Marx also predicted many things that turned out to be completely false. It's easy to make a convincing sounding argument after the fact if you only cherry pick the bits that support your view.
If you're familiar with Marx's work beyond capitalism-bad-communism-good, I think they're fairly obvious, but I'll bite since most of the other comments so far are fairly brief quips. Marx predicted that communism would rise from the internal collapse (or revolution, but the two are interchangeable in his context) of late capitalist societies, however this has not happened. Neither China nor Russia were really capitalist societies in any reasonable sense when they turned to communism, if anything, you could call them agrarian.
Similarly, Marx claimed that as capitalist societies develop, workers would face increasing poverty, declining living conditions, etc. While the income gap between the top and low end is ever increasing, in the grand scheme of things, living standards for workers have improved considerably across the board in pretty much every category. Marx also argued that capital accumulation would lead to a decrease in profit margins, which would eventually result in an economic collapse, again ending capitalism. While we've seen numerous economic downturns, practically all affected economies have eventually recovered.
And so forth, there's many other examples we can take turns picking apart, but I doubt there's much value to it — most people arguing over Marx don't actually know much about Marx.
He didn’t lay out a specific timeline though. So who is to say if this might come to pass? Also, perhaps his work and the development of more left leaning politics and policies actually slowed down the future he predicted. Finally I think people in the comments are deluding themselves about being petit bourgeois when they are more comparable to working class. Many of us have small savings but that does not mean we are not working class - having a million in savings means you might be able to retire, hardly being wealthy. I think a delineation that makes sense today is if you trade your time for money you are working class.
That the industrial working class would come to compose the supermajority of society? That history was driven by a Hegelian dialectical structure which would guarantee that something like the attempted German Revolution would succeed?
Are the working class not the majority of society? 1% of the population of most western countries are farmers. 1% are extremely rich and 98% are the rest of us.
Well, as far as industrial workers, they definitely aren't a super-majority, given all the people working in service, creative, and white collar jobs. But I don't know why that would matter.
I'm no scholar of this stuff by any means, but by my understanding the relevant difference was between those that lived by what they owned versus those that lived by selling their labor. I don't know the exact numbers but I would assume those that live by selling their labor are a majority but not super-majority. Those that live entirely off their property are a tiny minority, but there currently exists a solid chunk of people that both sell their time and build wealth from property/interest.
Most of the HN crowd probably falls into that later category
>I don't know the exact numbers but I would assume those that live by selling their labor are a majority but not super-majority.
They are a global supermajority. In some of the wealthiest nations on the planet, they are instead only a majority.
>there currently exists a solid chunk of people that both sell their time and build wealth from property/interest.
Yes, they are called the petite bourgeoisie. Marx wrote about them extensively. In very wealthy nations like the US, Canada, UK, Australia etc my understanding is that they make up roughly 30% of the population. The rest are proletarians & lumpenproletarians, aside from a negligible-in-numbers percentage of the population that compose the haute bourgeoisie or "real bourgeoisie". I believe the percentage of the population who are bourgeois in the US is around 0.3%, much lower in the other wealth nations because so many of global elite choose to live in the US.
The percentage of the population who are petite bourgeoisie in countries other than the wealthy nations is highly variable, class composition varies a lot worldwide (e.g. there are many countries like the Phillipines where there is quite a large peasant population still). In general, outside of the wealthy nations the petite bourgeoisie are something like 5-15% of the population, and the haute bourgeoisie make up significantly less than 0.3% of the population.
I think having some money saved does not make one petite bourgeois as I say in the comment above I think people who trade their time for money are working class. If you’ve saved enough money that you can retire you aren’t not working class, you are working class. The bourgeoisie do not need to work and so don’t retire.
>Well, as far as industrial workers, they definitely aren't a super-majority, given all the people working in service, creative, and white collar jobs. But I don't know why that would matter.
The Marxian theory, as such, concerned specifically industrial workers, because they were, by their own occupation, brought together in organized thousands at single sites of production.
All of which are small groups that rely on a ton of interpersonal trust. Large groups that lack interpersonal trust (like nations) tend to fail under communism.
Catal Huyuk, Mohenjo-
Daro, Harappa, Tripolye-Curcuteni, Norte-Chico, Hopewell, Ain Ghazal.
Populations from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands of people, over the course of millennia, in effectively completely egalitarian, likely communal societies.
And those are just the ones we’ve found.
Indus River Valley civilization may have been as many as 5 million people, no rulers, no social hierarchy, uniform housing, no monumental/elite structures or housing, no evidence of centralized power or government, standard weights and measures, collective infrastructure projects, etc etc.
It lasted roughly 1400 years.
So… no, you don’t actually need a small groups. You actually only really need it to be completely socially unacceptable for some to live in excess while others suffer.
In the entirety of human history, the only mechanism by which the human condition as a whole is improved is by applying a portion of the private surplus towards the public good. How much is a question of the moral character of the civilization in question.
In the 50’s, in the US, if you made over $200k (~$2.2million in 2025 dollars) you paid over 90% of every dollar earned above $200k in taxes. The top corporate tax rate was 52%.
I’d argue that the US is reverting to the average global experience precisely as its domestic market breaks down due to interventions — eg, destroying small businesses via regulation and mass importation of foreign labor.
The people who have won the game in our current system love to point to this statistic, as if "extreme poverty" is the only thing that matters.
Even if people have a roof of their own head and bread in their belly, they don't like living with anxiety about being able to pay off debt, or what would happen if they had an unexpected hospital stay. And above all, they don't like working so hard only for the value they produce to be sucked up and used to buy back stock for the benefit of billionaires.
