Do you think that marxism is dead?

I think Marx's problem (and I've not read all that much about his work) was he was anchored in a certain point in history and was extrapolating how society would evolve, believing it had an arrow-like direction.

Nowadays we would refer to the evolution of societiess as an anarchic self-regulating system, beyond prediction, and affected by factors in the future which we cannot predict (let alone predict their effects). So, while he did identify movements and trends in society, and their socioeconomic drivers his predictions for the future were stabs in the dark.

I agree with Hingehead. Marx's moral and cultural theories might still hold water. His economic theories, however, are firmly rooted in the social climate of the industrial revolution and have no more than historical importance.

I'm a bit vague on the details too but is his theory of historical materialism now redundant?

IMO, Marx's flaw was that he settled on money (and from that, class struggle) being the root of all evil and in doing so he missed the boat. Money is simply a means to express a much more base desire - power.

But because he shoots at a symptom instead of the cause, the idea of Marxism doesn't resolve the issue of competition for power so Marxism becomes just another interesting theory.

He borrowed his theory of dialectical materialism from Hegel (q.v.). His practical application of it, all his "case study" scenarios, were firmly rooted in the bourgoisie vs proletariat struggles of 19th Century Western Europe, a region struggling to reconcile lofty moral ideals with the sweatshop realities fostered by the industrial revolution. Today, the so-called bourgoisie is a fast-disappearing phenomenon. Today the proletariat and the bourgoisie are comrades-in-arms against the moguls of multinational corporations, the fat cats with golden parachutes. Today few people would want to see a Marxist state which requires "from each according to his ability" and gives "to each according to his need." What most people want today is simply a bigger piece of the pie, which is getting divided so unevenly. The disparity between a worker's pay (even a middle level manager's salary) and a CEO's pay-plus-perks package is astronomical. And the CEO does not do any sort of work to justify it.

I think Marx is alive in his critique's of capitalism. These are right on the money and exact.

He ways of solving these problems... well... sucked.

TTF

hingehead



In general, I agree with you.
But any society has it's conflicts, dominant vs subjugated groups.

What I ask is this: moral, culture, laws, are part of that conflict in order to assure and perpetuate the position of dominant groups?
An example: Iraq's invasion was a political and moral decision, or an economical one in order to protect the interests of large multinationals?

I don't agree with his use of Hegelian dialectics. I think putting two groups as always opposing each other is an inaccurate and oversimplistic view. The so-called destruction of the class system in Das Kapital seems more like the takeover of a single class, the proletariat...

I think the invasion if Iraq was a political and economical move by the US.

Hi Val

I wouldn't limit societal conflict to dominant vs subjugated groups. For example the abortion vs pro-life movement.

On you're question on Iraq, in my opinion it wasn't a moral decision, and politics and business are so incestuously entwined there is almost no point making a distinction between them any more. See http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=50320&highlight=

Marxism isn't dead, just on vacation. And if Marx's problem was being historically anchored, then we would be forced to level the same criticism against every other social scientist and social philosopher. He based his ideas on empirical evidence and made the best extrapolations possible with the data at hand. If the conditions of the working class had remained as they were in Marx's time, his predictions of workers revolutions in the major industrialized nations would no doubt have been fulfilled. Luckily, many leaders in Europe and America were aware of Marx's writings and took his predictions seriously. They, in effect, compromised with Marxist theory and integrated limited socialism and increased regulation to provide enough relief to the working class to avoid revolution. Indeed, much of Franklin Roosevelt's motivation for pushing the New Deal was to prevent a workers revolution in America. He understood that the immiseration of the working class had to be alleviated or all hell was going to break loose.

Marx's biggest shortcoming was his failure to explain exactly how human society was going to arrive at a perfect communist state (recall that the end result was a democratic and egalitarian society free from private property). He explains why a workers revolution would occur and the necessity of a strong central government to oversee the transition of society and ideology, but he never really explains just how that strong central government goes away. It's irksome to read that this strong central government will just 'gradually wither away' after reading his meticulous explanations of why and how everything else would occur. It's enough to make you want to buy stock in Wal-Mart!

Marx' perfect communist state was a beautiful fantasy, and his inverted Hegelian dialectic was a form of historicism with all that approach's shortcomings. Nevertheless, Marx' analysis of the woes of man are still valid. Like Freud's theory of the mind, penetrating but impractical, Marx's model of society provides little of pragmatic value.
But who knows about the future? If things get worse.
I love the "early Marx's" analysis of alienation.

JLNobody

I agree. Marx theory of History has the same metaphysical problem of Hegel "Phenomenology": the History has its own movement, in Hegel based in the dialectic of the "Geist", in Marx in the economic relations.

But I think Marx is still alive in one point: moral, right, the State, are not above the conflicts of society. They are expressions of them.
But those conflicts are not only economical. The example gave by Hingehead is very suggestive: in the conflict about abortion, I think the main problem is not the foetus. It is, in one side, a religious perspective that is clearly residual and subjugated, and uses cases like abortion - or evolution - as a flag to make themselves be listened, and in the other side those who, at least in western societies, express the science and technological values that are dominant.
Of course, the conflict is not only within the limits of those two perspectives. But I am sure they are the most relevants in those "battles".

Yes, Val, we would like to the think of the State as a referee regarding a nation's social conflicts, but the Marxists perspective sees the State (as "expressions of them") as an instrument of the "ruling class(es)". And for the last six years in America this has been extraordinarily obvious.