A quick question about a quote I read in one of your articles.
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Some months ago, while reading an article about the Russian Revolution and/or the impossibility of socialism existing in one country, I came across a quote (attributed to one of Marx’s works) that goes like “When conditions are premature, the proletarian revolutionaries will be forced to play the role of the capitalist class.” What is the full quote and where can I find it?
Thank you,
-GrantIt sounds like that statement was expressing, in the author’s own words, this view expressed by Marx in 1847 in “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality”.
“If therefore the proletariat overthrows the political rule of the bourgeoisie, its victory will only be temporary, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in the year 1794, as long as in the course of history, in its “movement”, the material conditions have not yet been created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and therefore also the definitive overthrow of the political rule of the bourgeoisie. The terror in France could thus by its mighty hammer-blows only serve to spirit away, as it were, the ruins of feudalism from French soil. The timidly considerate bourgeoisie would not have accomplished this task in decades. The bloody action of the people thus only prepared the way for it.“
https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1847/10/31.htm
Also it may originate from Engels Peasant Wars
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany/ch06.htm#6.1
“The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply… In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination. In the interests of the movement itself, he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost…”
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