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He 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

by mafribe 10y ago

He 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 ago
Indeed. 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.

by mafribe 10y ago

sievebrain 10y ago

Indeed. 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.