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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

If I recall Marx's thesis correctly, my recollection is that he thought that capitalism would spontaneously lead to the proletariat revolution. And 150 years later... well, the two most spontaneous communist revolutions occurred in the most backward, feudal states among the great powers, and in the context of a multi-factional civil war in a state that was losing to foreign powers.

It's not exactly a ringing endorsement of your ideology if you're promoting a scientific view of the world that makes predictions that failed to come to pass.

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Marx was specifically drawing from proletariat uprisings that were happening around him. To name one particularly famous one, The Paris Commune. Marx was trying to explain the tumultuous political situation of 1800's Europe. You also have to keep in mind that he wrote from a context that still had a living memory of pre-industrial, pre-capitalist social and economic relations.

> And 150 years later... well, the two most spontaneous communist revolutions occurred in the most backward

They don't commonly teach about the leftwing revolt in Germany in 1918 which was crushed when the ruling government instructed the Freikorps to smash it and murder its leaders. It's also hardly mentioned that FDR's policies in America were an urgent response to multiple general strikes that spontaneously erupted all over the country.

It is certainly not the history of proletarian unrest in the West that discredits Marx's historical materialism, we just have a common understanding of a very sanitized and biased version of labor history.

The internal forces of capitalism that Marx identified as the source of these class conflicts have certainly evolved over generations of spectacular technological and social change, but they're still there and still very relevant. Our capitalist present, in the broader context of history, is still very young in comparison to other socioeconomic orders.

Perhaps I should have added the qualifier "successful."

What actually happened was that laissez-faire capitalism (which was the dominant form of capitalism in the 19th century) ended up yielding to essentially social democracy, whereby the state becomes a check on capitalist control of the working classes and provides guarantees and surety to the working classes. I'd argue that the modern social democratic variant of capitalism would be foreign enough from the laissez-faire capitalism of Marx's era that he wouldn't consider it capitalism.

What are these differences between social democratic capitalism and laissez-faire capitalism that are so fundamental that Marx would not recognize the former as capitalism? We still have class relations defined by how we participate in economic relations. If anything, the extensive financialization of modern capitalism really exaggerates just how subordinate _all_ of us are, proletariat and bourgeoisie alike, to the logic of concentrated capital which seeks to increase in its concentration.

And is it really fair to call the capitalism of Marx's time "laissez-faire" when the government coordinated very closely and heavy-handedly with the bourgeoisie to develop capitalism further (for example, land reform, imperialism)? I will take the position that laissez-faire is an ideological definition of capitalism that never described actually existing capitalism and could never for long. After all, all those prole revolts of Marx's time that were squashed were squashed by the state on behalf of the bourgeoisie. If they did not have a state to rely on, they would invent one. And if a state emerged that would oppose them, they would seek to destroy and replace it. So it goes.

But it would be impossible for me to defend such a position in the confines of a thread because I would have to scour the entire history of capitalism and show how involved the state was in creating and preserving a world suited for bourgeois hegemony. It would easily be thousands of pages and I would just be recapitulating dozens of scholarly works.

> What actually happened was that laissez-faire capitalism (which was the dominant form of capitalism in the 19th century) ended up yielding to essentially social democracy

and subsequently started decaying into neoliberalism.

I don't see your point.

Marx had many ideas, but I think you're dismissing them just because a revolution hasn't happened. In which case, I don't think you understand Marx. Much of his critiques on capitalism hold true today (eg growing inequality between classes, alienation of labor).

Anyhow for your argument above, Marx might see it confirm his theory, as what you call a movement towards social democracy capitalism, Marx might see it a step away from free market capitalism and one step closer to socialism. But the idea might not even be true, as the state is arguably controlled by the capitalist classes, so he very might well still see it as capitalism....

Spontaneously? What are you referring to? The only particular moment in dialectical analysis is the synthesis, which is inherently unpredictable. Marxism is only predictive over the totality of history given the structure of the dialectic. I’m sure if you constructed an arbitrary dialectic you could find a synthesis tomorrow, it just wouldn’t be the synthesis he’s writing about.

The effective law of which I am aware is that “eventually there will be a proletarian revolution”, although obviously this is impossible to invalidate if it’s incorrect.

150 years is blink of a second in the order of history. Think about how long feudalism has lasted and how long it took bourgeoisie to eliminate the ruling class.

Also, it's debatable if Russian Revolution was a communist revolution per se. There is sufficient literature that goes both ways, i.e. arguing it was more of a bourgeoisie revolution against the monarchy than a proletarian revolution.

Of course, Marx himself predicted (which is not a prediction of his theory) that a communist revolution will happen in his lifetime. It might be him overfitting to his own era which saw successive revolutions. I personally don't find this a big deal since it doesn't have any important implication to materialism. It just makes Marx's prediction wrong.

For an updated/modern view on Marxism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory

I think it's important to distinguish Marx's theories (dialectical materialism) from Marx's application of them. Marxists apply his method of systemic analysis to contemporary events to navigate global and local economic issues, but don't deify the man himself. Marx isn't a Nostradamus-like figure, and many people have added to dialectical materialism and the labor theory of value.

To put it simply, Marx looked at this machine we're using to produce things and said "Woah, I don't think this machine will run more than another 150 years", and we've managed to duct tape and super-glue it to running much longer, the fundamental analysis of capitalism's contradictions are still true, we've just adapted better to them than he anticipated.

Some think capitalism recovered from the 1929 crash only thanks to the enormous destruction brought by WWII (in lives and capital). That's a very costly "duct-tape".

Absolutely not. Marx's conception was that due to the internal contradictions and failures of capitalism, it would eventually and progressively lead into a communist revolution through at some point a revolution.

The proletariat revolution in itself, according to Marx, would be slowly triggered by the advancement of material conditions, that is the evolution of the relations between classes, up until a point where the relations between the proletariat class and the bourgeois class would lead to revolution. The predictions made about the upcoming contradictions of capitalism by Marx have been quite accurate, altough not perfect; he didn't expect them to be.

This specific scenario that Marx was predicting never happened. Late stage capitalism has not been achieved until recently. For example, Marx expected the revolution to happen as all classes would be absorbed into either the owner class or the proletariat class, which has only happened in the past few decades. He also expected it to happen when the capitalist, automating most production, would start to run out of consumers as they would not be employed anymore: we see this contradiction being paliated through creation of demand and creation of useless jobs, which are not sustainable solutions. He also predicted that beforethen, the middle class would be absorbed into either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, with people formerly of middle class becoming reliant on rent and debt in order to provide for their essential assets. This transformation is in the process of happening.

I am also skeptical of any grand theories of history. However, be fair in your criticism of Marxism. Dialectical materialism posits that eventually, communism would overtake capitalism the same way that feudalism overtook slavery and capitalism overtook feudalism. It also posits, and I think that this is a very good observation, that political economies are based on class relations and that these systems progress, regress or succeed one another by class relations moreso than individual action. Marx's theory could be read to predict that communism will overtake capitalism in five decades or in a hundred. It's core assertion is that the next dialectical shift will be about the proletarian class and it's relationship with the owner class, and that when capitalism is supplanted it will be through the abolition of the relationship between worker and owner through the vehicle of private property. This seems like a fairly rigid theory that holds all possible observations.

Why socialist revolution advanced on backward countries instead of the most advanced capitalist ones, like Marx "prophetized" (in a simplistic reading)? This question is one of the most profound ones, and is debated in socialist circles before, during and after 1917.

Read Gramsci "The Revolution against Das Kapital" (1917), Trotsky predicting the Russian revolution in "Results and Prospects" (1908), and most of all, read about the concept of uneven and combined development. You will find a richness of thought not seen in other places, and marxism in a very different (and non-linear) light.

Apologetics and pseudoscience are also littered with hotly-debated, profound questions and a half-dozen answers for each of them.

In science, the null hypothesis that all of this theory is the result of human ingenuity rather than methodical observation gets a seat at the table too.

Doubt must have always the biggest seat at the table, but we also need to take special attention to the models showing the most predictive power against the facts. If not, we can fall in the extreme postmodernist trap (every "narrative" is equal). Of course, a model with many fulfilled predictions can be falsy too, maybe there is only just a very lucky astrologer behind the predictions highlighted by survivorship bias. But is worth to look closer to these models for (maybe) grains of truth.

Many think marxism/historical materialism is only pseudoscience with no predictive and analytic power at all because we aren't living yet in fully automated luxury communism. But dig on it and there are pearls, for example, Trotsky predicting in the thirties the URSS bureaucracy restoring capitalism and becoming a new bourgeois. That was an historical prediction of the highest caliber against forecasts of all kinds (from the capitalist and the stalinist camp). The capital concentration process predicted by Marx is another, enduring many years. There are many more.

And there is also the analytic power. Suppose you aren't making any prediction, you can really say an historical materialistic class-based analysis of the French revolution is entirely pseudoscience?

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