I think we can now take it as established that Marxism is thoroughly discredited, to the extent it purports to be a predictive science of the course of human events. Marx expected proletarian revolution to result from fully-developed capitalism -- meaning, it would happen first in the most industrialized countries, such as Germany and Britain. In the event, Communist revolutions have only ever succeeded in agrarian backwaters, such as Russia, China, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam. That warrants some basic re-evaluation of the theory.
OTOH, as a guide to running an economy, Marxism has not been discredited -- because it never was that in the first place. Marx never actually described how a socialist or communist economy would work -- he seems to have assumed that once the revolution burst the capitalist integument, everything would just fall into place and what to do next would be obvious. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, they developed the Leninist model -- the state owns and manages the productive property, and the Communist Party controls the state. But, that system is not necessarily implicit in the ideology. See the anarcho-syndicalist but Marxist-influenced Spanish Revolution, which was based on each workers' and peasants' collective being completely autonomous, not controlled by the state or by any political party, and which seemed to work well enough economically until the nominally communist Republic put it down. (At that time the Republic was utterly beholden to Stalin for military aid, because nobody else in the world but Mexico would give them any, and Stalin didn't like that kind of revolution at all -- also, Stalin didn't want too radical a system in place in Spain, for fear that would frighten the French, whose support he needed against Germany -- you can read about the relevant politics in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.)
A completely different discussion is whether Marxist values and ethics, which place equality above all other considerations, are better than capitalist or libertarian ethics. Curiously, Marx never much addressed that either -- even though his academic background in philosophy would have qualified him to comment on ethics as such.
Of course, both Marxist and libertarian ethics are severable from any ethics based in tradition -- which has provided the most important opposition to both.
OTOH, as a guide to running an economy, Marxism has not been discredited -- because it never was that in the first place. Marx never actually described how a socialist or communist economy would work -- he seems to have assumed that once the revolution burst the capitalist integument, everything would just fall into place and what to do next would be obvious. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, they developed the Leninist model -- the state owns and manages the productive property, and the Communist Party controls the state. But, that system is not necessarily implicit in the ideology. See the anarcho-syndicalist but Marxist-influenced Spanish Revolution, which was based on each workers' and peasants' collective being completely autonomous, not controlled by the state or by any political party, and which seemed to work well enough economically until the nominally communist Republic put it down. (At that time the Republic was utterly beholden to Stalin for military aid, because nobody else in the world but Mexico would give them any, and Stalin didn't like that kind of revolution at all -- also, Stalin didn't want too radical a system in place in Spain, for fear that would frighten the French, whose support he needed against Germany -- you can read about the relevant politics in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.)
A completely different discussion is whether Marxist values and ethics, which place equality above all other considerations, are better than capitalist or libertarian ethics. Curiously, Marx never much addressed that either -- even though his academic background in philosophy would have qualified him to comment on ethics as such.
Of course, both Marxist and libertarian ethics are severable from any ethics based in tradition -- which has provided the most important opposition to both.
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