06-05-2016, 10:09 AM
(05-07-2016, 10:18 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: A great deal of Marx is accurate, a great deal of it was inaccurate because of factors he could not foresee and some of it was wrong. One needs to also read Engels (which is hard to to get in hard copy but Marxists.org does a good job with e-versions) and also Lenin.
Naturally I would also include Stalin and Hoxha as well, particularly Stalin's work on the national question. Hoxha's work is more about late 20th century revisionism and might only hold interests to those who are already Marxist-Leninists.
But what did Marx get wrong?
1. that the Proletariat could never have a stake in the economic order. The consumer culture saved capitalism from proletarian revolution. Toilers worked to exhaustion for bare survival. This is a cornerstone assumption of Marxism.
Capitalists recognized at a certain point that they were better off getting smaller margins of profit on larger volumes of sales than gigantic margins on small numbers of sales. That required that capitalists transform workers into consumers. If one lives in barracks-like accommodations, sees one's children die of hunger and disease to which the economic elites seem exempt, and lives in crowding and filth so that elites of any kind can live in opulent splendor, then one might see almost any radical change in the political order as a cure to one's distress. But workers who have cars, furniture, and electronic entertainments and who see their kids attending school might have something to lose in the event of a revolution in the name of the proletariat.
2. He ignored the effect of technological change upon productive power. More machines means less need for raw toil, and that much of the consequence of new technologies would be that people would have more stuff that could make life richer.
3. That proletarian revolutions would first appear in the countries with the most advanced capitalist systems as the plutocrats became more entrenched. But Socialist revolutions were more likely to appear in countries with undeniably backward economic and political systems -- Russia, Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Nicaragua. The earliest stage of capitalism is always the hardest stage of capitalism, and the one in which the political order is most precarious. Working conditions are then the worst; no social welfare system aids those crippled in industrial accidents which are then more common; no relief system supports widows and orphans (the cure is simple -- put the children to work!); housing is shabby, filthy firetraps. A welfare system can alleviate much.
4. That bureaucratic elites that own none of the assets could be themselves exploiters on the scale of rapacious intellectuals (from shamans and witch doctors to televangelists and corporate attorneys), big landowners, and capitalists themselves. Those might need be overthrown if humanity is to have any dignity.
5. Once the rural peasantry gets adequate land it becomes arch-conservative. Peasant farmers in Europe and yeoman farmers in America became the core support of conservative parties. They do not want to become serfs on land that they recently owned or become employees of a state apparatus that treats them as a rural proletariat. The one Socialist state that had the most difficulty in collectivizing agriculture -- so much that it gave up (Poland) -- ended up with a strong agricultural sector capable of exporting foodstuffs to capitalist countries.
6. He never foresaw fascist reaction as a brutal suppression of the socialist tendency.
OK, he did pick the right side in the American Civil War.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.