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Marx is outdated.
Jun. 11th, 2018 17:10I've come to conclude that it's been long since necessary that we purged Marxism of all Marx, and left only Engels in place. Then there maybe could have been some sense. But as it is, we have what we have: a legion of religious sectarians, talmudists, doctrinaires, scholasts and sophists, who, by means of Marxism, solve nothing but their deeply personal and sexual problems.
Sure, a sect can spring out of anything, if only there is enough of the willing to join. Nonetheless, some materials are more suitable for sect building than other materials. And it so happens, that the materials, which Marx authored, are more suitable for sect building, than the materials, which Engels authored or at least co-authored. That's why the Marxist sectarians worship Engels merely as sort of a "first comrade" and "the publisher" but, in contrast to Marx, don't worship him as a prophet. Some especially passionate ones don't worship Engels at all, considering him fallen to the un-Hegelian mortal sin of "positivism" (in quotes 'cause for such ones it's just a buzzword, since they never take pains to actually learn even a quick version of the content this term signifies). And that's, in fact, the clue to the whole thing. Marx's writings are permeated with the spirit of Hegel's esoteric metaphysics, which is quite religious in nature, thus supplying highly nutritious environment for all this sectarianism.
That's why we should insist, that the younger generation, for the purposes of acquainting itself with the history of human thought under the category historically known as "Marxism", used only the materials (co-)authored by Engels and excluded the materials authored solely by Marx from the relevant reading curriculum. Not that Marx must be prohibited and his texts pulled from libraries (that never works as intended), but it's necessary to point out, to give a decent warning, that by reading the Man himself, "the students are likely to squander their time pointlessly on grinding through long stylistically heavy and barely readable passages, and in the process some particularly so far unstrengthened minds may get permanently harmed..." In any case, other Marxist writers, such as Luxemburg, Lenin, etc., in their works use quotations from Marx's works aplenty, often at length and in appropriate context even as they blindly repeat his mistakes or try to amend them, so that an inquiring reader can himself always check up the original place for reference.
Another critical issue with Marx is that even if his works were cleaned up of that Hegelian trash and recompiled in some sort of an analogue to "Jefferson's Bible", the classical Marxist narrative would still look like this: "Capitalism is the exchange of commodity equivalents, and even to the workers, as a rule, the capitalists pay the fair value of what they buy from them, i. e. their labor power, and the main problem is that the value of labor power, as a result of the STP*, falls"... It is perfectly obvious, that a description of capitalism less relevant to the reality existing nowadays is hardly possible to imagine. It used to be more relevant maybe only at the very limited historical stretch, when and as a result of the reality (i. e. economic conditions) within the borders of three and a half European "countries" approached the model of the "perfect competition". These days, however, half a century since the capitalists themselves abolished commodity money (something Marx thought was impossible), looking at the Marxists, regurgitating the "exchange of equivalents" paradigm instead of exposing and correcting Marx's errors and filling in the gaps, one can only wonder and facepalm.
In short:
Marx has no recipe for the world revolution.
Marx has no recipe what to do after it.
Marx has long since had no answer as to how everything works. He wasn't the inventor of class analysis and the LTV, by the way.
Instead, Marx has a lot of muddle, esoterics, anthropocentrism and Lysenkoism.
And, between today and Marx more time elapsed than between Marx and Rousseau!
Marx is outdated.
Even though on some points he was right (that is, he developed the classical English political economy in the right direction on those points), and his rightness on those points is becoming actual only now, in a world, which is only now becoming sufficiently globalized...
Ceterum censeo, Family must be destroyed.
___________________
* Scientific-technological progress.
Sure, a sect can spring out of anything, if only there is enough of the willing to join. Nonetheless, some materials are more suitable for sect building than other materials. And it so happens, that the materials, which Marx authored, are more suitable for sect building, than the materials, which Engels authored or at least co-authored. That's why the Marxist sectarians worship Engels merely as sort of a "first comrade" and "the publisher" but, in contrast to Marx, don't worship him as a prophet. Some especially passionate ones don't worship Engels at all, considering him fallen to the un-Hegelian mortal sin of "positivism" (in quotes 'cause for such ones it's just a buzzword, since they never take pains to actually learn even a quick version of the content this term signifies). And that's, in fact, the clue to the whole thing. Marx's writings are permeated with the spirit of Hegel's esoteric metaphysics, which is quite religious in nature, thus supplying highly nutritious environment for all this sectarianism.
That's why we should insist, that the younger generation, for the purposes of acquainting itself with the history of human thought under the category historically known as "Marxism", used only the materials (co-)authored by Engels and excluded the materials authored solely by Marx from the relevant reading curriculum. Not that Marx must be prohibited and his texts pulled from libraries (that never works as intended), but it's necessary to point out, to give a decent warning, that by reading the Man himself, "the students are likely to squander their time pointlessly on grinding through long stylistically heavy and barely readable passages, and in the process some particularly so far unstrengthened minds may get permanently harmed..." In any case, other Marxist writers, such as Luxemburg, Lenin, etc., in their works use quotations from Marx's works aplenty, often at length and in appropriate context even as they blindly repeat his mistakes or try to amend them, so that an inquiring reader can himself always check up the original place for reference.
Another critical issue with Marx is that even if his works were cleaned up of that Hegelian trash and recompiled in some sort of an analogue to "Jefferson's Bible", the classical Marxist narrative would still look like this: "Capitalism is the exchange of commodity equivalents, and even to the workers, as a rule, the capitalists pay the fair value of what they buy from them, i. e. their labor power, and the main problem is that the value of labor power, as a result of the STP*, falls"... It is perfectly obvious, that a description of capitalism less relevant to the reality existing nowadays is hardly possible to imagine. It used to be more relevant maybe only at the very limited historical stretch, when and as a result of the reality (i. e. economic conditions) within the borders of three and a half European "countries" approached the model of the "perfect competition". These days, however, half a century since the capitalists themselves abolished commodity money (something Marx thought was impossible), looking at the Marxists, regurgitating the "exchange of equivalents" paradigm instead of exposing and correcting Marx's errors and filling in the gaps, one can only wonder and facepalm.
In short:
Marx has no recipe for the world revolution.
Marx has no recipe what to do after it.
Marx has long since had no answer as to how everything works. He wasn't the inventor of class analysis and the LTV, by the way.
Instead, Marx has a lot of muddle, esoterics, anthropocentrism and Lysenkoism.
And, between today and Marx more time elapsed than between Marx and Rousseau!
Marx is outdated.
Even though on some points he was right (that is, he developed the classical English political economy in the right direction on those points), and his rightness on those points is becoming actual only now, in a world, which is only now becoming sufficiently globalized...
Ceterum censeo, Family must be destroyed.
___________________
* Scientific-technological progress.
