More than a century after Marx made these predictions, most of them are so plainly mistaken that one can only wonder why anyone sympathetic to Marx would attempt to argue that his greatness lies in the scientific aspects of his work. In industrialized countries, workers’ real wages have risen far above bare subsistence. Rates of profit rise and fall in different times and places, but the long-term decline that Marx predicted has not eventuated. Capitalism has gone through several crises, but nowhere has it collapsed or been overthrown as a result of internal contradictions. Communists have
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