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Krassen Dimitrov's avatar

Excellent essay. There are some differences, however, with the other social scientists and social events that you reference.

The October revolution was not really an event that validated Marx's theory - it was just a serendipitous coup by a group of people who happened to read and espouse Marx. Not a proletarian revolution as proscribed by Marx, by any means; heck that country hardly had any proletariat to speak of.

Further, once in power the Bolsheviks institutionalized Marxism as state ideology, which is not something that happened to any of the other scholars that you mentioned. Their theories are mostly pure science, or in the case of Keynes applied science, which happened to be corroborated by world events. The Marx - October Revolution connection is quite different. That does not invalidate the intellectual merit of Marx's writings, but it is just a different paradigm.

I think a more relevant comparison is probably early Christian doctrine and its institutionalization by Constantin and the Roman Empire. While powerful, emotive and viable for over 300 years, the Christian cult was not meant to become the state religion of the most powerful Empire. It was an extrinsic event that vastly increased Christianity's relevance in history.

While Marx's writings are as compelling as any of the other scholars you mention, the October revolution did indeed elevate his historical status in the XXth century far above that of any other social scientist, in a somewhat random and stochastic way.

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Lucio Pench's avatar

Having read some of the exchanges generated by the Magness and Makovi piece I was reminded of the saying ‘academic fights are so vicious because the stakes are so low’. Having said that, I find much to agree with Branko Milanovic’s take on Die Karl Marx Frage, in particular, his criticism of Magness and Makovi thesis as affected by ‘presentism’ and exclusivism’. Allow me however an observation. Branko Milanovic states:

The fact that Marx’s fame was caused to a large extent by the October Revolution and Lenin’s decision [to link the proletarian revolutions in the West to the anti-colonial movement in the rest of the world] that I mentioned is no different than how any social scientist becomes famous. It is the political, external events which suddenly reveal the importance of the work that we might not have appreciated.

I see an important difference with respect to the other great social scientists and great social events that Milanovic has in mind, e.g., Keynes and the Great Depression. At least as far the October Revolution is concerned, I guess that Milanovic would agree that more than one century afterwards the historical verdict is close to the one that Kerenski pronounced only ten years after it: the catastrophe. Therefore we have the paradox that Marx’s ascendancy as global thinker is due to having inspired an ultimately catastrophic historical event.

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