> Do you think that capitalist societies would not have eventually ended child labor, nationalized some key industries, and provided free education without the October revolution? I think that this would have happened anyways, these policies are just too helpful.

I don't know, but I don't think the answer depends on how socially beneficial these policies are; it depends on how much support they had among elites in different countries. It would be wonderful if elites favored all helpful policies (and only helpful policies), but surely nobody thinks that that is the case.

> The idea of preventing people from leaving with their capital was indeed quite popular, ... many economists do think that they improve welfare.

I was saying these aren't liberal policies. They certainly are popular, and it's unsurprising that many people disagree with me about whether they improve the welfare (generally or of the working class in particular.) However, I think "confiscating the property of emigrants" goes very significantly beyond what we normally understand as "capital controls"; an emigrant might return, after all, or rent out his house to tenants who pay the rent to his factor in the city, and these are not possible if you confiscate his property.

> Equal liability of all to work was also something that liberals implemented - here it basically just means public works projects open to all.

I read "liability of all to work" as a universal corvee system, which would be completely incompatible with liberalism, and which was in fact implemented (with some exceptions, for example for children and retirees) in officially Marxist societies. Clearly you know Marx's work much better than I do; can you point to something where he clarifies what he and Engels meant here?

> As far as "the means of communication", Marx does mean mails, telegraphs, and radio communication.

Since the Communist Manifesto was published in 01848, and Bose's first public demonstration of radio communication was in 01895, and Marconi's the following year, it seems unlikely that Marx meant radio communication. As for mails and telegraphs, do you know of anywhere that he or Engels went into more detail on this?

> He had argued otherwise for public newspapers, but argued against any kind of censorship of the press - making this actually yet another policy liberals would adopt:

Here by "freedom of the press" Marx seems to mean "freedom of information" in the FOIA sense; specifically the policy he is advocating is the "unabridged and daily publication" of the debates of the Provincial Assembly. Since such things are normally done by the State if they are done at all, this doesn't seem at all incompatible with the newspapers being all State-owned, much less the death penalty for posting broadsheets calling Stalin a wanker.

> At the time, the income tax in England was of 3% - our modern income taxes of 20-30% are what Marx was referring to by saying heavy income taxes,

I suppose you are right about this. Thank you.

> As far as saying that capitalism made the working class better off but that it will never completely stop immiseration of the working class, is that not what I said?

I think those two clauses are inconsistent with one another; it is impossible for them to be simultaneously true in any possible world. The immiseration of the working class would be the gradual decrease over time of its wages down to the bare minimum required for survival. An increase over time of the wages of the working class is precisely the opposite. Unless you mean that the working class had less income than previously but at least wasn't literally enslaved any more?

But, looking again at what I originally wrote, I see that my original point seems to have been that Marx was comparing the capitalist system of voluntary wage-labor, not with the feudal past, but rather with a hypothetical future Communist system, which also wasn't based on voluntary exchanges. Within a feudal system, where wealth is understood as land, it's easy to imagine how people would readily conclude that any voluntary trade had a winner (who received more value than they gave) and a loser (who gave more value than they received); this mentality is still common in many places.

But the ideologies of liberalism and capitalism were based on the widely shared presumption of positive-sum transactions, and in the face of conspicuous rapidly increasing general wealth, plus the gradual capitalist replacement of relations of involuntary servitude (including chattel slavery, indentured servitude, captured apprentices, impressed soldiers, the corvee labor later reinstated in places like the USSR, and manorial serf labor, as well as the much more recent prohibitions on debt bondage) with voluntary wage-labor, the zero-sum worldview would seem to be implausible, which you would think would give rise to the common-sense presumption that transactions would only occur when both parties believed they benefited by them, and that they would usually be right about it.

So, I was saying, Marx had to do a lot of work to construct an account of how such voluntary exchanges were still harmful to the workers. Nowadays we have much better conceptual tools for this, like the Nash equilibrium, the whole apparatus of game theory, Schelling's theory of negotiation, behavioral-economic experimental results on things like the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and so on.

> As far as abolishing property of land and renting it out, this is essentially just another way of saying "Land value tax". While it's not a liberal policy in essence, it is a policy that liberals advocate nowadays, and that many liberal capitalist countries such as Denmark, Singapore and Taiwan implement.

I don't think the people who are advocating a land value tax are liberals, and surely you would agree that Denmark, Singapore, and Taiwan have significant departures from liberalism; Singapore doesn't even have freedom of the press. I also don't think a land-value tax normally amounts to abolishing property in land.

(Not being a liberal policy doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. The liberals could be wrong. But I think it's important to be clear about the reasoning behind different policy proposals.)

> Completely abolishing inheritance of capital is something that no country has done in the capitalist world, yes, but it is again something that many liberals do advocate for, and nowadays inheritance tax rates of 50% do exist.

Again, I don't think the people who are advocating such policies are liberals.

Thank you again for taking the time to explain your understanding of the situation to me!