[cynicalkane]

> Marx expected this to happen by forcing capitalists into ever harsher competition and automation at the cost of starting to throw workers back into poverty

His analysis of this in Capital uses the LTV as a base assumption. Under the LTV, capital profit is "surplus value" that is driven down by competition, and capitalists cannot exist as a social class once their surplus value fails to exceed their personal labor cost. Marx was very proud of this claim, and bragged in a letter to Engels that he had "proven" this historical inevitability.

Like most economic models, they cease to be correct when the premises fail.

[vidarh]

The point is that the LTV is not a critical premise for the hypotheses underlying his political ideologies, but one possible theory for a mechanism that if correct would certainly provide some degree of evidence for parts of those hypotheses, but which is just one of many possible such mechanisms.

Disproving/invalidating the LTV does no more disprove the claims underlying Marx political ideology than disproving one meterological model would be sufficient to say I'm wrong if I say it'll rain tomorrow.

If you want to attack the validity of his ideas regarding the long term viability of capitalism, there are many possible approaches, but the LTV is a sideshow.

[cynicalkane]

It's a strange world you live in where a political theory can be both fundamentally unsound in theory and disastrously, murderously false in practice, but worth considering anyway. I don't want to spend any more mental cycles on understanding your world.

[vidarh]

It's a strange world you live in where invalidating one possible explanation for predictions made as part of a political theory is sufficient to invalidate every possible explanation.

As for being "disastrously, murderously false in practice", the only thing this demonstrates is that you are conflating Marxism-Leninism and Marxism.

Lenin devoted years to revisionism and campaigning to justify how Russia could break central tenets of Marxism and successfully transition to socialism without first going through a capitalist phase. Even then, he was left with having to carry out a coup in the October "revolution", overthrowing not the former oppressive Czarist regime, but the democratically elected socialist interrim-government (SR and the Mensheviks making up the bulk; both were hunted down over the following years), after it was clear that contrary to Lenins theories, Russias landless peasants did not rise up to join the working classes (the Bolsheviks got the support of about 10%; mostly based in the big cities - this was prompty explained away as the result of counter-revolutionaries etc.)

While this does not prove Marx is/was right, the abject failure of the SSSR was directly in line with Marx theories. Already from 1845, a central portion of his thesis was that a pre-requisite for a successful socialist revolution would be a well developed capitalist economy where redistribution would not merely lead to making poverty common, as well as the working classes making up a substantial majority of the population. Neither were true for Russia, nor for any of the other countries where Leninist inspired groups tried to carry out revolutions.