Has anyone in history made some valid criticism against Marxist ideology? And I’m not talking about the CIA propaganda no iPhone vuvuzela shit. But like, someone must’ve made some good point somewhere along the line?
I don’t want this to be a bash marxism thread. Just curious. Debates with people usually tend to incorporate the usual stuff that can be debunked easily.
IMO there aren’t any genuine criticisms of the main points in Marxism… as Che alluded to, the things Marx+Engels discovered are as fundamental to the political and social sciences as Newton’s discoveries are to physics.
The criticisms that are genuine, point out the areas that Marx and Engels glossed over, or didn’t pay as much attention to. No matter really, since Marxism is a science, and later Marxists have and are filling in these gaps. Leninism added on a more thorough understanding of imperialism, and corrected the forgiveable error of Marx assuming that capitalism would break in its birthplaces in Europe.
A few of these are IMO, are women’s oppression, imperialism, dependency theory, divisions between rich and poor countries, labor aristocracy theory, settler-colonialism, racial oppression, the development of market economies to build socialism, etc.
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It’s not even new. Bernstein, Struve, Bogdanov, Kautsky, Khrushchev etc. etc. all those caled themselves “marxists” but abandoned the core points of marxism in favour of empty phrases. Some of them even managed to wreck most of established marxist parties with them.
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Disclaimer: I haven’t read the book (yet), only going by what I’ve seen comrades here speak of it
I think I recall seeing a comrade say that Caliban and the Witch criticizes Marx for glossing over reproductive labor and it’s social relations. With that said, while criticizing Marxism, the author by no means rejects Marxism, and even develops it. The work, as I understand, is supposed to be a really good example of historical materialism.
I urge any comrades that have actually read it to correct anything I may have gotten wrong.
I’ve read the book, and you’re correct. I’m not sure where people got the assumption that Federici is out to disprove Marxism, because that isn’t the case. She’s more out to illuminate one of the areas ignored / glossed over by Marx and Marxist historians, and in doing so, she helps develop and apply Marxism to women’s historical oppression.
edit: btw, here’s a link to Dessaline’s recording of that as an audiobook.
Yeah, she is an anarchist but she pretty much does a Marxist analysis of the whole situation, and she never disproves anything. Basically what Marx/Engels didn’t have into account was the role played by women in the accumulation of capital as reproducers of the work force that allowed the bourgeoisie to produce the series of revolution they committed. Basically the witch hunt was a process of enclosure of the womb similar to the one that occurred with other common goods where monogamy, birth control prohibitions, illegalization of sodomy, etc, that gave place for a stable and fast development of the work force in a Europe deeply weakened after the black plague, which then later also expanded thanks to the slave trade of African and American people.
You can often find criticisms of narrow technical points, such as TRPF and okishio’s theorem. But yeah, generally it seems that the most prolific critics of Marxism are, uh, Marxists.
I’m currently reading On Materialism, which makes a lot of hay on this.
As far as I know the only serious people who have criticized Marx are Popper, which I haven’t read but it doesn’t seem to hold much, Mario Bunge, which according to him provides a more rigorous materialist method, and Antonio Escohotado in his “Los Enemigos del Comercio” (The Enemies of Commerce"), which I think you could maybe get some interesting historical facts but I doubt really can affect Marxist theory.
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A friend recently got a book that both explains and criticizes Marxism. He’ll lend it to me after he’s done reading.
Cheers comrades I will process your answers 👍
Oh, I also recall Gregory Claeys’ “Marx and Marxism” distilled some stuff like this. I read it long enough ago to not remember any of the specifics or validity, but maybe worth checking out.
There are plenty of valid criticisms in the social sciences, where you learn Marx and Engel along with all the other theorists. One of the main things they got wrong was that they thought the revolution would come from workers in the industrialized world, and of course that’s not what has ever happened. They also argue for an avant garde that would eventually hand power over to the people, which of course has also never happened. As far as I can see that’s what ends up being the major problem. The people who start the transition decide they want to stick around forever, and so it eventually becomes a game of who is closer to those in power.
The biggest criticism of course is that Marxist thought has never been successfully implemented long-term. I think it’s just not possible to do in large groups. If it worked well, we’d be using it. But it doesn’t really work well. Instead we’ve found that a hybrid form of managed capitalism, combined with an extensive social and environment safety net, seems to be the best way forward.
They also argue for an avant garde that would eventually hand power over to the people, which of course has also never happened
They argue that the vanguard (which is more from Lenin rather than Marx and Engels) is the most theoretically advanced segment of the proletariat who is able to guide the revolution to a productive end. After which the state will whither away as the material conditions for its existence change. This has been seen in history and to say otherwise is historical revisionism. We had state ministries of colonial affairs, and now we don’t because there’s no more colonies to administer.
I suspect you have a degree in social sciences where you learned that the USSR was paranoid Stalin killing everyone who disagreed with him or didn’t clap long enough, but I can turn that around in one question: you said, “The people who start the transition decide they want to stick around forever, and so it eventually becomes a game of who is closer to those in power.” But can you explain how the USSR was in a position where they could start this transition?
Marxist thought has never been successfully implemented long-term
Is 3 generations not long-term? In a world where we focus on trimester figures, I think that’s pretty long term. Capitalism wasn’t established in a day either, it took wars, revolutions and centuries to destroy the old feudal order.
