The Real Karl Marx

[ashling]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/may/09/real-karl-marx/

The view of Marx as a contemporary whose ideas are shaping the modern world has run its course and it is time for a new understanding of him as a figure of a past historical epoch, one increasingly distant from our own: the age of the French Revolution, of Hegel’s philosophy, of the early years of English industrialization and the political economy stemming from it.

[immoderate]

1. He's a contemporary of Charles Darwin, who's also out of style...

--imm

[Recursion]

5. Well, in a lot of specifics, yes.

The basic idea of evolution by variation and natural selection is solid, but nearly every specific thing Darwin said has been "refined" beyond recognition since then (remember, Darwin had no theory of genetics whatsoever).

Marx is in some ways a worse position. While the notion of an empirical rather than documentary history is still important, the specific form of a phenomenological dialectic of human spirit is so quaint as to not even merit treatment anymore (witness how few students today read that part of his books anymore, despite how central they are to his arguments).

[leftstreet]

2. Yeah, because Capitalism is dead, too

In the modern world we don't sell our labor in order to survive

[killbotfactory]

3. capitalism has solved the problem of exploitation, labor, and crisis

by furthering the problem exploitation, labor, and crisis indefinitely.

[dimbear]

4. Das Kapital came out in 1867. That's a long time removed from the French revolution.

I wonder if he meant the commune.

??

[Recursion]

6. Marx's philosophical basis comes out of Hegel's critique of Kant

It's kind of a shame that people don't read that part of Marx's work anymore, though as the author is pointing out it's basically in a nearly-inaccessible conceptual language. Do you believe in a transcendental dialectic and a phenomenology of the human spirit? Do you even think those are worthwhile concepts? If not, the actual underlying argument of Marx will make no sense to you.

[hfojvt]

7. well at least he is still celebrated

on cinco de Mayo