“To understand Marx is to be a Marxist.” — Bertell Ollman
Marxism isn’t something you can un-see once you see it. I’ve had conversations with business owners before when they were explaining basic Marxist concepts without knowing it. A lot of people are kind of struggling to find an explanation for why everything is so fucked up, but because no one has actually explained Marxism to them or recommended that they read Marxist texts (teachers will lose their jobs and get blacklisted if they do this, parents are also disincentivized to mention it because Marxism can also help with class struggle at home), they basically find themselves having to reinvent the wheel, even though at this point we have almost two centuries of Marxist scholarship and plenty of praxis to confirm the theory. Bourgeois folks definitely understand Marxism, there’s just certain aspects they don’t want to understand (the overall tendency for profit to decline for example), and the proletariat also often gets the basics (my boss is my enemy and all bosses are enemies) without having even heard of Marx. It’s the labor aristocracy (IMO), trapped in the mid-deck of the sinking Titanic, which is confused.
Ahh, this is Harriet Fraad’s thing, but Wilhelm Reich also used Marxism in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Basically, in the modern nuclear family, there is a contradiction between the parents and children. Parents may want one thing, children may want another. A parent might not want his kids to learn about Marxism because they might team up against him or realize how society itself enforces the enslavement of marriage for instance. I also felt like this sometimes as a teacher. I was intensely aware of how being alone in a room with dozens of students put me at a great disadvantage. If they had only gotten over their own petty internal disputes, they could have been running the classroom, the school, and who knows what else.
“To understand Marx is to be a Marxist.” — Bertell Ollman
Marxism isn’t something you can un-see once you see it. I’ve had conversations with business owners before when they were explaining basic Marxist concepts without knowing it. A lot of people are kind of struggling to find an explanation for why everything is so fucked up, but because no one has actually explained Marxism to them or recommended that they read Marxist texts (teachers will lose their jobs and get blacklisted if they do this, parents are also disincentivized to mention it because Marxism can also help with class struggle at home), they basically find themselves having to reinvent the wheel, even though at this point we have almost two centuries of Marxist scholarship and plenty of praxis to confirm the theory. Bourgeois folks definitely understand Marxism, there’s just certain aspects they don’t want to understand (the overall tendency for profit to decline for example), and the proletariat also often gets the basics (my boss is my enemy and all bosses are enemies) without having even heard of Marx. It’s the labor aristocracy (IMO), trapped in the mid-deck of the sinking Titanic, which is confused.
Can you elaborate on this?
On which part?
Sorry, meant to quote this:
Ahh, this is Harriet Fraad’s thing, but Wilhelm Reich also used Marxism in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Basically, in the modern nuclear family, there is a contradiction between the parents and children. Parents may want one thing, children may want another. A parent might not want his kids to learn about Marxism because they might team up against him or realize how society itself enforces the enslavement of marriage for instance. I also felt like this sometimes as a teacher. I was intensely aware of how being alone in a room with dozens of students put me at a great disadvantage. If they had only gotten over their own petty internal disputes, they could have been running the classroom, the school, and who knows what else.