As a Trot, albeit a reluctant and undogmatic one (I think), I also am terrified of winning a revolution with MLs in the mix. They love to talk about how no anarchist/trotskyists have ever had a “successful revolution” and its like no shit you killed them all and took power in the name of socialism.
Curious about your intellectual issues with Marx. No one is above critique, not asking to jump all over ya. I have some criticisms of Marx, namely that he spent the end of his life not finishing Capital and instead working on ethnography and trying to chart a path to socialism through Russian peasant society, and like I’d rather he’d have finished one of those instead of not finishing any of it. His work on ethnography would be really useful to anarchists and mutual aid networks: Anarchist Marxists, how cool would that be? But instead we just have his volumes and volumes of notebooks.
My main issues are that he blatantly misrepresented Proudhon. I also think that he largely overestimated the inevitability in a way that’s been harmful to communists.
And there absolutely anarchist Marxists, I just fall more along mutualist lines
Well as someone who couldn’t get through the Poverty of Philosophy, despite having read lots of Marx including Capital: that’s fair. He was really gunning for the Young Hegelians. I thought his critique of Stirner was really good, and his debunking of Bauer was essential. But I didn’t get into PoP. Maybe some other time. He was too optimistic wrt how capitalism would create “gravediggers.” I think its an actual thing that happens, it happened to me for example, but he underestimated ideology, or maybe like over estimated the way capitalism would change people’s consciousness.
You’re right there are individual anarchist Marxists, I study with one, but I guess I was referring to something more like a movement. I guess the Kurdish liberation movement kind of qualifies? Maybe my views are too west-centric.
Any recommended Proudhon I should read? Maybe take on Philosophy of Poverty before trying Marx’s response again?
As a Trot, albeit a reluctant and undogmatic one (I think), I also am terrified of winning a revolution with MLs in the mix. They love to talk about how no anarchist/trotskyists have ever had a “successful revolution” and its like no shit you killed them all and took power in the name of socialism.
Curious about your intellectual issues with Marx. No one is above critique, not asking to jump all over ya. I have some criticisms of Marx, namely that he spent the end of his life not finishing Capital and instead working on ethnography and trying to chart a path to socialism through Russian peasant society, and like I’d rather he’d have finished one of those instead of not finishing any of it. His work on ethnography would be really useful to anarchists and mutual aid networks: Anarchist Marxists, how cool would that be? But instead we just have his volumes and volumes of notebooks.
My main issues are that he blatantly misrepresented Proudhon. I also think that he largely overestimated the inevitability in a way that’s been harmful to communists.
And there absolutely anarchist Marxists, I just fall more along mutualist lines
Well as someone who couldn’t get through the Poverty of Philosophy, despite having read lots of Marx including Capital: that’s fair. He was really gunning for the Young Hegelians. I thought his critique of Stirner was really good, and his debunking of Bauer was essential. But I didn’t get into PoP. Maybe some other time. He was too optimistic wrt how capitalism would create “gravediggers.” I think its an actual thing that happens, it happened to me for example, but he underestimated ideology, or maybe like over estimated the way capitalism would change people’s consciousness.
You’re right there are individual anarchist Marxists, I study with one, but I guess I was referring to something more like a movement. I guess the Kurdish liberation movement kind of qualifies? Maybe my views are too west-centric.
Any recommended Proudhon I should read? Maybe take on Philosophy of Poverty before trying Marx’s response again?