Travis:
> Look Woj you made a rather large covering claim which puts
> the onus on you to then systematically go through
> contemporary Marxist empirical studies and demonstrate their
> falstisity. The onus is on you because you made that claim.
This is not exactly what I said - I said that the value of Marx is a "thick description" (to use Clifford Geertz's term) of the 19th century capitalism and it is others who want to treat it as a general theory of everything social and economic - but I can take to this challenge.
For example, one of the key "predictions" (if that term is appropriate here) of the absolute immiseration of the proletariat - it did not happen, the working standards of living have been continuously improving albeit at slower or faster rates. That prediction was the premise to even more fundamental one, that of a socialist revolution in the most advanced capitalist nations. It did not happen, not in a single one. Worse yet, when it (or something resembling it) did happen, it was in the most backward countries like Russia, EE or China where capitalism did not even had a chance of taking a foothold. Clearly it was something else that the falling rates of profits that prompted the proletariat to revolt. Then there is the withering away of the state. It did not happen, in fact the opposite did - the state grew exponentially, became a major producer of public goods, and assume the role of a mediator between labor and capital (Keynesianism) albeit not always even handed.
So the major "predictions" were all flops - none of them happened, or went in the opposite direction. That is pretty bad if it were a nomothetic theory - but of course not bad at all if it were idiographic explanation as no one expects such explanations to make predictions. Now you are telling me that some obscure econometrician developed a mathematical model derived from Marxist concepts allowing him to predict some prices. Is that what the Great Emancipation of the Proletariat Project came to? Predicting prices? It surely looks like a mountain laboring heavily only to give birth to a mouse.
Let's face it, comrade, the value of Marx lies not in what his followers wanted to see in him, but what he himself wrote - that the point is not to explain the world differently, but to change. And he did just that - by his polemics and critique of the dominant bourgeois ideology that mobilized people and showed them that there is an alternative. As Francis Wheen in his recent biography of Marx argues, his strongest point was dialectics - turning the opponents' arguments on their head and reducing them ad absurdum. That is what he did with the bourgeois economics purporting that capitalism is the panacea for all social and economic problems of humankind. Marx used their own arguments and conceptual apparatus to show that they can lead to the opposite conclusions - that capitalism will collapse under its own weight. Whether that would actually happen is irrelevant - all that matters is that the dominant bourgeois ideology has been shown to have contradictions and is not as airtight as its apologists claim - therefore there is, after all, an alternative. I wish someone proposed something similar today.
Wojtek