Marx thought that revolutions would happen first in countries with the most advanced capitalist development like England. But they happened in feudal backwaters like Russia and China.
Towards the end, the author characterizes World War I as an “accident of history”. But there are no accidents in history, for believers. Monstrous sociopolitical systems like Marxism (and its derivatives, e.g. Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Nazism) devised by the god of this world are destined to rise and try humanity until the Second Coming.
Marxism is purely inane and illogical. It reminds me a lot of Obamacare.....Package it up in a few thousand pages of legalese and gobbldygook, make it sound like your helping the poor, put an intellectual twist on it.....but in the final analysis, it is a pile of crap which only succeeds in making matters much worse.
Yawn. Another dead white male in the dust bin of history.
Typical.
He was also a satanist.
“Certainly Marx understood crucial features of capitalism...”
As a businessman who has actually read Capital, I disagree completely. Marx had some genuine insights, but he only understood a caricature of capitalism.
Thank you for this...bfl.
“Marx the anti-Communist is an unfamiliar figure”
Nonsense. Anyone who has studied the scientific history of Marxian theory knows that society must transition to communism via socialism with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Of course Marx criticized the Paris Commune and other naive communist advocacy. One of his most famous works, Critique of the Gotha Program, is quite clear about that.
John Gray knows this very well. I don’t know why he would write such nonsense.
But it didn't work. For starters, it was only a descriptive model that failed at being a predictive model. His predictions, for example, that profit levels would fall and that the proletariat would become increasingly immiserated, increasingly illiterate; none of that came to pass, quite the contrary.
And there's a real problem when you try to take a failed predictive model and turn it into a normative model, which is what you do when you try to run an economy on its precepts. Failure is predictable, it followed, and what followed that was a scrambling to explain away the failures rather than simply discarding the model. The model is still with us, no longer an economic model but a religion.
I always smile a little when I hear the Constitution denigrated as the product of kept white males and Marx, who really was one, celebrated as some sort of liberator from all that. It isn't a laughing matter though - so much pain for so much time and still they believe.
I hope to be excused about my sort of sneaking sympathy for Marx. This is because my knowledge of what it was like to try to live in old London Town, during the Victorian era. Pretty extensive knowledge. I agree that Marx and his brilliant intellect did not allow him to face reality.
Today such as Marx would wallow in government grants. Perhaps if he was affluent he could not have written Das Kapital. I would use the great works of Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth on survival in Victorian London. "London Labour and London Poor is a classic work. Marx cursed "the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker". They were tradespeople who badgered him for their debts.
If one was poor in my native city of "foggy old London Town" it was an unmitigated hell. My own criticism of Marx, is that he had rejected the brutal fact that one HAD to earn money, the man HAD to provide. He lost children through lack of the necessary upkeep. He lived in squalor, as did many others and they worked.
Finally his friend Engels managed to give him a weekly stipend. Yet his friend was the son of a cotton manufacturer. The cotton operative had a life span expectancy of half of that of a middle class person. Another Victorian horror story, that of child labour in the cotton mills etc.
All this is a bit of a ramble, but the personal history is what fascinates me- what made the man? I shall find out more when I get that book.