(10-30-2012, 01:47 AM)FireIceTalon Wrote: Marx's theory is much harder to test, because after all, we can't travel back in time and change the course of history. Sociology, economics, and Marxism are soft sciences, where as Biology is a hard(er) science so its not really a fair comparison in that sense. And even if we could go back in time, it would still be difficult to test because sociological and economic processes are constantly changing in a material sense. The process of evolution takes place much slower and over a very long period of time compared to human social development.
And yet, we have about 150 years of history that have passed since Marx formulated dialectical materialism. They do not bear the scarcest resemblance to the process he predicted. One can try to patch up the theory to fit the facts, as many (Gramsci included) have done, or one can reject the theory. But the basic problem must be dealt with - almost none of Marx's predictions about the evolution of society, which he considered to be established scientific fact, have come true.
Quote:It is pure fantasy to think that racism, poverty, patriarchy or other reactionary conditions can be reformed out of capitalism. If it were possible, it would have likely happened by now.
Except that this isn't even close to what has actually taken place. Throughout the industrialized world, workers are richer, better educated, and live longer by not just a little bit, but by enormous margins, than they were in Marx's day. Class antagonism, far from defining politics, has largely receded into the background as a driving social force. Bit by bit, life gets better, richer, fuller, freer. Some years or even decades are better or worse than others, but the overall trend is clear across basically all indicators.
Reform has a long record of successes in promoting rights and freedoms, an in improving lives. Life in the first world is good, by historical standards, and life in the developing world is getting better by the day. Revolution, by contrast, has left a trail of blood a hundred million people long, and scarcely anything to show for it. Only by persistently denying the first, and disowning the second, could anyone seriously still believe in revolution as a solution to anything.
Quote:You should look at some of Gramsci's works if you haven't, I find much of it very relevant to the current state of capitalism right now. Cultural hegemony at this point has moved from beyond "theory" status, into the "objective sociological process" category since 1991.
With all due respect to Gramsci, who I find far more insightful than Marx or Engels, "cultural hegemony" is not and never could be an objective phenomenon, since it describes an intangible and mutable set of relations, not an observable fact. (Why 1991, exactly?)
-Jester