Marx failed to contemplate the concept of value
Marx failed to contemplate the concept of value
https://xcancel.com/NicholasTyrone/status/1942222683107934233
Neoliberal Centrist Dad, hoping British politics sobers up eventually. Author of several books. Research Director
Don’t believe this? Pay attention anytime someone says “Marx lived hundreds of years ago, we have to adapt his theories to present society”
Those adaptations? They are always pre-Marxist succ dem revisionist nonsense. They never come up with new ideas, it’s always the same social chauvinist horseshit every time from the breadtubers and their ilk.
Adapting Marxist theories for present conditions is what Lenin did. Radlibs don’t want to hear that these adaptations will actually be more severe and “authoritarian” than Marx, not less. Our present world demands even more radical and extreme and sudden action than in Marx’s day. We need Climate Stalin.
Deep ecology is the big one that I run into a lot. There's a 150+ year history of Marxist ecology which inherently understands those ideas in an intersectional framework. I can go back to Engels and describe climate change from a humanistic perspective even if he predated the science. Deep ecology tried to reinvent the wheel without the overt political analysis of Marxism, still using that intersectional framework but in a defanged liberal way. The result is a very messy paraphrasing of Marxist ideas without being able to name them directly or reference them across that 150+ year body of literature. It's much more easily recuperated and made into a passive academic subject for fancy lads to ponder without a coherent sense of ontology. That comes at the expense of Marxist ecology not being able to get a real foothold in modern academia.
Then there's hippie shit and other forms of reactionary traditionalism. They take the same core ideas but don't even have the academic pretense of the deep ecologists to help define or organise those into something actionable, scientifically or politically. A hippie can say something I agree with but derive the opposite conclusion from it because they don't have actual theory or a sense of organised praxis. A reactionary can say they want to go back to the specific time period Marx is describing in his ideas of the antithesis between town and country, but they aren't doing so from a post-enlightenment or historical materialist standpoint. They want a literal reinvention of the 17th century where they're the guy enclosing the commons while Marx wants to apply 19th century ideas to solve specific contradictions that came from those 17th century conditions.
My caffeine hasn't hit yet, so this entire paragraph is filled with words that I understand and yet I have absolutely no idea what the fuck its saying.
Marxism is the next stage of philosophical and scientific inquiry beyond the enlightenment. Rejecting it just reinvents the same things it's saying or reinforces some kind of reactionary movement toward feudalism.