Based on my understanding (which isn’t much, please mention any additional things I missed) Marx believed that the “proletariat” (the workers) were being abused by the “bourgeois” (the owners) in the capitalist system, and that the proletariat should seize control of the state and the means of production (“dictatorship of the proletariat”), and that the end goal was a stateless, classless society where everyone was equal, and that the state would “wither away”.
As we all know, a perfect communist society was never achieved, and that the state never ended up withering away for any of them.
How would Marx react to the Soviet Union under Stalin and his purges, Khrushchev to his denouncing of Stalinism and brutal crushings of protests in the Warsaw Pact states, to Gorbachev and his “glasnost and perestroika” reforms?
How would Marx react to the communist states that took power in Latin America, Africa, and Asia? Would he be happy that a communist state was able to compete with the capitalist U.S. in terms of global dominance, twice (Soviet Union during the Cold War, PRC in the modern day)?
Note: I am neither procommunist or anticommunist. I think that some if Marx’s ideas were quite good (everyone should be equal, classless society, etc.) but others not so much (history tells us what happens when there is a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, the state never withers away like Marx imagines it would, as power corrupts all)
If he spawned in during the cold war he would probably denounce them. The bourgeoisie wasn’t removed, just replaced and the proletariat kept in chains. At least in the Soviet Union 🤷
You should ask on .ml for just for the lulz
He would almost certainly support them based on his support for the deeply flawed paris commune. The communist experiments of the cold war were absolutely not perfect and I am certain Marx would have opinions about their exact natures but it is doubtless he would support them. If he could put up with proudhonist he can put up with anything.
Vanguardism and such are closer to fascism and purges killed a lot of communists. Maybe he’d remind that the dictatorship of the working class means true democracy
Y’all just don’t know what fascism means do you?
I don’t think Marx would be as revered by the “communists” (emphasis on the quotation marks) as much as current timeline had he lived longer.
It’s easy to idolize dead people, after all, they can’t denounce your movement from the grave.
I mean, you can see this with both PRC and ROC reveres 孫中山 (Sun Yat-sen) as the 國父 founder of the country, but… imagine if he lived longer…
Maybe there wouldn’t be a civil war? Maybe CCP still wins and then Sun Yat-sen is not idolized within PRC in this new timeline… who knows?
We don’t really have a magical brain-scan of them to recreate a simulation of their brains, so its really just speculation.
But I don’t think Marx and Stalin would be on the same side. Perhaps there might not been a dictator Stalin, if Marx was alive. What’s for certain is that there would be a huge butterfly effect.
Doesn’t basically every political philosopher hate the governments built off their philosophies?
I think if he were honest with himself he would see that what he got wasn’t what he had envisioned in any of the countries that claimed to be communist/socialist. But they were his team so he would publicly support them. You can sell his stance as an evolvement of the theory rather than admitting mistakes. Not too dissimilar from the way the PRC sells its version of communism to its people: communism “with Chinese characteristics.”
Chances are though that he would have perished in one of the purges happening in whichever communist country he would have chosen to reside in. He would have enough clout to niggle at leadership openly about stuff going wrong and eventually be would deliver the straw that broke his camel’s back. He would be mind-holed and his legacy rectified so he wouldn’t be the lighthouse of the movement that he could only become because he died early. And he didn’t starve millions. And communism would become the thing created by the people through an arduous march and not a system dreamed up by some German philosophers.
You can sell his stance as an evolvement of the theory rather than admitting mistakes.
I dunno, that sounds an awful lot like “reform” to me.
wait you guys like communism/socialism i thought you only like social democracy?
Of course he would disapprove. And, hopefully, learn something about human psychology, its relationship with power, and why single-party governments are a super bad idea.
Judging by his behavior during the First International, I reckon he would have approved of Lenin’s vanguard and applauded the rise of the Stalinist empire.
Disapprove
If Marx was alive in 1970, then he could not write his books 100 years before.
History were all different then.
