I want to call this 21st century Proudhonism, but that's too harsh on Proudhonism. However, I will also say that Marx Madness being 31 something episodes deep in DuBois and still missing contexts of the work is also funny. Nor does reading theory mean you understand or gleam something from it, whatever you are "supposed" to gleam. For instance I think people way over hype/get wrong What Is To Be Done because of its fundamental specificity to Lenin's circumstance that you don't get by just reading it. In that sense I guess Robinson has a point but like come on, reading Marx or other historical materialist works gives you a fundamentally different understanding of history and political change. An understanding that could of course be gotten elsewhere, but in its fullest form is written, and a socialist magazine editor should know that. He should know what he is critiquing, and if he is going to put out a book about leaving behind Marx that better mean digging through MEGA project, constructing an overarching argument about what Marxism is and how deviations from Marx/misinterpretations/misapplications are not those things but integral applications of Marx and thus mean abandoning his ideas themselves, and why it's better to go back to some utopian socialism (which is funny as I consider Marx to still have utopian kernels present in his work, and that's fine, but Robinson should know that if he's writing a book lol). However I have the feeling he won't be doing that.
I want to call this 21st century Proudhonism, but that's too harsh on Proudhonism. However, I will also say that Marx Madness being 31 something episodes deep in DuBois and still missing contexts of the work is also funny. Nor does reading theory mean you understand or gleam something from it, whatever you are "supposed" to gleam. For instance I think people way over hype/get wrong What Is To Be Done because of its fundamental specificity to Lenin's circumstance that you don't get by just reading it. In that sense I guess Robinson has a point but like come on, reading Marx or other historical materialist works gives you a fundamentally different understanding of history and political change. An understanding that could of course be gotten elsewhere, but in its fullest form is written, and a socialist magazine editor should know that. He should know what he is critiquing, and if he is going to put out a book about leaving behind Marx that better mean digging through MEGA project, constructing an overarching argument about what Marxism is and how deviations from Marx/misinterpretations/misapplications are not those things but integral applications of Marx and thus mean abandoning his ideas themselves, and why it's better to go back to some utopian socialism (which is funny as I consider Marx to still have utopian kernels present in his work, and that's fine, but Robinson should know that if he's writing a book lol). However I have the feeling he won't be doing that.