So he got the boom and bust cycles and inequality right but missed the ability of capitalism to reform itself and the establishment of welfare states which boosted upward social mobility and improved lives. He didn't foresee Marxist regimes killing people on a horrendous scale either. After ideology had become an opium or tool of deception for too many of his followers. But the most interesting thing about Marx was the healthy dose of scepticism he kept about ideas including his own (read with a free subscription). He was relatively unknown during his life with between nine and eleven people attending his funeral.
The MMM started out as a Marxist-Leninist party. Would you believe this? While a recent breakaway faction with interesting initials wants to privatise water.
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Yes Karl Marx could not foresee the scourges that came up with extreme communism, same as a river cannot not predict its course as it first pokes it head out of its source. Yet Marx’s philosophy was revolutionary in the end. His legacy is still felt today in the neo capitalism. The problem with communism was that it was too rigid a system unlike capitalism. When there is a conflict between equality and liberty and the major players are creatures that also have emotional needs and not just material needs to be satisfied, the outcome is inevitable as people cannot behave like mere cogs in a machine. The collapse was predictable in the end. The good thing is that the new system copied what worked from the communist experiment and adapt itself with the change of times.
Today however, we are depleting the resources of the planet because of that same capitalism, paving way to eventual massive ecological disasters. Everyone wants progress and growth to infinity.
You cannot blame people and the countries though. We measure the quality of our lives with the amount of stuff we can accumulate and not the subjective happiness we may be experiencing individually. This is what we have been brainwashing ourselves for generations and what we are teaching our kids through our educational system. Moreover in the inevitable game of comparisons proper to the sapiens species, the delusion is further enhanced.
Perpetual progress though was made possible thanks to science and technology. The latter has supplanted the old religions of yore which could not offer lasting panacea to the challenges of everyday life. Let us hope then, the winner of the bout that is capitalism, along as its side kick science can eventually come up with a true revolutionary solution to confront the dark clouds ahead. That for sure, will be a make or break for capitalism in its current form.
We can start by restoring our tax rates to how they were before 2006 so that we're more in equilibrium with nature.
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