Marxism One of History's Greatest failures

[Ray McCarthy]

Marx was against Mr Gradgrind, not Bill Gates, at least to my understanding.

You must mean some different Bill Gates. He's a philanthropist now, but he used under hand tactics to create a de-facto monopoly, and for many years OEMs paid a per PC DOC then windows fee, even if the PC was shipped with a different OS. His first product was Free Dartmouth BASIC ported by a friend in a short period of time to 8080 assembler. PCDOS/MSDOS was sold to IBM before it existed. They bought it (QDOS) from a company down the road that had ripped of the x86 version of CP/M (both done by Digital Research).
Bill Gates even bailed out Apple so as to maintain the illusion of competition. The Mac was then (and largely now too) only a niche product and wasn't in reality competition. The only two genuine from scratch successful and really good MS Products are Excel and Word. Ironically delivered for Mac first as Windows wasn't yet working properly. Mac then was a MkII Lisa, it and Windows GUI as well as Amiga and DR GEM (on PC and Atari) were all copied from Xerox (developed in late 1970s). Current Windows is based on NT, derived from DEC VMS for VAX and the IBM OS/2 (1985). MS released own version of OS/2 in 1989 and 1st real Windows OS, NT3.5 in 1993. (The Win 2.0, Win3.1, Win95, Win98 were really only shells on DOS). MS ripped off a billion consumers and held back computing by over 10 years with their behind the scenes shenanigans. Which haven't stopped.

Instead of oppressing millworkers, Bill Gates oppressed consumers. Marx I think would be very unhapppy about Apple (US Marketing Co. using cheap Chinese labour), Google, Facebook and Windows 10 tracking and spying on people in ways that would have made Stazi and KGB envious. GCHQ and NSA spying wholesale on their own people. Marx if still alive would be writing a very different sequel to Das Kapital
Much of the worst excesses of Capitalism are in the end self defeating. Much of what upset him (like Luther and Catholic Church in a way!) has gone anyway with no revolution or communism. Communism has proved to be unscaleable beyond the size of a small Kibbutz, which don't work as efficiently as the hybrid Capitalist / Socialist Moshav. The USSR never really had Communism as envisaged by Marx, nor has China. China today is more like a socialist version of pre-1912 Empire.

Perhaps there are interesting parallels between how the the German Princes exploited Luther's teaching for political ends and how Lenin and Stalin exploited Marx's teaching for political ends.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

I agree, the current economic situation that we have is not sustainable in the long run . Im think that at some point , there will be a severe economic correction, a depression probably on the order of the one we had back in the 30's maybe worse . It will effect everyone rich and poor.

Agreed. It will be linked to oil production, I suspect - by which I mean the lack of it.

 

[Gramm838]

Agreed. It will be linked to oil production, I suspect - by which I mean the lack of it.

But they keep finding more oil, so we are not running out of it any time soon; and oil needs will be overtaken by fuel efficiency in the coming few years, so I'm not sure where the cause for a great depression is going to come from.

Sound more like some sort of wishful thinking...

 

[MWagner]

I wager the likeliest cause of a severe and prolonged economic decline is the relentless automation of production and services that requires the labour of fewer and fewer people. Once two-thirds of the people on the planet are completely unnecessary economically, our means of allocating wealth is going to become a smoking anachronism.

 

[Dave]

I wasn't going to reply again but MWagner has reminded me of the science fiction magazines that I would read as a child - things like TVCentury21 - predicting a future as a world where robots did all the labour and man had a lifestyle filled with leisure activities.

In reality, robots do some of the labour, but the rest is left to a few people working 60+ hours a week in unsociable shifts, a few working zero-hours contracts, mass unemployment, and a few super rich who are paid huge salaries for working a few hours per week.

I expect to be lectured that I don't understand the pressure of being rich once again, but I'm quite sure it is preferable to the other three options.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

But they keep finding more oil, so we are not running out of it any time soon; and oil needs will be overtaken by fuel efficiency in the coming few years, so I'm not sure where the cause for a great depression is going to come from.

Sound more like some sort of wishful thinking...

My feeling is that it isn't. In most cases it isn't the finding of the oil, it's the relative expense of extracting it. As less remains, it gets more expensive to acquire, and at some point this century - estimates vary - we'll hit that point.

As for efficiency, you only have to look at the current and projected energy "requirements" (note inverted commas) for billions of human beings to see that fuel efficiency ain't going to happen. We'll hit the wall first.

 

[Darth Angelus]

Given any particular type of government (or economic model), there are people who are ready to declare it a failure. And there are other people who are ready to declare it a success. Observe capitalism and democracy. The nay-sayers will tell you that democracy is nothing but the institutionalized purchase of votes, and capitalism is just another form of serfdom.
I think Karl Marx would have found a way to compartmentalize the failures and use some form of the No True Scotsman argument to dismiss them. If there's one thing that's been proven over and over and over, it's that people are capable of believing (or continuing to believe) anything, regardless of contrary argument, evidence, or logic.

I think this pretty much spot-on. It is not impossible, nor even hard, to declare any political or economic system you don't like to be a failure. You could for example say that capitalism fails in eliminating inequality and poverty, thereby causing millions to die worldwide, from starvation. You could also say the system fails when it comes preserving the environment.
Of course, strong supporters of capitalism will challenge the idea that the capitalist system is the cause of this, but strong supporters of communism would deny that system's responsibility for certain things it is accused for by its critics, including the OP.

And as for what others have done in Marx's name, is Jesus Christ then also responsible for every single thing done in his name since?

None of this is meant to be defending active genocide, when done in Marx's name (or for any other cause), but it is hard to know for certain why a certain system fails, in any particular case.
If we look at the Soviet Union, I am pretty sure the civil war, WWII and the Cold War took its toll, and it wasn't as rich or developed as certain western countries to begin with, i.e. even before the October revolution. Those circumstances aren't ideal, and it may or may not have failed, even if it had been a capitalist system. As it is impossible to repeat the twentieth century with a capitalist (and everything else about it the same) Soviet Union, you can't really compare results.
Then again, perhaps it was Marxism that caused Soviet to fail.
What I am saying is that the critics who are inclined to believe Marxisn is doomed to fail will see that as the cause of the fall of the Soviet Union. Those who do believe in Marxism have plenty of other possible causes to use as excuses for that particular system's failure.
I am uncertain which is correct, and I think either side will fill this uncertainity with personal conviction, as always in politics.

 

[BAYLOR]

So much Venezuela's bold experiment in Socialism .

 

[BAYLOR]

It's the 200 anniversary of Karl Marx's Birth . I think if he were alive , he wouldn't be in too good shape.