Dan Little: Marx on peasant consciousness

Dan Little writes about Marx on peasant consciousness.

From this description we can draw several positive ideas about the foundations of collective solidarity. Here are the elements that Marx takes to be crucial in the formation of collective consciousness in this passage:

1. The group needs to possess "manifold relations" to each other.
2. There needs to be effective communication and transportation across space, not just local interaction.
3. There needs to be a degree of economic interdependence.
4. There need to be shared material conditions in the system of production.
5. There needs to be an astute appreciation of the social and economic environment.
6. There needs to be organization and leadership to help articulate a shared political consciousness and agenda.

And Marx seems to have something like a necessary and sufficient relation in mind between these conditions and the emergence of collective consciousness: these conditions are jointly sufficient and individually necessary for collective consciousness in an extended group.

There are several crucial ideas here that survive into current thinking about solidarity and mobilization. So Marx's thinking about collective consciousness was prescient. It is interesting to consider where his thoughts about collective solidarity came from. How did he come to have insightful ideas about the social psychology of mobilization and solidarity in the first place? This isn't a topic that had a history of advanced theory and thinking in 1851.

Emphasis Mine

The problem is why only the Bolshevik Revolution was led by workers while other revolutions were led by peasants. (Little is mistaken in characterising the October Revolution as a peasant one.)

In a way, the Chinese Revolution was led by the remnant of the Shanghai working class that survived the Long March. The Vietnamese and Korean revolutions started in the more industrialised parts of the country.

I would have to disagree with Little's assertion that all of the revolutions in the 20th Century were peasant ones. The peasant were integral parts of those revolutions, but the conditions described by Marx prevented them from developing their revolutionary consciousness by themselves. They needed the political leadership of the revolutionary workers.

So, why don't workers in the advanced industrialised countries develop their own revolutionary consciousness? That is a question that baffles Socialist parties in the West.