What were some Marxist beliefs that proved right with the span of time? What were some that were proved wrong?

What were some Marxist beliefs that proved right with the span of time? What were some that were proved wrong?

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Everything Marx said about Capitalism was right.

Lenin's idea of imperialism as the final state was wrong, cause then the nukes came.

The belief that you can simply industrialize with a state capitalist economy and end up with real socialism or even communism eventually if you just keep developing long enough has proven to be disastrously, monstrously incorrect.

Marx's mistake was underestimating capitalism's flexibility–that is, he was too optimistic on its historically inevitable downfall (I don't think that capitalism will last forever ofc, but it's already lasted over a century after Marx's death and probably will not go down with a single global revolution to socialism).

His overall analysis of capitalism and society are more or less correct, though, and form much of the bedrock of modern social science (even though most modern sociologists are liberal dipshits).

kautsky was right about imperialism tbh

That seeing commodities as being neutral agents is an inherent aspect of ruling class ideology instilled onto the workers and lumpens.
Materialism.

I want idealists to leave

Yui I like you and agree with you on a lot of shit but you really need to stop trying to push this horseshit. If anything Marx said has come to pass it is materialism, both dialectical and historical, and there is literally no reason apart from some pointless leap of faith to believe that Idealism is anything but an attempt on Hegel an Kant's part to secularize their former theological positions


God damn stop trying so hard to be a contrarian for five seconds and just realize how obvious the stupidity of your argument is

Punch yourself in the head as hard as you can and say that again

That was Engels

Basically this. Marx didn't foresee the emergence of Keynesian economics and the welfare state. Now that capitalism has become so embedded in society, (in general) modern Marxist theorists have struggled to propose coherent/viable methods of overthrowing modern capitalism. see (Zizek, Slavoj)

Marx made two big miscalculations. His first was assuming a direct linear progression of manorialism, to mercantilism, to capitalism, to socialism. The proletarians will not want a communistic society unless they do their homework, and Gramsci explained quite brilliantly the ways in which the proles have their revolutionary urges suppressed.

The second mistake is assuming that the transition between the dictatorship of the proletariat to communism will be easy. Marx assumed that revolutionary ideologues would be free from selfishness or paranoia, but the general failure of 20th century socialism shows how easy it is for the dictatorship of the proletariat to become permanent, especially if a nationalist identity develops.

nigga what?
just because the proletariat don't want a revolution now doesn't mean that socialism won't succeed capitalism as the next mode of production

KEK

Strange how we move away from them and onward to a neoliberal corporate future, isn't it?

Could it be Marx was right all along?
Could it be Capitalism cannot be saved from itself?

I haven't gotten around to Capital Vol 3 yet, but what about the declining rate of profit? I've seen it done out algebraically, looks ok. But is it really happening?

Have certain phenomena (eg imperialist super-exploitation or the increase in speculation on financial markets, derivatives, etc) done anything to mask the tendency which nonetheless exists or was he just wrong or is evidence inconclusive?

Globalization be like "workers are too expensive here! Let's go to china! Ok… Profits continue.. China is getting expensive .. .. where to go? WHERE TO GO??? … AUTOMATION! Yeah! That's it! Fuck the workers.. … b-but.. .. why aren't people buying my products? Why aren't they working? Are they lazy or something? … WHERE MY PROFITS AT?????????"

And this is how Marx was right.

Marx was right in his analysis of capitalism, but he failed to realize (simply because capitalism was still early at the time and he was limited by his time frame) that capitalism would change and fix some of the criticisms he had. I would also say his understanding of the dialectic was also limited by his time (which is very dialectical)

As I said before, capitalism tried to save itself from itself, and is now failing because contradictions.

Marx was right in the long run.

(I don't know enough about dialectics. I am trully ashamed).

This is partially false

First, government control of the economy was definitely predicted by Engels. He of course did not specify how this would occur, nor did he elaborate on the "why" part much, but the prediction is there.

From Anti Duhring

As we all know, state coordination and nationalization were everywhere in the capitalist world, Marshal Plan Europe being a fine example of such. However, these policies were used not only because of


but because they actually proved better at extracting surplus value.

Second, Marx in Volume III elaborates on 6 counteracting influences that act against the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to fall (which is after all the goad of capitalist production). While many of these tendencies are not specific to Keynes, they are indicative of what the capitalists have been doing these past 100 years as a whole. These are


Of these 6, 1 is of course a general feature of capitalism no matter the degree of control, but Keynes deserves special mention for his policy of full employment. Regardless of whether these jobs are needed or not, the State will assure that everyone has a job. Even if this labor is completely unproductive and useless, total hours worked will be extended whether you like it or not.

For 2, Keynes specifically advocated a devaluation of the dollar against gold in "An Open Letter to President Roosevelt".

extremely undignified. It upsets confidence, hinders business decisions, occupies the public attention in a measure far exceeding its real importance, and is responsible both for the irritation and for a certain lack of respect which exists abroad. You have three alternatives. You can devalue the dollar in terms of gold, returning to the gold standard at a new fixed ratio. This would be inconsistent with your declarations in favour of a long-range policy of stable prices, and I hope you will reject it. You can seek some common policy of exchange stabilisation with Great Britain aimed at stable price-levels. This would be the best ultimate solution; but it is not practical politics at the moment unless you are prepared to talk in terms of an initial value of sterling well below $5 pending the realisation of a marked rise in your domestic price-level. Lastly you can announce that you will definitely control the dollar exchange by buying and selling gold and foreign currencies so as to avoid wide or meaningless fluctuations, with a right to shift the parities at any time but with a declared intention only so to do either to correct a serious want of balance in America's international receipts and payments or to meet a shift in your domestic price level relatively to price-levels abroad. This appears to me to be your best policy during the transitional period. In other respects you would regain your liberty to make your exchange policy subservient to the needs of your domestic policy–free to let out your belt in proportion as you put on flesh.

Regardless of whether real wages rose or not after the devaluation, the point is that Keynes ultimately argued for devaluation, and that the depression bottomed out with the suspension of the gold standard.

One could also argue that the Fed setting inflation targets also falls under this category, but that deserves a thread of its own.

3 is a byproduct of full employment in military R&D and imperialism. However, this cannot be restricted to Keynes alone, so it does not count.

4. Keynes argued against overpopulation.

5 is Not unique to Keynes, but is a definite component of globalization.

6 is not well elaborated on in the chapter it is first mentioned. However, Marx definitely would have considered the bailout (in which government covers debt with Micky Mouse money) to be both absurd yet predictable.

From Reflections On Money

“It would be wrong to say that lack of credit is of paramount importance in times of crisis, and currency is of no importance. It is evident from the reasons mentioned earlier that the amount of currency is then at its lowest ebb precisely because on the one hand its velocity has decreased and secondly because cash is required in numerous transactions where it was not required previously. But it is precisely this which accentuates the great difference between the amount of money and the value of the operations transacted with a relatively small quantity of currency. There is therefore in fact a lack of currency and not a lack of capital. Capital loses its value and cannot be turned to account. But what does cannot be turned to account mean in this context? It cannot be transformed into currency, and it is precisely its convertibility which constitutes its value. But in spite of all that, capital exists.
The thing shows itself primarily in the refusal to discount bills of exchange, even those based on bona fide transactions. And the bill of exchange is commercial Money, its value represents commercial capital. The convertibility of bank-notes into gold is a minor matter, the failure of bank-notes merely aggravates the commercial crises. The real difficulty is the inconvertibility of commodities, i. e. of

the actual capital, into gold and bank-notes. It is for this reason that when these phenomena appeared in 1793, 1825 and 1847, it was possible to remedy them where capital actually existed, by issuing exchequer bills and bank-notes. Moreover, it cannot be asserted that these bills and bank-notes were capital. They were merely currency. The crisis did not end, but the currency crisis did. The convertibility of bank-notes, therefore, is based on the convertibility of securities, and not only in banking but also in commerce. But even securities which by their very nature are considered to be convertible, such as government securities and short bills, cease to be convertible. It seems that this is by no means a question of commodities, but of the convertibility of the tokens of value which represent them. Commodities cease to be money, they are not convertible into money. The blame for this Is of course put on the monetary system, on a particular form of this system. It is due to the existence of the monetary system, just as the latter is based on the present mode of production. But the convertibility of bank-notes into gold is in the end necessary, because the convertibility of commodities into money is necessary, in other words because commodities have exchange value, and this requires a special equivalent distinct from the commodities, i. e. because in fact the system of private exchange prevails.
Actually the depreciation of money is even in inverse proportion to the depreciation of commodities. But bank-notes can depreciate in terms of gold only because commodities can depreciate in terms of bank-notes. In any case, what does depreciation of bank-notes mean? That at any particular moment, commodities, i. e. their value, cannot be transformed into gold or silver, and that each intermediate link between the commodities and gold, or each substitute remains only a substitute and hence without value. The principal question therefore always remains the inconvertibility of commodities, of capital itself. It is rubbish if some say, there is no lack of currency but lack of capital. Currency is of no consequence. For what matters here is precisely the difference between capital, i. e. commodities, and currency. What matters is the fact that the former does not necessarily entail the latter as its representative, that is as its price in the commercial world; that capital ceases to be currency, that it can no longer circulate and has no longer value. When capital appears to be a secondary matter, it is ridiculous to present currency as a secondary matter. However there is even more nonsense on the other side. They acknowledge the inconvertibility of capital and make fun of the convertibility of bank-notes. But they want to offset this by some artifice or other and by modifying the monetary system. As if the inconvertibility of capital were not already contained in the existence of any monetary, system, indeed as if it were not contained even in the existence of products in the form of capital. Trying to alter this on the existing basis means depriving money of its monetary qualities, without conferring on capital the quality of always being exchangeable, and moreov er at its fair price.
The existence of a monetary system entails not only, the possibility but even the reality of this separation, and the fact that this system exists proves that the inconvertibility of capital, because it is appropriate to money, is already entailed by the existence of capital, and therefore by the entire organisation of production. It would be just as wrong however to say that the pressure on the money, market was simply caused by fraudulent credit operations. Money, as such implies the credit system. Or both are produced by the same cause. The Birmingham men, 122 who want to do away with the inconveniences of money by putting large quantities of money into circulation, or by lowering the standard of money’, are of course fools. Proudhon, Gray and others who want to retain money but in such a way. that it should no longer have the properties of money, are also fools. Since it is tit the money market that the entire crisis erupts and ill the features of bourgeois production recur as symptoms, which, it is true, become incidental causes, nothing is simpler to understand than the fact that it is money that narrow-minded reformers who stick to the bourgeois standpoint want to reform. Because they want to retain value and private exchange, they retain the division between the product and its exchangeability. But they want to modify the token of this division in such a way that it expresses identity.
(5) The complete simpletons, i. e. the staunch ignorant democrats, are familiar only with money as used in the trade between dealers and consumers. They therefore do not know the sphere in which the

collisions take place, the tempests of monetary crises and big financial transactions. Thus the problem, just as everything else, appears to these simpletons to be as simple and silly as they themselves are. They regard the trade between dealers and consumers as a straightforward exchange of values, in which the freedom of each individual receives its supreme practical confirmation. Class antagonism is in no way involved in this exchange. One trader confronts another, one moneyed individual confronts another. The precondition that every individual must be moneyed to be able to participate in the consumer goods trade, i.e. to be able to live, this precondition is of course automatically given by the fact that every individual must work and let his talent act, as Stirner says.”

Dialectics isn't debunked, but we shouldn't assume that a revolutionary mindset is natural.

Colonialism didn't spread capitalism. Marx thought that Europe taking over India would lead to a capitalist social revolution, but it didn't. There, and pretty much everywhere the European colonialists went, they just allied themselves with the local landlords, tribal leaders, etc., leaving the social structure unchanged.


He never said it was the final stage of capitalism. That's just one translation of a subtitle that didn't even appear in early drafts.

Just kill yourself.

MUH APPLIED IDEALISM

If you didn't have the mental capacity to understand dialectical and historical materialism-A simple as fuck book, you don't have the mental capacity to be taken seriously.