@nikolademitri731

3 years ago

Fascinating shit, I really enjoyed this a lot. I’m not sure I completely agree with all the conclusions, particularly the “don’t be a Marxist” part, but there’s a lot of value here. I definitely agree with actually using dialectical materialism today, and not being dogmatic in “one’s Marxism”, lost in the past, but I don’t see how we go from that to just not “being a Marxist”. I guess with that part it all comes down to what one means when they say they are a Marxist, and what Zižek means, etc.. I want to spell this out a bit, bc I think it actually matters, and maybe someone can help me understand how I’m not getting it, if they disagree. It’s like, I call myself a Christian, because I have faith in the person who was Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, but what I mean when I say that, and what most of my family members mean, are VERY different things, which really are only connected to each other via Christ. I’m very influenced by Tolstoy, Christian Anarchism, Cornel West, and a more radical Christian tradition, and conceptualize my actual faith most closely to how Kierkegaard explained faith; I’m an anti-fundamentalist, as I think a fundamentalist reading of the Bible makes no sense in just about every way you could cut it, and I think fundamentalism, in general, can only be maintained through a fervent dogmatism, and is actually contradictory to Christ. (I could go deep into that, logically and theologically, but that’s not my purpose here.) My family is the polar opposite, dogmatic and fundamentalist, with a view of the Bible as inerrant (KJV, of course), and of course believing Genesis literally is ESSENTIAL to them, otherwise Christ means nothing (so Adam and Eve literally happened, and the universe is only thousands of years old). Several of those in my family simply view me as a heretic, as someone who can’t possibly “be saved”, because I break from a form of their tradition that can’t be broken from while continuing to actually be that tradition... One might call me, “a revisionist”, though in reality that’s of course what all modern Christians are to some extent, bc the interpretations and theology has expanded and contracted and evolved over 2000 years... So... um, you see where I’m going with this? Marxism is definitely younger, not even 200 years old, but I hope people see the parallels I’m trying to draw here (of course I could have used something other than Christianity, and I’m not saying they’re perfectly paralleled, for obvious reasons). Point is, there isn’t a singular MARXISM, just like there isn’t a singular CHRISTIANITY, just like there isn’t a singular.. well, almost any kind of ethos, system of thought, and so on. There isn’t even just one singular NAZISM ffs, though the difference there is that all Nazism(s) are trash. Given all this, why stop being a Marxist, full stop? I mean, I’m not JUST a Marxist, just like I’m not JUST a Christian, just like I’m not JUST humanist, or JUST a queer, etc, and so on.. For me, it makes far more sense to just say, “give up dogmatism”, or any kind of dogmatic thinking, in general. You want to be a Marxist, fine, but don’t get so bogged down in theory from the past that it clouds your understanding of the future. Instead, discard what doesn’t make sense in 2021 given the change in material condition, and the last 170+ years of history, and keep using the tools for analysis that continue to make sense. To me, there’s something almost hypocritical about saying everything up until the point of, “don’t be a Marxist”, all that useful stuff about remembering what year it is, and what the material conditions are, but then saying, “now, don’t be a Marxist”... Idk, maybe it’s meant to provoke, or sound more radical, or something. I get lost on that, as anyone who’s read this far can see. Now, you can tell me what I’m missing or why I’m wrong. ✌️❤️🏴♾

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