{"id":26040,"date":"2020-03-08T12:04:47","date_gmt":"2020-03-08T16:04:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=26040"},"modified":"2020-02-23T21:17:54","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T02:17:54","slug":"popularity-of-bernie-sanders-proves-that-marx-was-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/08\/popularity-of-bernie-sanders-proves-that-marx-was-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Popularity of Bernie Sanders proves that Marx was right?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Karl_Marx\">Karl Marx<\/a> 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. (<a href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/30\/remembering-the-russian-revolution\/\">the Bolsheviks got a big boost from Germany<\/a>, though, which may have distorted the natural course of history)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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&#8217;t rich enough?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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&#8217;s time. Suppose that Bernie wins the primary elections and then at least wins the popular vote in November. Wouldn&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Popularity of Bernie Sanders proves that Marx was right? - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/08\/popularity-of-bernie-sanders-proves-that-marx-was-right\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Popularity of Bernie Sanders proves that Marx was right? - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Karl Marx remains one of the most referenced and taught authors in Academia today. 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