#1 https://nitter.net/Itmechr3/status/1327814014630584320
#2 https://nitter.net/OneiricCanid/status/1295866346727710726
#3 https://nitter.net/Lynxgespuis/status/1327824748550770692
Where do you even begin with some of this? It’s all so mangled and stupid.
Some greatest hits from these:
The problem is that as a propaganda tool the labor theory of value needs to function at an individual level so you can tell a worker that their surplus value is being exploited ect. ect. even if the truth is likely much more complicated. Class functions much the same way.
I’ve seen like 14 different theoretical explanations claiming to be from the left for why it’s actually good when store owners shoot looters, including my favorite "Korean store owners weren’t actually shooting at Black looters to kill them and besides this whole thing is a distraction from fighting the white ruling class
Left Twitter doesn’t care about about class in a sociological sense. What it cares about is class in a moral sense
the Marxist definition of “Bourgeoisie” is not the colloquial one.
You need class consciousness before a Marxist analysis of class can be helpful.
the idea of surplus value has also seemed largely pointless in a world filled with jobs which don’t actually contribute to material production
I still have no idea what they are talking about. What the hell is this nonsense.
I think they’re referencing other criticisms of Marxism they’ve heard of though out it, but they don’t explain anything and I’m skeptical about the 60 classes in Maoism thing, for instance. It reads like a long run-on sentence generated by a GPT-3 bot almost. I don’t think they actually care expressing their idea here, they seem much too sure of themselves to bother.
I disagree with whatever small points I could make out of it. The main point about Marxism not being 100% accurate at the individual scale for everyone sounds reasonable until one realizes they’re making an argument that class, relationship to the means of production, etc. almost don’t exist and they’d have a hard time labeling even someone like Trump as bourgeoisie because of it. Class is actually pretty simple and powerful as an explanation of how capitalist politics works, so for them to reject that for some ultra-individualistic anarchist, almost post-modern, nonsense is just stupid. The marxist definition of class relating to their relation to the means of production lays out why worker and employer have opposing politics, which we can see is obviously the case, while they’d struggle to prove even that with their model that cares only to label everyone as unique individuals who can’t be labeled.
A lot of it reads like they didn’t even try to understand Marxism and at best read a bunch of Libcom and bourgeois criticisms of it.