On Mon, Nov 17, 2025 at 02:20 AM, <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Yet we must also recall, in that same vein, the huge strike waves in > China, the three general strikes in India of between 100-150 MILLION > workers in the last five years, and we get a clearer sense of how to > evaluate Marx's predictive powers. As I’ve noted before, mass demonstrations, strikes and other forms of protest, including armed insurrection, have been as much a feature of industrial capitalism as profit-seeking and wage labour over the past three centuries. However much we may want to spin it otherwise, Marx and his revolutionary followers read into such activity capitalism’s imminent demise. They did not expect they system would survive to the present day. Marxism’s predictive powers consequently get a failing grade, as does the living movement which it inspired. Like most, I I was mainly attracted to Marxism as the anticapitalist wing of what was then a mass international movement of the working class and its allies. D espite some spectacular successes in Russia and China and elsewhere, it ultimately failed as a movement to overthrow capitalism as a world system. However Marxism's historical materialist method of analysis gets an A grade. It remains unmatched as a means of understanding present and past society. I accept that the movement or something resembling it will someday reappear and overthrow capitalism, perhaps sooner than we think and in as abrupt and unexpected a manner as when it disappeared. But historical report cards are based on past performance rather than the promise of future results. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39320): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39320 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116301050/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
