crazyben

*SPOILER*
Actually, I don't know why I was so generous with Marx the other night! I think it may have been the fact that I was drunk on Duvel and Delirium tremens at the time...
I would recommend anyone who thinks the stuff he says about the proletariat owning or controlling the means of production is a good idea to read Jean Baudrillard's book "The Mirror of Production." He makes an excellent case that Marx missed something which modern economists consider highly relevant to achieving economic success: workers must control their own REPRODUCTION. Very interesting idea.
Second, and I concede in advance that it may sound ridiculous, one big problem with having the workers own or control the means of production is that you still end up with a bunch of peasants controlling the means of production. How that is supposed to benefit any corporation, or the workers themselves, beyond them finding out that's hard to run a company well or even to the level of minimal profitability, is beyond me.
Third, Marxism purports to elevate "science" to the status of a basis for starting, managing and ensuring a "just" society (whatever just means! Like Rome, it seems to be all things to all political philosophers). The problem with this, to me is that, Marx's science ignores much of biology. Now to be fair, Marx may or may not have read Darwin, but he should have, for if he had, and had read some Huxley perhaps as well, he would have realized there is no "blank slate" within a person's mind when he/she is born, our brains have evolved due to Natural selection to learn things which are relevant to successfully passing on our genes, and to ignore things which probably are not relevant. One thing behavioral economists, psychologists, evolutionary psychologists, experimental philosophers, and behavioral ecologists (to name a few broad research areas) have demonstrated again and again, is that there are some things we humans cannot learn very easily, and other things which our brains seem to be evolved to learn very rapidly. What Marx was hoping, that you could change people's thinking easily, or even at all, turns out to probably be false most of the time.
Fourth, the idea that "History"="Class Struggle" and that the "end" of History will be when all the means of production are owned or controlled by the working-class people of the world, is fairly deranged. It was bad enough to have Hegel talking about a "spirit' of History but to then have Marx say, in paraphrase, "Well Hegel was close, but not 100% to the finish line, class struggle is more important than any spirit of History" does not add anything to our understanding of how history actually happens. History probably has no "spirit", nor "defining feature" that I'm aware of, but historians can make generalizations over time of what sorts of events are likely to precede, and sometimes even cause, other sorts of events.
"Class struggle", which I think of merely as the struggle of most people to acquire enough resources to survive, do a little more than surviving and perhaps even reproduce, is, as far as many anthropologists have found, an ubiquitous part of the human cultural landscape and has been since we began living as Homo economicus around, perhaps (depending on whose theories you prefer!) 750Kya.
Even scarier to me however is the idea that everyone thing will be great when people stop fretting about acquiring more capital than their neighbors. Maybe, but I'm sure we humans will just create more problems for our selves at that point... Also, hierarchies seem to exist all around us in nature, they're in no way unique to humans, and the idea that hierarchies are inherently "bad" seems highly suspect to me (and keep in mind that the hierarchies Marx lambasted made it possible for him to have a servant to live with him and attend to his every need while he and Engels were writing "Capital").
Do I think people deserve to be exploited so bad they can barely scrape by in our, in many respects, likely somewhat unjust market economy? Of course not. But I don't believe that we will ever 100% eliminate economic or social disparities, particularly as the social, or "Human", capital we have available is pretty much entirely based on income.
In relation to the above, I highly recommend the book "Imagined Communities." In that book, a Marxist historian at Cornell, Benedict Anderson, asks why do people fight for their country, and in answering that question in a very novel way, he inadvertently addresses the question which has baffled generations of economists, which is: why are people often content with their lot in life? It may often seem to me or you, reader, that people need to know their "oppressed" or "exploited" but often those people, when this is pointed out to them, in vague terms, or even in very precise terms as to the nature of how much improved their lives could be if X or Y were to happen, simply could care less. Andersen wanted to know the answers to such questions.
Fifth, I can't think of the title of this damn book where a bunch of economists, check his data, but it's a very good book! I am now a professional philosopher of biology and mathematics, and a biologist in training, so I don't have much time to look it up. I probably, at some odd time of day, remember the actual title, and when I do I will post it up here because it's very much worth reading.