: So what are you saying SDF?: Arent you a Marxist?
Kind of. I'm quite squeamish about Marx's unalloyed endorsement of "technological progress," given that Marx couldn't see where capitalist technology was headed, what sort of ecological disaster it would create 125 years or so after he died. I also don't approve of this half-baked Marxist notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" that's supposed to take over after the revolution. And I'm convinced that Marx vastly over-estimated the numbers of people that constituted the "proletariat." Marx also vastly over-estimated the proletariat's resolve to fight a revolution, and to make sure its outcome was truly utopian, democratic, consensus-oriented, and "free" in the sense that "freedom" might mean something more than the imposition of a command economy.
Eduard Bernstein was a Marxist, but he didn't believe in revolution. Go read some Bernstein, Lark. Bernstein thought that capitalism would become socialist to save its own skin. Joseph Schumpeter took this idea of Bernstein's and turned it into an economic theory of capitalism, although Schumpeter's idea of "socialism" looks more like monopoly capitalism than any Marxist utopia.
Check out Johann P. Arnason's THE FUTURE THAT FAILED and Craig Calhoun's THE QUESTION OF CLASS STRUGGLE. Also, if you have the patience for it, look up "Marx, Karl" in the name index of Jurgen Habermas's THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION, Volume 2, and read the pages listed. Also take a glance at Horkheimer and Adorno's I'm really a historical materialist, Lark, not really a Marxist. If I am caught defending Marx, it is because my interlocutor has just said something silly about Marx without having bothered to read his stuff. I'm a proponent of intellectual honesty.
So, can a revolution be a productive affair? You tell me.
None.
