Thread by @yungneocon, Quick thread on what I consider to be the flaws of ‘vulgar [...]

Quick thread on what I consider to be the flaws of ‘vulgar Marxism’ and Marxism as scripture, as well as failing to distinguish interpretation, use, analysis, testing, deployment, and social/historical analysis. PLEASE READ ON BEFORE GETTING ANGRY OR DONT READ AT ALL.

At the end I will focus on a problem Vulgar Marxians share—the inverse of that of Neoclassical economics. They want to have their physicalism, science & universalism but eat their historicism, social analysis, & normative judgments too. Please let me qualify before getting angry!

I’m not going to engage in whether or not people are truly faithful to Marx are Marxists or whatever. Ones method for determining fidelity to Marx is determined by their ideology, which reciprocally depends on their interpretation.

As such I am going to distinguish several things:
1. Marx’s writings & thought
2. Marx’s person
3. Marx’s life & behavior
4. Marx’s followers
5. Commentaries on Marx
6. Self described Marxists
7. The legacies of Marx

Similarly I’ll distinguish several other practices:
1. Determining what Marx ‘really’ meant
2. Determining the actual causes of & life of Marx & his writings
3. Analyzing how his writings would be understood at the time
4. How he was interpreted

5. How he influenced the world or his followers
6. Analyzing Marx’s writings & thoughts to find a self consistent view
7. Analyzing them to rationally reconstruct them
8. Determining if Marx was ‘right’ or not
9. Finding useful elements from Marx to use

10. Interpreting Marx in a novel way for the sake of productive critique
11. Doing all of these tasks for interpretations of and followers of Marx
12. Determining their fidelity or correctness
13. Analyzing who is or is not a true Marxist etc or if they were faithful

These are all independent but related—the logically self consistent, presently useful, historical exegesis, authorial intent, and rational reconstruction interpretations can all be different, and what’s more this is independent of whether or not they’re true.

NO author is always consistent, coherent, self aware, correct, and whole even within a single work, let alone across them, let alone across different contexts or types or in collaborations.

What’s more, this is especially pronounced across different kinds of texts (journals, polemics, analyses, letters), the life & the text, the work & the theory, and the tradition that followed & their interpretation.

For example, someone could have interpreted Marx in a certain way and produced a correct empirical analysis of the world. Then fragments/journals are later published showing that that interpretation is different from what Marx meant or would have been received as.

What’s more, what they ‘really’ meant or would have been received as may be self contradictory or less rationally coherent. Thus, the later interpretation altho ‘false’ to what he meant could be more true & coherent than that.

This gets compounded when influence, collaboration, traditions, genealogies, interpretations & so on come in to play.

For example, I do not think MLs interpretations of Marx are true to his intent or context, empirically correct, rationally reconstructed & coherent, but this doesn’t change that they are *Marxists*.

What’s more, there are often interpretations which are more self consistent, presently useful, and true to ‘spirit’ that are not what I think Marx meant or his context (take Kilman or Douglas), or are even trying to be (Steedman, Sraffa).

There are exegesis of Marx that is pretty good at understanding his text & context, but don’t do justice to the ‘spirit’ nor do they produce a particularly satisfying model (see Hollander, on one hand, or early philosophical Marxists)

There are proposals like the analytic Marxists, R Wolff, David Harvey etc, That try to be true to the spirit of Marx & use his terminology, productively deploy him, & make a self consistent present model.

I think all three of them produce useful, & correct insights. I do not think the analytics or Wolff interpret Marx as he meant it, as his context, OR as a rational reconstruction. Harvey does this more so. I also don’t think the analytics are particularly ‘Marxist’

Conversely, there is work like Postones, like the Value Form Theorists, like certain philosophical Marxists, and ecosocialist/ecomarxists that succeed at doing multiple of these projects st once.

Namely they find something true to Marx in his intent & context, rationally reconstruct it, produce a self consistent model, add new insights & deployments, productively use it, and make empirically correct claims. This is true even where they’re inconsistent w each other.

Then there are those who are very good at understanding how Marx was received, interpreted, deployed & influences & other Marxist thought, are good at critiquing it, etc, but this has little do with Marx, BUT does with *Marxists*.

Thus, I think ‘MarxISTs’ should be understood as a social grouping, a concrete history/genealogy, an identity, and a statement of connection to his traditions. ‘MarxIANS’ are those who tie themselves to Marx & his philosophy as such.

This is just for convenience in this thread, and these are often used interchangeably, and they overlap much of the time. For ex, the analytics & MLs are Marxists but not Marxians, whereas philosophical Followers are Marxians but not Marxists. Leftcoms aim to be both.

This is especially an issue when it comes to things like textual exegesis, and periodization, and so on. I will link to several threads on those before returning to my subject.

Basically too much of the above debates conflate the social & the intellectual, and are unclear if their aim is to secure legitimacy by reference to Marxian intention or to correctness or to tradition or what.

Here’s my thread on periodization https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1230934349455020032?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1230934349455020032