just tearing down one of the most ubiquitous theoretical frameworks for leftism without decent alternatives is not good.
This is what I mean by not addressing his actual take. As I recall, his main issue is with the reverence afforded to Marx and his writings. He would prefer socialists in 2020 to re-write key texts for a modern audience instead of relying on 150-year-old tomes translated from German. Note that Lenin and Mao would agree with this -- they both wrote socialist texts adapted to their time and place instead of just reprinting Marx and telling everyone to read him. That's not tearing down Marxism as a theoretical framework; it's saying "let's update Marxism the way a modern physics textbook describes Newtonian physics in modern language, including subsequent theoretical developments."
And he's not just leveling this critique and then sitting on his ass. He wrote a book doing exactly what I described, he runs a socialist magazine, and he's written extensively on how Bernie-style policies make sense from a socialist perspective. I seriously don't get the hostility towards a guy who's so obviously trying to move us in the right direction.
“marx was too focused on a scientific materialist approach and not enough about the moral imperative”
No idea if he actually said this, but appealing to the morality of a country that for the past 75 years has taught its citizens that we're the moral police of the world is far from unreasonable. He certainly never says that materialism doesn't matter, either.
Lenin and Mao are juvenile now? Because they updated socialist literature in the exact way NJR talks about.
We're not dealing with holy texts. It's OK -- good, even -- to write about why socialism is good in a style that's easy for a modern audience to digest.
This is what I mean by not addressing his actual take. As I recall, his main issue is with the reverence afforded to Marx and his writings. He would prefer socialists in 2020 to re-write key texts for a modern audience instead of relying on 150-year-old tomes translated from German. Note that Lenin and Mao would agree with this -- they both wrote socialist texts adapted to their time and place instead of just reprinting Marx and telling everyone to read him. That's not tearing down Marxism as a theoretical framework; it's saying "let's update Marxism the way a modern physics textbook describes Newtonian physics in modern language, including subsequent theoretical developments."
And he's not just leveling this critique and then sitting on his ass. He wrote a book doing exactly what I described, he runs a socialist magazine, and he's written extensively on how Bernie-style policies make sense from a socialist perspective. I seriously don't get the hostility towards a guy who's so obviously trying to move us in the right direction.
No idea if he actually said this, but appealing to the morality of a country that for the past 75 years has taught its citizens that we're the moral police of the world is far from unreasonable. He certainly never says that materialism doesn't matter, either.
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Lenin and Mao are juvenile now? Because they updated socialist literature in the exact way NJR talks about.
We're not dealing with holy texts. It's OK -- good, even -- to write about why socialism is good in a style that's easy for a modern audience to digest.