I do understand why "people" do not recommend Lenin to you, and they recommend Kropotkin. Since they belong to a layers of classes that benefit from the interests resulting from imperialist force of your homeland. Lenin will analyze it with scientific rigor and will show how the reality works, and he will not talk about abstract ideas! Ideas are the reflections of movements in the material reality. There are classes! There are layers in each class! Read Lenin for science's sake! We are in a phase that we are preparing for a horrible world war over repartition of the world market. Don't end up in one the trenches!
Lenin turned out to be an autocrat who fought to have managerial control reinstated in the factories after they had been taken over by Soviets and various other ways he crushed the revolution. The Bolsheviks were a group of middle class people who wanted everything subservient to them. If you read anarchist history books like anarchosyndicalism by Rudolf rocker or books by Emma Goldman on the subject you might be intrigued.
Right. I used to love reading Lenin. Until I realized that the first thing Lenin did upon assuming power was destroying the power of the Soviets and assuming full control of the entire state, thus removing almost all of the democratic elements from the revolution.
There’s nothing scientific about Lenin, nor about Marxism. We’ve learnt a lot more about how capitalism works, and how our economy works, in the last 100 years. Plenty of better analyses of capitalism in the mean while, such as the “Capital as Power” framework
Marx was a social scientist, much of his structural analysis of capitalism still plays out accurately today. Given that science is about building predictive models, that makes him a pretty successful scientist.
> Marx was a social scientist, much of his structural analysis of capitalism still plays out accurately today.
None of his structuralist analysis has played out accurately. Indeed it was discredited long before the Soviet Union collapsed. Marx's ideas of historicism have been largely abandoned decades ago.
You no longer hear people talk of "historical necessity" of socialism, nor do people believe that man goes through stages of capitalism to socialism to communism. And with the collapse of the Iron curtain and China abandoning communism, all that is left of modern marxist-lennist thought is the actual Lenninist part -- e.g. party dictatorship, which has proven resilient in some cases as a form of authoritarian control. Even the modern has left has abandoned class conflict as the source of ressentiment and is now pushing racial conflict - in fact one can argue that the modern left is firmly rooted in the professional classes, viewing the working class with great suspicion as a source of reactionary beliefs. That was always the problem with Marx, whose focus was on the politics of the city - real poverty lies in the rural countryside, which tended to be religious and conservative, wanting to honor God and King. This bothered Marx to no end, accusing the poor of having a false consciousness and not knowing what was in their best interests, whereas the urban leftists knew what was good for them. It was the failure, for example, of the republicans in Spain to win over the farmers that was the death knell of the left in the Spanish Civil war. And it was the farmers that were slaughtered first whenever lefist revolutions succeeded, from the Vendee in 18th C France to Ukraine in the 1920s to China in the 1950s. Marxism itself was always a bit phoney with the class conflict -- it is, at the end, a cultural conflict, and the economic stuff was tossed overboard like a used glove the moment a better one was found.
It's true that the world is discovering how fragile democracies are, especially racially diverse democracies[1], but that insight is available even in Plato, and really has nothing to do with Marx. That is, while Marx's notions of some economic end-state turned out to be false, the larger framework of the cycles of history as outlined by the Greeks still hold some sway.
But that does not mean that all of Marx is worthless. He did a good job describing the economic history of the English industrial revolution and was a keen observer of the urban reality of his day. It's just that his recipes didn't work and his predictions didn't pan out.
[1] My favorite trilemma is that you can have liberty, diversity, or centralization. Pick two.
You're narrowing down his ideas to only those relating to socialism, which I didn't even mention. I said much of his analysis of capitalism still holds. You know, the content of Kapital, where he analyses the capitalist mode of production, how it arose from feudalism, the form it takes in terms of a working and capitalist class and how their interactions drive the economy. The vast majority of that is still predictive today.
No, I really don't think it's predictive. It's interesting social commentary on a world that no longer exists.
It's interesting historical commentary on some specific events in England, but not "mankind". Capitalism arose out of feudalism in England yes, but Capitalism also predated Feudalism in Rome and other societies. In fact, Feudalism arose out of capitalism!
If you look at the history of Feudalism, it came to be from the efforts by Rome to fight inflation, which required moving away from taxation via currency and starting to tax goods in kind. They then created lists of people with certain occupatons, and they froze the economy -- you needed to do what your father did. People didn't like that, so they started preventing people from moving. That was the origin of capitalism devolving to feudalism.
In other words, the ideas that there are these "historical laws" is the most discredited part of Marxism (other than the pure economic stuff). That idea is called "historicism", and is no longer advocated even by those who really like marxist economics. The reason is that we know a lot more about economic history than Marx did, and especially about non-european economic history, where some societies never experienced feudalism and jumped straight into capitalism with the domestication of cattle in the neolithic era. Fun Fact: The word "capital" comes from cattle. I recommend reading A History of Interest Rates by Sydney Homer.
So as long as Marx sticks to commentary on 18th Century England then he's golden. Alienation of factory workers, economic surplus, rapacious financiers -- it's all good stuff to describe that society. But the moment he starts declaiming universal laws for all societies and economic history in the middle ages or even tribal societies, that's when he doesn't have a lot of evidence for his thesis and ignores lots of counter-examples and most economic historians no longer take it seriously.
So how do other capitalist countries solve the bootstrapping problem? Because in order to have capitalism you need to have a class that owns means of production (coming out of feudalism, that meant private land and farming equipment that were previously worked by serfs) - what was the economic model that led to the centralised ownership of these things in Rome? Perhaps a system of slavery or similar?
In different parts of the world, there are different evolutionary paths, but I think it's wrong to start with the assumption of class and think the class of owners appears before the thing they own. It is rather the opposite -- some means of production is discovered/invented and then people compete over owning that means of production and the results of that competition gives rise to classes of those who are rich in the resource and those who are not. Nature is unequal.
In some societies, that capital was cattle (and also other livestock, like sheep). Cattle create other cattle and are a store of value, so that's all you need. Labor without capital isn't worth very much -- you can walk around picking berries. But combine labor with capital and you can feed yourself well and have some surplus left over. So those who owned the capital would attract people who want to work for them and improve their life over picking berries, and they become servants of the cattle owners, and you develop nomadic tribes of cattle owners.
You can start out with just a pair of cattle sold to you in exchange for doing some valuable service to someone else and with a little luck and wise husbandry, your great-grandson owns thousands of head of cattle and is also attracting lots of people work for your clan. This, for example, is the story of Jacob in the Bible, except he got sheep and two brides from Laban in exchange for working for him for 14 years. Or Abraham, who in old age became extremely wealthy in cattle. It's similar to people like Warren Buffet today who are both lucky and well-tempered and they end up with ridiculous amounts of capital. Some get really rich, others get really poor -- their cattle die, or they can't find good pastureland, or their children end up wasting their inheritance.
Similarly, things do not start out as slavery, slavery is what happens as a result of historical processes. Maybe you agree to work for someone for 10 years, but then after you are done you don't have many good options so you sell yourself to them and they feed you and promise to protect your offspring. Then, a few generations later, you have one class and another.
Here, I am talking about nomadic societies. In other societies, things like land and slavery could be the result of conquest by rival tribes. Most nobility in the world originally were some conquering tribe that subdued the local population, and maintained traditions that discouraged intermarriage and encouraged family wealth preservation. You could enter this system by performing some act of valor or conquest, and be rewarded with a title and entrance into the nobility for your children.
Other examples are possible.
But there are many different paths. It is important to remember that all early societies had the notion of private property. Maybe not the exact same notion we have today, but even chimpanzees believe in private property, and will fight to defend a rival taking something away from them. So ownership + the existence of capital goods => capitalism.
