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- “ This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory” - I am sure I could google exact quotes from I think Marcuse that states t

- “ This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory” - I am sure I could google exact quotes from I think Marcuse that states the opposite. Maybe his utopia wasn’t called communism, does it make any difference? Having said that, what I find more interesting is how Marxism is the only theory adopted by all of western humanities, because it is the only theory that defines what social progress should look like. I feel we desperately need some alternative view of what progress is, because what we use now clearly isn’t working

beaconstudios 5y ago
Marxism isn't even an ideology though - Marx didn't concretely define what socialism and communism would look like outside of "collective control of the means of production", which really just means "factories are used for public rather than private benefit" (oversimplified but that's the gist). There's so many flavours of leftism that are completely mutually incompatible. There are also alternatives positions: anarchism of many flavours, the singularity people (post-scarity ideology, effectively - I like Manna [1] for a practical example - it's functionally equivalent to "fully automated luxury communism"), the degrowthers, the urbanists, the social democrats, the solarpunk types, probably a bunch of others I've left out. There's no limit to the number of futures being imagined on the left. There's lots of future-imagining on the right too, but the qualifying trait of the right is that their future is the same as the past. If you mean that western humanities have adopted Marxism as in the Soviet or Maoist visions of Marx - they haven't, by and large. They're mostly onto critical theory now, which is really interesting because it's a systems analysis of societal structures. Marx did a systems analysis of capital, so many critical theorists are also Marxists, but that's about as far as it goes in terms of their direct relation. As far as "not working" goes - trade unionism brought us many workers' rights, the 40 hour work week, and is the only thing big businesses are really afraid of. Marxism-Leninism was a massive failure, but the anarchists called that one in the 1920s. [1] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

beaconstudios 5y ago

Marxism isn't even an ideology though - Marx didn't concretely define what socialism and communism would look like outside of "collective control of the means of production", which really just means "factories are used for public rather than private benefit" (oversimplified but that's the gist). There's so many flavours of leftism that are completely mutually incompatible. There are also alternatives positions: anarchism of many flavours, the singularity people (post-scarity ideology, effectively - I like Manna [1] for a practical example - it's functionally equivalent to "fully automated luxury communism"), the degrowthers, the urbanists, the social democrats, the solarpunk types, probably a bunch of others I've left out. There's no limit to the number of futures being imagined on the left. There's lots of future-imagining on the right too, but the qualifying trait of the right is that their future is the same as the past. If you mean that western humanities have adopted Marxism as in the Soviet or Maoist visions of Marx - they haven't, by and large. They're mostly onto critical theory now, which is really interesting because it's a systems analysis of societal structures. Marx did a systems analysis of capital, so many critical theorists are also Marxists, but that's about as far as it goes in terms of their direct relation. As far as "not working" goes - trade unionism brought us many workers' rights, the 40 hour work week, and is the only thing big businesses are really afraid of. Marxism-Leninism was a massive failure, but the anarchists called that one in the 1920s. [1] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1