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.
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.
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.
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.