"Why Marx Was Wrong"

So, in other words, absolutely nobody here can actually refute the article, but instead spend their time strutting around like they've refuted the article… when they literally can't refute the article.

"America has the illusion of democracy and freedom so Marx is wrong."
Hmmm….

tl:dr; He doesn't know what he's talking about and the author is arguing against a strawman

Wow, I'm convinced. I'll report to the nearest gulag right away.

"Gulags r good, put pppl in Gulags"

t. Sam Adams, 1755

Whoah, Stalin was a Capitalist, answer for your crimes!

If you're going to shitpost off topic, at least try being coherent.

Even if we accept this at face value, do we then blame John Locke for the genocide of the American Indians? Do we blame Jesus Christ for the Portuguese conquest of Angola?
This is incorrect. Do you seriously expect him to write about non-economic issues in books on economics? Marx and Engels both ripped on Vogt and Buchner, the so-called "vulgar materialists."
Marx, who we must remember wrote in German, not English, considered his work to be scientific in the sense that it s aim was the analysis of the present society. No, he didn't just have physics envy. I don't know German, so I can't say to what extent translators should be blamed.
Dialectical materialism was the official Soviet synthesis of Marx and following thinkers. This is the sort of mistake made by a high school student.
Since the author referred to "emerging capitalist societies" above, we know that we're working with the same definitions of capitalism; wage labor, private ownership, production for exchange, and all the baggage that comes with that. The most cursory knowledge of contemporary history is enough to rebut this. Some of the residents of capitalist countries do enjoy great prosperity, but an awful lot don't (see the UN special rapporteur's report on the USA) and considerable material deprivation and suffering overseas is required to maintain the lifestyles of the residents of the wealthy countries. Besides this, prosperity or deprivation in absolute terms does nothing to negate the existence of the exploitative relationship that exists between the worker and the boss, the landlord, and the banker. In capitalist societies the workplace remains fundamentally undemocratic and the fortunes built up through parasitism can easily be applied to corrupt the political process. (1/2)

Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth also fell, so I guess republicanism is a lost cause. Better not try removing kings anymore. It is worth mentioning here that Marx did not believe that one political program was valid for all time.
Entrepreneurship is not necessary to drive an economy forward. This is demonstrably false. Even the most far right of works acknowledge that considerable industrial development was achieved under socialism. As far as freedom, what freedom is abolished? Merely the freedom to reap where you have not sowed, which is only a freedom in the most banal sense.
Marx advocated revolution. Revolutions are necessarily violent. This is not enough to pin every last excess on Marx. Are you also willing to blame the Sumerian inventors of irrigation for disastrous American agricultural policies in the west?
Of course not all suffering can be removed from the world. But that is no reason not to deal with what can be prevented.
In contemporary China, the state owns a very large portion of the economy, so not as much has changed as the author thinks. Widespread private land holding was only established in the first place after Mao dispossessed the landlords, a reform the nationalist government wasn't willing to undertake.
What inefficiency? The Chinese built the largest high speed rail system in the world faster than anyone believed they could, were once mocked for "ghost cities" only to fill them up as agricultural modernization proceeded apace, and are becoming world leaders in AI and biotechnology. Departure from a planned economy is not the same as departure from Marxism- look at the Soviet NEP. (2/2)

Thank you user. I am heading out right now, I'll write my critique as soon as I get back and post it here.

Oops, meant Adam Smith.

My point stands, prove me wrong, etc.

The best way to disprove this is to show that pre existing socialist systems weren't actually hell.

youtube.com/watch?v=Ep4odlI3mqk

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Vulgar economists, you mean. Wholesale materialism is not vulgar.

i mean what's the point? just look at the whole thing. china is apparently marxist (cause there's nothing more marxist than a bunch of oligarcs owning means of production). dude is one of those brainlets that counts every single death in ussr, cuba etc. like the ideology itself + marx killed these people and like they were 100% legit COMMUNIST nations. even though he never actually defined communism in this article. from what i've read i'm pretty sure he has no idea what he is talking about and has never read a book. how about deaths under capitalism? what about like 21k people DAILY dying from hunger? i mean who cares that bill gates could literally end hunger with like 1/3 of his money, but look at this marx fucker. wrote some books about alienation, how fucked capitalism is and based that on a shitload of research and data, then some people read them and were inspired by his ideas to come up with stuff of their own soooo obviously every time they fucked up that was his fault. got tired from reading this shit. wtf is this project syndicate website btw? another right wing think tank sponsored cancer?

It was more about how the modern scientific method didn't exist at all back then. Citing Karl Popper is a textbook example of liberal faggotry when his special snowflake criterion for science has long since been lambasted.

Well, you find out at the end that this guy was Sweden's foreign minister 06-14 and was prime minister in the 90s. So that tells you that this is an article from the universe where criticism of capitalism is just irrational because we've been doing such a good job at eliminating poverty etc. Scandinavia is sort of the Goldilocks country because it has social cred due to its social programs but is really a part of neo-imperialism, spectacle, surveillance / intelligence state, arms deals, etc. So this guy is basically just trying to address Marx since it came up but only to put the lid on discussion of him.

Someone already pointed out that Marx was into historical materialism, not dialectical, but you have to understand to people like this guy they don't care about that at all, commies are just bad m'kay? Notice this guy is constantly just name dropping other people for credibility: Karl Popper, later Kolakowski. This is to give him intellectual cache but is he quoting some deep point by Popper? No just that Marx was a false prophet.

This is where you can see this guy's record skipping on ideology. To call capitalist societies open is strict propaganda. Western countries will not give up their moral superiority to Russia/China no matter what, it's a calling card of authoritarianism that we have to be the good side. It's closer to saying our societies are totalitarian than to say they're open- we're dominated by classified information, anyone who cares and is powerful can spy on us, tech development is accelerating and also secret and proprietary. So to me the crux of the article is here, in the gesture where they're saying that capitalist countries just obviously turned out so much better than communist countries that the ideological debate is just over because of it.

For instance, everything he's talking about here is related to the fact that Marxist revolutions occurred in Russia and China, not the UK and Germany. So what's the difference between Marx being intellectually deficient in a given respect- not accounting for a set of possibilities- and Marx being evil and there being nothing of value in his work?

We have to note here that under capitalism the economy is not free of the state. Debord argued that the story of the 20th century was the fusion of state and economy, and Zizek notes that under neoliberalism the state grows more powerful, not less, since its regulation is applied to the rapidly growing tech apparatus. The State controls the land and has the military, and so underwrites the whole economic edifice. The whole point of a state is to centralize and subsidize security for the major property owners. The I mean, the US government is way bigger and more powerful than the Soviet government ever was.

He's also saying private property is freedom here, which opens him up to challenge- does he think previous societies without private property had no freedom? What about the fact that we are unfree because of the freedom granted to the largest property owners (including the state). Anti-communists want to paint the state as this thing we can't let the commies make to strong, but the state is their bulldog and they're delusional about the unfreedom it propagates because it's literally their entire job. Just think that if there were a serious movement to try and bring justice to society, it would be infiltrated by the government within days or hours. And with internet overexposure plus the development of tiny drones, everyone is totally open to clandestine extermination. The main thing I think normies would get is the internet spying.

No, because neither of their principles were the result of those things. Marxism was.

Marx's analysis of "private property" was pretty much the entire point of his Manifesto, particularly in regards to "means of production", aka, "who owns what property".

And was pseudo-scientific, at best. He put forward a hypothesis, which failed miserably, most of his predictions turned out to be wrong, and are in dire need of (at the very least) revision.

Next to spamming "praxis", this is the second most meme term spammed here, so I fail to see your point.

Yes. Countries that embrace capitalism have enough excess that they can afford social safety nets, unlike communist countries, which experience millions of deaths due to starvation, caused entirely by communist policies.

Do I need to keep going, or do you unironically think these "criticisms" hold any water, and are in any way convincing to anyone who isn't waterlogged on communist coolaid?

This reminds me of Camus in the Rebel. It's worth noting that some people like him do criticize Marx for this kind of thing. But you can do it without saying that capitalism is basically good and that Marx was wrong about everything. Camus wrote that "he could blend in his doctrine the most valid critical method with a Utopian Messianism of highly dubious value." I'm going to keep going with Camus because I like this part. All these quotes are from the rebel bibotu.com/books/2013b/Camus, Albert - The Rebel (1951).pdf

So for Camus, Lenin thought that
The problem is that
So obviously criticizing Lenin and Stalin would be normal for a leftcom, not sure what line you're trying to take here? For Camus, the Soviets just kept on rationalizing dictatorial power long after they had consolidated control. My own two cents is that Marx expected communism to happen in a place where, if it won, it would be a great power or world power. He probably thought the world's first communist country would be at war, but also that conditions in other industrial countries would be to the point where the communist great power could foment communist revolutions there, each ally won being a new module on the growing communist bloc.

So lets' talk Russia. Russia has a crazy history! The Russian Revolution occurs in the middle of WWI for crying out loud. The Russian gov't collapses because they are an industrial backwater while Germany has a world class army (note this is why Germany wanted to fight a world war sooner rather than later…). The Soviets come to power and must then immediately fight a civil war where hostile factions are aided by developed outside nations and forces from those countries are also invading. Combine this with Russian geopolitics- the expanding of the state to find defensible boundaries leading to the comical hugeness of Russia leads to the need for strict central control and militarization of society. Then in WWII Russia fights and wins the largest large war of all time and takes huge losses. All this piles up to a situation which is totally incomparable to the US experience of sitting on your ass and having everything handed to you, geopolitically speaking.

If you want to say that, then the argument becomes about after Stalin, basically after they got the A-bomb and a strategic deterrent, why didn't the Soviet economy develop quickly and overtake the US, the way China is doing right now? Especially after China is doing it, it's hard to see why the Soviet Union should have collapsed if everything was going smoothly. I think a lot of people here would probably blame the people that came after Stalin, and they are in large part to blame.

But at the same time you can see deficiencies in Marx. But to say "Marx is wrong" about one thing is different to say "Marx was wrong" about everything or that Marxism is wrong. I think we will need a new synthesis for our time but Marxism is a viable contributor to that at least as much as Liberalism lol.

The United States, which persecuted the native population, based itself around the ideas propounded by Locke. The Portuguese talked an awful lot about their noble work spreading Christianity to colonized peoples. There very much is a relationship between these thinkers and the later regimes, just as much as there is one between Marx and the Soviets.
Yes, and? Tenants rights activists today don't write a whole lot about food, because that isn't an issue they're focused on. But I don't think any of them deny that people need food as well as housing.
Did you read what I wrote? He did not mean "scientific" in the sense of the traditional scientific method.
The author of the article attributed to Marx something that Marx never came up with.
You didn't read what I wrote. I'm not retyping it. Have a good day.

science =/= popperianism you fucking imbecile

Did he ever actually contradict Marx in anything said in this article?

yeah pretty much.

Yeah, kinda disappointed in the fucking communists here but it is to be expected I guess.
Outside the two or three long posts refuting the article nobody has refuted it yet, I guess that's the power of marxism.

liberals smh

But there's nothing to refute in the article in regards to marxism since it doesn't engage with marxism in the slightest. Its a condescending series of about a dozen assertions with no argument made.
There has been gorillaposting more insightful than this.

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The article doesn't actually make any coherent arguments though, especially since the author doesn't seem to know anything about Marxism

it's an euroliberal/pseudo-left Kool-Aid dispenser

Fuck, you got us. It's not that no one here can be fucked to do your homework for a cunt like you, it's just that no one here understands Marx.

hys