>It’s OK to demand an end to capitalism and imperialism and to not be a Marxist. It is OK to be the left wing of the left wing and to not be a Marxist.
See, I don't think it actually is, because so many of the definitions accepted as the default coin of the realm on the Left are derived, one way or another, from some branch of Marxism. Hell, try to find an explicit socialist movement today that takes literally zero ideological inspiration from Marxism-Leninism or Trotskyism -- just ignores them completely. You mostly can't! Everyone from the demsocs to the anarchists is working with a vocabulary taken mostly from 20th-century actually-existing Left movements that considered themselves heirs of Marx in one form or another.
So for instance, I actually knew most of those bold-faced bullet-points about Marxism you listed! In fact, many of those are what I *like* about Marxism. But (as you advise!) I don't really consider myself a Marxist. I would just say we should take what was right from Marxism and leave alone what wasn't right and didn't work. We should learn without worshiping.
But, and this is the tough part, IMHO to learn without worshiping demands that we do a much more fundamental rethink of Left politics and question whether we, today, should really automatically be in continuity with, well, all those Marxists (be they orthodox Marxist, ML-but-not-tankie, ML meaning tankie, Trotskyist, Marxist-socdems, Marxist-humanist, goddamn fucking Maoists, etc) who came before us.
Excellent post about Marxism. I learned a lot from it. Question: what is the informed opinion about the rate of profit? Over the past decade. U.S. corporate profits as a % of revenues and GDP have increased materially.
I've thankfully cut down social media a lot, but I remember reading some argument between "Marxists" and "anarchists." One side said they couldn't ally with the other because of what happened in 1930s Catalonia or 1920s Russia. It seemed pretty wild to me: completely performative identities believing they have some connection to real conflicts 100 years ago.
Personally, I do what you mentioned a later paragraph. I identify (ugh) as a socialist, with no particular leanings from there. I think labor power in the US is so dead that we need a robust welfare state and a lot more union density because we can even think about anything remotely revolutionary.
Embarrassed to say I didn't know a lot of this. Thanks for this post. Could you recommend a book that is a summary of Marx's thought? I know I will never make it through Das Capital.
It would be great at some point to read about how Marxism is still relevant in 2021.
Many of the core precepts don't seem to hold. Not sure if 'hyper-modernism' is the right term, but it seems like with the rapid change of technology we are basically failing to come up with a vocabulary and conceptual framework to make sense of the world in general and economic relationships in particular.
The misuse of 'neoliberal' is one example of this tendency, the enthusiasm for 'Marxism,' which was an appropriate critique in the setting of 19th century British industrialization but is not explanatory of our current economic relationships, is another.
What does Marxism say about a Goldman Sachs 'wage slave' making seven figures? Versus a truck driver who owns his truck?
I am nostalgic for the Marxist-ish materialists who were old when I was in college 20 years ago because, even though they failed, they were smart and well read and wanted to argue and had a generally positive moral valence even if all of their projects ended in catastrophe. They never took their eye off the ball which was poverty and suffering due to material deprivation.
But what is the narrative for similarly oriented materialists today, if not specifically Marxists? I don't know what it is. Without out a clear class critique everything devolves into the weirdness of Gramsci, DIY indentarianism, increasing administrative and bureaucratic power, and affluent radical kabuki of the New Left/Frankfurt School.
I appreciate that the socialists and Marxists can still throw rocks (thank you WSWS), but what's actual plan, beyond midwits like Breunig branding themselves as True Socialists TM?
The class distinctions that I see animating people out in the world are between people who sell their labor at higher and lower prices, with more and less autonomy, more and less security, polarized around education and urbanization.
No one gives much of a shit about who owns the means of production. In fact you see this in tax / social safety net discourse all the time: yes there are a few Jeff Bezos figures out there, but we can’t build the welfare state on their backs alone; we have to get it from the urban educated workers.
"To be a Marxist is to believe that a sufficiently advanced understanding of the world can describe a fundamental relationship between workers, the means of production, and the owners of the means of production..."
INESCAPABLE flaw in LOGIC. There can NEVER be a sufficiently advanced understanding of PEOPLE to be able to describe what Marxism wants to describe, right?
"...which implies the inevitable triumph of the producing class over the rentier class as the internal contradictions of capitalism assert themselves."
THIS, dunno... But MEBBE possible WITHOUT Socialism. Don't see it happening if there's a broad welfare state, tho. That's just me and ICBW. Show me.
Great essay. This is something few people these days realize - particularly in the right-wing contexts I grew up in where communism, socialism, Obama-style neoliberalism, and fascism all get conflated together so that words have no meanings.
But clearly significant confusion exists on the left as well.
For me, I find the mutualism of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day more attractive than Marxism, but I recognize that the labor theory of value was an important development in economic theory even though I don't agree with the implications Marx drew from it
Hmm you've got a few more years to go till you can call yourself an aging leftist...
'I still believe that no political or philosophical tradition better describes our world or its economy...'
I mean isn't this David Harvey? Marxism not as a blueprint for remaking the world, but as an epistemology for history and as a basis for critique?
>It’s OK to demand an end to capitalism and imperialism and to not be a Marxist. It is OK to be the left wing of the left wing and to not be a Marxist.
See, I don't think it actually is, because so many of the definitions accepted as the default coin of the realm on the Left are derived, one way or another, from some branch of Marxism. Hell, try to find an explicit socialist movement today that takes literally zero ideological inspiration from Marxism-Leninism or Trotskyism -- just ignores them completely. You mostly can't! Everyone from the demsocs to the anarchists is working with a vocabulary taken mostly from 20th-century actually-existing Left movements that considered themselves heirs of Marx in one form or another.
So for instance, I actually knew most of those bold-faced bullet-points about Marxism you listed! In fact, many of those are what I *like* about Marxism. But (as you advise!) I don't really consider myself a Marxist. I would just say we should take what was right from Marxism and leave alone what wasn't right and didn't work. We should learn without worshiping.
But, and this is the tough part, IMHO to learn without worshiping demands that we do a much more fundamental rethink of Left politics and question whether we, today, should really automatically be in continuity with, well, all those Marxists (be they orthodox Marxist, ML-but-not-tankie, ML meaning tankie, Trotskyist, Marxist-socdems, Marxist-humanist, goddamn fucking Maoists, etc) who came before us.
'Marxism is not antagonistic to civil liberties.'
Of course it is. Without *exploitative* market mechanisms that signal what needs to be done, who is going to volunteer to clean the toilets?
When said toilet cleaning volunteers do not show up, what happens next?
'labor theory of value' has been totally dispensed with by economists.
Digging and filling fence post holes has the same value as Steve Jobs playing around in his garage in the 70s?
Excellent post about Marxism. I learned a lot from it. Question: what is the informed opinion about the rate of profit? Over the past decade. U.S. corporate profits as a % of revenues and GDP have increased materially.
I've thankfully cut down social media a lot, but I remember reading some argument between "Marxists" and "anarchists." One side said they couldn't ally with the other because of what happened in 1930s Catalonia or 1920s Russia. It seemed pretty wild to me: completely performative identities believing they have some connection to real conflicts 100 years ago.
Personally, I do what you mentioned a later paragraph. I identify (ugh) as a socialist, with no particular leanings from there. I think labor power in the US is so dead that we need a robust welfare state and a lot more union density because we can even think about anything remotely revolutionary.
Embarrassed to say I didn't know a lot of this. Thanks for this post. Could you recommend a book that is a summary of Marx's thought? I know I will never make it through Das Capital.
It would be great at some point to read about how Marxism is still relevant in 2021.
Many of the core precepts don't seem to hold. Not sure if 'hyper-modernism' is the right term, but it seems like with the rapid change of technology we are basically failing to come up with a vocabulary and conceptual framework to make sense of the world in general and economic relationships in particular.
The misuse of 'neoliberal' is one example of this tendency, the enthusiasm for 'Marxism,' which was an appropriate critique in the setting of 19th century British industrialization but is not explanatory of our current economic relationships, is another.
What does Marxism say about a Goldman Sachs 'wage slave' making seven figures? Versus a truck driver who owns his truck?
I am nostalgic for the Marxist-ish materialists who were old when I was in college 20 years ago because, even though they failed, they were smart and well read and wanted to argue and had a generally positive moral valence even if all of their projects ended in catastrophe. They never took their eye off the ball which was poverty and suffering due to material deprivation.
But what is the narrative for similarly oriented materialists today, if not specifically Marxists? I don't know what it is. Without out a clear class critique everything devolves into the weirdness of Gramsci, DIY indentarianism, increasing administrative and bureaucratic power, and affluent radical kabuki of the New Left/Frankfurt School.
I appreciate that the socialists and Marxists can still throw rocks (thank you WSWS), but what's actual plan, beyond midwits like Breunig branding themselves as True Socialists TM?
The class distinctions that I see animating people out in the world are between people who sell their labor at higher and lower prices, with more and less autonomy, more and less security, polarized around education and urbanization.
No one gives much of a shit about who owns the means of production. In fact you see this in tax / social safety net discourse all the time: yes there are a few Jeff Bezos figures out there, but we can’t build the welfare state on their backs alone; we have to get it from the urban educated workers.
"The fundamental proposition of Marxism, above and beyond any other, is the emancipatory potential of reason."
Then, by this definition, I'm a Marxist through and through. But then not, because I understand the LIMITS of reason. https://www.amazon.com/Divided-Brain-Search-Meaning-ebook/dp/B008JE7I2M/ref=sr_1_3
I'm MEBBE more Marxist than not, but here?
"To be a Marxist is to believe that a sufficiently advanced understanding of the world can describe a fundamental relationship between workers, the means of production, and the owners of the means of production..."
INESCAPABLE flaw in LOGIC. There can NEVER be a sufficiently advanced understanding of PEOPLE to be able to describe what Marxism wants to describe, right?
"...which implies the inevitable triumph of the producing class over the rentier class as the internal contradictions of capitalism assert themselves."
THIS, dunno... But MEBBE possible WITHOUT Socialism. Don't see it happening if there's a broad welfare state, tho. That's just me and ICBW. Show me.
Great essay. This is something few people these days realize - particularly in the right-wing contexts I grew up in where communism, socialism, Obama-style neoliberalism, and fascism all get conflated together so that words have no meanings.
But clearly significant confusion exists on the left as well.
For me, I find the mutualism of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day more attractive than Marxism, but I recognize that the labor theory of value was an important development in economic theory even though I don't agree with the implications Marx drew from it