woodenghost [comrade/them]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2024

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  • I totally feel and understand your frustration. Vijay Prashad is great though, isn’t he? The thing about Marxists is, that they are always pretty harsh with each other, always polemic, but still comrades in the end. So I won’t take sides against any of the people you mentioned in general but still disagree with them on certain points. I’ve read biting polemics critiquing Michael Roberts too. And Harvey’s Answer to Smith isn’t pulling punches either. I guess some stuff might have been taken out of context and he definitely spend decades teaching thousands of students Marx’s labor theory of value. I’m still thankful to Harvey for getting so many people to read Marx, even if I’ve grown beyond lots of stuff and always looked to other teachers for insight on imperialism.

    In the end, it’s not purity of theory that counts, but the impact on organizing movements. People who read theory on that level to inform their on the ground organizing efforts can definitely think for themselves anyway and will only take what is useful for their place and time and leave the rest.



  • Value and circulation. MMT is not completely wrong, it’s just incomplete. And it’s weird to see incomplete alternative economic theories pop up again and again who’s main selling point is avoiding the term Marxism. Keynesianism is another example. And there was this weird phase in US anarchism, where a whole lot of anarcho-capitalists finally started becoming anti-capitalist (which is good of course) and they wrote a whole book about it like they just personally came up with the idea capitalism is bad for the first time ever. And it’s weird every time because, like, Marx is right over there, way, way in the back of the economics departments library. Ready to be read whenever you decide to become a serious scientist.

    Even David Harvey started out like this. He just started calling himself a Marxist after people had repeatedly pointed out to him that he had become one. And his response was something like like:“Oh, I guess I am a Marxist then. I didn’t set out to become one, I was just looking for theory that makes sense for a change.”

    Of course, most economists would do everything to avoid being called a Marxist in order to keep their funding. And that’s where things like MMT come in.