(Thread) This is extremely silly in at least three ways: https://twitter.com/Andrew_Adonis/status/1307716030974787584

(1) Marx used the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" (i.e. "rule of the working class") in a few places but thinking that means anything like "dictatorship" in the standard contemporary sense is just flat-out historically illiterate.

The idea is that the working class would be wielding power against the capitalist class during he transition to socialism. Calling that "dictatorship" invoked an analogy to Roman history.

Just as dictatorships in the Roman Republic were temporary, Marx thought the working class would for at time use its numerical superiority to "win the battle of democracy" and exercise power as a class, but this was temporary as a transition to a society not divided into classes.

Nowhere anywhere in his and Engels' voluminous writings is there the tiniest hint of a suggestion that this temporary "dictatorship" of an entire class would involve one-person or even one-party rule. Just the opposite!

Their explicit model of what it would look like was the Paris Commune, which was so ultra-democratic that it was seen as a post-revolutionary model by *both* the Marxist and anarchist factions of the First International.

(2) Marx (who had Jewish roots himself) was not "deeply" anti-Semitic. He used casually anti-Semitic language a few times while trashing mutual acquaintances in private conversation. Keynes, by the way, has at least been accused of much the same thing.

Beyond this, the case for Marx as an anti-Semite largely relies on passages taken out of context from his (in many ways brilliant) very early work "On the Jewish Question" by adults doing the equivalent of 12-year-old boys skimming great literature to try to find the dirty parts.

It's true that there are parts where he describes Judaism in a way that shows that he hadn't rejected some of the anti-Semitic depictions of that religion that were pretty pervasive at the time, but the *point* of the pamphlet was to argue that:

(a) his fellow Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer was wrong to say that Jews should have to give up their distinctive religious practices before being granted full civic and legal equality and (b) full civil and legal equality weren't enough without economic emancipation (ie socialism).

(3) While it's true Marx didn't think social democracy was sufficient--he thought we had to go beyond it and change the underlying mode of production--Marx did enthusiastically support reforms like the 10 Hours Law that we might now call "social democratic." And more importantly:

Thinking that a thinker is an "enemy of social democracy" (which is btw not at all the same thing as liberalism) because they talk frankly about the existence of class war and the importance of the working class winning it is just deeply, deeply stupid.

Class war is how those big social democratic welfare states in places like Sweden were won in the first place and if they get to keep them in the face of ruling class austerity pressure they'll do it with more class war. Smarter social democrats understand that relationship: