Grok.

It's not an either/or world, black vs. white, all-bad vs. all-good. Many of us partly agree with you about capitalism, we've read our Marx too, but we may have become very disillusioned that what passes for socialism provides anything like a better model. A pox on both of them. Counting the new Leftist cause du jour, the Khalifate and Islamist pre-feudalist terrorism (anti-American, therefore good, therefore close to socialist), a pox on all three of them.

So where to go from here ? What sort of society to aim to build, in conditions that are vastly more complex than anything Marx (think 'productive forces', increasing complexity of labour processes and massive fragmentation/division of labour, hence the new, vast, professional classes) would have dreamed of.

It was a dream. It didn't happen as Marx thought it would, and it didn't work anywhere. Correct me just once, Grok, and stop trying to bully the rest of us through cyberspace. Just one example :)

Joe Lane

>It's not an either/or world, black vs. white, all-bad vs.
all-good.

Loudmouth:
You are not qualified to judge what I believe or don't about marxism (or whatever you're fixating on); however, you cannot say likewise about what YOU believe: because I know this system at least as well as you do.

>So where to go from here ? What sort of society to aim to
build, in conditions that are vastly more complex than
anything Marx...would have dreamed of.

(One More Time...)
Your foolish ignorance about what Marx understood -- or what 'marxism' actually *is* -- aside: 'so where to go from here' is the same 150+-year-old goal it's always been: socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist slave-order -- and the building of communist society after that. And as long as capitalism and capitalist logic have not essentially changed in this world, the goal of replacing them has not altered much either. So you've been WRONG to assume different, based on specific historical experience so far. Your challenge to "prove" it works, **right now**, is like any example you could think of where some sneering challenger demands proof of that which doesn't yet exist. Once upon a time it was 'impossible' for people or their machines to fly, either -- even though birds and bats were clearly already capable of the act...

And not knuckling under to you 'knowing' fools is not "bullying". How you people do invent things out of whole cloth. It's like you truly don't have a point or something, and are constantly dissembling in the hope no one will notice...

Well Groky, its quite simple really.

We have no intentions of being your experimental guinea pigs in
finally proving that marxism does work, when we are doing pretty
well with our system, right here and right now.

So go and find a country where they need help, unlike Australia
and show us how its done. Go and rescue Cuba, or North Korea, for
they need rescuing.

Once we can sit back and marvel at your amazing achievement, we'll
take notice. Until then, you will remain just another dreamer.

Dear Joe,
I don't treat Marx's predictions as doctrine--neither did Marx.
What Marx did do was show that capitalism is ultimately untenable, but he didn't preclude the possibility of devastation rather than communism; a new dark age.
Marx argued that the old system was "pregnant" with the new, ergo capitalism had to go the full-term. Marx was not a prophet and never saw himself as such; he was more a materialist version of Hegel, using dialectical thought to critique social/historical formations and make projections. Engels arguably helped turn Marx's thought into the doctrine it manifested as in Russia: "vulgar" Marxism or "materialist dialectics".
I sympathise with Grok's exasperation because most of the comments expressed on this thread are patently ignorant of what Marx argued. Every objection has been based on manifest ignorance that, however, is difficult to correct in a few words because the disputants lack even an ABC of Marx's thought.
You say you've read Marx, and you complain that every attempt has been disastrous, yet you don't consider that those attempts were harassed throughout by the much more powerful system under threat. More importantly, if you've read Marx you know that despite these failures, the important thing is that the present system remains social-pathological incarceration (alienation).
If you're locked in a dungeon and the first several attempts at emancipation are unsuccessful, do you "embrace" your captivity?
This is not to say Marx is infallible; I don't think he figured the extraordinary adaptive evolution of capitalism, for instance; yet it remains untenable in the long run. Should we condemn Marx for being an optimist rather than a millenarian?
The important thing is his critique of capitalism, his exhaustive account of its dehumanising and degrading dynamics; if you critique that honestly, you're a life-time convert!
The problem is that humanity is too compliant; able to rationalise the unspeakable, even when it's perpetrated against itself. Humanity will accommodate itself as best it can to any dispensation and take comfort, meanwhile, in confabulations---religion, commodity fetishism, culture generally.
Most people only know the propaganda, by rote.
Read Marx and discover your humanity!

>We have no intentions of being your experimental
guinea pigs in finally proving that marxism does work,

"We"..? Speak for yourself and not for others.

>when we are doing pretty well with our system,
right here and right now.

Proving nothing so much as the insular, obtuse self-satisfaction of a loyal toady to the capitalist order. Yabby's own, precious breadcrumbs must be of an extra special caliber.

And FYI: most of the people of the world slave under capitalism for peanuts, in insecurity -- when they're not actually dreaming of getting REAL breadcrumbs, as @ 1/3 of the world's people in fact do.

Hope the world-wide depression hits you extra hard, yobbie.

>the disputants lack even an ABC of Marx's thought.

The disputants lack even a basic grasp of bourgeois 'common sense' logic -- let alone of the dialectical variety.

>Engels arguably helped turn Marx's thought into the
doctrine it manifested as in Russia: "vulgar" Marxism
or "materialist dialectics".

One of those lies that bourgeois academics have spent generations milking for personal gain. Engels' 'popularization' of dialectical-materialism is not responsible for the stalinist perversion of "DiaMat": the usual historical expediency -- found thruout history -- is the culprit here. Engels and Marx are more to blame for simply running out of time and resources to ever begin a popular treatise on dialectical-materialism itself, explicitly, on the scale of "Capital" -- which itself is an unfinished triumph of analysis.

>This is not to say Marx is infallible; I don't think he
figured the extraordinary adaptive evolution of capitalism,
for instance; yet it remains untenable in the long run.

Don't sell Marx short. While he hoped for a well-led uprising in Europe to smash capitalism there in a very early stage -- and it was indeed possible -- he stated explicitly often enough that capitalism had many resources to fall back on before its back was truly and objectively and finally to the wall -- as is far more the case today than then. What has truly been tragic in the past century or so is the clear and objective fact that *subjective leadership* has been the overarching failing in the working-class at all crucial moments -- barring the genius leadership of the Lenin/Trotsky period in Russia.

And we can see today that there is NO genius leadership anywhere in the world in the working-class at this very moment of supreme capitalist crisis. Far from it, indeed.

>The problem is that humanity is too compliant; able to
rationalise the unspeakable, even when it's perpetrated
against itself.

People will only take so much. The real issue is: can they rise up and defeat a highly organized and ruthless capitalist enemy, and hold the fort long enough for this to be a permanent victory.