Marx and the Obshchina

[Guardia Rossa]

What was all that stuff about Marx studying the Obshchina/Mir in his late life? I recall reading that Marx saw in it the possibility of making communism? What?

Post Scriptum:

This is it:

http://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/draft-1.htm

What do you think of it?

[Blake's Baby]

Don't see the problem.

If you're a stagist and believe that every single country needs to go through a capitalist stage of development, I can see this would blow your mind. This used to be called 'the Hottentot Problem' I believe, the question being 'does every Hottentot (that is, Namibian Khoikhoi hunter-gatherer) need to become a proletarian?'

If you look as capitalism as a world system, then the state of development of each individual country doesn't matter, it's the state of the world system that is at issue

If a revolution had happened in say Germany in 1880, and then spread around the world, then why could the myr not have helped in the transition to a socialist society?

[Guardia Rossa]

Not a problem, just seeing what everyone thinks on it.

[Tim Cornelis]

"And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat just beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he is a prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina [B], and Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.

The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?"

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Personally, I always thought that this would be a promising frame to understand how we should relate to traditional village "communes" in Latin America, and other areas in the geopolitical periphery where local production is run along social lines.