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For his prediction of society? Yes. Not even talking about the various tin-pot dictators paying nominal lip service to him, but Marx predicted that the working
by noirscape 3y ago
For his prediction of society? Yes.
Not even talking about the various tin-pot dictators paying nominal lip service to him, but Marx predicted that the working class would rise up against the bourgeoisie/upper class because of their mistreatment during the industrial revolution in well, a revolution and that would somehow create a classless society. (I'll note that Marx pretty much didn't state how to go from "revolution" to "classless society", so that's why you have so many communist dictators; that between step can be turned into a dictatorship to as long as they claim that the final bit of a classless society is a permanent WIP, which all of them did.)
Now unless you want to argue we're still in the industrial revolution, it's pretty clear that Marx was inaccurate in his prediction given... that didn't happen. Social democracy instead became a more prevailing stream of thought (in no small part because few people are willing to risk their lives for a revolution) and is what led to things like reasonable minimum wages, sick days, healthcare, elderly care, and so on and so forth being made accessible to everyone.
The quality of which varies greatly by the country (and you could probably consider the popularity of Marxist revolutionary thought today in a country as directly correlated to the state of workers rights in that country; people in stable situations will rarely pursue ideologies that include revolutions), but practically speaking - yeah Marx was inaccurate on the idea of a revolution across the world happening.
The lens through which Marx examined history is however just that - a lens to view it through. It'll work well in some cases, less so in others. Looking at it by class is a useful way to understand it, but it won't cover things being motivated for reasons outside of class.
- ETH_start 3y agoAnywhere where the working class rose up against the bourgeoisie/upper class because of their "mistreatment" (sense of victimhood instilled in them by Marxism), became dramatically worse in its civil liberties, and in its economic trajectory, in every respect. And in most places there was no such uprising, and incidentally, those places fared far better. So no, Marx was resoundingly proven wrong. Even during his own lifetime, some of his pseudoeconomic ideas/doomsaying was proven wrong. He claimed, like many demagogues and economic laymen, that automation would reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch09.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour... >>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly? and >>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together. This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.