Ok, but would Marxism understand the societies that have called themselves communist as being such - my understanding is the common argument is that they are not truly communist and that no, Marx would not have considered them as such. As this post doesn't seem to even address that argument I find it highly suspect, as well argued as it would otherwise appear.
On the one hand, Marx anticipated communism rising up through society organically from the proletariat, whereas in most communist countries it was instead imposed in top-down fashion by a so-called "vanguard party" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism).
Vanguardism was a feature of the Leninist approach to communism, and Lenin had not-terrible reasons for preferring it -- namely that by the 20th century, people had been waiting more than 50 years for communism to bubble up organically the way Marx had predicted it would way back in the 1840s, and it never seemed to, you know, happen. Lenin argued (in What Is To Be Done?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F) that Marx was wrong in this regard, that the only way the working masses would ever embrace communism was if a narrow, elite activist class first educated and agitated them.
Vanguardism worked, in the sense that it resulted in the creation of formally communist governments, which waiting for Marx's prediction to come true had never (and still never has) done. But it also tainted those governments (which were of course staffed top to bottom with members of the vanguard party) with a strong sense of their people as cattle who needed to be herded by their betters, which then made it easier to abandon democracy, shutter the free press, and murder lots of people whenever they got in the way of the next five-year plan.
On the other hand, complaints by communists that existing communist governments weren't practicing Real Communism™ always had a whiff of no-true-Scotsmanism about them. Most countries with these governments were pretty miserable places to live, so they weren't exactly great advertisements to people who lived elsewhere for the idea that they should embrace communism themselves. So people who advocated for communism had to somehow find a way to assure people that the communism they were preaching wasn't the same thing as the system down the road that couldn't feed anyone and was riddled with secret police. Accusing the folks down the road of deviationism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviationism) was a useful way to do that.
This is a very cynical view, and does a disservice to the spirit of intellectual pursuit in normative social theory. The idea that the only reason why they would oppose such examples of communism is out of embarrassment doesn't fit well with their actual criticisms and reference to Marx himself. Thorough examination of Marx's notebooks and ancillary works only began in the 60s in English language literature. Your suggestion makes even less sense when one considers that the modern left critique of capitalism (usually focusing on concepts such as domination and totality) could be (and were) equally applied to the USSR.
This takes a much different form to deviationism. Deviationism is a result of party politics. It isn't a result of theoretical work. For example, many of the criticisms I mentioned in my other comment in this thread have not come from Trotskyists, Maoists, Titoists or any other "-ist"!
I was thinking it was more that the X I believe in is good, Y is bad but says they are X I better devote some resources to explaining why Y is not X lest people get the wrong idea.
although as claudiawerner suggests below there are other reasons for finding the statement about Marxist thought not handling the collapse of these Communist companies to be factually inaccurate.
Would you consider that the Nordic countries are growing communism organically albeit how rudimentary it is?
the concept of the state is intended to be a temporary fixture that gets dissolved, and no communist state has ever been able to make that transition
pushes for decentralized finance aim to do the same thing under a strict private ownership and capital appreciation method, with egalitarianism sprinkled in
so it is interesting that these parallel ideologies are propelling towards the same zenith
The fact that the USSR and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism are associated so strongly with Marx himself is in my view an intellectual tragedy. But you won't find such associations made by professional modern theoreticians.
The author writes,
>But Marxist view is entirely powerless to explain 1989, the fall of communist regimes, and hence unable to provide any explanation for the role of communism in global history.
But this is wrong. The figures I have named above actually use a Marxist lens to explain the fall of communism and its fall in global history. Herbert Marcuse goes further in investigating the role of the Nazis is history in Hegel's idea of progressive development of freedom.
Why was the USSR not a socialist state? What lead to it being the way it was? Why did Stalin effectively admit as such in Economic Problems of the USSR? There are papers by Marxist historians, philosophers and value-theoreticians alike. Here[0] is one by Chattopadhyay, a respected figure in Marxist philosophy.
From Peter Hudis:
>This is in many respects a remarkable passage, for it anticipates the problems with many of the social experiments that will be carried out (ironically enough) in Marx’s name in the twentieth century. Two points are worth noting from this. First, wages, like property, are results of human activity. They are made necessary by the existence of alienated labor. To ignore alienated labor while altering wage and property relations through the elimination of private capitalists does not undermine the necessity for a ruling class to impose forced labor on the workers. Society has a whole now becomes the “abstract capitalist.”One form of oppression is ended by instituting an ever more egregious form of oppression. Second, if everyone is paid the same wage, labor becomes treated as a uniform abstraction. Treating labor as an abstraction, however, is precisely the problem with alienated labor.
[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/25769087?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
You have replied with strong knowledge of the literature, but it still sounds a great deal like "No True Scotsman" to me. For every approach, you can find a scholar who says that approach is wrong, so it can never be definitively disproven, because there's always a great Marxist scholar who says "No, that approach was wrong". But from where I sit, the following things seem to be true:
1. No nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted organically, that is, without vanguardism.
2. Vanguardism has been tried, but produced something that was worse than capitalism - worse both economically and in terms of freedom.
That leaves... what? What are you, personally, looking for that you think would work? If it is tried and fails, will you say "they didn't do it right", or "I was wrong, but Marx wasn't; this other approach is the answer"? Or will you say that Marx does not give a viable answer on how to fix capitalism in a way that actually makes things better?
On the same token, no nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted with vanguardism. They never claimed to bring about Communism, only that they were "socialist states". Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish Leninism as incorporating ideas from Lenin from Marxism-Leninism, an ideology created around Stalin's systematizing as a state ideology.
The truth is that I don't know what it would take, especially in today's world. I'm pessimistic about the possibility of workers as a whole uprising, and in the case that they did, succeeding. As David Schweickart wrote on his essay on Sartre's Marxism:
>Moreover, the democratic process, our best hope for relatively peaceful social change, is, increasingly dysfunctional, due in no small part, to the fact that, since the mid-70s, there has been a coordinated, beneath-the-radar, well-financed, largely-successful, ongoing effort, not only to keep “Democracy in Chains,” but to tighten those chains more and more so as to shield the wealthy from democratic discontent. Not good news for Marxists hoping to “win the battle of democracy.” At the same time the prospects for a violent revolution by progressive forces (as opposed to a right-wing military coup) are essentially zero. (A successful storming of the White House? A guerilla army swooping down from the Appalachian Mountains?)
But the point is this: by going through an intellectually lazy route to say that Marxism died with the collapse of 20th c. Communism, we are already shutting down discussion of what Communism could be. The hypothesis, from my point of view, has not been refuted. It is less a matter of teasing out Marx's vision of a future society (which is lacking, because of his philosophical commitments) but rather trying to see what a future society would look like based on the critique. Unlike the diagnosis from a doctor, the features of a socialist society flow from the critique of capitalism, indeed, I would say they are already within it.
I am no dogmatist. If we find that Marx's critique must be reformulated or even abandoned, then so be it. But I think this is less and less the case when Marx's framework is being fruitfully used today for apparently modern phenomena, from McDonaldsisation to the neoliberal state.
So to answer your question: For Marx to be wrong on the solution to capitalism would, for me, necessarily entail that his critique is lacking or wrong. Since we are more able to access the latter than the former, we can sort things out from there. This is actually a weak claim - because I admit that Marx's vision of socialism depends on his critique. A stronger, dogmatic, claim would be that even if Marx was wrong about capitalism then his socialism would still be the answer. I don't think that's defensible.
> This is actually a weak claim - because I admit that Marx's vision of socialism depends on his critique.
I disagree with you here. I think it is quite possible for Marx to be correct about his critique, and still be completely wrong about how to go about fixing it.
But as the Schweickart quote shows, there's no immediately obvious way to go about fixing it, once we admit that (1) there is a problem, (2) the problem can be fixed. It's a mistake to think that Marx thought revolution is the only way to abolish capital. But it's also a mistake to characterize him as a reformist.