> Problem is, Marx didn't advocate what was later called Marxism.
There are many things that were later called Marxism, some of which Marx did advocate, some of which he didn't (and, in the latter case, some of them are arguably well-grounded in what Marx did specifically advocate and many of them are directly opposed to what Marx advocated.)
> In fact, he famously said "je ne suis pas un marxiste" - "I am not a Marxist!".
Actually, he wrote to a particular set of French "marxists" who had diverged from his approach on a program for the particular situation in France on which he had collaborated with them, that if their view was "Marxism", then "what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist".
The context and condition are almost invariably left off by people who want to claim that Marx rejected Marxism generally.
> Marx was very much a political activist (if not a revolutionary in the violent sense), and pretending he wasn't isn't particularly helpful.
I never said he wasn't a political activist - only that the emphasis is definitely misplaced. In popular culture people think communist manifesto and not Capital or the rather large corpus of sociological, historical and economic writings.
> Noam Chomsky quite well articulates what so greatly annoys me in the use of term "marxist". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Tq4VE8eHQ
> It has hardly any relation to the original context or meaning of the writings of one Karl Marx.
Truth be told, Marx himself would probably not be seen as a "marxist". And as a guy who swears by his Hayek and Lord Acton, I wonder how come when someone in the former Western block countries calls you a "marxist" or as a follower of Marx supposedly it is something bad, very bad?
> Marx was foremost an economist and philosopher not a revolutionary,
Marx was very much a political activist (if not a revolutionary in the violent sense), and pretending he wasn't isn't particularly helpful.
Of course, its also not helpful to conflate his political activism with that (including the violent revolutionary aspects) of Leninists and others who sought to use association with Marx's name to sell radically different programs which even rejected the basic required preconditions of Marx's proposed program, even where they adopted some of Marx's language about the basic struggle and desired end state.
>Marx had a lot of ideas; some of them were probably good. Involving workers in the ownership of companies seems like a good idea even if Marx supported it.
I'm not saying otherwise. In fact, a lot of Marx ideas were good. He also famously said "I'm not a marxist".
>One of the reasons Marx is so popular is that his writing is vague enough that people can read a very wide range of meaning into the words.
I don't think this is true, and I say this as someone who's read Marx (almost) back to back. The ambiguities are sometimes mathematical, and there are debates as to meaning in some places, but the overal thesis and critiques are anything but vague, whether you agree with them or not.
Exactly. There's a big difference between 'Socialism', 'socialism', and 'libertarian socialism.' He's a libertarian socialist. Marx advocated Socialism.
As someone who has read most everything Marx has written... no, I am not a Marxist. And the fact that some of Marx's points about alienation and such have become memes does not make me, or anyone else, Marxist.
> He didn't, really. His proposals were pretty vague. 99% of what he wrote was a (pretty spot on) critique of capitalism.
The Communist Manifesto was fairly detailed and prescriptive. It's true that Capital was mostly description and critique of capitalism, but that's not all Marx wrote.
> Needless to say most of the propaganda attacks on his ideas are based upon guilt by association.
Specifically, most are based on association with Leninist vanguardism, which is a fairly radical departure from Marxism prescriptively.
> Calling people Marxist for quoting Adam Smith would be an amusing troll if you didn't sound like you actually believe it.
It's not as big of a stretch as it might sound as first; there a number of ways in which Smith was more like Marx than like a modern capitalist (and plenty of ways in which he was far from either, particularly his identification of the feudal landed aristocracy -- explicitly and particularly as opposed to the mercantile/capitalist class -- as the class whose interests were most naturally aligned with the common interest. (Though one who shared Smith's concerns about the mercantile class might see Marx's investment in the proletariat as the only solution given the demonstrated failure of the landed aristocracy, as such, as a viable class in the face of capitalism, so even that view could be seen as less incompatible with Marxism than with modern capitalism.)
To be clear, its ridiculous to call some one a Marxist just because they quote Smith, but not as ridiculous as it might seem from the naive association of Smith with capitalism and Marx with its opposition.
He is indeed quoted as saying "I'm not a marxist, I'm Marx."
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