Marxism is a critique of capitalism, but not my critique of it. <\/p>\n
I’m not a Marxist for one simple reason. <\/p>\n
A Marxist wants you to think of yourself as a worker, and to stand in class solidarity with other workers–Unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains, and all that. <\/p>\n
The problem with this formulation, from my perspective, is that identifying as a worker means you already identify with the conditions of your enslavement–you accept that you are<\/em> a slave, to the wage at least, even if as is likely you commit to changing that grim reality in some way. <\/p>\n This may very well be a much more realistic view of things than my own. <\/p>\n I accept the costs involved in my deficit of realism. <\/p>\n I do live under a system that runs on coerced labor, and legalized enslavement. <\/p>\n I have spent years picking massa’s cotton and that’s the truth. <\/p>\n A Marxist would say that running away from the plantation and into employment at a machine shop in Detroit is an act of progress toward freedom. <\/p>\n I see Alabama chains and Michigan chains and I can’t tell the difference. My eyes, you see, not so good.<\/p>\n His vision is acute, hopeful, and aspirational. <\/p>\n Mine is chronic, static and merely poetical.<\/p>\n We both hold stock in the revolution, and maybe even have faith in its promise. <\/p>\n He just wants to get there by seizing control of the means of production. <\/p>\n Whereas I want the buffalo back, and all the Cambodians and Iraqi children and the girls who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire to be resurrected into a paradise earth where rulers are extinct instead of polar bears. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Marxism is a critique of capitalism, but not my critique of it. I’m not a Marxist for one simple reason. A Marxist wants you to think of yourself as a worker, and to stand in class solidarity with other workers–Unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains, and all that. The problem with this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4891"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4892,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4891\/revisions\/4892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}