Dubious wrote: ↑Mon Jul 21, 2025 6:48 am
Response from Gemini: Is Marx still important?
### 1. Enduring Critique of Capitalism
“Capitalism” is a fake. There’s no such thing.
The “-ism” marks it as an attempt to make commerce into an ideology, as if people could, so to speak, have a philosophy or religion of “capital.”
The word did not actually even exist prior to just a couple of years before Marx wrote. (Etymologists agree that it was the middle of the 19th Century, at the earliest. There had long been the word “capital,” as referring to available monies of various kinds. But no “Capital
ism." I haven’t discovered that Marx himself invented it, but he certainly appropriated it very early in its history, when it was hardly even circulating. Before that, there simply was no such concept as an “-ism” of surplus value. And I suggest to you that there wasn’t any such reality, either. And there isn’t one today.
Unlike Marxism, this “Capitalism” thing has no manifesto, like The Communist Manifesto. Nobody “believes in” capital. It has no teleological or utopian dream, either…no particular precepts, no societies dedicated to it, no political program, and no acolytes. There’s no central figure of this “Capitalism,” like Marx or Engels. In fact, this so-called ideology has none of the basic features of ideology at all. It seems to catch together disparate economic strategies, the sole common feature of which is that they create economic growth of some kind, are not Socialist. We might instead use the word “profit,” or “commerce” or “value-added,” or some such synonym that does not imply an ideology, and we’d be more accurate.
So here’s the best hypothesis: “Capitalism” is a Socialist bogeyman, not a real thing. Marx needed it, because he was seeking to characterize the economic landscape as a war between two ideologies, rather than a market system. This had two effects he needed: one, it provided an imaginary object of hatred upon which Socialist ideologues could focus their ire, and two, it made the manifestly ideological and aspirational nature of Socialism not obviously a flaw anymore — it redescribed the situation as a competition between two
ideologies, rather than between one ideology and all free-market kinds of options.
Many of Marx's core observations about capitalism continue to resonate in the 21st century.
* **Inequality and Exploitation:** Marx's analysis of class struggle, surplus value, and the exploitation of labor still provides a powerful lens for examining the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
It never worked out where Marx insisted it would and should. It was, in particular, England, and also possibly continental places like Germany. And Marx is very clear on the sequence: his industrial “Capitalism” is suppose to be the prerequisite, in fact the dynamic, that issues in the revolution, and then in Socialism, which later converts into the Communist utopia. It is the dialectical contradictions within “Capitalist” society which are supposed to make Socialism inevitable, historically unavoidable, and expedient.
But when the alleged “workers’ revolutions” came about, it was in two places about which Marx had not predicted anything, and in contradiction to his theory of dialectical progress. It happened first in the feudal-monarchial Russia, and then in the peasant-rich land of China, and without any “Capitalist” phase at all. In Germany, which was developed, it was National Socialism that emerged, not International Socialism (Communism). In fact, the defeat of Marx’s expectations was so complete that it gave rise to a thing called “The Frankfurt School,” a collocation of disappointed Socialist philosophers, who had to reinvent Marx’s whole analysis, using other categories than “class” to explain the same aspirational and teleological outcomes. This “school” later migrated to America, to Columbia University in particular, and from there established the Neo-Marxist ideology which is the only kind of Communist ideology that today’s informed Marxists find at all defensible.
This is why Marx is, today, by his own followers, relegated to being viewed as “Crude Marxism,” by which they mean, “a kind of Marxism that was admittedly flawed and needed revision, so we don’t have to defend what Marx taught in specific anymore.” If Marxists today had to defend his views on their historical merit, they wouldn’t last long — and I think their revisions make it quite evident that they know that’s the case.
* **Economic Instability:** Marx saw capitalism as a system prone to internal crises.
The insight that global economic dynamics are volatile is perhaps the least impressive of Marx’s achievements. Unfortunately for him, what has proved to be even more volatile is Communism, which has literally destroyed every economy it has been allowed to control, and has issued in piles of corpses orders of magnitude higher than created by any other single cause.
Yes, global economics are difficult. Not an amazing surprise. But Marx had no solutions to that problem, at least none that aren’t worse than the disease.
* **Alienation:** His concept of "alienation" describes how workers can feel disconnected from their labor, the products they create, and from each other. This idea is still used to discuss the psychological and social effects of modern work life, where people may feel powerless and detached from the purpose of their jobs.
Ah, this is where we get to Marx’s anthropological problems.
He didn’t understand people. He said they “self-actualize through praxis,” and that their ultimate nature is as a kind of
homo faber or
homo laborans. The failure to be placed in the right kind of labour, was, Marx thought, the source of his alienation and dehumanization.
Of course, he was quite wrong. Men do not gratuitously leap into labour of various kinds, even the kinds they may like. A labour is hard, and people tend to avoid it, especially when things can be had for free. And the kind of Communist vision for the welfare of a grand abstraction like “society” is not at all why people work: they work because they have to, to provide for themselves, their loved ones, and their families.
Labour doesn’t humanize people. People are born human, and do what humans do. And human nature isn’t at all what Marx thought it was.
### 2. Influence on Social Sciences and Humanities
Beyond economics, Marx's ideas have had a profound and lasting impact on multiple academic disciplines.
That Marx has had an impact is the very saddest thing we could say about Socialism. It’s completely ruined the academic world of the modern West, polluting it with absurd, non-disciplinary pseudo-studies, such as “Theory and Criticism,” or “Women’s/Queer/Gender/Educational Studies.” That the universities are today in a crisis of credibility with the public is largely due to the non-functional and ideologically-indoctrinatory state in which they presently are. People don’t want to pay for a non-education plus identity confusion plus debt plus no marketable skills. It’s not a good package for anybody’s children.
### 3. Impact on Political and Social Movements
While the revolutionary communism he envisioned has not been widely adopted in its pure form, his ideas continue to inspire a range of political and social movements.
I was wrong, perhaps. THIS is the most lamentable achievement of Socialism: the poisoning of everybody’s political projects with the toxic slop of Socialist idealizations. The “Woke” movement in politics, for those who know, is a thoroughly Neo-Marxist project: a late attempt to produce the destruction of the status quo and the necessary “revolution” that Marx predicted but did not get. There is now almost no polity that can legislate or make policies on purely pragmatic, or economic, or realistic grounds, because the public (what Lenin called “the useful idiots” — Marxists notoriously praise the public as “workers” but despise them as a mass), but in order to avoid agitating the prejudices (about sex, race, quotas, colonialism, etc.) of the voters, they find it expedient to include in every policy, every action, every decision, some sort of concession to virtue signalling that will prevent Neo-Marxists from raising a frenzy.
Good examples are the complete paralysis over immigration in Europe, or over child abuse in England, or over hiring of competent air pilots and of fair college admissions in America. The powers that be are unable to deal with these problems, out of sheer terror of being categorized in the public imagination as “phobic” or “oppressive” in one way or another.
Again, that’s due to Marx.
* **Social Justice Activism:** Concepts like class struggle and the analysis of systemic oppression have influenced movements advocating for racial, gender, and economic justice, providing a vocabulary and framework for critiquing deep-seated inequalities.
Absolutely this is Marx’s fault. Absolutely.
For example, all the founders of BLM openly declared themselves as “trained Marxists.” Most of the “useful idiots” they mobilized, though, had little awareness of that: they thought it was about getting them some kind of fairness, or advocating for a dead fentanyl user they had elevated to godhood. It wasn’t. It was about advancing the Marxist agenda. They just weren’t being told.
But ask yourself: in which of the neighbourhoods in which the Neo-Marxists riots were organized did things become better afterward? Which poor, black folks found more grocery stores in their area afterward, or had better access to public services, or saw any part of the billions of dollars that were flushed into that organization? And the answer, you know: zero. It was never about “justice” at all: it was about the “social” bit.
What’s the difference, you may ask? Good question. Real “justice” is simple to define: everybody gets exactly what they deserve. But “social justice” is not that. “Social justice” means you have to give me control of your society, on the promise that I will make changes that will create “just” conditions for you, one day, if you trust me, and if we destroy the entire cultural inheritance upon which we both presently stand (we cannot “collude” with or “perpetuate” an “oppressive system,” you see), and if you let me reconstruct your society as my utopian project.
In other words, yes, “social justice” is Marxist to the core. And wide open to the uses of power-hungry ideologues who want to use it to seize control and remake society in the way they’d like. This, again, is from the legacy of Marx.
Which is why I think Marx deserves serious consideration as the most wicked man who has ever lived. If we judge by the number of people his followers have killed, the number of places they have destroyed, the number of economies they’ve crashed, the number of institutions they have completely ruined, and the sheer amount of human misery proceeding from that one source, we’d have to say that Marx is peerless. Nobody’s done so much evil.
Thanks for your list. I imagine you probably just clipped it from somewhere, but it provides a fine opportunity to fill out the record. I only wish more people knew this stuff.
