Reply #19: He believed that the social question would trump the national one.

[Democracyinkind]

So he was not able to incorporate the effects that two world wars would have on class warfare. Anyways, it is not correct to portrait Marx as someone who made rigid predictions about the future, a common misperception ever since Karl Popper started peddling it - although even he notes that it's not Marx that held that position but the people calling themselves Marxists long after the moor had died.

Then again; there's a strong argument to be made that the overall dialectic narrative of class warfare as the driving force of history is spot on once the effects of Western Imperialism and its culmination in the two great wars have worn off - a process that has gained a lot of traction in the last decade. It's true that doctrinal, pre-Leninist-post-Marx Marxism didn't incorporate a concept of a rising middle class in their historic narrative - but I beg anyone reading this to go back to their texts and tell me that it doesn't sound eerily of things to come.

Concisely: Some Marxist schools - especially in the period between Marx's death and the first World War, made the mistake of believing that the global (national) playing field was going to be leveled, they anticipated the rise of a postimperialist capitalist China, India, Russia etc. and therefore laid all their emphasis on inter-class warfare instead of inter-state warfare. If such a "mistake" qualifies for being an idiot, then I don't even want to know how I, you, or anyone reading this would be labeled: but I suspect it would be even less inviting than "idiot".

I'll never understand why Marx isn't considered what he was: a (in some ways even typical) continental social and economic philosopher of the 19th century. I never understood that Marx is practically banned from discussion in academia while Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin or the worst kind of proto-nazistic Taylorist "philosophy" is debated and quoted freely. The whole cold war circus is still virulent.