Yes. Marx would be saddened if he learned that some Marxists would think of him as infallible.
Easy example: Marx thought revolution would first happen in industrialized countries, but the exact opposite happened, there hasn't been a single long-term communist revolution in industrial countries, and all the revolutions have instead happened in non-industrial countries.
Long-term is key: Communist revolutions happened in Paris (during his lifetime!) and in Germany (a generation after Engels passed). So mainly he was off-base on how certain he was these workers’ revolutions would succeed.
I don't think he was certain that any specific revolution would succeed, he's very clear that "The common ruin of the contending classes" is a potential outcome.
Yes, I am well aware of those revolutions and why Marx thought what he did, but thanks for pointing them out anyways.
There actually was a letter where he mentions that Russia had the opportunity for a communist revolution that could skip capitalism/proletarianization due to their heavy peasant population + communication with capitalist countries. Rack 'em
Damn, I actually have read some of his letters, but havent read that one yet, good to know.
I looked around for it again; here are the 3 letters I was thinking of, arranged from least text to most -
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/reply.htm
The ‘historical inevitability’ of this course is therefore expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe. The reason for this restriction is indicated in Ch. XXXII: ‘Private property, founded upon personal labour ... is supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on exploitation of the labour of others, on wagelabour.’ (loc. cit., p. 340).
In the Western case, then, one form of private property is transformed into another form of private property. In the case of the Russian peasants, however, their communal property would have to be transformed into private property.
The analysis in Capital therefore provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune. But the special study I have made of it, including a search for original source material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia. But in order that it might function as such, the harmful influences assailing it on all sides must first be eliminated, and it must then be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm
If Russia continues to pursue the path she has followed since 1861, she will lose the finest chance ever offered by history to a nation, in order to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime. (...) If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction – she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all.
But that is not enough for my critic. He feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/draft-1.htm
My answer is that, thanks to the unique combination of circumstances in Russia, the rural commune, which is still established on a national scale, may gradually shake off its primitive characteristics and directly develop as an element of collective production on a national scale. Precisely because it is contemporaneous with capitalist production, the rural commune may appropriate all its positive achievements without undergoing its [terrible] frightful vicissitudes. Russia does not live in isolation from the modern world, and nor has it fallen prey, like the East Indies, to a conquering foreign power.
some of his anthropological work is off
could you go into more details? as a history undergrad who really likes trying to understand how different civilizations worked (especially south american ones being SA myself), the underlying premises of historical materialism seem to show up everywhere
to the point where i really can't understand how any historian manages to not be a materialist
he's never wished me a happy birthday, not once which is pretty fucked if you ask me :disgost:
Well I read his diary writings and followed his advice so I tried applying arsenic to the syphilitic boils on my taint and it just made them worse!
Thesis: Ass
Antithesis: Balls
Synthesis: Taint
Seems dialectical enough to me.
Yes. And we champion the figures throughout history who have gotten what Marx got wrong right.
He wrote that Russia would be the last place that a revolution would happen
He doesn't say interest rates are arbitrary, he says that they're linked to the average rate of profit. He does say that they aren't defined or linked to any process of production.
He also said that interest rates are frequently subject to lots of fraud.
Read the next chapter:
Since we have seen that the rate of profit is inversely proportional to the development of capitalist production, it follows that the higher or lower rate of interest in a country is in the same inverse proportion to the degree of industrial development, at least in so far as the difference in the rate of interest actually expresses the difference in the rates of profit. It shall later develop that this need not always be the case. In this sense it may be said that interest is regulated through profit, or, more precisely, the general rate of profit. And this mode of regulating interest applies even to its average.
In any event the average rate of profit is to be regarded as the ultimate determinant of the maximum limit of interest.
There isn't a natural limit on interest, any individual can charge any other individual whatever they want to in interest (fraud/payday loans), but the rate of interest must be regulated by production and profits else you have collapse and failure of capitalism to reproduce.
Why not? I don't really see anything seriously wrong with his reasoning. Just that it seems to regulate, but not because of any laws of competition or anything innate to capitalist production, more like it's an example of collaboration between members of the industrial capitalist class.
I agree that his use of "lawless" is odd, especially because he very quickly lays out laws and even explains that some interest is necessary. (the part of interest that pays the working entrepreneur the value of their management labor, the part if interest that pays the wages of the workers maintaining the money infrastructure/banks etc.)
He mentions at one point the bookkeepers in Indian communal villages, and how their substance is assured by surplus labor volunteered by the village. You could call their subsistence costs a form of interest on the total productive output of the village. I think the only think that makes interest "lawless" is situations where the lending capitalist decides to raise their interest rates to increase their personal standard of living. They can do this without having to balance out another commodity (labor price in the industrial capitalists books).
The fact that they limit themselves is some form of class collaboration and knowledge that exceeding a certain amount of interest would deprive them of the production needed to reproduce themselves.
That being said, I definitely find Marx's explanations on the subject lacking, even if all the examples he gives work correctly.
he failed to consider human nature
😎 😎 😎 😎 😎 😎 😎 🕶️ 🕶️ 🕶️ 🕶️ 💯 💯 💯 💯
I don't know if he was able to foresee nuclear weapons and climate change. Capitalism will destroy itself, but now instead of only socialism, there's also the extinction followed by primitive socialism option.
I read a book in the late 1800's that was very much warning about environmental collapse. Nuclear weapons were not something you could reasonably predict
im pretty sure he was pretty bad on imperialism/colonialism right? like whenever i see people talk about that shit its always "read lenin" and "read settlers" idk
He was what you'd call a western chauvinist, saw Europe as the "most culturally developed". Doesn't make his analysis of capitalism wrong, but it did kinda blind him to the reality of colonialism which I think Lenin actually started to understand and then Mao was like "oh shit, it's the colonies that are the most likely to do revolution, not the core".
