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Why socialist revolution advanced on backward countries instead of the most advanced capitalist ones, like Marx "prophetized" (in a simplistic reading)? This qu

Why socialist revolution advanced on backward countries instead of the most advanced capitalist ones, like Marx "prophetized" (in a simplistic reading)? This question is one of the most profound ones, and is debated in socialist circles before, during and after 1917. Read Gramsci "The Revolution against Das Kapital" (1917), Trotsky predicting the Russian revolution in "Results and Prospects" (1908), and most of all, read about the concept of uneven and combined development. You will find a richness of thought not seen in other places, and marxism in a very different (and non-linear) light.

allemagne 6y ago
Apologetics and pseudoscience are also littered with hotly-debated, profound questions and a half-dozen answers for each of them. In science, the null hypothesis that all of this theory is the result of human ingenuity rather than methodical observation gets a seat at the table too.
- nahuel0x 6y ago
  Doubt must have always the biggest seat at the table, but we also need to take special attention to the models showing the most predictive power against the facts. If not, we can fall in the extreme postmodernist trap (every "narrative" is equal). Of course, a model with many fulfilled predictions can be falsy too, maybe there is only just a very lucky astrologer behind the predictions highlighted by survivorship bias. But is worth to look closer to these models for (maybe) grains of truth. Many think marxism/historical materialism is only pseudoscience with no predictive and analytic power at all because we aren't living yet in fully automated luxury communism. But dig on it and there are pearls, for example, Trotsky predicting in the thirties the URSS bureaucracy restoring capitalism and becoming a new bourgeois. That was an historical prediction of the highest caliber against forecasts of all kinds (from the capitalist and the stalinist camp). The capital concentration process predicted by Marx is another, enduring many years. There are many more. And there is also the analytic power. Suppose you aren't making any prediction, you can really say an historical materialistic class-based analysis of the French revolution is entirely pseudoscience?

allemagne 6y ago

Apologetics and pseudoscience are also littered with hotly-debated, profound questions and a half-dozen answers for each of them. In science, the null hypothesis that all of this theory is the result of human ingenuity rather than methodical observation gets a seat at the table too.

nahuel0x 6y ago
Doubt must have always the biggest seat at the table, but we also need to take special attention to the models showing the most predictive power against the facts. If not, we can fall in the extreme postmodernist trap (every "narrative" is equal). Of course, a model with many fulfilled predictions can be falsy too, maybe there is only just a very lucky astrologer behind the predictions highlighted by survivorship bias. But is worth to look closer to these models for (maybe) grains of truth. Many think marxism/historical materialism is only pseudoscience with no predictive and analytic power at all because we aren't living yet in fully automated luxury communism. But dig on it and there are pearls, for example, Trotsky predicting in the thirties the URSS bureaucracy restoring capitalism and becoming a new bourgeois. That was an historical prediction of the highest caliber against forecasts of all kinds (from the capitalist and the stalinist camp). The capital concentration process predicted by Marx is another, enduring many years. There are many more. And there is also the analytic power. Suppose you aren't making any prediction, you can really say an historical materialistic class-based analysis of the French revolution is entirely pseudoscience?