> For example, one of the key "predictions" (if that
> term is appropriate here)
> of the absolute immiseration of the proletariat
Reference please? My reading of Marx is that he insists of the relative immiseration -- ie., he points out taht wealth perceptioon is relative and a rich Tobriand islander, for example, might be a poor American worker in term of material goods.
- it
> did not happen, the
> working standards of living have been continuously
> improving albeit at
> slower or faster rates.
Seems likea fundamental prediction of Maex to me, one reason he regards capitalism as progressive up to a point. It unfetters all the forces of production, etc.
That prediction was the
> premise to even more
> fundamental one, that of a socialist revolution in
> the most advanced
> capitalist nations.
No, of course the socialist revolution _failed) in the adavnced capitalist countries, but it did in fact occur in two of the most highly advanced countries of the late 19th and early 20th century -- France (the Commune) and Germany) after WWII. That does not obviate the fact that it not gotten off the ground elsewhere in the adnaced industrial west or Japan, or that Communsim became a tool of forced modernizartion for underdeverloped countries like Russi and China. But it's false to say the revolution never happened at all in the advanced capitalist countries.
In addition, you copmpletely mistake the mechanism by which Maex images the revo might occur. Your idea is simple -- simple-minded to tell the truth. Capitalsim leaves workers naked and starving, nothing lose but their chains, they overthrow regime. You will find this picture nowhere in Marx. In the Mnaifest,w here the chains line occurs, there is a rather subtle and antecdently plausible story about how the proletariat builds organizationa nd class consciousness out=f of defears with an ever-wideniung circle of solidarity and in which unions (which presumably raise living standrads) and working class political parties (likewise) play a large role. For more detail. see Hal Draper's five vol. Karl Marx;s Theory of Revolution. I don't saw Marx was right, but your crude caricature aims at the wrong target.
It did not happen, not in a
> single one.
as noted, it happened all right, but it was defeated -- not without a bitter struggle. This civilization and this justice reveal themselves as barbaric savagery and lawless revenge." (Marx on the supression of the Paris Commune)
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.
Well, it had a chance -- a longshot one -- if it had been able to make a foothold in an advanced capitalist country as well. That was Lenin's bet. It's not a dumb idea. In 1918 it just might have worked.
Clearly it was
> something else that the falling
> rates of profits that prompted the proletariat to
> revolt.
Now you drag in the FRP, which in the first place Marx calls a tendency and emphasizes that it can be ciounteracted by lots of things, secondly, which is constructed from his notes by Engels in CIII and is not even a full blown theory, and thirdly is not at all obviously relatedto any abolsute immiseration thesis.
Then there is the
> withering away of the state. It did not happen, in
> fact the opposite did -
> the state grew exponentially,
This expression is Engels', but Marx's idea that the state as an instrument of class oppression is supposed to be dispalced by other institutions that fulfull its functions (Critique of the Gotha Program,) does not imply taht it will get smaller and is not supposed to happen until the higher phase of communism where scarcity is overcome (yes, yes, a pipe dream but the enlargement of the state in the first phase of communism, if that is what Formerly Existing Socialism embodied, is not a refutation of the idea.)
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.
My list of the major predictions is a bit different:
growing polarization of wealth, within and between nations the persistance of imperialist war dynamic increase in the forces of production destruction of all traditional ways of life bringing everything under the cold cash nexus -- all relations become commodified The abolition of the commons and the privatization of previously commonly held rights degradation and proletrianization of labor, including formerly professsional artisanal, craft, and professional labor persistence of class conflict and failure of attempts at class compromise (thus liberals in the US sense cannot deliver) the perssitence of ideology in that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class
That's all more true now that it was in Marx;s time and it shows no signs of becoming less so. Much if not all of it is quantifiable and operationalizable. Marx's predictions about communism -- intentionally vague and scanty -- were not much realized. His predictions about capitalsim have been all too accurate,
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.
Well, there's a big debate about whether Marx was even interested in price theory -- Jim D says no. I think rather yes, but it wasn't his main schtick.
>
>
> 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 -
False dichotomy. Many of his followers saw in him a better, freer, more equal world, millions were moved by those ideals. Some still are. That's not nothing.
> 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.
But that is exactly what he refused to do. How on earth a Pole, educated in the Communist Ex-Bloc, can get this obvious stuff so wrong astounds me. I used to say, back when I was a Sovietologist, that too few bothered to read Marx in the Ex- (or then-) Bloc countries. I would have thought that you would have time to catch up, Woj!
> 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.
Yes.
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.
Hmm. He thought so, surely. But this conclusion was not unique to him -- Smith thought it would without the Moral Sentiments,w hich capitalism erodes, as we descend intoa Hobbesean whirlwind. Malthus certainly thought so.
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.
That. Does. Not. Follow.
I wish someone
> proposed something
> similar today.
>
Me too. Read David Schweickart's Against Capitalism and After Capitalism, for a start.
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