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> Marx didn’t say much useful about how to fix the problem Nor did he intend to say much. He famously said "I don't write recipes for the kitchens of the fut
by pastProlog 10y ago
> Marx didn’t say much useful about how to fix the problem
Nor did he intend to say much. He famously said "I don't write recipes for the kitchens of the future". He gave advice to organizers in his day, and left the future for those in the future, with the material conditions and relations of production they would have.
> there isn’t a proletariat any more
In the world of 1867, the proletariat was rather small. The world just shifted from majority rural to majority urban/suburban a few years ago. The proletariat is larger than it ever was. You can argue if it will ever be a vanguard revolutionary class or not, but it has not disappeared.
One point Marx and Engels made is the world has seen several economic systems over the past 10,000 years - primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism. The last three systems all collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. Marx and Engels believed capitalism would run its course and eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions just like the previous economic systems. Capitalism has only become predominant relatively recently historically.
- mafribe 10y agoHe gave advice to organizers in his day, Yes, and terrible advice it was: in the Communist Manifesto [1] Marx & Engels gave concrete recommendations what is to be done to bring about a transition from capitalism to communism via a revolution and an intermediate phase of socialism. Lenin and Stalin implemented those points to a T. Didn't exactly bring about the predicted benefits. The core of the problem was that Marx really didn't have a meaningful concept of state and of political change. He could only conceive of a state as an oppressive tool of capitalist control, that would whither away together with capitalism after the revolution. And he thought political systems can only change in revolutionary change. The latter, while false, is kind-of understandable from the myopic view of Marx's times where revolution was more or less the only way governments changed. The former was simply naive. Marx's main teacher (Hegel) already had a much more sophisticated theory of the state in society, but Marx was so blinded by naive economism that he was unable to grasp the productive function of a state structure in any large-scale society. [1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Man...
- sievebrain 10y agoIndeed. It's too bad that so many leftist intellectuals try to defend Marx as merely a product of his time, or worse, as someone misunderstood. The reality is that Marx's ideas were bad, and were understood to be bad at the time by contemporaries like Bakunin who swiftly identified the obvious flaw in the plan: no state powerful enough to perform massive redistribution of wealth from the bourgeois to the proles would ever simply say "job done" and dissolve itself. To argue for the Marxist plan was inherently to argue for totalitarian dictatorship of a vast and powerful bureaucratic state.