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.

  • comi [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    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.