It’s been almost a century and a half since Karl Marx’s death, and decades since the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and elsewhere. In the still nominally…View Post
Unilineal cultural evolution is pretty much only very early Marx and even then it was more a leftover of Marx's formal German education then a genuine developing mode of analysis from him, instead it manifested pretty much solely as a political reaction from Marx over the reactionary responses of peasant movements all over Europe post-1848, Marx did not see the revolutionary peasant movements of the 20th century, he saw the monarchies of Europe using peasant isolation and reactionism for their own benefit and concluded, semi-rightly in my opinion that peasants at least in Eastern Europe and Central Europe were not reliable, of course this take is fully bound in the time period and is not, unlike what some miseducated Marxian dogmatists or anti-marxists hold, a central pillar of Marxist analysis
It's completely absent in late Marx and honestly academic critics only bring it up because it's easy to misconstrue without the geopolitical context of what Marx was writing about
Here I found it, Marx in 1877 completely rejects it as a mode of analysis
In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.
Literal same baseless critiques for 150 years
Another one is the idea that the state is a neutral instrument for class rule which can be weilded by any class
That's definitely not a late-stage Marx belief because he pretty harshly critiques this idea in the Gotha Program
Unilineal cultural evolution is pretty much only very early Marx and even then it was more a leftover of Marx's formal German education then a genuine developing mode of analysis from him, instead it manifested pretty much solely as a political reaction from Marx over the reactionary responses of peasant movements all over Europe post-1848, Marx did not see the revolutionary peasant movements of the 20th century, he saw the monarchies of Europe using peasant isolation and reactionism for their own benefit and concluded, semi-rightly in my opinion that peasants at least in Eastern Europe and Central Europe were not reliable, of course this take is fully bound in the time period and is not, unlike what some miseducated Marxian dogmatists or anti-marxists hold, a central pillar of Marxist analysis
It's completely absent in late Marx and honestly academic critics only bring it up because it's easy to misconstrue without the geopolitical context of what Marx was writing about
Here I found it, Marx in 1877 completely rejects it as a mode of analysis
Literal same baseless critiques for 150 years
That's definitely not a late-stage Marx belief because he pretty harshly critiques this idea in the Gotha Program