:marx-joker:

This is worth plugging wherever possible. The entire idea of “phases of development” that a society passes through, as well as Engels’ economic analysis of the family, is based on the disreputable source of LHM.

Yeah, this one’s on the money. That said, I think I’m still going to call myself an anarchist, and even participate in anarchist discourses.

Here’s why: I don’t think anarchism has very much theory as anarchism. Its a lot of very convincing rhetoric built on other people’s theory. Emma Goldman for example came from the Pale of Settlement, where there was a Jewish tradition of mutual aid, parallel power structures, fighting the police, etc. Then she read neitschze, Marx, Thereau, befriended Margaret Sanger (Goldman was a Eugenecist, all your faves are problematic), and participated in queer poly relationships and the labor movement. Her writings are reflective of those theories and lived practices, not of a specifically anarchist discourse, the way we could talk about Mao’s writing as being within a specifically Marxist discourse (although we could go into Mao’s readings of the anarchists, Buddhists, Confuscians, European enlightenment figures and complicate the issue.)

If you look at modern anarchism, it’s the same. People aren’t quoting Reclusée or Kropotkin for the most part, they’re reading the feminists, indigenous studies, and the post structuralists. Anarchism isn’t so much a set of theories but a way of approaching other social theories.

And again, I could complicate this by looking at report backs and zines on tactics and the ongoing shifting approach to activism in anarchist circles, but that’s another story that I haven’t put in conversation with the one i told yet.

Not surprised by this video, Marx thought that reports on native Americans were a window into how Europe was before the medieval age, which could not be determined properly because of the amount of historical ideological bullshit “historians” registered. The same way that he said once that to know how the medieval age was structured it was better to look at japan, rather than read historians of the day, in this sense, they were important, nothing else. And the notion that Marx somehow had his ideas based on these reports is right down laughable, this guy is speaking as if almost everything Marx thought wasn’t the adaptation, subversion, or repurposing of the ideas other people had, the falling of the rate of profit, alienation, materialism, his value theory, dictatorship of the proletariat, communism, all rescued and then corrected from a different thinker who wrote a good thing or two and bullshited his way through the rest of his career.

Marx wasn’t a singular great man, whc by the will of his genius came up with a new way of organizing society, like this board belives, he was the culmination on an entire movement, at the crossroads of multiple branches of through, used for the interest of workers, all of which existed before, and after that bloody book.

Well, I know what I’m linking to every person I talk to for the next 6 months.