Also electrification, and social movements that promise to deliver the fruits of these productive forces to the masses

Maybe China pressing the socialism button in the next couple decades will force capitalists to give us a 4-day work week. The US and EU will probably be outright fascist by then, but one can hope

So much advancement of technologies happens in publicly funded research/open source software, and so much progress is held back by monopolies and patent enforcement, that I have a hard time believing we’d not have been better off with a socialist model of economy in most of the world.

Liberals are petrified of change and lack imagination, even if the current system is inherently unsustainable. It will default to unconstrained growth (the money only exists to generate more money). State controls are probably always going to be chipped away at by those with money because they can buy influence (in press, locally, fake protests/destabilize things to generate “real” protest). The only solution, to my mind, is a system which does not allow that to exist and which prioritizes sustainable development.

Refridgeration and electrification were big, too.

Liberals will point to how improvements in quality of life have occurred in capitalist countries in recent centuries (debatable, and certainly not true for the entire world, but let’s assume they are correct for now).

This isn’t debateable. The Imperial Core states and its outposts through the world have living standards more luxurious than ever seen before. We also shouldn’t place the Imperial Periphery, on whose falling standards of living the living standards in the core depend, to the side–this exploitation formed a key part of Marx’s analysis. Improvements in quality of life in the Imperial Core go with and are predicated on increasing impoverishment of the periphery.

famines were a harsh reality of life for much of human history, modern agriculture has allowed us to now be in a position where globally, we can produce more than enough food consistently for the whole planet.

This is only true if we refer to history in the narrowest sense (i.e. only the written past) and famine in the broadest sense (i.e. any period of going hungry is famine, regardless of whether or not there were deaths).

Famines in the broader sense are endemic to history in this narrow sense. When you have a stratified class society with surpluses and urban populations doing writing (i.e. fulfil the narrow sense of history) you have an (urban) population with control over distribution of the grain. This population, historically, will restrict the consumption of the ‘lower classes’ to maintain its own (often already inflated to include luxuries as ‘necessary’) consumption, which often leads to relative hunger (but not always or even usually deaths).

As you mention Chinese famines later on, here is an excerpt from Late Victorian Holocausts describing the Qing government’s response to the famine relief in 1743-44, not paralleled in contemporary European famines (where the starving peasants died for lack of cash for the crops they sold to pay rent):

the renowned “ever-normal granaries” in each county immediately began to issue rations (without any labor test) to peasants in the officially designated disaster counties.8…When local supplies proved insufficient, Guancheng shifted millet and rice from the great store of tributegrain at Tongcang at the terminus of the Grand Canal, then used the Canal to move vast quantities of rice from the south. Two million peasants were maintained for eight months, until the return of the monsoon made agriculture again possible.

Famines with certain deaths are an invention of the last few millenia, and are particularly concentrated at first in Europe, and thereafter to greater, more rapid extents, in places it colonises. In the narrow historical sense, “producing more than enough food consistently” has been the norm. In the broader sense of history, i.e. the entire human past recorded in writing or not, famines seem to be even less of a regular occurrence. Archaeological evidence suggests that, contrary to this stereotype of hungry and starving hunter-gathers turning into regularly fed farmers, the hunter-gatherers were consistently fed from a variety of sources with less wear and tear from labour.

Likewise in regards to medicine… in the past just getting sick could be a death sentence. People had to live with incredibly painful conditions their whole life that we now have cures for.

Not really the case (outside of the (ofc horrible) childhood mortality rates). In a lotta cases, medicine went backwards with the enlightenment as remedies/coping methods/etc for pains were regarded as “superstitions” that didn’t “truly cure the [incurable even today] ailment”. And ofc throughout the world (including Europe at some point) cultures that live on the land tend to know a variety of local medicines based on herbs, animals, plants, etc. These methods are ofc sought after today by multinational corporations so they can copyright them and sell them.

Honestly modern medicine is the one reason why I would rather live in 2023 than any other time.

When you say this are you accounting for the fact that, if you were randomly born in 2023 there is a >80% chance you’re born in the Imperial Periphery and therefore, rather than accessing such medicines you’re the one suffering for their production? You might be downwind of some industrial ‘development’ that gives you and your entire family diseases no one has ever heard of before, or you might have your entire village burnt to the ground to mine the minerals or harvest the plants used for the medicines up in the global north. Heck, even in the US or Canada we are still settler-colonial entities; you could very well be born up somewhere in Northern Alberta where much of the food you eat is contaminated with oil and the water has various industrial runoffs.

What I’m getting at is… though these advances did occur under capitalism, I don’t think I would give capitalism the “credit” for them.

I would give imperialism the credit for them. Having a large population that doesn’t have to live with the negative consequences of its luxuries (i.e. a nobility) is a key part of imperialism (and a necessity for surplus value realisation).

Obviously socialism was not possible 200 years ago. I’m not denying standard Marxist historical progression.

Did something fundamentally change between 1823 and 1848 when Marx began saying “socialism is possible”?

Marx doesn’t have a “standard historical progression”. Marx has a method of analysing society and looking for ways to transform it for the better. In his early works (e.g. the manifesto or german ideology articles) there is a schematic tendency, but this is abandoned mostly in Capital and totally in later notes and letters (e.g. to Zasulich in 1881). Marx’s near uncritical positivity towards capitalist development of productive forces also fades very quickly, to be replaced with scathing critiques of machines, agriculture (animal and plant), colonisation and peasant-clearing.

I think the only things you can give capitalism “credit” for is developing the productive forces, allowing for high levels of commodity production, and increasing levels of wealth (though not equally shared).

Because of how critical he was before the great acceleration and expansion of consumerism, I would think that Marx’s view on the current ‘development of productive forces’ would be rather more critical than you’d expect, especially since his views on all this don’t even take greenhouse gasses into account so he’d probably be even more negative on this.

You know how the plot of some movies get completely subverted by making a call or sending a text? Communication infrastructure has to be a big one as well. Like having an excel sheet full of important shit and emailing it has got to help keep people informed and organized. “Man, this sure seems like a lot of wheat, but they said they need 12 tons of the shit, so I’ll keep planting.”

And then, of course, the noble train to get 12 tons of the shit from here to there