Karl Marx lives to see the Russian Revolution

On such issues as the attitude the Socialists should take to the Bolshevik-Menshevik split in the 1900's, the World War in 1914 and the Russian Revolution in 1917, I suspect that the views of a surviving Marx would be irrelevant. If, for example, Marx sided with the Mensheviks after the split, Lenin would simply say that the old man was out of touch with Russian conditions (or would even imply he was senile). And the older Marx gets the easier it is for any "Marxist" party or faction that disagrees with him to brush him off as, well, past his prime...
 
This is off a bit of a tangent however in regards to Lenin and company I recommend reading Stalin: In the Court of the Red Czar.
Nah, that book's more like a series of anecdotes (sometimes completely out of chronology) without any analysis of the context and the broader implications. A good Stalin biography is Isaac Deutscher's Stalin: A Political Biography.

I'm curious, what were Marx' thoughts on personal property since I've seen some confusing overlap and/or merging with private property in the way the soviets handled it.
When Marx says 'private property', he means property that can be utilised to accumulate private wealth for owners through exploiting the labour of workers.

On such issues as the attitude the Socialists should take to the Bolshevik-Menshevik split in the 1900's, the World War in 1914 and the Russian Revolution in 1917, I suspect that the views of a surviving Marx would be irrelevant. If, for example, Marx sided with the Mensheviks after the split, Lenin would simply say that the old man was out of touch with Russian conditions (or would even imply he was senile). And the older Marx gets the easier it is for any "Marxist" party or faction that disagrees with him to brush him off as, well, past his prime...
I don't see why there's this assumption that Marx would side with the Mensheviks over the Bolsheviks. Marx would have recognised, just as Luxemburg, Debs, Gramsci and Lenin did, that the first world war was a war between imperialist aggressors and should be opposed (whereas the Menshiviks and other SocDem movements throughout Europe capitulated to petty nationalism).
 
Nah, that book's more like a series of anecdotes (sometimes completely out of chronology) without any analysis of the context and the broader implications. A good Stalin biography is Isaac Deutscher's Stalin: A Political Biography.


When Marx says 'private property', he means property that can be utilised to accumulate private wealth for owners through exploiting the labour of workers.


I don't see why there's this assumption that Marx would side with the Mensheviks over the Bolsheviks. Marx would have recognised, just as Luxemburg, Debs, Gramsci and Lenin did, that the first world war was a war between imperialist aggressors and should be opposed (whereas the Menshiviks and other SocDem movements throughout Europe capitulated to petty nationalism).

To be Fair Bernstein was also Anti-War..
 
It was only 'based on his ideas' in a very distant sense. Marx was of the opinion that socialism should be attempted in an industrialized nation; he had Germany in mind. His worldview led him to the conclusion that 'capitalism' (as he understood that term) was a phase that had to be passed through first, before a socialist society could ever emerge.

I should point out that Marx wrote almost nothing about socialism. In his collected works, there were only a few pages about it. Das Kapital was an analysis of capitalism -- and a very insightful one at that, even his (honest) critics admit that much.
 

Dirk_Pitt

Banned
well ... my view (and one i've seen repeated other places on the left wing) is basicly that communism is the ideal thing on paper (original marxist theory), but frankly we havn't seen a good showing in the world as of yet since all attempts (except prehaps that little village in Spain and even that is more collectivist than communist) was quickly usurped by wanna-be dictators, usually with strong military support which only were communists by name (if even that), and not by act. So likely its a utopian dream that collapses as soon as you add humans into the equation

I laugh hard at that mentality. I hear it all the time! How can something "work on paper" if you don't include the most important variable: the human variable. Especially when the whole Marxist theory is about human behavior

Any theory where when you enter the central variable and falls apart is not a theory that works well on paper.
 
well ... my view (and one i've seen repeated other places on the left wing) is basicly that communism is the ideal thing on paper (original marxist theory), but frankly we havn't seen a good showing in the world as of yet since all attempts (except prehaps that little village in Spain and even that is more collectivist than communist) was quickly usurped by wanna-be dictators, usually with strong military support which only were communists by name (if even that), and not by act. So likely its a utopian dream that collapses as soon as you add humans into the equation

I was under the impression that Kerala was an example of successful socialism?
 
I don't see why there's this assumption that Marx would side with the Mensheviks over the Bolsheviks. Marx would have recognised, just as Luxemburg, Debs, Gramsci and Lenin did, that the first world war was a war between imperialist aggressors and should be opposed (whereas the Menshiviks and other SocDem movements throughout Europe capitulated to petty nationalism).

First of all, I didn't say that Marx would have sided with the Mensheviks in the party split. I said that *if he did,* Lenin would ignore or dismiss his views. Second, I was talking about the split which took place years before the War. In the 1900's there was no disagreement between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks on whether socialists should oppose imperialist wars. Their disagreements were largely about organizational questions. Most western European social democrats who knew about the split were puzzled by it and didn't think there were sufficient grounds for it. Bebel told Maxim Litvinov, "But you are children!" http://books.google.com/books?id=dN5V8WX5WP0C&pg=PA266 (That might, or might not, have been Marx's position.) Third, it is not true that the Mensheviks came out in favor of the war in 1914. The Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in the Duma walked out of the session and refused to vote for credits--and then issued a joint statement attacking the “false patriotism under which the ruling classes wage their predatory policy." Now one can argue that the statement was not unequivocally anti-war enough, because it also stated "that the proletariat would defend the cultural treasures of the people against all attacks, no matter where they came from, whether from within or from without." http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1976/lenin2/ch02.htm But equivocal or not, it was agreed to by Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike, and was more anti-war than the position of any other social democratic party in Europe. (Plekhanov, who was enthusiastic about the war, was as isolated from the Menshviks as from the Bolsheviks.) The Mensheviks did not become clearly "defensist" until after the February Revolution.

Marx and Engels during their lives were not neutral in capitalist wars (and of course *all* wars were waged by capitalist or feudal powers at the time). They favored the victory of whatever nation (i.e., whatever national ruling class) would have the most advantageous consequences for the working-class movement. In particular, they wanted to see Tsarist Russia defeated, as they considered it the basis of reaction in Europe. Their anti-Russian statements were constantly cited by pro-war German Social Democrats in 1914-17.

To Lenin, of course, Marx's favoring the lesser evil (in the sense of the nation--or if you prefer, national ruling class--whose victory would do most to advance, or at least less to retard, the revolution) was an obsolete policy. This was now the age of imperialism, in which all sides in the war were equally reactionary, and the only answer was proletarian revolution. Would Marx have agreed, or would he have maintained his old anti-Russian line? I don't know, but my point is, *whichever way Marx decided* those Marxists who disagreed with him would not be persuaded. Likewise, suppose that Marx agreed on opposition to the war as an imperialist war in 1914, but disagreed with Lenin on other matters--e.g., suppose Marx agreed with not only the Mensheviks but many Bolsheviks that "defensism" was justifiable after the February Revolution. (After all, the Germans *did* come pretty close to a victory in the West which would have allowed them to liquidate the Russian Revolution.) Again, Lenin would simply say that Marx in his old age was unfortunately departing from Marxism.

My point is not to decide what the "true" Marxist position on the issues confronting the world socialist movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century would be. My point is that nobody--not even a surviving Marx!--could *authoritatively* give an answer to them. An elderly Marx's (or more likely Engels') opinion of the implications of *The Communist Manifesto* and *Capital* for the early twentieth century would simply be one man's opinion--even if that one man was the co-founder of Scientific Socialism. Nobody else would be *bound* to accept it, and those who disagreed with whatever position a nonagenarian Marx or Engels took would continue to disagree.
 
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