that society would mechanically progress from socialism to communism as a matter of historical necessity).

Also East Germany was not feudal at all, and it returned to capitalism. So nyeh

[Weezer]

Also East Germany was not feudal at all, and it returned to capitalism. So nyeh

What is the materialist justification for that? In arguments over Marxism, I have a hard time defending defunct socialist states when people bring up "trolololol they all fell because of popular uprisings/reforms, communism fails trololol."

[scarletghoul]

What is the materialist justification for that? In arguments over Marxism, I have a hard time defending defunct socialist states when people bring up "trolololol they all fell because of popular uprisings/reforms, communism fails trololol."
East Germany became capitalist again for the same reason China, Russia, Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland, Vietnam, etc became capitalist again: because a new bourgeoisie emerged within the Party/state, and their revisionist ideology + policies were in contradiction with the socialised economy, leading to the collapse of socialism. This was able to happen because there was insufficient direct peoples control over the state, so once the revisionists had state power they were difficult to stop. Mao noticed this problem at least in part, which is why he encouraged people to rebel against reactionaries in the party/state,, though he didn't go far enough, as deng and friends were able to restore capitalism after his death anyway. but he was going in the right direction.

[Leftsolidarity]

East Germany became capitalist again for the same reason China, Russia, Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland, Vietnam, etc became capitalist again: because a new bourgeoisie emerged within the Party/state, and their revisionist ideology + policies were in contradiction with the socialised economy, leading to the collapse of socialism. This was able to happen because there was insufficient direct peoples control over the state, so once the revisionists had state power they were difficult to stop. Mao noticed this problem at least in part, which is why he encouraged people to rebel against reactionaries in the party/state,, though he didn't go far enough, as deng and friends were able to restore capitalism after his death anyway. but he was going in the right direction.

I don't think that at the fall of every socialist state you can just cry "It was revisionists!" It think there was more at play.

[Rooster]

East Germany became capitalist again for the same reason China, Russia, Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland, Vietnam, etc became capitalist again: because a new bourgeoisie emerged within the Party/state, and their revisionist ideology + policies were in contradiction with the socialised economy, leading to the collapse of socialism. This was able to happen because there was insufficient direct peoples control over the state, so once the revisionists had state power they were difficult to stop. Mao noticed this problem at least in part, which is why he encouraged people to rebel against reactionaries in the party/state,, though he didn't go far enough, as deng and friends were able to restore capitalism after his death anyway. but he was going in the right direction.

So you are saying that the revisionists managed to reform society peacefully, changing the mode of production, from socialism into capitalism?

[Zanthorus]

I don't think that you have to be an 'orthodox Trotskyist' (Whatever that actually is) or uphold Trotsky's writings on the permanent revolution (Which isn't exclusive to 'orthodox Trotskyism' anyway. Rosa Luxemburg after 1905-07 also began to see that the Russian revolution would not stop at the democratic stage but would end up bringing the working-class to power, and Programma Comunista's 1965 theses on the Chinese question nod their head to both the permanent revolution and uneven and combined development) to the letter to see that what Eagleton writes is seriously problematic. First of all, Marx's materialist method does not involve theorising a series of pre-set stages of historical development which any human society originating anywhere on the planet is forced to go through. He is explicit from the 1875 French edition of Capital onwards that his sketch of historical development is based on theorising about the empirical reality of Western European societies rather than "a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical." (Marx to the editor of Otecestvenniye Zapisky).

Even as early as his 1843 critique of Hegel it's easy to see why such an interpretation is untenable. He says remarking on the transition from the categories of the family and civil society to the sphere of the state in Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie that "the transition is not derived from the specific essence of the family, etc., and the specific essence of the state, but rather from the universal relation of necessity and freedom. Exactly the same transition is effected in the Logic from the sphere of Essence to the sphere of Concept, and in the Philosophy of Nature from Inorganic Nature to Life. It is always the same categories offered as the animating principle now of one sphere, now of another, and the only thing of importance is to discover, for the particular concrete determinations, the corresponding abstract ones." In other words, Hegelian philosophy begins with the abstract schema of Hegel's Logic, and then attempts to impose this schema on the facts of everyday life. If Marx had actually started from a unilinear schema of historical development and then attempted to impose it on actual history then his criticism of Hegel would have been horribly inconsistent, but all the evidence, from his studies of the French revolution to the extensive source documentation of the chapters on the working-day and primitive accumulation in Capital to his extensive 1879-82 notebooks on the history of pre-capitalist societies shows that Marx was on the right side of the divide between grand philosophical narratives of history like Hegel's and the concerns of modern historians for source-based studies of events.

There is a fairly strong theme throughout some of Engels' letters in his later years of criticism of supposed Marxists who use the materialist conception of history as a philosophical battering ram to mold concrete, particular history into an adequate shape as opposed to analysis which begins with the study of the real, particular, empirical content of history. "The materialist conception of history has a lot of them nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history." (Engels to C. Schmidt, August 5th 1890) This is even one of the contexts in which Engels cited Marx's famous 'I am not a Marxist' quote.

In terms of parts of Marx's works which any interpretation of him as positing a determinate and unilinear historical progression necessarily trips up on, chegitz and Anarion have already mentioned Marx's belief that the Russian village commune could be used as a basis for skipping over the capitalist stage of development in Russia. I would note in addition that this was not just Marx's belief but also in evidence in Engels 1874 piece 'On Social Relations in Russia (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/refugee-literature/ch05.htm)' (He also co-signed the 1882 Russian Preface to the Manifesto). I would emphasise that this view of an alternative historical development in non-western societies was not something that Marx came around to in the later years of his life, but is present in some form in his work from the Grundrisse onwards, the latter work marking the point where Marx develops his albeit flawed conception of a seperate 'asiatic mode of production'.

His notebooks on Indian history also attack the idea that there was ever a period in Indian history which could be accurately labelled as 'feudalism' and Kevin Anderson has put forward the proposition (http://www.kevin-anderson.com/just-capital-and-class-marx-on-non-western-societies-nationalism-and-ethnicity/) that his notes on the communal social relations of the Indian villages indicate that he saw the possibility of a similar development in India to that which he also hypothesised for Russia. Anderson accuses Engels of obscuring Marx's later development away from a eurocentric and unilinear determinist outlook but I think in this connection it's also worth mentioning Engels Origins which contains a passage on how historical development in North American society had travelled along a seperate path from that in Western Europe until the entry onto the scene of a bloodthirsty European colonialism cut that development short.

Quite apart from the issue of unilinearism, I think Eagleton misses a very obvious point, namely that Western European countries including France and Germany at the time when Marx and Engels were writing also had a majority peasant population. My own personal opinion is that Russia prior to 1917 could very easily be described as a capitalist society, with the industrial centers of Petrograd and Moscow in particular having the heavy industry and socialised labour processes typical of fully developed capitalist societies. This is a situation incredibly similar to France in the 19th century which had a concentrated working-class population in the city of Paris but a majority peasant population in the rest of the country. Marx certainly thought that a revolution establishing a workers' government (With the support of the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie) was possible in France at that time, more than that, there actually was a revolution establishing what Marx regarded as essentially a workers' government - the Paris Commune of 1871. If the Commune had fulfilled it's goal of spreading it's administrative form over all of France then that would've meant a situation akin to that of Russia. Marx himself explicitly poses such a possibility in his Conspectus of Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy. Ditto Engels in his commentary on the peasant question and the agrarian programme of the French socialist party. Why would Engels or the French socialists have bothered to draw up and discuss such a programme if they did not believe in the possibility of the French socialist party coming to power while the majority of the country consisted of peasants?

Moreover the Petrograd and Moscow workers were more proletarianised and worked with much more modern and more socialised industry than the Parisian working-class in 1871, and they were not backing a hodgepodge mix of Blanquists, Proudhonists and Jacobin Republicans but the revolutionary Marxist Bolshevik party (The vote for the Bolsheviks in Petrograd was 45% and in Moscow 50% IIRC. The Bolsheviks had a clear majority of delegates at the All-Russia congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' deputies). All the conditions in terms of the composition of the working-class and the character of it's leadership and organisations were more favourable to the initial success of a revolution in Russia in 1917 than in France in 1871, so how can we support the latter and denounce the former as premature? I think that's completely fucking backwards personally.

One final point, if we accept Eagleton's eurocentric rubbish about the backwardness of the Russian population and their lack of comprehension of liberal-democratic ideals (tbh I don't really see much of a problem with the latter. More evidence that Eagleton's 'Marxism' is a cover for liberal triumphalism) then we've sort of let Stalinism in through the back door. The brutality of the Stalinist regime as well as other third world modernisation regimes of the 20th century appear justified as the inevitable product of a backward population rather than the result of reversible historical contingencies. By contrast, the approach of revolutionaries like Trotsky, Bordiga and Luxemburg was to explain the degeneration of the revolution in terms of historically contigent factors like the failure of the German revolution, the ravages of the civil war, mistakes in internal policy prior to 1928, the Comintern's disastrous line in places like China and so on. Eagleton's approach mimics the Stalinist critiques of the latter along the lines of "what else was Stalin supposed to do given the conditions GET SOME MATERIAL ANALYSES PETTY BOURGEOIS ULTRA-LEFT REVISIONISTS!!!!111oneone".


Its worth pointing out that Terry Eagleton is a nob.

You've managed to summarise in one sentence what it took me eight paragraphs to say...

[scarletghoul]

So you are saying that the revisionists managed to reform society peacefully, changing the mode of production, from socialism into capitalism?
It wasn't/isn't peaceful at all; there were riots in the USSR after the Secret Speech, and of course shit loads of violence in the 90s, including an attempted coup. In China the political violence of the GPCR was a response to the attempts to restore capitalism, and the Dengist government certainly wouldn't have survived with its reforms if it hadnt violently crushed the antirevisionist uprisings of the people (which go all the way from the gpcr to the present day workers riots).


I don't think that at the fall of every socialist state you can just cry "It was revisionists!" It think there was more at play.I don't see what is wrong with thinking there is a consistent cause for all these very similar happenings. Consistency is not the same as simplicity

[Jose Gracchus]

Zanthorus: I think you probably have the ratios for Moscow and Petrograd reversed, given how easily the Bolsheviks assumed the majority in Petrograd and the protracted struggle with the right-socialists in Moscow after October.

[Rooster]

[QUOTE=Zenga Zenga !;2170590]It wasn't/isn't peaceful at all; there were riots in the USSR after the Secret Speech, and of course shit loads of violence in the 90s, including an attempted coup. In China the political violence of the GPCR was a response to the attempts to restore capitalism, and the Dengist government certainly wouldn't have survived with its reforms if it hadnt violently crushed the antirevisionist uprisings of the people (which go all the way from the gpcr to the present day workers riots).[QUOTE]

But what were the actual forms of revision that took place? Did it happen with a social revolution or through reforms to the state apparatus? Is a political coup the same as a social revolution? Aren't the bourgeois incapable of carrying out their historic role of history and had to rely on the proletariat?