Why did Marx think that rich countries would be more likely than poor countries to embrace communist revolution? Marx's theory was that developed countries, with industrialization and capitalism, would have the greatest economic inequalities. This would imply a revolution was most likely to spring up in a country like Germany, the United States, Britain or France. Instead, the communists took over in far more backward countries that were still either partly or almost totally feudal, such as Russia and China.
What marx seemed to miss was that these developed capitalist countries were generally the wealthiest and the "freest" (hedonic-liberal-egoism sort of freedom), so the citizenry had a stake in the system as it was.
even with all the government favors and restrictions hampering the economy, there is still upward mobility in most capitalist nations. One study in USA found that only five percent of those in the bottom of income in 1975 remained there in 1991…. Despite terrible incentives from the welfare state, most of the poor don’t stay poor. And almost everyone at least has dreams and aspirations of moving up the ladder. In capitalist nations, class is not something you are stuck with unlike in fuedalism, feudalism creates a strict hierarchal and static society where class is effectively something you are born into.
so was marx wrong about this or am I missing something? Seems like an oopsie doopsie
He wasn't wrong, he just wasn't clairvoyant. In his times that assumption wasn't wrong because if you weren't a bourgeoisie-capitalist industrial state you were probably still feudal.
Also Get out
Hunter Nelson
why? you think comfortable middle-class libs are gonna revolt any time soon? lmao
Nathaniel Wood
He predicted capitalism in advanced economies would collapse and there'd be no alternative but to enact socialism. The reason why poor countries enacted communism was because of state capitalism. Lenin saw that Russia had not gone past the feudal stage, so he created state capitalism in order to industrialize it. This was a way for poor countries to get out of the poverty trap and not have to rely on foreign capital.
Jackson Butler
Also class =/= income. Capitalist "upwards mobility" is a sham for naive petit bourgeois. Maybe one in a million prole will luck into becoming a bourg.
Caleb Powell
How many no longer remained there by 1991 because they were dead?
I forgot most of you guys aren't from North America, lmao
Cooper Flores
Why are you a 30 year old north american boomer with a house, a john deer tractor and a speed boat?
Bentley Perez
Almost no 30 year old has any of that. I knew this meme was gonna go that far. Millenials are not Baby Boomers or even Gen X.
Charles Ross
That was indeed a big mistake and it was very wrong in many ways. Russia might have been semi-feudal, but a lot of countries, including those which Marx with Engels loved like Germany and Austria at the time were also semi-feudal, ending feudalism around the same time Russia did. France ended feudalism only 50 years before Russia, however it is worth mentioning that many regions of Russia like Baltic's and major cities had ended feudalism long time ago. It is also worth mentioning that Russian Empire was third was fifth largest economy in the world at the time, and Polish crown was tenth, so European Russia, Warsaw, Belarus and Baltic's were rather industrialized.
Very specific theory that only very specific factory working proletariat will rebel against factory owners, rather than also city workers,peasants and overall poor people will rebel against the rich, ironically was also prevalent in Soviet textbook manuals. I find it very annoying, bad representation of overall leftism and very ultra specific sectarian.
Hudson Lewis
What you talking about? The Jacobins and Napoleon ended Feudalism in France, the Bourbons were an entirely bourgeois monarchy, let alone the reign of Louis Napoleon.
Grayson Cooper
Reminder that if you participate in the stock market you aren't a prole.
Camden King
He didn't realize just how effective imperialism would become.
Ian Green
I don't think he put it in those terms. His belief was that through capitalist development the countries of Western Europe would lay the groundwork for socialism. Other countries might follow a different path, but for countries already developing along capitalist lines the future was socialism.
And the idea that "rich countries" would be the first to embrace a revolution was not what he argued. His idea was that capitalism has a tendency to polarize the population between a few wealthy owners and large masses of workers. This, plus capitalism's economic instability, would make some kind of revolution necessary in the long-term. In one of his letters he admitted the possibility that in some non-capitalist societies there was a chance that development could occur along different lines, but he also pointed out that in Russia, specifically, that possibility was rapidly disappearing due to the introduction of capitalism. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/index.htm
I would also restate that what was created in various 20th century socialist experiments was not socialism as envisioned by Marx or Engels (or even Lenin, for that matter.) These experiments created societies in which the economy was heavily regulated (far more than in any society that had ever existed) but maintained all the elements of capitalism. I have to hammer this point again and again because people don't read Marx or Lenin. What the 20th century socialist experiments achieved was to use centralized bureaucratic methods to introduce a capitalist methods and a fundamentally capitalist mode of production (factories, wage-labor, scientific management, etc) to backward societies and thereby develop economically in a period of time far shorter than was required historically. This was an impressive achievement but it was not what Marx had envisioned.
In Section III of Critique of the Gotha Program Marx explicitly argued against using state aid to "pave the way" for workers cooperatives when a majority of the population are peasants who are "neither ripe nor ready for rule." marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch03.htm
Carter Perez
This. He also failed to realize that most capitalist governments would bend to working class pressure rather than resisting any reform until things boiled over into a revolution. Imperialism and social democracy prevented revolution in the first world. In poorer countries there were a number of factors that prevented this, such as the fact that they were the main sources of exploited labour and resources, so the empires couldn’t allow them to implement socdem reforms. Also the governments there were often just too stubborn, incompetent, or corrupt to realize the need for reform to prevent revolution. Keep in mind that when colonized people finally regained control of their countries, they didn’t have the benefit of hundreds of years of self-governance to work with, so they were basically amateurs.
Caleb Sullivan
marx was talking about revolutions in capitalist countries, not 17 century feudalist monarchies, if you keep in mind that then in marxist theory of course the feudalist monarchy is going to have a revolution faster than the early capitalist democracy, at the begining the contradictions inside the capitalist country are not yet developed, while in the feudalist country the contradictions of feudalism are at their peak, marx just thought that if a revolution happened in the feudalist countries it would be capitalist, and that it would develop commodity production and wage labor, and of course even though the revolution in the ussr was communist in theory, in practice they did quite a lot of development of commodity production, like marx thought
Benjamin Myers
Feudalism in France lasted since Charlemagne until French revolution. That is almost 800 year and since French Revolution it was back to semi-Feudal capitalist monarchy which featured child employment. Regions of Russia like Estonia and Latvia didn't have serfdom since around 1730's so even before France or Germany.
Eli Ortiz
I agree with this viewpoint. After French Commune and strikes and revolution in Spain western ruling class was scared, took note and reacted. Similar thing was during cold war when American rich paid higher wages and prices were lover and taxes were paid. This is why since the end of cold war there has been such a high inflation and wage cuts.
Its also the fact that more of the world has a bigger share of the pie since the rise of China
Nolan Brown
is that most people are retards that are just living, they don't have a consciousness. Or if they do it's for their own conservation. He was right about classes of people, but he went from a bourgeois mind. Or he knew that most people are retards and he knew they could be used for political purposes to upset his father
Blake Adams
Capitalism makes them like this, they see how miserable and ground down their awful jobs get them and are frozen in horror. It's the same with heroin addicts and alcoholics.
Evan Anderson
all the people that you said, Life makes them like that and all all the choices that past generations made. if you want a true communist revolution the people need to change
Adam Jones
Material reality shapes consciousness. If you change material conditions you will by and large change the people.
Jackson Gomez
What's interesting about this is I bet you had these Russians sitting around in 1900 thinking – is the Satanic mills of England really our future? So they decided to skip a step.
Also interesting to me is Engels' communist principles in 1847, per Cockshott. The "combination of rural and urban conditions" doesn't seem applicable anymore but a lot of this sounds like contemporary China. One thing China doesn't have is inheritance taxes from my understanding (there is very little inherited wealth to begin with), though that may change.
that is just pure evil. Don't change the people, change the world/enviroment and people will adapt.
Austin Reed
Were actually closer than ever of combining rural and urban. Theres plan out there for hydroponic buildings.
Connor Martin
Only neolibs believe this
Tyler Gonzalez
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Michael Kelly
Come on now really? I don't see anything wrong with doing this, I mean Marx wasn't a prole but he still did this.
Caleb Russell
so give people better education?
Easton Smith
That does beg the question, how does the new communist man look like? Is he the wandering hippie that shares gumbo, the neet, the punk, the striker, the state loving liberal?
Robert Anderson
don't give, provide. Let people educate themselves
Grayson Smith
oh for fuck sake, stop with the stupid demagogue.
Hudson Flores
it's a marxist thread, what do you expect?
Alexander Lewis
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Nathaniel Torres
I think one of reasons why communists won in so many countries like China,Vietnam and Cuba because of either revolutionary export of Soviet Union, inspiration from Soviet Union or support from Soviet Union. The reason why communists won in Russia, but lost in France,Germany and Spain? Mostly luck.
A lot of them were anti-imperialst, so were awesome.
