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Marx != Marxism... There is a huge gap between Marx' writings and what Marxists made of it. I guess most people agree that Marxism was bad. Not just that it did

Marx != Marxism... There is a huge gap between Marx' writings and what Marxists made of it. I guess most people agree that Marxism was bad. Not just that it didn't work economically, but that it led to undesirable, authoritarian societies. Problem is, Marx didn't advocate what was later called Marxism. In fact, he famously said "je ne suis pas un marxiste" - "I am not a Marxist!". That article is misleading and tendentious in many ways. I was going to write a post debunking it, but I honestly didn't manage to get to the end. I found it's just not worth getting worked up ("Someone's wrong on the Internet!"). Just some short ideas: - The author seems hung up on one aspect of Marx's thinking, the concept of alienation. While it is an important concept for Marx, I think if you just single out one aspect, you risk making a similar mistake to the Marxists (who emphasized the expropriation of workers' surplus value, and the need to get control over that surplus through class war). - People who most vocally criticize Marx usually haven't read him. I'm no fan of the Soviet Union, but Marx doesn't advocate a state like that. His main opus, the Kapital, is a theory of Captialism, not of Communism. Most economists and many other academics don't use Marx nowadays, but not because he is wrong per se, but rather because his work-value theory does not have much quantitative predictive power. You can't use it to calculate much, but that wasn't his goal anyway. Rather, (as I'd describe it in modern terms) he shows how from simple axioms you automatically get all the injustice and crisis-proneness he criticizes in capitalism (a la: Assume there's a society where most people work, get paid wages, and buy the products of their labor on a open market.... BAM people who own the means of production get richer, etc.). I personally was really surprised how relevant his writings still are today.

dragonwriter 13y ago
> 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.

dragonwriter 13y ago

> 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.