Permanently Deleted
obviously one of the biggest problems we face today is that too many people like Marx
can't believe I ever defended this fool
this is Jordan Peterson level shit
Jacobin even fucking called him out a while back saying you should be Marxist.
Jacobin's been pretty good at having a wide variety of different Marxist authors come and write articles, they have their heads on right with that at least. At least a few of their editors have also read a lot of Marx too as far as I can tell, enough to off the cuff reference things in livestreams.
Yeah, Bhaskar Sunkara may be a SocDem, but he at least occasionaly allows actual Marxists to publish on his site.
He lets literally anyone publish it seems. I also think he likes causing shit storms. They really should publish a Pro China article to make everyone mad.
Please, I’m begging you NJR, read Capital.
There are entire chapters dedicated to describing the impoverished living conditions of people in 19th century industrialised Britain.
Even when Marx discusses the economics of the matter, he likening the capitalists to tanners and vampires, and capital to zombies. He hardly goes a page without injecting moral judgement.
Dude's also just gonna pretend that Marx didn't write a fucking moral critique like his precursors before he wrote capital lmao. It entirely makes up his early writing and is pretty fucking present throughout the whole thing.
I also don't understand why he's just gonna pretend psychoanalysis never happened. Questions like 'why do people often fight for their own oppression' seems like a good place to start.
Like this guy is just gonna do a speedrun of the last 400 years. "People don't listen to my poetic 'capitalism bad' proselytizing, so here's a mechanical critique. What's that? The proletariat, despite it's possible dominance over the bourgeoisie, still toil in oppressive and menial labor? Huh, well why do people invest in systems that don't benefit them? Okay, here's my critique of ideology."
This is hilariously wrong. Literally all of Marx's writing is steeped in a language of justice and democracy. Marx just avoids explicitly making a moralism argument because that's his one of his problems with utopian socialists. If anyone wants a good recent work on the democratic theory in Capital Volume I, the book-club on the discord and !books@hexbear.net is doing Marx's Inferno this month. Marx is working in a deeply democratic tradition, a deeply moral one too, and those are exemplified and raised by the material backing he gives them in Capital and his other works. Capital is literally a work on the social hell that is capitalism, I mean jfc, this is just embarrassing for Robinson. And Marx constantly stressed that things were not inevitable, and warned against the determinism some later Marxists would engage in.
When Marx wrote "you have nothing to lose but your chains" he wasn't talking about justice he was talking about BDSM
Welp, they've had a good run. Ironic that they've pushed me to read Marx lol
- Refuse to read any books
- Write a book refuting things you refused to read
Who the fuck is the audience for this? "Dead white men" liberals?
I'm not saying that NJR is an FBI agent. But I do think that if the FBI wanted to design someone in a lab to repel any actual workers away from the left; it would be a Yale Law educated journalist, who larps as a Dandy, with a fake British accent, who spends his time critiquing the revolutionary theory that is historically most successful in overthrowing the Bourgeoise.
My point is that Nathan J Robinson definitely receives cheques every week sent from the J. Edgar Hoover Building .
He seems obsessed that the errors of the USSR and China, or any other self identifying Marxist group/country are due to Marx's theory itself, rather than literally anything else. Really just shows he has no engagement with Marx or most Marxist theorists. Like if he doesn't like MLs theory, you don't have to blame Marx for that lol. Make him go read like Mario Tronti or another autonomist Marxist, or just actually read Marx.
Also, any even remotely decent Marxist should understand that material conditions dominate the reality of all presently and previously existing socialist projects, regardless of their opinions on said projects..
I'd say that's selling ideas a bit short but yeah, there's material and social and ideological conditioning on all systems, and you need a very strong argument to blame stuff on one thinker.
rather than literally anything else
He writes extensively about how bad many other things are, and publishes a magazine and runs a podcast that boosts other people doing the same thing.
For example, he wrote an entire book on how bad Clinton-era democrats were on amplifying racial disparities in criminal justice.
It really annoys him when Marxists point out that his (Utopian/Liberal) theory of revolutionary change has never succeeded in establishing Socialism in the Global North. He knows he can't attack Marxists on material grounds, so he decided to either ignore it or critique it on the basis that it doesn't meet his arbitrary standard of "moral" or "democratic" enough.
his (Utopian/Liberal) theory of revolutionary change has never succeeded in establishing Socialism in the Global North
Neither has any sort of literal revolutionary (as in, protracted people's war) socialism. There's ample opportunity for critique when nothing has worked in the Global North.
Uh same reason he thought a law degree from Yale the best thing he could do?
- Marx is absolutely open to critique, as to date Marxism and all derivative schools of thought have failed to produce socialism in the Global North. It's a science, which means adapting methods to changing conditions and the results of experiments. It's not religious dogma.
- You know who "[took] the good bits of Marxism" and adapted it to the specific conditions in their country? Lenin, Mao, etc.
- When someone starts an explicitly socialist media operation -- something that pipelines people left and provides the sort of media infrastructure that is incredibly useful for any modern political movement -- the criticisms of that person should be more sophisticated than "he wears ascots" or "he went to a good law school" or "the only possible way someone could disagree with Marx is if they haven't read Marx."
bullying NJR for being a fancy lad and not reading Marx is a meme
Doesn't seem like it is for some folks on here, and we all know how memes get turned into "this, but unironically," too. If we want to create a pipeline to the left, we should be generally treating people like him a lot more generously than we treat chuds. I see very little of that here despite the significant value NJR creating a socialist media outlet.
Can our end goal be achieved by liberal reformism and educating libs? I guess NJR wants to find out, but I prefer Marx’s analysis and think it’s more correct.
The near-term answer is to try both and see which works best. But we can critique one approach without glomming on to whichever school we disagree with; that's just sectarianism.
The actual article is in fact very much pro-Marx until last 2 paragraphs
I don’t see what are the gains of disavowing Marx and marxist orgs... full on condemnation
Which is it? This is what I mean when I say I don't believe "lol fancy lad sucks" is a entirely a meme. It constantly bleeds over into "this guy hates Marx, let's get him," which -- as you said -- is not actually what the guy believes. We should do people on our side the courtesy of addressing what they're actually saying.
I don’t have much hope for them being good faith
You said you believe he's actually read Marx. If he's read Marx, but just has a different opinion on it than you do, how is that not a good faith position? He's not just trolling or speaking to something he has no knowledge of. Clearly it is possible to read Marx and not 100% agree with everything he had to say.
NJR was doing a sectarianism by publishing this article too
Sectarianism isn't just disagreeing with someone. It's more than offering a critique of someone's ideas. It's bitter, it's vitriolic, it leads to an unwillingness to work with the person one is criticizing. "NJR is a lib fancy lad" is far, far closer to sectarianism than "I have some disagreements with Marx and how leftists use Marx, and I'm going to explain those disagreements in detail."
instead of dedicating more of CA space and his personal efforts to anti-capitalism
Like this? Or like this? He publishes anti-capitalist stuff on CA multiple times every week.
