Has Marx or anyone else addressed these problems with Marxist theory?
Looking at history, Marxist dialectic Slave society>feudalism>capitalism>socialism>communism
the problem with this is that the theory presents communism as an inevitability however it is a prediction based specific data points from the past not proven.
So ultimately this is unfalsifiable.
Yeah seems like Marx was wrong about a lot of things. I think the reason is because it's rooted in Hegel idealism. You can use Hegel to come to pretty much any conclusion you want (see Zizek). Hegel idealism was used by Stirner to completely BTFO communism just to give you another example.
While Marxism may be rooted in observable reality, it seem like every dialectic layer built on time loses more and more fidelity to the real world.
I think that's why Marx was so wrong about the future. He though capitalism was going to collapse in his own lifetime. And it's definitely implied throughout his writing that it's unsustainable. But unsustainable to whom? Certainly no the bourgeoisie, there were 2 major wars in the 20th century and not only did capitalism survey, it came out stronger than ever. And the more information that comes out about both WWI and WWII the more it seems like it was simply another turf war between capitalist powers, and not a potential extensional threat to capitalism that nearly consumed it that it's been sold as.
only if you're a determinist brainlet that only reads what other people have to say about marx
brainlets like this guy
Where did you get this from? This isn't what Marx says. There are some problems with the importance of class conflict and qualitative distinctions in pre-capitalist modes of productions, though.
marxists.org
Communism naturally arises out of capitalism.
All but 5 ML states exist, and they're all hanging by a thread. I don't even think you can consider China an ML state anymore, it's more capitalist than fucking burgerland.
the hell are you talking about?
But it hasn't though, if anything capitalism has continued to entrench itself.
Maybe Marx was just wrong, and yes I do understand some of his predictions have come true. But they were smaller predictions, there hasn't been a falling rate of profit, it's more like stagnated.
Not an argument, faggot.
Striner used Hegelian dialectics to write "An Ego and His Own". His critics even used that fact as proof that Hegel was right. He countered that he used dialectics to show how bullshit they were, since you could use them to actually shit all over communism.
It is, but if you got something other than ad hominems then I'd love to hear it. Going on 100 years since Capital came out, and we're further from socialism then we were in Marx's time. There's more slaves now then there was during the 1800's.
Vote Communism in all capitalist nations. Pump and Never Dump.
Kill the Elite. DOTR.
Isn't this the sort of trajectory of history according to historical materialism?
But how can this be proven correct?
Nothing ever happens to us anons.
Oh the cope.
The material base supports communism in every material way. Communism is a fact that capitalism has been trying to hold back for decades. Napster single handedly killed the entertainment industry and it's been desperate to hold on ever since.
That's the inevitability of Communism, that capitalism would produce so much that the scarcity which it requires to survive would no longer exist, which in turn has required bourgeois society to completely rearrange itself to try and stop, which is in itself an impossible task because the system it is trying to stop is what it relies on now to survive–digital distribution, streaming, etc.
no
Kill the Elite DOTR.
No person on the left should be centrist. Every leftist must be communist.
get a load of this retard
It's really not you smoothbrain fuck
Look who's the brainlet now.
Why wouldn't China be a ML state?
No it doesn't, why do you think he urged revolution so much? Society doesn't change unless pressure is put on it to, and Marx wanted to usher in the pressure.
That's the prediction. It falls to 0 thus the rate is stagnant. rate of profit != profit.
You know most capitalist entities/products just smear communism, but "progressives" like the assassin's creed team just do the age old trick of neutering revolutionaries instead. The entire west all in concert to destroy concert, in their every waking moment.
FFS.
To destroy communism*
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Imagine believing this
It's about the advancement of productive forces.
Agricultural plots→The wind mill→The Sail-→The steam engine→the diesel engine
Also
And this
Not really as historically the profit rates are falling and are boosted for a time by wars (total destruction of capital) or by natural disasters. But in the long run it will collapse. But it is true that this doesn't mean communism, it can be totally opposite - primitive barbarism or neofeudalism, but Marx also says that himself.
"Scientific" or "Materialist" is not a strong claim. What makes Marxist theory scientific? Marxist theory offers a method to derive "superstructure" from Natural processes and objects. Traditional Scientific Method fails in application to Social subjects. Other ideologies like Liberalism do not attempt to justify or link their foundations with the Nature. "Human rights" exists just because, dogmatically.
Not exactly. It is only inevitability if humanity would progress. "Socialism or Barbarism", as it stands.
Poppers' criteria is ultimately a useless crap, that was only prominent once only because it was featured in a cold war anticommunist propaganda.
Read Cockshott’s theory of stochastic materialism in his review of althussers philosophy of the encounter
Anybody got some resources examining the claims Marx made in light of more recent historical evidence?
Yes. Cockshott, Kliman, Michael Roberts and others have looked at data and it shows that LTV is correct and that falling rate of profit is also what's happening.
read marx
I mean, it's falsifiable on a sufficiently large scale. When the sun explodes and swallows up the earth (hopefully taking non-communist humanity with it) we can finally say it has been falsified.
That may not be useful falsification for mankind, but whatever.
Though quite honestly, I’ve never read ‘Das Kapital’; I only got as far as page two – that’s where the footnote is nearly a page long. I felt that the two sentences of the main text and a page of footnotes were too much.
It's a social science so not a real science. This applies to economics in general too though. So I think it's better to avoid trying to claim it's scientific and just simply focus on the sociological and personal aspects and provide evidence where available.
imagine my shock
And yet we're seeing a huge resurgance in Marxist thought and class struggle worldwide as the rate of profit continues to plummet.
Why does the existence of ML states matter when the whole point of leninism is pushing history forward?
Althusser tackles the problem of Marx's theory of history by introducing probabilistic concepts and overdeterminism. Check out the philosophy of the encounter or at the very least cockshott's review of it. it is an incredible improvement of Marxism as a scientific theory
academia.edu
Two points on the falling rate of profit.
1. Capitalism as a global system has been continuously growing, while the rate of profit falls, the mass of profit grows, the fall towards zero isn't a freefall, which leads into
2. Capitalism as a system goes through a series of primitive accumulations to sustain the rate of profit and of growth, either by the destruction of capital when imperial borders (real and economic) clash (wars), or when Capital is able to find a new vector of of investment, neocolonisation and the neoliberal turn to the third world and cannibalisation of the nationalised and public sectors.
we're at the convergence of two of those crises right now, nearly every corner of the world has been taken and the internet only went so far, the public/private model was an unmitigated disaster, because it only produced high-risk debt.
I think that a lot of promblems in the assertion that "communism is enivitable" is that it comes from the assumption that capitalism, also was inevitable - however, a lot of historical evidence shows the opposite. Like had the Marcellian/Jaquerie Alliance not been defeated (and keep in mind, it was only befeated because the leader was assassinated), one of the largest feudal systems would have been a syndicalist city-alliance instead, a system that would have made capitalism impossible as it would have robbed the nascent capitalist class of hierarchal military protection but also the desperate poor urban plebians, that were essential in amassing wealth and building capital.
Had the Levellers been the succeeding faction during the English revolution and eliminated base tenure, urbanization - and thus the primacy of industrial capitalism - would never have occured.
So, yes right now we live in the reality where urban capitalism won out, but there were many instances in history, where that wasn't a given and where either luck or happenstance is what saved it in the long run.
And thus, as capitalism was never an inevitablity, neither is communism - Sure, capitalism may very well fall all on it's own, but that doesn't mean automatically that we transition out of it.
This. Book related is a good source on summarizing what Althusser and his (meh) contemporaries thought about what constitutes a science.
The reason capitalism came out strong out of WWI and II was because these wars destroyed unbelievable amounts of capital, which could all be rebuilt, driving profit rates up. States could tax the hell out of the bourgeoisie. Nowadays this isn't the case, and capitalism is fueled by bubbles. That means we get another WW soon within the next fifty years, and I'd rather not since I'll be alive (I hope).
Its 100% scientific. In fact, its more scientific than "science", which claims politics and economics are subjective and rejects the dialectic method even though they can't actually explain why they're subjective.
This. I'm not saying that there aren't valid criticisms that could be made against Marxism as a science, but please have a look what its up against: Neoclassical economics with their fallacies, presuppositions, obscurantism and bad faith lingo.
Hegel's idealism definitely had a negative impact on Marx, and I would even go so far as to say that Stirner's radical nominalism had a positive impact on Marx from him trying to out materialism him. There's very little reason to use dialectical logic to make predictions, at best it can be used how Zizek does with Lacan, to describe the ideological functions of the human mind.
I was curious about some recent remarks zizek made, I can't remember if it was with the Peterson debate or not, but trying to do a materialist reading of Marx through Hegel. He seemed to be drawing the right conclusions but I'm just not sure how he did it.
While instabilities might be arguable on some of the interim steps, communism is inevitable, or as near as it can get, as it is the social relation of production humans evolved for thousands of years in, and is the 'lowest energy' state, if you will. ultimately all class conflict is tension being released from the unnatural stresses humans have not living under this system.
The only way its not inevitable is if humans fundamentally change. This is of course possible, but it puts us in a realm of 'ifs' that is so open ended there is no real point in even trying to make plans or predictions about them.
I think people misunderstand just how significantly the materialist part of dialectical materialism changes the entire nature of the dialectic part. People trying to critique dialectical materialism by approaching it as a normal kind of dialectics simply using materialist-derived ideas is doing it wrong.
You talk like your alternate history events would freeze the society in place forever after, worldwide. Protip: they wouldn't.
Not everything Marx wrote or predicted was scientific. But the labor theory of value makes a number of predictions that can be confronted with empirical data. That is science.
Our concept of science changed since Marx.