> 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 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.
> 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.
>The article also misinterprets Marxism/communism.
>it's not a revolutionary seizure of the means of production.
The revolutionary bit of Marxism was a political sideshow for Marx's anarchist supporters. The economic theory of Marx does not require a revolution, because according to that theory, the superior mode of economic production should eventually prevail.
That is why you have political movements like democratic socialism and social democracy. These are moderates who believe that Marx's theory of economic progression is correct, but who also believe in incremental change.
> 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.
>In what way? There has been dozens of ideological factions calling themselves "Communists" like various types of anarchists, left-communists, Orthodox Marxists etc. More importantly, there was academic Marxism which wasn't revolutionary in its intention, which affected dozens of fields including history and sociology, and had factions too (e.g. Frankfurt School)
I should have been more clear. I meant Marxism that achieved real political power. My point is that Marx's original vision could never be carried out successfully in the real world. Your further comments don't really present an argument to the contrary.
>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.
>I doubt that the author of the book tried to understand Marx because he wrote this: "Why is it, he wondered, that certain intellectuals are “merciless toward the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines”?
He didn't write it about Marx, he wrote it about the Marxists of his day (mid-20-th century France) -- people who were justifying Stalinism crimes and so on.
>Marx wanted the opposite
What Marx wanted is not really relevant. As Marx himself said, you don't judge a man by what he thinks himself to be. Similarly, you don't just whether Marxism has been used as an opiate for the people by whether Marx wanted that to happen or not.
Ideas leave the hands of their creators. To see how they end up and what kind of influence they have, we must examine them in actual use, after they spread.
> The very core of Marx political agitation was aimed at getting the members of the working classes to understand that their self interests were separate from those of the bourgeoisie.
That's like teaching sheeps to unite. It's important to enlighten people, but it won't prevent self interests to collide. Politicians in power can't listen to everyone, it's always easier to listen and talk to powerful minorities who have the strongest self interest.
> Marx was a politician first, philosopher second.
I'd say an activist. I don't see Marx as an active member of a political party, making speeches and announcements. He was more of an intellectual.
When I say politics I say the original etymology of the word politics, meaning having power.
> Labor, Capital - jeez there's plenty of countries built on Marxist ideology you are advocating.
No, there aren't. There are plenty of countries built on Leninist (and it's descendants, including Maoist) ideology, which advertise themselves as being Marxist as well, but Leninism sharply deviates from Marxism on a number of key points largely because Marxism is grounded in the necessity of starting with mature capitalism, and Lenin wanted a shortcut for the USSR (and later movements following Lenin likewise sought to bypass, rather than develope through and from, mature capitalism.)
Also, recognition of the existence of the conflict within capitalism that Marx’s proposals sought to address isn't the same thing as advocating Marxism.
> But it turns out that, after a socialist revolution, who is going to make the bread and who is going to distribute it is not a problem that will inevitably be solved.
Marx was, I think, of a very different mind about revolution than many of his later followers: I suspect that to Marx, a “socialist revolution” was more like the Industrial Revolution and less like the French (or, perhaps more to the point, Russian) Revolution.
Marx wasn't against providing concrete steps addressing coherent real issues adapted to the conditions in particular places (see the program for the German Communists that is often presented as an appendix to the Communist Manifesto). But the utopian end-state society was, in Marx’s view, rather far off.
>They believe that applying Marxist economic theory to cultural issues
This is literally gibberish. It's like saying you're going to apply quantum mechanics to modeling bird populations in the Galapagos.
>Robin DiAngelo
Nobody seriously considers her a Marxist.
>Patrisse Cullors
Likewise.
>random list of Frankfurt school scholars you grabbed from Wikipedia
These people claim influence from Marx, sure. They also claim influence from Freud and the psychoanalysts, who were some of the first critics of Marx. Someone who worked as long ago as Marx has touched a lot of fields in a small way. That doesn't make anything with even a hint of Marx's influence "Marxist", any more than it makes Ho Chi Minh an American liberal because he quoted the Declaration of Independence at a rally.
Jordan Peterson knew not to say anything so utterly farcical as what you've presented because he would have gotten raked over the coals. You should learn from his example.
> Marx was a political scientist, not an economist
This is probably as pointless of a statement to argue against as it is to make in the first place. But, Marxian economics is still considered one of the main schools of economic theory today and comprises several other schools within it
> He thought about how greed effects decision making and power corrupts.
This is not really something he wrote about. Maybe you're confusing him with the anarchist Bakunin who believed anyone with any amount of (unequal) power would inevitably become corrupt. But given that he believed you could have a "dictatorship of the proletariat" to usher in revolution, he clearly didn't share this view.
> He was interested in a political revolution because he believed capitalist systems are unable to solve market failures.
I guess in a vague, broad sense this is sorta correct... But he actually believed capitalism was a necessary step towards socialism. So much so that Russian Marxists like Lenin specifically tried to bring Western-style capitalism to Russia. They thought it necessary for the advancement of society
> Economics is generally less interested in the politics of how to implement solutions and more interested in what the optimal solutions are.
Karl Marx was specifically interested in "Scientific Socialism". In his time he was hailed as "having done for economics what Newton did for physics". He developed a pretty in-depth and rigorous theory that provided really useful tools to study and analyze society. And he and his followers believed that his conclusions were a result of this rigorous and scientific approach to social analysis
Mind you, this is not really unlike modern economic theory. We have tons of tools that had never actually been tested. In fact, I'd say that the past 15-ish years of economics are revolutionary precisely because it's the first we're actually being data-driven about things. Things like the Phillips curve are still taught in Econ 101 classes around the country but it has thoroughly been debunked using actual real-world data
You can argue that Marx's theories had issues but they were just as "scientific" as modern economics has been up until very very recently. (That is, not very)
>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".
> To start, in the mid-19th century Marx believed that capitalism has inherent contradictions that would lead to its weakening and being overthrown through violent workers revolution and replaced by communism, a utopia in which everyone would work together and the state would disappear.
Wrong, he thought that capitalism would be replaced by socialism, which would itself transition over time to communism; Marx’s socialism is not a utopian state, and Marx did not see workers revolutions replacing capitlaism directly with utopian communism.
> Leftists say none of this matters because none of the nations were true communism
No, non-Leninist Leftists say none of this is relevant to non-Leninist communism and the broader non-Leninist Left, because all these systems were Leninist vanguardism, and non-Leninists on the Left reject vanguardism and generally also the Leninist deviation from classical Marxism in bypassing capitalist democracy as a necessary part of the path.
>Most Marxist revolutions involved attacking the producers which did lead to starvation.
Yes.
> Just because there are people in the world doing better than you does not automatically mean you are being oppressed.
Certainly.
>The idea you are entitled to what other people have is absolutely the root of Marxism.
Here is where I disagree. I think Marxism is fundamentally the idea that all significant suffering in the world is caused by wealthy elites exploiting common people, and that sufficiently eliminating this exploitation will lead to a utopia. It's more than a simple "Give me that!" urge. How else could it be so superficially appealing to naive college students for centuries of history?
Don't take this as justification for Marxism. It's not. Marxism is one level above Nazism in a level of evil (if it's not evil, what else could you call evil?) since Nazism eventually demonizes everyone who looks or acts differently than you, but Marxism eventually demonizes (and kills) everyone.
> 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 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.
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