Why aren't capitalist countries becoming communist like Marx predicted?

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Because he didn't see social democracy and welfare coming, which flew in the face of everthing getting worse for workers forever. He actually became skeptical of revolution's imminence due to the rise of the welfare state in his writings towards the end of his life. He was hopeful that this could turn into a democratic transition to socialism eventually.
 
Because Marx was wrong, it's only when countries have been ground into the fucking dust that they will rise up and take Communism because all the people who spat on them and attacked them said it was bad.

Happens every single time, from Russia to China to Cambodia to Cuba. It's a reaction against capitalism and imperialism, not like any of them would want to be called "reactionaries."
 
Marxism deriving from Hegel is a parable for how midwits can take good ideas, miss the point completely, and use surface level bullshit to reach erroneous conclusions
 
I can't believe we are having this discussion today

Marxism is only real in a sense that the world is post-scarcity society.

In any world that's not a post-scarcity society, communists are just roleplaying communism.

Think of it this way. Before communism, it was the bourgeoisie who ruled over the proletariat. After communism, it was proletariat that ruled over the rest.

In the end, different name, same result.
 
23iwakura23 dijo:
If things are fucked up for you, it's because you likely are either just not earning money to begin with (which would suck in the USSR too), or you're just not familiar with the financial instruments available to you. In the US though, there are infinite little means where you can become a partial owner of "the corporations", and use that to your advantage, and secure anything from real estate to your own retirement.
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Most of the early leaders of socialism and communism were well to do people who chose to give up charmed lives to fight for the poor.

But you are right. One theory of Communism was "Finance Capital". Basically that capitalist wealth would become concentrated in a few elites making it easier to socialize everything. Socialism would no longer have landowners, petite bougeois, farmers or capitalists opposing them and everything would already be centralized for the taking. Obviously stock markets have killed this last hope by expanding ownership.
 
If governments use brutal regulations and massive subsidies to dictate the direction production takes, isn't that a form of planned economy using carrots and sticks instead of direct rule?
 
Slap47 dijo:
Most of the early leaders of socialism and communism were well to do people who chose to give up charmed lives to fight for the poor.

But you are right. One theory of Communism was "Finance Capital". Basically that capitalist wealth would become concentrated in a few elites making it easier to socialize everything. Socialism would no longer have landowners, petite bougeois, farmers or capitalists opposing them and everything would already be centralized for the taking. Obviously stock markets have killed this last hope by expanding ownership.
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I wouldn't really say the stock market has meaningfully expanded ownership. 50% of it is owned by the top 1%, and 90% is owned by the top 10%.
 
Marx didn’t predict countries would be communist overnight.

He did predict things that are coming true though:

Concentration of wealth at one pole and poverty on the other.
The increase in automation-leading to the means of production escaping the existing productive relations-AI, robots, etc… this is the means escaping capitalist property relations.
A global proletarianization. Absolutely happening with the collapse of the middle class and everyone more or less integrated into the global economy.
Indian doordashers, to Brazilian fruit pickers-all integrated into the machinery of global capitalism.
Also the rate of profit has been declining IIRC since the seventies.
Breakdown of older ideological and social norms-“all that is solid melts into air”.

People don’t actually read Marx, they just read memes.
 
Ishtar dijo:
Concentration of wealth at one pole and poverty on the other.
The increase in automation-leading to the means of production escaping the existing productive relations-AI, robots, etc… this is the means escaping capitalist property relations.
A global proletarianization. Absolutely happening with the collapse of the middle class and everyone more or less integrated into the global economy.
Indian doordashers, to Brazilian fruit pickers-all integrated into the machinery of global capitalism.
Also the rate of profit has been declining IIRC since the seventies.
Breakdown of older ideological and social norms-“all that is solid melts into air”.
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These are common leftypol talking points, and none of them are true or are even claims made by Marx.... especially the "rate of profit" thesis.
Trofimov dijo:
Overall, the empirical support for the classical hypothesis is rather weak even when sufficiently long time periods are considered. In most of the economies where structuralbreaks in the profit time series was not present (or not significant) the trend coefficients were not significant. Also, in economies the structural breaks were present together with insignificant trends, suggesting that classical hypothesis may not hold – the profit rates were not experiencing secular decline, but rather stepwise decline following structural
breaks. This is in line with earlier insights by Runyon (1979) stating that decline of profit rates in 1970s was not a secular decline (as classical hypothesis postulates), but instead a
decline from unusually high levels of profitability (i.e. stepwise decline)
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We've seen a growing middle class in countries like China after they decommunized (removing their population from the peoples' communes and worker co-operatives), and there are some countries like South Korea that have too many small businesses which would not indicate a global "proletarianization." Even your example, of door dashers, doesn't make any sense because self employed people are not proles. Even if you remove China, which you shouldn't, from global poverty statistics, there has been a sharp decline in poverty for decades.
 
Dendyy dijo:
Marx was a fat lazy Jew who was wrong about almost everything. You only have to take him seriously as a philosopher because commies will fucking kill you if you don't.
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Best summary. Why are people taking this son of a bitch rabbi, who was a fucking NEET btw, as source for anything is beyond retarded. You are unironically better off going to a /biz crypto thread and nu-/pol if you want more accurate financial theories, that's how retarded his ideas are.
 
1. “Gig work” is proleterianization. The situation for graduates is dismal. Renterism is worse than ever. Wealth inequality worsens every year.
Also world bank data is badly skewed. Absolute poverty has dropped but that doesn’t change anything fundamental.
Sneedmason dijo:
Best summary. Why are people taking this son of a bitch rabbi, who was a fucking NEET btw, as source for anything is beyond retarded. You are unironically better off going to a /biz crypto thread and nu-/pol if you want more accurate financial theories, that's how retarded his ideas are.
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Marx wasn’t writing about finance but sociology. How is this hard to understand.
 
Ishtar dijo:
Marx wasn’t writing about finance but sociology. How is this hard to understand.
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chad.webp
Nothing to "understand" since I didn't read it.
 
Fundamentally the tension Marx observed was true. The lack of revolution in the western world is a complex subject but it wasn’t impossible.

As someone who has read a great deal of Marxist literature, I do know what I’m talking about.
 
Because Karl Marx was a few hundred years too early. Communism can only work in a post-scarce society which we're approaching closer and closer to, but we're still perhaps half a century to a century off. At that point though it wouldn't even be "Communist" it would be more akin to what we see in for instance shows like Star Trek: TNG where you can just "materialize" your own food and have an infinite amount of it, but that wouldn't necessarily mean the concept of work would just disappear, rather transform into something completely different. That's implying a post-scarce society is possible in the future though, and we don't nuke ourselves into oblivion and that Capitalism ever gets phased out.
 
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