The Problem of Marxism

I thought we could discuss the present state of "Marxism" as a coherent system, and what it even means to be a Marxist today.
The primary problem, as I see it, is that Marxism has taken on decidedly different meanings according to which discipline one is referring to. Marx himself was a "cross-disciplinary" thinker, and he would most likely criticize the strict division of sciences that we have today. From a contemporary view, Marxism is (at least) an economic theory, a sociological approach, a historical apparatus, and a philosophical school. Each of these disciplines have developed Marxist strands that can be independent of each other, leading to the chaos that is academic Marxism in the last few decades. While all of them have contributed valuable insights, the obvious casualty has been the conception of Marxism as a proletarian theory that informs a real communist movement. When you take away the economic and the historical aspects of it, Marxism becomes something like a liberal criticism of social relations, as was the case for many "humanist" strands of it in the West. The majority have abandoned the materialist conception of history, viewing it as a reductionist theory, and emphasize cultural, ethnic, gender etc. perspectives.

The unsettling conclusion is that Marxism has itself become part of capitalist production, when stripped of its revolutionary edges. i would guess that this is why many people choose to go back to Marxism-Leninism, searching for a genuine praxis of constructing socialism, and look at any contemporary Marxists with a suspicious eye. However, is this the best alternative? Do we have any chance uniting the multitude forms of Marxism into a unified approach?

Other urls found in this thread:

marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith4.htm.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/letters/65_01_24.htm
anarchism.pageabode.com/pjproudhon/appendix-proudhon-and-marx.html
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

The people to reject any facet of marxism don't call themselves marxists. The problem Marxism faces today is the same it has been facing since the 2nd international, on one hand you have dogmatists and on the other you have revisionists.

there are however people that have tried and are still trying to develop marxist science even further. and this is the research that's really censored by neoliberal academia, since it presents a genuine effort to evolve marxism and make it capable of facing today's post-monopoly capitalism. i'd tell you to google Viktor Vazjulin, but unless you speek german/russian or greek you won't find anything on him.

Looked and the title and was expecting some good discourse but OP went downhill real fast and at such a steep angle that I don't even know where to begin.

Anyways here's a potential appetizer I've been thinking is accurate and agree with but still rummage on: marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith4.htm.

Wanna quote something from calculation in-natura

In attacking them one should not hesitate to use the advances in other sciences
- statistical mechanics, information theory, computability theory. And, to
re-establish scientific socialism there must be a definitive break with the speculative
philosophical method of much of Western Marxism. From the time of
Marx till about the mid-twentieth century, most left intellectuals saw socialism
and science as going hand-in-hand, in some sense. Most scientists were
not socialists (though some prominent ones were), but Marxists seemed to regard
science as friendly to, or consonant with, their project, and even saw it as
their duty as materialists to keep current with scientific thought and assess its
implications for social questions.
But since some point in the 1960s or thereabouts, many if not most Western
Marxist thinkers have maintained a skeptical or hostile attitude towards
science, and have drawn by preference on (old) philosophical traditions, including
Hegelianism. It is not clear why this has occurred but these may be
some of the factors:
• The conception of science as socially embedded. Science in bourgeois
society is bourgeois science, rather than offering muh privileged access to an
independent reality. This idea was obviously present in the Proletlult
tendency criticised by Lenin, and was later expressed in Lysenkoism.
In addition there has been a conflation of science and technology in the
minds of many writers. The role of nuclear weapons no doubt played
a part in this and spilled over to a general hostility to nuclear power.
Socio-biology too, was seen as hostile to progressive social thought, so
the alliance between Marxism and Darwinism came to be weakened.
Evolutionary psychology could be seen as transparent apologetics (for
example [47]), but this blinded left thinkers to progressive Darwinists
like Dawkins[15, 14].
• Althusser, the French communist philosopherwas obviously pro-scientific
in intent, but may have unwittingly influenced many of his followers in
1This article is part of a systematic program of work aimed at contributing to this critique,
previous articles were [10, 5].
4
a contrary direction. One could easily get the impression from Althusser
that while staying too close to Hegel is an error, empiricism is a cardinal
sin. Equate empiricism and science, and you’re off to the races.
• The appropriation of the "Scientific Socialism" label by the USSR and
its official ideologists.
• The brute historical fact that while science was doing very nicely, socialism
in the West was not. Thus undermining the idea that Marxism and
science somehow marched together.
Whatever exactly is the cause, the effect is that while in the 1930s (say) one
might have expected the "typical" young Marxist intellectual to have a scientific
training – or at least to have general respect for scientific method – by
the turn of the century one would be hard pressed to find a young Marxist intellectual
(in the dominant Western countries) whose background was not in
sociology, accountancy, continental philosophy, or perhaps some "soft" (quasiphilosophical)
form of economics, and who was not profoundly skeptical of
(while also ignorant of) current science2.
Unlike that Western Marxist tradition have to treat political economy and
the theory of social revolution like any other science. We must formulate
testable hypotheses, which we then asses against empirical data. Where the
empirical results differ from what we expected, we must modify and retest our
theories3.

marxism in itself is science however, and it incorporates itself the science of the study of history, of political economy and of the formulation of class struggle. while it should be linked with other sciences (like all of them are linked with each other), marxist scientists shouldn't necessarily come from hard science backrounds. Someone who is willing to study history in a scientific dialectical method is still a scientist, he doesn't have to do string theory to be one.

this is coming from someone whos doing a phd in stem btw and also studying modern revolutionary theory

which language should I learn first?

dunno, i know greek and german

greek is pretty much useless, but some of the most important living marxist scholars atm are greek. german is more useful i believe, as for russian i know serbocroatian and i think its pretty close. i know serbo-cro isn't a hard language, so if russian is anything like it it wont be hard. german isn't hard either, greek is hard though because of the alphabet and tonal system.

i really gave you a non-answer here, sorry

to add, one of the scholars im currently following is Dimitris Patelis, however all his lectures are in greek. Was thinking of offering to translate some of them with his approval, but I really don't have the time for it. It's a waste too because many people don't understand marxism at all, even people claiming to be marxists

so is greek more valuable to learn for reading their stuff?

patelis is writing 2 books now to build on vazjulin, dunno if those will be translated in english though.

first of all tell me, whats your maternal language and are you already bilingual?