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

[Frederica Bernkastel]

Hardly, all FDR did was provide material needs and services during the Great Depression. This is what marxists call concessions. The capitalist ruling class giving the workers stuff to mollify their discontent.

You're talking to a retard who thinks the "Bolsheviks ruined Russia." Apparently, he thinks the Bolsheviks threw the country into a World War, or that the Tsar was even relevant by the time the Bolsheviks took power. Our friend here claims he understands Marx, but even got basic facts about him wrong. Mind you, he clearly doesn't even know what the Provisional Government was, how the Bolsheviks came to power, or even the dynamics driving the white movement.

You say this, but forget that capitalism requires scarcity.

This is a misconception about communism too, and you're making the mistake of reading into too much into a retard's ramblings about a subject he's not equipped to talking about. Marx actually disagreed with this "post scarcity" claim people wrongly make, and wrote an interesting correspondence with a pretty famous Menshevik who quarreled with Lenin named Vera Zasulich. Marx argued communism was possible in Russia, through agrarian means, if a Russia revolution consolidated, and protected them from capitalist development as a result of these talks with her about Russia's communal development.

In fact, it's one of the first things he says in the Communist Manifesto too.

Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the
land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval
common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass
through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution
becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.

Mind, these letters and things were said just before he died a year later.
Lenin went in a different direction,and disagreed with Marx here, because he believed the obschina was doomed to be a victim of primitive capitalist accumulation, and that Russia needed a larger proletarian and industrial basis to do so.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

What's silly is there are retards talking about the Bolsheviks, without understanding them or Marx, and then even extrapolating their theories to believing it means anything outside of that specific historical context. Communists make that mistake, and wrongly become Sovietsboos. Some idiots, who are an inversion of that, make that mistake too for different reasons. But a socialist society, in a modern context, would have to be very different than what was practiced there. The conditions are just totally different now from a social and technological standpoint.

There were people who were even communists who saw that, like Gorbachev, who tried to be pragmatic about it with an attempt at making social democracy. Funny enough, early on in Soviet history, there were discussions to reform NEP into something like that too. I could elaborate on this a bit more, but KF isn't the place for a deep, intellectual discussion for anything let alone communism lol

 

[Ishtar]

My point was more scarcity is baked into capitalism and sci fi(for the sake of the term being used accurately to its connotation), post scarcity would mean capitalism’s end. Automaton itself is the means of production developing beyond the fetters of capitalist relations. If not to “that” level yet.

As far as Marx is concerned-I think he was generally correct insofar as he described class conflict, the role of material conditions in shaping the limits of human social arrangements and ideas. Communism itself in the 20th century is an entirely separate matter.

One I’m not particularly interested in talking about.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

What's silly is there are retards talking about the Bolsheviks, without understanding them or Marx, and then even extrapolating their theories to believing it means anything outside of that specific historical context. Communists make that mistake, and wrongly become Sovietsboos. Some idiots, who are an inversion of that, make that mistake too for different reasons. But a socialist society, in a modern context, would have to be very different than what was practiced there. The conditions are just totally different now from a social and technological standpoint.

There were people who were even communists who saw that, like Gorbachev, who tried to be pragmatic about it with an attempt at making social democracy. Funny enough, early on in Soviet history, there were discussions to reform NEP into something like that too. I could elaborate on this a bit more, but KF isn't the place for a deep, intellectual discussion for anything let alone communism lol

Tbf about early commies, they didn't know how bad things will get, and Tzarist Russia was legitimately that bad to justify a revolution. It's modern commie that deserve the helicopter rides.

My point was more scarcity is baked into capitalism and sci fi(for the sake of the term being used accurately to its connotation), post scarcity would mean capitalism’s end. Automaton itself is the means of production developing beyond the fetters of capitalist relations. If not to “that” level yet.

As far as Marx is concerned-I think he was generally correct insofar as he described class conflict, the role of material conditions in shaping the limits of human social arrangements and ideas. Communism itself in the 20th century is an entirely separate matter.

One I’m not particularly interested in talking about.

Scarcity is a part of nature, you will never remove it, at best you can mask it. Automation itself is part of human tool making.

Class warfare is as old as agricultural society.

 

[Shartavius]

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.

Whether for or against it, this post is the best summary of Marxism yet presented in this thread: It reduces the complexities of the world to a few Marxist terms (first invoked with contextual definitions as premise, before being dismissed as interchangeable in the "conclusion" undermining its own premises), purely for the sake of affirming the consequent with a wave of the hand. No insight; no wisdom; no knowledge either applied nor applicable - Only shortcuts in thinking, presented as though there is no difference between it and what it isn't.

 

[The Dude]

When Marx was still kicking around and wanking off to his worker's utopia fantasies, living standards were still pretty shit. You had industrial accidents, high infant mortality, filthy cities, diseases, etc. What happened was as nations became more industrialized, workers unions pushed for better treatment and work environments, laws changed to protect workers as a valuable resource, and people got more money, their standard of living became better and better. Poor people in industrialized countries had a better standard of living than even upper class people in undeveloped countries. When Marxism was applied in earnest on a country-wide scale in places like the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, there was finally a contrast to Capitalist countries. People in free Capitalist countries got to see for themselves how worse off people in Communist countries were, how their standard of living was lower than those in Capitalist countries. And then Communism failed entirely in the 80s and 90s. China moved to a Capitalist economy because they couldn't continue under a Communist economy (they kept the trappings of Communism for their system of government however, because the CCP loathed to give up control) in the 1980s and became a member of the WTO in the 90s after Bill Clinton pushed for it, hoping it would liberalize China and push them towards democratizing (it did not and now China is a monster hybrid of the worst parts of both Communism and Capitalism). The USSR broke down entirely because they could not compete economically with America and the Iron Curtain fell in the early 90s. Cuba and Vietnam were the two main hold-outs (plus North Korea's kooky-ass version of Communism) because they were smaller countries and isolated from the rest of the world, so it was easier to get away with a Communist system for longer. However, even Vietnam eventually opened up to Capitalism economics to survive much like China did.

Unfortunately, we now have a couple of generations who were born after Communism's failure and were unable to see for themselves what a failure it was. They were born in safe, prosperous, Western nations where any kind of "unfairness" seems amplified. Some of these young people have been ideologically captured as useful idiots and convinced that all the history and negative stories about Communism is just "Western propaganda" or that "real Communism hasn't been tried yet". And a lot of them don't associate Marxism with the workers controlling the means of production, but instead the government paying for everything and everyone getting to do whatever they want whenever they want, and being able to have whatever they want without having to work for it. Thankfully these days the people pushing for Socialism/Communism are lazy morons and in the minority.

 

[Nonga Tork]

People also forget or choose to ignore (the latter especially in the case of Marxist themselves) that Marxism was only one of a wide variety of socialist schools of thought that developed over the 19th and early 20th centuries. Marxism was just the most successful both because of how systemic it was, making it attractive to academics (though while most academics are some sort of leftist, nowadays actual Marxists aren't very common in academia) and because the triumph of the Bolsheviks over all of the other socialist factions trying to take control of revolutionary Russia gave it a massive propaganda boost compared to its competitors.

 

[LeChampion1992]

If we looked at the countries that became communist through revolution almost all of them were pretty much agrarian or feudal societies that used communism as a way to rapidly industrialize the country.
You had economic systems in these nations that made natural trade hard beauracracy, police state, or simple conflict that made the push to communism appealing to the working and peasant classes.
With industrialized societies you have the working classes tend to have a small stake that is threatened by the intellectuals drive for communism.

This is why in places like France the factory workers kicked the shit out of communists with the police same as Germany And America where the Hard hat construction workers fought the Vietnam anti war protesters. This is why the working class really in western countries is the secret backbone of the right.

Meanwhile in places like China where landlords were often stuck in feudal classes which encouraged cruelty and resentment between classes. China still had a softer version of a caste system during feudalism, a merchant couldn't own arms, a warrior couldnt own land, and a farmer was always st the bottom.

Tldr agrarian societies become communist not industrialized societies.

 

[Ishtar]

The French communist and socialist parties were absolutely popular with the French working classes. There were real strikes and unrest in Germany-even before WW1.

Uh yes-the western working classes were attracted to socialist ideas. To say otherwise is just historically illiterate.

(Should be noted actually even Hitler-considered the working class attraction to Marxism to be a real problem).