The "cures" in the 20th century were on the whole written by people with far simpler minds and uglier motives. Their actions don't take away from the value of Marx as an analyst and critic of capitalism.
The phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" in particular has a very unfortunate history and ... interpretation.
I assume you are overlooking the little things like the abolition of private property, or central planning of the economy on purpose?
You can point to a lot of periods in history where everything changes rapidly for at some points a couple of centuries before settling down again. It's hard to say if the modern period is unique or just another period of tumult between long stretches of calm. I'd caution against the notion that history is a science.
Nobody can know the future, but some things are clear:
1. We are a lot more interconnected than in the past (every human civilization that wants to interact with others can do so... or was even forced do it, not very long ago).
2. We are a lot more self-aware than in the past, en masse.
3. We are a lot more structured in our large scale scientific approaches, and we have a lot more science centers working in parallel, widely distributed around the world.
Assuming peaceful conditions and no Venus-style global warming, things will stay hectic for the foreseeable future.
I don't think interconnectedness presages rapid social change. We could just as easily settle into a sort of long quiet period where people are more or less accustomed to the way society is organized and institutions have been reformed to adapt to present day issues. After the industrialization of the 1early 9th century there was a fairly stable social arrangement until WWI swept everything off the map. It isn't impossible to imagine a situation where WWI didn't happen and the Belle Époque stretched for a long period of time.
That's one way to look at that period with rose tinted glasses :-)
There's a reason Marx & co wrote things during that time.
WW1 was just a more violent outburst of many frustrations, national, social, etc.
Marx wasn’t writing during the late 19th century. The Revolutions of 1848 were the backdrop of their work.
Whether history is or isn't a science is completely orthogonal to how unique a period is.
The modern period is unique due to the amount of resources being exploited per capita being unprecedented compared to any other time in human history. Although in the future it's possible that that number will trend down, for the time being our current prosperity is only enabled by copious amounts of energy spent on modern conveniences, particularly infrastructure, appliances and utilities.
I do feel like Marx "slips up" a bit there with the "senses his real conditions of life"; this feels like "Younger Marx" of Manifesto/German-Ideology era and not older, mature, cynical Marx of "Grundrisse" and "Capital". I think the latter recognized that at no point are the "real conditions" visible or confronted, and that all is 'obscured' by ideology and the pursuit of market domination and exploitation.
The words of "Younger Marx" there were easily twisted and exploited by people with awful motives and means and brutal simple minds. Later Marx ... they didn't understand.
If we need progress, and we do, because nobody wants to die (of disease, old age, whatever) and everyone wants a good life (not one doing backbreaking work or even doing dishes), then that means trying to progress is an inevitable aspect of being human, not a an aspect of the "bourgeois epoch".
It's not the bourgeoisie doing stuff, it's just us, humans.
So if we are progressing and we build upon progress, then progress accelerates, it's only natural, since we have more stuff to build on top of.
That's what's actually melting social conventions and perceived stability.
And I don't think anyone has a solution to this problem, yet.
I think this is misunderstanding what Marx was trying to say here. Marx saw the bourgeoisie (fancy word for "owners", that's all) as a product of forces, not a cause.
The cause is the specific form of economic management / ownership in the current era -- capitalism. The structure of private property, or ownership of production by private entities; which unleashes the profit motive. Which rewrites and restructures everything in its path.
Yes it's humans doing it. But they're doing it in the context of filling their stomachs. The point is that the way that they filled their stomachs changed. With consequences, good and bad.
Disagree strongly with this phrase "we are progressing"; this is value laden, and hand waving. There is definitely a motive force driving things -- profit extraction -- but the word "progress" implies inevitability and a singular direction as well as a positive aspect. I think we can be more scientific than that.
And yes, agreed, nobody has a solution. But I think Marx is among many who have a line of useful analysis about what this is.
This accurately describes modern life and, I think by extension, modern software development.
The concepts and abstract skill of programming is undoubtedly useful, but the implementation details and how it's done are going to be replaced by something worse in 3 years.
I think it bothers me because I'm attached to it, and it's disappointing to see it move in directions I don't like or that feel wrong to me. It's all "market forces" and "public opinion" and nobody controls it, but it would be less depressing in an industry I didn't care about.
Software in web development, at least, has a quickly shrinking shelf life and the value it creates (besides intellectual stimulation for developers) seems very very small.
My overall development experience writing C++ 10 years ago was actually better than writing C# and Typescript now. The more interactive environments like Jupyter notebooks and browser dev tools are nice, but they're still not as featureful or as interactive as a good Lisp environment.
For consumer software we're nearly in the same place we were 25 years ago, except we took a round trip through the web, and now we're back to downloading native apps, which are more "secure" in some sense, but are funneling private data off to strangers, making it overall worse. And our hardware is 100x more powerful but our software is 1000x more bloated to make up for it. And the business model of consumer software now is to treat the user like an idiot and monetize them as much as possible.
Business software has some bright spots, like IAAS, SAAS, etc. but they're kinda just regurgitating ideas from the 60s, 70s and 80s.
Security is a funny one because it's technically better, but overall worse because software that wouldn't be connected in the past now "has to" go online, opening it up to attack.
There is a lot of good, like the open source world, and Linux and FreeBSD gaining popularity, but even those have dark sides, like corporations exploiting them as a source of cheap or free labor.
Is React better than using vanilla JS? Yes. I like not storing state in the DOM.
Is it worth the layers of abstraction, both mental and infrastructural? This is a difficult question to answer.
I suspect that the difference has a lot to do with culture. The Japanese companies with a long life are probably smaller, family-run, and don't go aggressively for growth. When your company has been going for over 200 years, I imagine one feels a sense of "don't fuck it up." Compare that to the US, where it's always ever onwards and upwards, always going for growth.
The Japanese have some ideas which seem bizarre to the West. Like, companies in those positions might "adopt a son". Typically they're 25-30 year-old men who take on the name of their adopted families. They then run the business (although presumably not straight away). Seems weird, but look at the results.
These small Japanese businesses seem more in-tune with their regular employees, too, treating them like an extended family, to some extent. There's no hire and fire mentality that we've been seeing lately; with the likes of Microsoft scooping up a big workforce only to turn around a couple of years later and reverse it. It's a shitty way to treat people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1259275/average-company-...
Family-run companies don't have an agent-principal problem companies with a dedicated corporate management layer have, but they have a problem of inheritance: when the old owner+manager dies, the new one must be one of his children, but this is a very limited pool of potential successors. What if your sons are all rakes and louts?
Someone who loves working for your business and shows a lot of potential is a much better heir if he's willing to become your son-in-law. The whole "adopt a son" thing is just a bit of legal fiction the preserve the family name.
> Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To ‘be modern’ means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underdefined. Each new structure which replaces the previous one as soon as it is declared old-fashioned and past its use-by date is only another momentary settlement – acknowledged as temporary and ‘until further notice’. Being always, at any stage and at all times, ‘post-something’ is also an undetachable feature of modernity. As time flows on, ‘modernity’ changes its forms in the manner of the legendary Proteus . . . What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) 'post-modernity' and what I've chosen to call, more to the point, 'liquid modernity', is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago 'to be modern' meant to chase 'the final state of perfection' -- now it means an infinity of improvement, with no 'final state' in sight and none desired.