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This logic seems incomplete, but there’s obviously some merit to it. It’s easy to be an advocate when one is completely removed from the negative consequences of their advocacy. Commies eventually got so triggered by repeatedly being called out on their revealed preferences that they made a webcomic just to snark at it (without actually refuting the original criticism, naturally).
The utopian socialist Star Trek narrative of cornucopia technology making war obsolete is itself born from the luxury of living in a hyper secular capitalist paradise bereft of any real ideology. Every great story of central planning returning man to the Garden of Eden begins by skipping the part where capitalism made a technologically advanced civilization possible. The endless irony of 1984 is the unchallenged assertion that a fascist shithole like Oceania could actually foster and cultivate a scientifically rich inner circle, when Hitler’s relatively kind and gentle Third Reich couldn’t even figure out the atom bomb.
So capitalism continues to pave the way for its enemies to live comfortable lives attacking its excesses in as many novel and uncharitable ways as possible. Easier to try to build civilization in the skeleton remains of a better one than to have to figure out how shit works on your own. And when everyone’s starving and hauling hay as a peasant, they’re too miserable to listen to your screed on inclusion and diversity.
Just as a real specific issue, Nazi Germany did not get the nuclear bomb due to a lack of scientific innovation. They simply were bombed too often in too many places, didn't have a lot of access to the right resources, and more. The US basically threw a ridiculous amount of money at the problem and the program never got bombed once and it still took years and years to build just two bombs and even by the time they did, they had air superiority anyways. So I think that's worthless as evidence. In fact, I think there's plenty of evidence that a lot of scientists are perfectly happy "doing their thing" without much regard for what society is doing outside their research bubble.
Yes, being a fascist society makes being technologically advanced hard, for all the reasons you stated. A society that requires constant war to flourish eventually runs out of reasons to research and develop a bigger gun.
But does fascism actually require war to flourish? Spain and Portugal, Pinochet's Chile, etc. seem like strong counterexamples for this.
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If you want a picture of the future, imagine a black woman twerking on the ruins of a nuclear reactor, forever.
Sounds like a good way to generate energy?
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More effort than this, please.
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In the Motte tradition of taking a good post, and pointing to a nitpicky error...
Marx did theorize that humanity had to pass through capitalism as a stage between feudalism and communism. For that reason, communists in the early 20th century thought that advanced economies such as Germany or France were ripe for communism, while backwards countries like Russia would have to wait.
Just one more thing Marx was wrong about.
I don't think this is something that Marx was wrong about in the simple and obvious way you are suggesting. Marx is vague about what "communism" (as opposed to the intermediate stage of "socialism") was supposed to be like, but most of the circumstantial evidence points towards Marx's uptopia being what the youth of today would call "fully automated luxury space communism" - a world in which the economy was so productive that all material needs were met and there was sufficiently little disagreeable work to do that the kind of gentle social pressure used to get roommates to do the washing up was sufficient to get it done.
Marx absolutely knew that even early C20 Britain or Germany was too poor for communism - part of the point of the socialist stage was to preside over the period of economic growth needed to get to the level of wealth where fully automated luxury steampunk communism was a material possibility. (Marx was wrong in believing that rational planning under socialism would generate faster economic growth than the chaos of market capitalism, but until the Soviet system started to fall apart under Brezhnev almost everyone made the same mistake).
The other thing that would have surprised Marx is just how high material standards of living can get before the average Joe is willing to give up toys in order to have more leisure time to play with them. Keynes famously thought that a society as productive as C21 America would have a 15-hour work week*. I think almost anyone from the 1970s or earlier who looked at modern America and saw people working extra hours in a not-fun job to afford an F250 instead of an F150 would have a WTF response, but this is the choice that modern blue-collar Americans fairly consistently make - including people who have enough control over their work hours that it clearly is a choice like self-employed tradesmen.
* Some of increased leisure Keynes predicted has happened, but in the form of shorter careers as a fraction of life expectancy rather than a shorter work week. Blue-collar workers in Keynes' day started full-time work at 14 and worked until they were no longer physically able to do so. Now they start working full-time at 18 (pace the Florida child labour bill allowing high schoolers to work full-time hours on top of their schooling) and expect to retire in their early 60's and enjoy a decade or so of being healthy enough to work but not required to do so.
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