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I know that maybe is a bit OT here, but I cannot wrap my head, after seeing communists argue on /r/wikipedia (that, as the wiki itself, is full of radical leftists arguing inside) about communism.
When I think how Marxism was gladly embraced by èlites in the West, and, after the fall of the URSS, the more anglocentric progressive one that took his side, it makes me think about the type of people that embrace it.
As Zagrebbi argue here https://salafisommelier.substack.com/p/a-robin-hanson-perspective-on-the Marxism is really the Platonic Realm of wordcellery!
All arguments, apart from being factually false, are reduced not on "policy" or "government", but on words, and how to define words, how to use words in a different manner, how words can be used in different ways, how different ideologies are different because "words" says so. A typical argument goes like this: "Communism is good because, unlike Fascism or whatever else, has a good objective. The objective is good because Communism say so. Different types of Communism are born from different interpretation of Communism, who are not all good (choose here if we are talking about Stalin, Social Democracy, Left Liberalism, Anarchism, Maoism etc) because they did not adhere to the ideal definition of Communism, and everyone who does not produce a good result has secretly bad objectives or it was a Fascist all along"
Obviously I am paraphrasing an hypotetical argument of an hypotetical communist, so I am really fighting against a non-entity here. But I saw enough debates that I could crystallise it in few phrases, and understand that the marxist galaxy today has been reduced to discussions about hypoteticals and fandoms, as if it was Fanfiction.net or Archive of Our Own. Gone are the immense volumes of marxist economy or revolutionary action, in autistic dissertation on good end evil. Or maybe not, and I do not have enough knowledge of historical marxist politics, maybe they were like this all along, but I refuse to believe that communists won for decades using this kind of reasoning.
It is not surprising why Wokism had an evolutionary advantage on post-URSS marxism. All of this autism is pretty ick, it works on Reddit but not on real life, because every normal person can smell with a bullshit detector that this lines are actively trying to scam you as a North African reseller on an Italian beach. Wokism is better as an ideology because it refuses, partially, to play words. Patriarchy and Europeans are not evil because machiavellian people have tried to derail the progressive project, and our objective is to clean it arguing that, no, whoever did something bad was actively trying to sabotage the Real Meaning of Patriarchy. No, they are evil because of biology/social constructs and they deserve suffering. Autistic screeching and wordcelism do not play well with modern political coalition and the Schmittian Friend/Enemy distinction, and they also makes the women have the ick and the supporters smells like Redditors!
A lot of people love to criticize Marx without actually having read him. You and this sub-stacker included. Where does Marx ever support wokeness in his writings? Capital was a critique of capitalism and the social systems that it encourages that is largely correct. I have yet to hear an actually convincing critique of commodity fetishism or the labour theory of value that isn't a nitpick. Western leftists don't actually want to read Marx (because he is hard), nor do they seriously want to implement his ideas (also hard, and never successfully done, you can complain all you want about me pulling out the "not real communism" card, but the Soviet Union and China very clearly still engaged in capitalistic commodity production, which Marx would have criticized).
If Marxism does not work in practice, it doesn't matter how elegantly his theory is postulated: no more than we don't have to read Mein Kampf to present a convincing rebuttal of Nazism.
As for commodity fetishism and LTV, why do people want to buy Belle Delphine's gamer girl bathwater? Subjective theory of value (STV) is that it is not labor or the raw materials that determine the price of the good, but the people buying and selling. Can Marx explain the used panties market? The collectable card market? Not without extensive academic arm-twisting or moralistic dismissal.
If you were waiting for the right moment to add a flair, this is your moment.
Noted.
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