It’s been almost a century and a half since Karl Marx’s death, and decades since the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and elsewhere. In the still nominally…View Post
how do you even become a former marxist? i feel like i have opened some eldritch tome that cannot be closed. in fact i feel like karl marx himself has fucked me over
There are a few good faith criticisms of Marx to be made, but most of them have been made by Marxists. Once you've read them, it's kind of up to you about whether or not you call yourself a "former Marxist."
The author above made one of them. Unilineal cultural evolution is baggage from 19th century anthropology. The idea of society moving through phases on a single track ignores the ways that many anti-colonial movements grounded their resistance not in capitalist class struggle and communism, but in indigenous social forms which they sought to displace capitalism with. The Zapatistas are a great example.
Another one is the idea that the state is a neutral instrument for class rule which can be weilded by any class. In most of the world, capitalism and the State were imposed simultaneously and resistance often takes the form of alternative political formations. The maroon colonies were a great example as many were egalitarian or built into existing indigenous institutions (although some certainly were states).
My examples here are from black and indigenous people, which I think points to a common thread in legitimate criticisms of Marx: while he acknowledged the struggled of indigenous peoples and women, he centered European city dwellers in his analysis. He argued that they were the main revolutionary subject, but the first Marxist revolution was carried out by peasants.
That's not to say Marxism isn't powerful, only that it's blind-spots need to be accounted for and that what results from that project night reasonably be called "after Marxism"
Or, we could call it by its current names: autonomism, 4th world nationalism, the black radical tradition, 4th wave feminism
The author above made one of them. Unilineal cultural evolution is baggage from 19th century anthropology. The idea of society moving through phases on a single track ignores the ways that many anti-colonial movements grounded their resistance not in capitalist class struggle and communism, but in indigenous social forms which they sought to displace capitalism with. The Zapatistas are a great example.
Most modern Marxists do not believe this for the simple reason most Marxists are from Asia where the track as espoused by Marx is completely inapplicable to past Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Laotian society. For example, none of those societies had a slave economy. They just went from a communal society to a feudal society that lasted for millennia with multiple stages of feudalism. Obviously, the communal society->slave society->feudal society->capitalist society track is only relevant in Western Europe when those East Asian societies' track is more like communal society->feudal society->colonized (semi-colonized for China) semi-feudal society->socialist society. It's not like Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese/Laotian Marxists are purposefully shoehorning the slave society stage to their histories just because some 19th century German dude who never set foot in Asia said so. And it goes without saying that the track Marx described doesn't apply to Cuba either.
In general, most people who are critiquing Marxism in good faith (and everyone who is critiquing Marxism in bad faith) have almost no knowledge of actually existing Marxism ie the Marxism that is studied and practiced in current countries with ruling ML parties. Whether China et al is revisionist or not shouldn't be particularly relevant to critiques of Marxism because the question of whether China is revisionist or not is a question between Marxists, not people who think Marxism is flawed. It makes no sense to cast aside Chinese communists as "not real Marxists" in order to find a different band of Marxists as "real Marxist" only to then critique them and use them as a demonstration of Marxism's inadequacies.
The hilarious thing about all this is Marx himself would agree with you
Here he is in 1877 responding to the same critique and being somewhat baffled that it's being applied to him lmao
Now what application to Russia can my critic make of this historical sketch? Only this: If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction – she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all. But that is not enough for my critic. He feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.) Let us take an example.
In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.
This is why I can't take modern critiques of marxism seriously, 99% of the time they're not applicable or Marx himself would agree with them which begs the question why would it be considered a critique of "Marxism" in the first
The answer is pretty simple, Marxism as defined and elaborated by late-stage Marx is a robust critique and analysis of capitalism that hasn't actually been successfully challenged on its own merits and instead requires a degree of academic slight-of-hand to dismiss, this is enforced on a political basis which is why it's easy for even folks who consider themselves "well-read" on Marx to be completely misled on the subject
I very strongly agree with the points you're making wrt. eurocentrism, and that have been made about progressivist unilineal history but I'd like to add that Korea was absolutely a slave economy. For most of Korea's recorded history 25-40% of the population were slaves.
I think some of this can be explained away as Marx centered his focus on industrial society. Some of those societies that you mentioned were not industrial to a great degree. Agrarianism can be easily seen through a Marxist lens, and these movements had tons of support throughout history and tended to be protosocialist in their language and means. Industry is just the most world changing thing we've got.
Marx of course underestimated how quickly the old protosocialist rhetoric of agrarianism and similar ideologies could be used to create a Marxist state, but I don't think it was outside the realm of his ideas. I guess the true underestimation is not knowing how rapidly a deindustrialized area could become industrialized with a concerted effort by a communist party, which honestly in places like China and Russia, its astounding how quick things changed, it'd probably blow Marx's socks off.
I'd question if "protosocialist" is necessarily the word, I think it concedes Marx's unilinealism. Instead, I'd ask how different constituencies build different revolutionary political formations. Like, the Zapatistas adapted Maoism and eventually decided they'd moved beyond Marxism. The political formation the Zapatistas built uses far more high touch decision-making than any state, despite acting as an organ for exercising class power the same way the state is used in China (where decision-making is far lower touch).
Unilineal cultural evolution is pretty much only very early Marx and even then it was more a leftover of Marx's formal German education then a genuine developing mode of analysis from him, instead it manifested pretty much solely as a political reaction from Marx over the reactionary responses of peasant movements all over Europe post-1848, Marx did not see the revolutionary peasant movements of the 20th century, he saw the monarchies of Europe using peasant isolation and reactionism for their own benefit and concluded, semi-rightly in my opinion that peasants at least in Eastern Europe and Central Europe were not reliable, of course this take is fully bound in the time period and is not, unlike what some miseducated Marxian dogmatists or anti-marxists hold, a central pillar of Marxist analysis
It's completely absent in late Marx and honestly academic critics only bring it up because it's easy to misconstrue without the geopolitical context of what Marx was writing about
Here I found it, Marx in 1877 completely rejects it as a mode of analysis
In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.
Literal same baseless critiques for 150 years
Another one is the idea that the state is a neutral instrument for class rule which can be weilded by any class
That's definitely not a late-stage Marx belief because he pretty harshly critiques this idea in the Gotha Program
Most people that call themselves Marxist have never read Capital.
Most self-proclaimed Marxists that have read Capital have never gone past Volume 1, nor have actually tried to figure out the parts that didn't make sense to them.
Most self-proclaimed Marxists that have read any of Capital Volume 1 didn't finish it.
Basically... unless you got one of those degrees in Marxism in a cool country, talk of being "Marxist" is cheap. This author sounds like someone that skimmed the Wikipedia article on Marx and thought, "yeah okay cool" and never dived deeper.
It's slightly disturbing to me that having read Capital through about half of volume 2 seemingly makes me more well read than like 90% of Marxists (on the internet at least), because I genuinely don't know what I'm talking about half the time lol
Yeah it's kind of amazing. In the abstract sense it doesn't bother me, I'm fine with Marxist thought resonating with people even if they don't quite "get" the core of what Marx actually wrote.
But then folks decide they get to have critical opinions, either towards Marx or based on some misapplication of Marx, and then they're annoying and can do harm. I've met "Marxists" that fall for the reactionary trope of "real workers" (blue collar, hard hat, etc) vs. everyone else. Like... just don't share your opinions until reading the stuff you imply you did, bro. Also, amazingly, I've run into entire self-proclaimed "Marxist" parties whose reading lists contain neither Marx nor summaries of his work. I shouldn't be surprised, then, that those parties spend most of their efforts on party building but can't create coherent messaging.
I haven't read marx's capital, but i've got the marks of capital all over my back
or something along those lines
i don't expect the average worker to read capital, but yeah as @AHopeOnceMore@hexbear.net said it should at least be a prerequisite to making strong criticisms of marxian theory.
everyone should at least try to understand the basic concepts though, understanding the mechanisms of capitalism is essential to fighting it.
like for real. how can you think marx is wrong? even the clintons and the most evil neoliberals think marx is right and try to do their best to subvert marxist theory and organization as described in order to extend their time in the sun
they know that unions are how we get our in in a industrial society and have been hammering them for decades
how do you even become a former marxist? i feel like i have opened some eldritch tome that cannot be closed. in fact i feel like karl marx himself has fucked me over
There are a few good faith criticisms of Marx to be made, but most of them have been made by Marxists. Once you've read them, it's kind of up to you about whether or not you call yourself a "former Marxist."
The author above made one of them. Unilineal cultural evolution is baggage from 19th century anthropology. The idea of society moving through phases on a single track ignores the ways that many anti-colonial movements grounded their resistance not in capitalist class struggle and communism, but in indigenous social forms which they sought to displace capitalism with. The Zapatistas are a great example.
Another one is the idea that the state is a neutral instrument for class rule which can be weilded by any class. In most of the world, capitalism and the State were imposed simultaneously and resistance often takes the form of alternative political formations. The maroon colonies were a great example as many were egalitarian or built into existing indigenous institutions (although some certainly were states).
My examples here are from black and indigenous people, which I think points to a common thread in legitimate criticisms of Marx: while he acknowledged the struggled of indigenous peoples and women, he centered European city dwellers in his analysis. He argued that they were the main revolutionary subject, but the first Marxist revolution was carried out by peasants.
That's not to say Marxism isn't powerful, only that it's blind-spots need to be accounted for and that what results from that project night reasonably be called "after Marxism"
Or, we could call it by its current names: autonomism, 4th world nationalism, the black radical tradition, 4th wave feminism
Most modern Marxists do not believe this for the simple reason most Marxists are from Asia where the track as espoused by Marx is completely inapplicable to past Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Laotian society. For example, none of those societies had a slave economy. They just went from a communal society to a feudal society that lasted for millennia with multiple stages of feudalism. Obviously, the communal society->slave society->feudal society->capitalist society track is only relevant in Western Europe when those East Asian societies' track is more like communal society->feudal society->colonized (semi-colonized for China) semi-feudal society->socialist society. It's not like Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese/Laotian Marxists are purposefully shoehorning the slave society stage to their histories just because some 19th century German dude who never set foot in Asia said so. And it goes without saying that the track Marx described doesn't apply to Cuba either.
In general, most people who are critiquing Marxism in good faith (and everyone who is critiquing Marxism in bad faith) have almost no knowledge of actually existing Marxism ie the Marxism that is studied and practiced in current countries with ruling ML parties. Whether China et al is revisionist or not shouldn't be particularly relevant to critiques of Marxism because the question of whether China is revisionist or not is a question between Marxists, not people who think Marxism is flawed. It makes no sense to cast aside Chinese communists as "not real Marxists" in order to find a different band of Marxists as "real Marxist" only to then critique them and use them as a demonstration of Marxism's inadequacies.
The hilarious thing about all this is Marx himself would agree with you
Here he is in 1877 responding to the same critique and being somewhat baffled that it's being applied to him lmao
This is why I can't take modern critiques of marxism seriously, 99% of the time they're not applicable or Marx himself would agree with them which begs the question why would it be considered a critique of "Marxism" in the first
The answer is pretty simple, Marxism as defined and elaborated by late-stage Marx is a robust critique and analysis of capitalism that hasn't actually been successfully challenged on its own merits and instead requires a degree of academic slight-of-hand to dismiss, this is enforced on a political basis which is why it's easy for even folks who consider themselves "well-read" on Marx to be completely misled on the subject
I very strongly agree with the points you're making wrt. eurocentrism, and that have been made about progressivist unilineal history but I'd like to add that Korea was absolutely a slave economy. For most of Korea's recorded history 25-40% of the population were slaves.
What do you suppose caused it to diverge so greatly from its neighbors?
I think some of this can be explained away as Marx centered his focus on industrial society. Some of those societies that you mentioned were not industrial to a great degree. Agrarianism can be easily seen through a Marxist lens, and these movements had tons of support throughout history and tended to be protosocialist in their language and means. Industry is just the most world changing thing we've got.
Marx of course underestimated how quickly the old protosocialist rhetoric of agrarianism and similar ideologies could be used to create a Marxist state, but I don't think it was outside the realm of his ideas. I guess the true underestimation is not knowing how rapidly a deindustrialized area could become industrialized with a concerted effort by a communist party, which honestly in places like China and Russia, its astounding how quick things changed, it'd probably blow Marx's socks off.
I'd question if "protosocialist" is necessarily the word, I think it concedes Marx's unilinealism. Instead, I'd ask how different constituencies build different revolutionary political formations. Like, the Zapatistas adapted Maoism and eventually decided they'd moved beyond Marxism. The political formation the Zapatistas built uses far more high touch decision-making than any state, despite acting as an organ for exercising class power the same way the state is used in China (where decision-making is far lower touch).
Unilineal cultural evolution is pretty much only very early Marx and even then it was more a leftover of Marx's formal German education then a genuine developing mode of analysis from him, instead it manifested pretty much solely as a political reaction from Marx over the reactionary responses of peasant movements all over Europe post-1848, Marx did not see the revolutionary peasant movements of the 20th century, he saw the monarchies of Europe using peasant isolation and reactionism for their own benefit and concluded, semi-rightly in my opinion that peasants at least in Eastern Europe and Central Europe were not reliable, of course this take is fully bound in the time period and is not, unlike what some miseducated Marxian dogmatists or anti-marxists hold, a central pillar of Marxist analysis
It's completely absent in late Marx and honestly academic critics only bring it up because it's easy to misconstrue without the geopolitical context of what Marx was writing about
Here I found it, Marx in 1877 completely rejects it as a mode of analysis
Literal same baseless critiques for 150 years
That's definitely not a late-stage Marx belief because he pretty harshly critiques this idea in the Gotha Program
You're giving the author too much credit, lol. Your example criticism is more valid and coherent than everything they wrote.
An important fact to remember:
Most people that call themselves Marxist have never read Capital.
Most self-proclaimed Marxists that have read Capital have never gone past Volume 1, nor have actually tried to figure out the parts that didn't make sense to them.
Most self-proclaimed Marxists that have read any of Capital Volume 1 didn't finish it.
Basically... unless you got one of those degrees in Marxism in a cool country, talk of being "Marxist" is cheap. This author sounds like someone that skimmed the Wikipedia article on Marx and thought, "yeah okay cool" and never dived deeper.
Being a marxist is when you reply to byyourlogic and zei_squirrel
Whomst among us?
It's slightly disturbing to me that having read Capital through about half of volume 2 seemingly makes me more well read than like 90% of Marxists (on the internet at least), because I genuinely don't know what I'm talking about half the time lol
Yeah it's kind of amazing. In the abstract sense it doesn't bother me, I'm fine with Marxist thought resonating with people even if they don't quite "get" the core of what Marx actually wrote.
But then folks decide they get to have critical opinions, either towards Marx or based on some misapplication of Marx, and then they're annoying and can do harm. I've met "Marxists" that fall for the reactionary trope of "real workers" (blue collar, hard hat, etc) vs. everyone else. Like... just don't share your opinions until reading the stuff you imply you did, bro. Also, amazingly, I've run into entire self-proclaimed "Marxist" parties whose reading lists contain neither Marx nor summaries of his work. I shouldn't be surprised, then, that those parties spend most of their efforts on party building but can't create coherent messaging.
or something along those lines
i don't expect the average worker to read capital, but yeah as @AHopeOnceMore@hexbear.net said it should at least be a prerequisite to making strong criticisms of marxian theory.
everyone should at least try to understand the basic concepts though, understanding the mechanisms of capitalism is essential to fighting it.
atleast we both understand that shit is fucked and that capitalism isnt going to fix it
should really read capital though
like for real. how can you think marx is wrong? even the clintons and the most evil neoliberals think marx is right and try to do their best to subvert marxist theory and organization as described in order to extend their time in the sun
they know that unions are how we get our in in a industrial society and have been hammering them for decades