Marxism is Supposed to be Normie Sh*t
I posted a new video (about this hippie rapper woman everyone is supposed to hate… yeah she’s kind of irritating but I wouldn’t have known about her if I wasn’t supposed to hate her) the other day, and I think I’ve gotten the most normal response to it I've had in a long time. In the video, I talked about how an obviously-conservative account called “Women Being Awful” is dumb, but also went on to call feminism a fandom. I said characterizing Larry David’s CNN rant calling Trump a “baby” to be a “meltdown” is stupid (his show is just him having meltdowns and it wasn’t even close), even though Larry David clearly has Trump Derangement Syndrome. I said “the left” is wrong, and I said “the right” is wrong.
Because they are both wrong. Constantly.
This would be the time to cue the left to scoot in and say, “When you say ‘both sides are bad,’ that means you’re a covert fascist” or some such nonsense. But… it didn’t happen. Instead, I’ve gotten many comments that simply agree with the analysis. People saying things that seem maybe a bit muddled by “savvy political operator” standards, not necessarily left or right. Things people actually think.
When I get this kind of response to a video, I am reminded why I am a Marxist. It’s because if one actually reads Marx (not what people who claim to love him say) one will find that it’s just grounded, material distinctions that allow us to easily map conflict on a societal level.
Karl Marx didn’t want to burn everything down and start again; he believed that society moves in stages and that class conflict progresses us through those stages. He believed people acted according to their interests and that direct material contradiction drives human ingenuity.
Marx didn’t fetishize the old ways or the lack of technology in the past; he embraced the future. He saw the potential of automation as a liberatory force and that bourgeois property relations were in the way, not the technology itself. While many today make reactionary proclamations about new technologies, they do so out of a lack of understanding that those technologies could work for them rather than against them.
For some, looking back becomes a fetish. Whether that means degrowth or hoarding old media with a bizarre sense of superiority, this lack of foresight has “somehow” become associated with “the left” and “progressives.” Honestly, this “return” mindset is a truly hilarious one, given what “progress” is meant to entail, but it is also simply the place someone has to land without material analysis.
Rather than a means to pander to popular political grievances, Karl Marx provided a method to analyze the workings of society. The things he talked about were not elevated or insane-sounding. While people love to cite the fiery sloganeering of The Communist Manifesto, the point of Marx’s work is really found elsewhere (and continued after his death by the likes of Engles, Lenin, and Dutt). Marx talked about linen and machines, workdays and ownership. He talked about the economic factors preventing true self-determination and freedom.
Ultimately, this is the most normal possible shit to care about. I just try to find things that a lot of people are talking about to attempt to express this method. Sometimes, I explicitly say, “This is Marxism,” and sometimes, I don’t. But I’m always trying to do dialectical materialism.
This is the latest attempt at that. I think it’s good. And I hope your day is, too.