Karl Marx remains one of the most referenced and taught authors in Academia today. The best that one has been able to say about him was that he was a great historian and sociologist, but a failure as a prophet. It was supposed to be a rich industrialized country that turned socialist and, ultimately, communist, not a relatively poor and just-beginning-to-industrialize country such as Russia. (the Bolsheviks got a big boost from Germany, though, which may have distorted the natural course of history)
What if the socialist governments that returned to a market system, e.g., in Russia and China, were not evidence that Marx was wrong, but only that the particular countries that had adopted socialism weren’t rich enough?
The U.S. right now is in an unprecedented position of material prosperity. Americans on welfare today have a far higher material standard of living than did middle class Americans in Marx’s time. Suppose that Bernie wins the primary elections and then at least wins the popular vote in November. Wouldn’t that be evidence that Marx was right? Once a country is rich enough, the working class citizens will demand socialism and many of the elites will go along with this.
There are two mitigating factors for Marxism’s rise in the 19th and 20th centuries. One is that it did have a rational basis, in that the traditional source of wealth (land) was then in the course of being replaced (by industry). That massive and historic change called for a rearrangement and Marxism was one outcome.
The other mitigating factor is that no one had yet seen that in practice it would produce pitiless and absolutist regimes that ruled by terror. We now know better.
But how to explain Marxism’s rising popularity today? This time around it’s probably another aspect of the pervasive mental illness resulting from generations of industrialised prosperity. Other modern phenomena can be explained likewise.
Traditional views of debt put US actually in unprecedented poverty, but the modern view of debt as an investment in the future puts US in unprecedented prosperity. To keep the shindig in business, the government is issuing rapidly growing amounts of devalued currency. The support for Bernie is a sign the growing amounts of devalued currency are causing more poverty.
If memory serves, most of the demands at the end of the Communist Manifesto have been fulfilled in Western countries by now. And more!
There’s the logical proof by von Mises, from 1920, that stable communist/socialist economy cannot exist and will inevitably self-destruct. The proof haven’t been seriously challenged and by now the mainstream economists simply pretend it doesn’t exist (and their students usually haven’t even heard of it). Look up “the economic calculation problem”.
Marx was a crank. His ideas about history are total nonsense. His economic theory is a huge monument to the principle of logical explosion: it’s all derived from labor theory of value – which is ridiculously easy to debunk with a simple counterexample. Marx’s sociology is nothing more than complete ignorance of biology.
The only reason this crank became popular philosopher is that his creed turned to be the perfect match to human basest instincts: envy, theft, murder. Marx justified all of them by reducing people to dehumanuzed “classes”.
Thank you. I am so tired of listening to today’s newly-minted and even more intellectually dishonest and morally shallow Marxists who continue, despite decades of nothing but evidence against their insanity, to demand that the entire society turn itself over to their rule-by-theory, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge reality (or even the existence thereof, as the proponents of the nouveau-chic and Marx-inspired “intersectionality” do today).
Suppose that Bernie wins the primary elections and then at least wins the popular vote in November. Wouldn’t that be evidence that Marx was right? Once a country is rich enough, the working class citizens will demand socialism and many of the elites will go along with this.
Once again, no one appears to know the meaning of the word socialism. This has been going on for just about 12 years now, since the right wing media started calling Obama a socialist. Apparently, some Americans think that Medicare for all is socialist or communist, but Medicare for senior citizens is just fine. It must be capitalist. The same thing goes for education. Free K-12 education is great. Free college leads to people in gulags.