Vejas Liulevicius: belief

Transcript context

…What do you think Marx would say about the 20th century? Let’s take it before we get to Mao and China, just looking at the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. That’s a really good question. I think that Marx was flexible in his expectations about tactics and strategies, even as he was sure that he had actually cracked a big intellectual problem of what the future’s going to look like. So how it would play out, he was a man who had to deal with a lot of disappointments because in revolutionary uprising after revolutionary uprising, whether it was in the revolutions of 1848 across Europe, whether it was in Poland, whether it was in the Paris Commune, this is it. This is the outbreak of the real thing, and then it doesn’t end up happening. So I think that he’d probably have tried to be patient about the turn of events. We mentioned at the outset that Marx felt it was unlikely that a workers’ revolution would break out in the Russian Empire because for that you needed lots of industrial workers and they didn’t have a lot of industry. There’s a footnote to add there, and it proves his flexibility. A Russian socialist wrote to Marx asking, “Might it not be possible for Russia to escape some stages of capitalist development? I mean, do you have to rigidly follow that scheme?” And Marx’s answer was convoluted, but it wasn’t a no, and that suggests that Marx was willing to entertain all sorts of possible scenarios. I think he would certainly have been very surprised at the course of events as it unfolded because it didn’t match his expectations at the outset. Not to put this on him, but would he be okay with the price of [inaudible 02:30:02] for the utopian destination of communism? Meaning, is it okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet?…

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