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.

  • Dimmer06 [he/him,comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    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.