Frank Li — What If Karl Marx Was Right, Mostly?

The image below summarizes Marx's works in a nutshell: his societal development model goes through several stages, from some early societies (e.g. slavery) to feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism, and finally to communism.

At a very high level, this model is correct.

Two "communists", Lenin and Mao, capitalized on this model more than anybody else. Both eventually failed for the same reason: They jumped from feudalism to socialism via a violent revolution that destroyed capitalism, albeit very primitive in their respective countries. As a result, the USSR was a total disaster, so was China under Mao (1949-1976)!

It's time for "capitalists" to accept this model as well, with a twist in details ...

4. The Loop Theory

The image below highlights my Loop Theory. It simply extends and truncates Marx's model as follows:

Capitalism and socialism are in a loop, requiring balancing from time to time. Socialism, if poorly managed, may set us back to feudalism. 

Communism is so far away that it should be ignored as irrelevant.

For more, read: Loop Theory - Capitalism vs. Socialism.…

1. Marx was a radical social critic of his time. Outstandingly, his analysis of capitalism, the most successful political and economic system of his time, remains most thorough and insightful to date.

2. On communism, ignore it, as it's irrelevant - Nobody has ever really had it (e.g. China under Mao was really feudalism, with Mao being the last Emperor, not communism per se), and nobody will, in the next 1,000 years, at least!...

I think that as a high level summary, Frank Li has this essentially correct. I agree with his assumption that communism is incompatible with with "human nature" as it presently exists and likely will continue to remain chiefly in this form for the foreseeable future. Yet, what we call "human nature" is malleable and transformable. 

Socialism and its higher form communism require a much higher level of collective consciousness than is presently the general case. Therefore, these forms do not scale under existing conditions, that is, in the absence of a transformation of collective consciousness. However, both are possible successively, communism being a higher form than socialism. But this is possible only given the requisite evolution of the general level of collective consciousness so that love prevails. 

To their credit, Marx and Engels were able to capture this in their thought, but they were unable to correctly assess the conditions requisite for historical unfolding. This had unfortunate consequences. But it would be even more unfortunate to conclude that they were absolutely wrong about this.

According to perennial wisdom, ideal society is achievable, and it is an ideal that true progressives should be envisioning based on the principle:  "Visualize and actualize." In a broad sense this involves raising the general level of education. 

Perennial wisdom teaches that in order to achieve human potential, education needs to be both horizontal, encompassing all aspects of the gross world as a system, and also vertical, integrating the gross, subtle, and causals worlds as relative manifestations of the absolute as that which does not change. This is the whole. Presently, this realization is dim to non-existent in the prevailing level of collective consciousness in this dark age.

Econintersect
What If Karl Marx Was Right, Mostly?
Frank Li | Chinese ex-pat, Founder and President of W.E.I. (West-East International), a Chicago-based import & export company, B.E. from Zhejiang University (China) in 1982, M.E. from the University of Tokyo in 1985, and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1988, all in Electrical Engineering