I was on some Marxist website reading up on Marxism, and my word, what a load of old hogwash it is! Marx was wrong on just about everything! I can't believe he still has so many followers in 2011.LOL.
Well, he predicted that a revolution would arise among the working class. The misery of the proletariats would set off a world revolution. The proletariats would triumph over the bourgeoisie and set up a new classless communist society. How did that work out?
Marxism is hilarious. They want to use class warfare to do away with classes. Similarly, they want to use overbearing government to do away with government. You can't make this stuff up.
    Sounds like democrats and republicans.         The guy had a misguided sense that people would want to better themselves and their communities as a whole, but that is ideologically flawed since most people only care about themselves. Wishful thinking on his part, not much different than some religions who attempted to control the masses.     Haven't really read that much on him just his political views in condensed formats and articles.
That wasn't the misguided part. The misguided part was assuming that would and could only happen in a manner that supported his asinine theories.
Well so far as I know nobody has come up with a system that everybody can benefit from equally. It's a figment of peoples imagination. An unobtainable utopian wet dream. Many idea sound good or look good on paper (not necessarily his) but when you add the human factor, it usually turns into a cluster fauk. Look at the US of A in it's current state. People allowed other people to screw it up!
The human factor is and has always been there, and will be reguardless of the type of government. The human factor brings a lust for power and is the reason every form of government will eventually fail.
Unfortunately, the typical marxist is not an intellectual but an emotional. So their support of him comes less from a place of rational agreement and more from a place of a burning emotional desire to make everything "equal." The argument for marxism disintegrates almost instantly under logical scrutiny.
Marx was brilliant in some of his ideas. "Wage, Labour and Capital" is filled with ideas and considerations that every capitalist should consider. A few of the assumptions were wrong, and his position was very biased, but a lot of his work is brilliant.
Marxism denies human nature. The "1%" demagoguery is ridiculous. If someone NEEDS training for their job above and beyond corporate culture than those people trained could not make money on their own. They were TRAINED to make money and be productive. The wealth producers don't train someone to be productive for free. What hurts the "1%" hurts the worker, or those who work for the "1%." We are all in this together, and EVERY job is important; something the Anti-Constitutionalist LEFT will never understand...
Marx theory on labor is bull(*)(*)(*)(*) and always has been. It assumes that the worker is being taken advantage of even though the worker is working for someone else for the very reason that he is able to make more money working for someone else than he can for himself. The bourgeoise is simply better at getting value out of the proletariat labor than the proletariat can so they can always pay the proletariat more for their labor than the proletariat can get from it themselves. In the end the proletariat is far better off working for someone else than they are working together for themselves or trying to work on their own.
It is also built on the accurate concept that money is actually a claim on future labor - something that more capitalists should understand. It accurately describes the effect on production that capital brings (and has a fairly accurate explanation on what happens with prices) but he comes to a different conclusion than others would. He has several really good concepts that people should understand - he just comes to some backwards conclusions.
I want to clarify I made a mistake when I said money. I should have said value. For the vast majority of people their labor has more value if it is sold to someone else than if they try and develop it themselves. It is a simple fact that only the best and brightest and/or most skilled have ever been able to get more value out of their labor working on their own than working for someone else. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, highly skilled tradesmen these are the few people who are able to get maximum value out of their labor. Most all other people are far better off selling their labor to someone else who can better utilize it than they can. Even the co-op model has shown the same problem because co-ops always fall behind the better led centrally controlled models of business so the workers leave the co-op for the better centrally run business that can afford to pay them more for their labor. For most people their labor has more value to someone else than it has to them. It is no different than a farmer who has excess food. Most of that food has more value to someone else than it has to him so he sells his excess. Your typical worker would rather maximize the value of their labor working and then use the profit from that maximized labor to enjoy their lives when they are not working. Yes their labor and with it that time has some value to them but they also have an excess of it that would be better used by someone else.
Which is why he's still often cited and his analysis incorporated into modern research. That he contributed a great deal to economics is an indisputable fact. Most of what I see here are knee jerk reactions to woefully ignorant opinions about what exactly Marx stood for.
Some people try to put Marx and Engels in with soothsayers but they weren't. They invented a form of social analysis that's still being used today. But if you understand Marxist theory in depth then good for you, I still struggle to understand it, but that's just my deficiency.
Popularity is no evidence of fact. A philosophy of from each to each is expected to be popular amongst those that lack the skill to give what is required to get back what is needed. Marx was himself a lazy worthless piece of (*)(*)(*)(*) and he invented a philosophy that appeals to lazy worthless pieces of (*)(*)(*)(*).