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The comparison is deeply flawed. Psychoanalysis is not good at explaining what has already happened. It only seems good if you don't know that those "explanat

• quadrangle 13y ago
  tl;dr: Psychoanalysis is not good at anything, so it is unfair to compare Marxism to that since Marxism has at least some merit.
• dragonwriter 13y ago
  > I forgot to give an example of a falsifiable prediction in Marxism: the outcome of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the transitional socialist state leading to communism. It was actually falsified successfully by Soviet Union et al. That's debatable, given the modifications to Marxism made in Leninism -- the actual "Communist" states all were based on Leninism, rather than Marxism. The advanced democratic capitalist states that had the foundations which Marx saw as essential for the transition to socialism on the way to communism have generally transitioned in the direction of socialism since Marx's time, though in a rather gradual way. At least in the direction of the natural progression beyond the model of political-economic system that Marx and other 19th century socialists critiqued under the name "capitalism", Marx seems to have been very broadly correct -- as to whether that eventually leads to communism is, well, something that we're probably several generations away from seeing. I think that its a lot more likely that something like the modern mixed economy -- evolving with productivity in a way that increasing has a greater domain of social support and responsiveness -- will be dominant for a very long term. OTOH, I can envision that happening in a way where the social support is delivered in a way based on private property (e.g., through a mechanism like basic income) with social goods delivered more through the market than directly by the state. With sufficient productivity (and hence, goods being less scarce) this would in many ways resemble communism (while still having features of socialism and capitalism.)
  • nzp 13y ago
    I agree it's debatable in terms of relationship of Leninism to "vanilla" Marxism. It is much less debatable, I think, that Leninism is an honest (in the sense of not being intentionally wrong or deceptive) continuation of the original Marxist sociology and economy (at least the "late Marx" version of it). So in that sense I took the term Marxism to encompass all those strains of social and economic theory based on late Marx.
    • dragonwriter 13y ago
      > It is much less debatable, I think, that Leninism is an honest (in the sense of not being intentionally wrong or deceptive) continuation of the original Marxist sociology and economy Whether it is "honest" or not is largely beside the point, which is that it is a deliberate attempt to short-circuit what in Marx's theory was an essential step on the road from feudalism through developed capitalism and then socialism and finally to communism, and that a such a short-circuiting effort cannot be an empirical test -- whether it succeeds or fails -- of Marx's theory (well, except insofar as its success would refute at least one element of Marx's theory.)
      • nzp 13y ago
        Do note that I'm making a distinction between Marxism and Marx's theory (in the sense that he was just one, although first, Marxist philosopher/sociologist/economist). So, it may be that USSR was not a test of Marx's own ideas on transition, but it was certainly a test of one, very much dominant for the most part of the last century, strand of Marxist thought. And they didn't decide they wanted to short-circuit the process "just because", or because they were lazy; they did have a theoretical analysis and rationale behind the idea.