133 years after this guys death

He refuted young Marx. Old Marx changed his theory after encountering Stirner's thinking.

These. I mean Marxist themselves to this day can't even agree with each other on what the "dictatorship of the proletariat" actually is since he never really bothered to provide a coherent definition.

Every single communist government.

They had nothing to do with Marx or his theory of communism. They were inspired by it, nothing more.

''communist government'' is an oxymoron you dunce

IT HAS LITERALLY NEVER BEEN TRIED

>hasnt been refuted

you mean other than reality?

>muh real gommunism!

>Ive never read Marx'w writings but I feel like I'm qualified to talk about them

Communism as defined by Marx can only come about through a developed capitalist economy. Marx predicted that globalization, centralization of market power, automation, etc. would make capitalism unstable and to right it, socialism would be needed until post scarcity was reached in which competitive based economic structure would not longer be necessary. He specifically said this model was only applicable to Western Europe.

The communist revolutions of the 20th century attempted to circumvent that by skipping the capitalist phase and establishing socialist governments. Which only worked in reverse, they industrialized rural countries and laid the foundation for future capitalist systems.

Communism is not an alternative to capitalism. It's what Marx believed to be the final product.

>but there has never been any REAL communism!

Communism put into action leads to totalitarian dictatorship, every goddamn time. How many more tens of millions of people need to die for you to realize it doesn't work??

Karl Marx said the middle-class would disappear thanks to industrialization. What has happened in the West since the 1970s is the middle-class disappearing thanks to deindustrialization.

The middle-class in industrializing countries like China and India is actually growing.

Isn't Old Marx essentially an escape from philosophy and ethics into economics?

If so, why do people usually cite Marx ethically ("struggle", "consciousness", "fetishism", "exploitation", "human nature") instead of amorally?

Can the capitalism-defending moralists ("muh totalitarians, muh purge, muh famine") stop repeating the same shit every day and let the Marxists defend themselves on the better dichotomy, Good and Bad, instead of your [wage]slavish dichotomy, Good and Evil?

Kolakowski not only refuted Marx, but every single of his followers until the early 1970s.

This is the exact shit I was talking about here: How does a vanguard party contradict Marx? Marx never really condemned the concept, in fact his personal correspondence hints at the fact he wasn't against something like what happened in revolutionary France, which certainly was a government. The very word DICTATORSHIP implies a government. The fact it's supposed to be just a transitionary period is not just irrelevant, it outright refutes Marx, because actual events proved the "new ruling class" (Marx's own words) will never let go of power on its own and achieve statelesness.

Furthermore, Marxists are dishonest cunts who will say shit like:
>b-but Marx was talking about industrialized capitalist countries with a strong working class, not about agricultural peasant shitholes like Russia!
Completely ignoring the existence of the DDR and Czechoslovakia which were indeed industrialized and capitalist before the communists took over, yet socialism failed there as well.

What's even more interesting is that class consciousness of the proletariat and sympathies towards communism happens pretty much only in the peasant agricultural societies (China, Russia, Nepal, Peru, Chiapas etc), so pretty much the exact opposite of what Marx thought.

How come the Marxists on my campus attack bankers so much (specifically those on a wage, with bonuses) instead of small-business owners?

Are the latter not the 'rentier' owners of production and the former are the workers who should unite?

>Marx predicted that globalization, centralization of market power, automation, etc. would make capitalism unstable and to right it, socialism would be needed until post scarcity was reached in which competitive based economic structure would not longer be necessary.

No he didn't. This is 21st century exegesis. It's like those Christians that try to read modern science in the Bible.

Marxism is pretty much a religion at this point.

>Capital
>vague

He has been. That does not make him irrelevant though, he invented or popularized a lot of useful philosophical and economic concepts to have a better understanding of the world.

Truth is, whether people like or not Marx and his theories, his thoughts have impregnated he world and the way we see it.

>Marxism is pretty much a religion at this point.

That's pretty much it for a lot of people.

Exactly, it's became a cult. Marxists claim Marxism to be scientific, yet a real scientist after the countless applications of communist thought would just say "Marx was wrong about this" and amend the theory. Marxists don't amend the theory, instead they perform absurd mental gymnastics to reinterprete the empirical evidence in order to prove the theory right.

Karl Popper summed it up well:

>Marxism was once a scientific theory: it predicted that capitalism would lead to increasing misery and, through a more or less mild revolution, to socialism; it predicted that this would happen first in the technically highest developed countries; and it predicted that the technical evolution of the 'means of production' would lead to social, political, and ideological developments, rather than the other way round. But the (so-called) socialist revolution came first in one of the technically backward countries. And instead of the means of production producing a new ideology, it was Lenin's and Stalin's ideology that Russia must push forward with its industrialization ('Socialism is dictatorship of the proletariat plus electrification') which promoted the new development of the means of production. Thus one might say that Marxism was once a science, but one which was refuted by some of the facts which happened to clash with its predictions (I have here mentioned just a few of these facts). However, Marxism is no longer a science; for it broke the methodological rule that we must accept falsification, and it immunized itself against the most blatant refutations of its predictions. Ever since then, it can be described only as nonscience—as a metaphysical dream, if you like, married to a cruel reality.

Popper might also have mentioned that despite rising to the world-stage through the Soviet Union, many socialist tenets have been incorporated into the West today, specifically to serve the ruling interests and quell any occurrences of rising ressentiment (e.g. as the welfare state does) but I guess he's simpleton enough to close his ears to anything Marxist on the basis of empiricism and petit faits by that point.

Will to Power is by far the best paradigm for documenting history, or any kind of change/flux.

Do you mean things like public healthcare, pensions or minimum wage? Those aren't Marxist ideas by any means, that's social democracy all the way. In fact Marx hated social democrats to the point he called them counterrevolutionaries to-be and advocated for slaughtering them after the revolution.

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>it took this long to post Main Currents

Thank God. One of the only good critiques of Marxism (the rest coming from lolbertarians/fascists/assorted idiots) and the work that led to me realizing that Marxist theory was flawed and outdated and Marxian economics was trash (though not quite as trash as Austrian economics!)

They aren't Marxist or socialist ideas at all but they are concessions to such developments. That's probably why Marx detested them, like when a boxer witnesses his opponent receive his best punch as if it were only a slap.

>One of the only good critiques of Marxism (the rest coming from lolbertarians/fascists/assorted idiots)
Which one would Stirner be? He directly inspired Marxisms refinement.

Stirner is a meme.

He forecasted both the immediate course of the development of capitalism and its ultimate end.
And that level of exploitation would reach such a height that workers would revolt.
He didn't predicted the rise of the syndicates wich balanced the situation, hence refuted.

>Isn't Old Marx essentially an escape from philosophy and ethics into economics?

Not exactly. He shifted his theories from an idealistic basis over to a materialistic one and became considerably more amoral in his thinking. His thinking changed from sort of idealistic end point of history over to a more basic idea that the working class would start to band together out of necessity to look after their own interests.

>If so, why do people usually cite Marx ethically ("struggle", "consciousness", "fetishism", "exploitation", "human nature") instead of amorally?

Mostly because a lot of those concepts do still have some merit, they're just not the universal moral good that young Marx held them to be.

>Which one would Stirner be? He directly inspired Marxisms refinement.

Stirner would fall under a lolbertarian, but he wouldn't be applicable simply because he wasnt critiquing Marxism, but Left-Hegelianism in general (also ideology itself, but he had an especial hate on for the left-Hegelians).

>Stirner would fall under lolbertarian

What? Isn't refuting Marxism 2nd year stuff at any major Uni

Well, he would. He doesn't share much in common with American propertarians, but he is a libertarian in so far as he held the state to be illegitimate.

>communist
>government

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>muh rites

Communism comes after socialism which comes after capitalism m8. You have the same issues of transfer of power with any revolutionary struggle. Centralized dictatorship only works when you have someone considered incorruptible.

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But Maoism and Leninism are new ideologies that are adaptations of Marxism, not orthodox Marxism. This is only a refutation of tankies.

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the number of people who died in those examples is 2, excluding Icarus who was fictional

plenty of people have m8

Historical materialism contradicts itself

I'm pretty sure Kropotkin didn't support the idea of a dictatorship of the proliteriat.

I won't dispute that Marx had some interesting thought, but I'd prefer people like Kropotkin, Mahkno and Subcomandante Marcos.

>"Marx was wrong about this" and amend the theory
That's how we got from Marxism to Marxian economics and TSSI, and from TSSI to Anwar Shaikh & co refuting that as well.
Muh LTOV=/Subjective and Sale Value, Marx recognized both LTOV is just the more philosophical way to look at Capital and the MOP you peasant

Post a really good one. Preferably by an orthodox economist.

I fucking love Karl Marx