I'm curious whether they are an overwhelming majority here, or just the largest plurality out of several, and not actually a representative of most posters.
Don't get me wrong, Marx definitely made some major achievements, got a ton of stuff 100% spot on, quite impressively that still measures up after 150+ years. At the same time, I think a lot has been discovered and researched in that period of time that makes me doubt some significantly foundational aspects of it.
Part of what might make this difficult is pinning down exactly what it means to be Marxist, esp so since most are brought up being taught complete nonsense about it. I'd probably boil it down to "The Materialist Dialectical view of History as being driven by the conflict between social classes (Ruling Class vs Working Class)". If you think I'm way off base here, feel free to downvote away and/or bully, shame, mock and/or troll me, but also please do so while teaching me a better/more accurate definition.
And I also really want to stress this isn't disparaging Marx, I just don't think he had the right tools available in his time to come up with what I'd see as a more valid foundation. Given another 100 or so years, an the advent and maturity of things like Systems Theory, Chaos Theory, Information Science, Quantum Physics, Sociology (which Marx could easily be considered one of the founders of) I could see his output being much more agreeable with me.
And of course, the almost dogmatic devotion later thinkers would have defending its scientificity (is that a word?) that practically bordered on fanaticism doesn't do any favors, but I try hard not to let what later people would do to his ideas affect my view of them.
Take Paul Cockshott for example. He's written about stochastic materialism which takes the traditional more "linear" progression, critiques it, and then offers an alternative that is still grounded in a materialist analysis https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2018/04/16/stochastic-historical-materialism/
I'd have a hard time labeling someone a Marxist if they don't have a "Materialist Dialectical view of History as being driven by the conflict between social classes", as I put it in my post. That seems like a pretty fundamental foundation to Marxism, it would be like being a capitalist without believing that humans are rational beings motivated by self-interest, or being a Christian who doesn't believe God sent his only son Jesus to suffer and die on the cross for humanity's salvation and he ascended into heaven on the third day and will come again in the end days to judge all mankind, or whatever their ridiculous creed is.
Obviously ideologies can and do change over time, and like I wouldn't say believe that capitalism/socialism isn't necessary to achieve socialism/communism disqualfiies someone from being a Marxist. But you change some foundational stuff and its just a different ideology at that point
I don't know why you're being downvoted, you are right.
Marxism is just that -- the belief that history is shaped by class conflict driving the reorganisation of society, this conclusion is acquired via the use of dialectical materialist analysis.
Communism, the ideology and goal of a communist society, does not HAVE to be marxist. Anarchist want to achieve a communist society but don't adhere strictly to any historical analysis (marxism). They derive ideas from Marx and his communist writings but don't have to be marxist.
Socialism again is not Marxism, it is an economic system that sits between capitalism and communism.
You are not wrong and people downvoting you seem to not really understand that these are all quite separate things that very precisely refer to parts.
Heck, you can be a marxist and be a member of the bourgeoisie fighting AGAINST communists. I have no doubt that there are members of the ruling class who are marxist, do believe in dialectical materialism, and do use it to fight for their own class interests despite believing fundamentally that socialism will eventually win due to a belief in Marxism(that socialism will eventually happen because of class conflict).
People that conflate what marxism is with socialism, communism, and so on haven't really understood the very specific things these refer to and instead just hear the media broad stroking all communists and anarchists as marxists and conflating them all.
I think it's more to do with the second part of their comment. The economic basis for the withering of the state (aka higher stage communism) in Marxism has always been the rapid and massive development of the means of production (under what Marx knew as capitalism but we might include ideas like the NEP or Socialism with Chinese Characteristics) because it is necessary to create a massive division of labor to supply everyone's needs and it takes time and education to condition people to a socialist system. Many of the liberal critiques of socialism due to "human nature" are actually bourgeoisie nature and the suppression of the bourgeoisie nature (along with the literal suppression of the bourgeoisie) will be necessary to achieve higher stage communism.
None of this can really happen directly from feudalism or a similar mode of production even if Marx was wrong about a dictatorship of the proletariat arising from feudalism.
Or maybe it's just trolls idk it's kind of a pedantic point.
I just made a comment here https://hexbear.net/post/55889/comment/542737 Chaos theory would've given him a way to rigorously discuss about how throughout history civilizations have tended to follow certain forms (feualism,capitalism,etc) in a much more useful approach than his dialectical one. Personally I think dialectics are at best a heuristic for hypothesis searching, but not of much use beyond that
But like which of this contradict Marx? Chaos theory is not very relevant, systems theory sure, but it’s nicely fits into dialectics, quantum physics is just physics. Nothing in Marx says that underlying material reality is deterministic, that’s for mechanicists/naive materialists.
As for the scientific thingy, depends if you got caught by positivism.
Each scientific theory is dogmatic, or more to say axiomatic. Either your axioms produce (sometimes observable and verifiable) results and are self-consistent or they are not.
Chaos theory is absolutely relevant! Marx makes claims like there is a primary driver of history, that the conflicts between the working and ruling classes are that driver, and that the eventual end result of those conflicts will be necessity be communism. I'll give that last on a write-off, since I don't think most contemporary Marxists believe that, and honestly I kind of feel like it was just a way to get around promoting communism as an ideal. But that first stuff... I personally think its incredibly naive to think of their being a "primary" driver of history at all (whether its class conflict or whether its "great men"), civilization has far too many inter-connected forces at play and too much feedback to be able to model/predict anything even slightly long-range, just like (for example) the weather. Up until the 60s or so, it was thought to just model that uncertainty with a noise variable, and after a certain point the noise variable just dominated everything and there was nothing you could do with it (which is why so many tried to find the REAL cause behind the outcome of long-term events being what they were). Then Chaos Theory comes along and says i f you look at a phase-space model of the system (One where there is an individual unique point for every combination of the variables), you can actually find order, where certain points in that phase space seem to be attractive, and the system seems to gravitate towards being around those points (called Orbits), although from time-to-time it will swing from one orbit's region into another. So for example you could see Slave Societies, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism, as orbits, as when societies are already in that sort of civilization, they tend to continue to remain in those systems. Sometimes though, this orbit can decompose or become degenerate, and it'll have a rupture into a liminal era, where it can seem to be haphazard, or oscillating between several orbits, before eventually settling down into another (or the same) orbit. I would absolutely love to see how these tools might have changed how Marx (and other Marxist thinkers pre 1960 or so) and others discussed those things.
Sure you can describe history in phase trajectories: production forces evolution drags the attractant of society in phase space to different place, to different type of society, and yet the orbit stays the same in its behaviour until it snaps and finds new way. But it very well could be in that sense that different attractants exists in this phase space which don’t interact with our society orbit and could present stable alternative. The problem is: you can’t describe such a system, the experiments are not possible, you cannot explore this phase space in live of universe. Driving force of history is evolution of productive forces which results in class antagonism.
But the thing is: humans are humans, nobody thinks in that way of their behavior. Yet using use and exchange values heuristic you can clearly see two different modes of exchange and social behavior in action, which produce two intermingling classes. I don’t think chaos theory can provide comparable insight.
Game theory is much better candidate for this, but game theory is just mathematical encasing of what every human knows and does subconsciously.
Edit: I’m not sure why comrades are downvoting you, it’s interesting thing to think about. In the end it’s just ontologically different view. in positivist sense you can’t disprove one or the other, unless one gives verifiably false predictions. You can see society as a bunch of game theory automatons, working to increase their utility function until none is more to find and crisis happens, you can see it as a whole organism adopting mutations to survive and being hit by periodic extinction events, you can look at it as synthesis of dialectically opposed classes, you can see it as a phase trajectory in hyperspace, bifurcating at crisis points, you can look at it as giant wave function, collapsing at observation (crisis), you can look at it as enthropy reducing being, following least resistance in that goal.
So for example you could see Slave Societies, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism, as orbits, as when societies are already in that sort of civilization, they tend to continue to remain in those systems. Sometimes though, this orbit can decompose or become degenerate, and it’ll have a rupture into a liminal era, where it can seem to be haphazard, or oscillating between several orbits, before eventually settling down into another (or the same) orbit.
This doesn't seem to really contradict historical materialism though. Couldn't the orbits just be the different nation-states progressing through history at their own rates? Dictatorships of the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and proletariat have all existed simultaneously as they did in much of the 20th century and aristocratic and bourgeoisie dictatorships simultaneously existed with primitive communism from at least the 1500s-1900s before that. Through imperialism, things have tended towards capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries, but that isn't to say that the historical moment isn't currently in this "liminal era" you describe.
Or are you suggesting that the Marxist conception of modes of production necessarily evolving out of each other and thus not being able "skip" a stage (i.e. you can't go from slave society to lower-stage communism without feudalism and capitalism) is incorrect? It is unclear to me.
I have no idea what the fuck I am, I just hate capitalism.
Does that count?
This, I care about three things: Anti capitalism, Anti bigotry, Pro environment
Whatever ideology that makes me I'm that.
Have a look at Okishio's theorem for an example of a twentieth century Marxist using modern mathematics to have a fresh look at some of Marx' ideas. Marxism isn't as dogmatic as you seem to think, how else could the huge differences between say Trotskyists and Stalinists exist; and certainly the dialectical view of history (wasn't that mostly Engels' work?) is something you won't see defended by many modern communists. People like Antonio Negri or Alain Badiou stray very far from orthodoxy, while still calling themselves communists.
The theorem was widely thought to have disproved Karl Marx's law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit
Why would this be the case? It seems to me that at best it provides an exception, but not even really that because it's a "tendential" fall in the rate of profit and the capacity to innovate is not limitless.
Im an ancom, havnt read any marx, but what ive heard ive mostly agreed with.
I suppose im not a marxist even though i agree with him because my views go beyond what he wrote about. Opposition to capitalism is good and all, but if capitalism were gone tomorrow theres still a lot more wrong with the world.
Not to be that guy but I've always called myself a nondescript leftist. A lot of my foundation is built on Abbie Hoffman
