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1. Ok so my real answer to this is that Marxism as a theory was designed as a critique of political economy. It's thus designed to work on a systemic scale, but tends to fall apart when applied on the individual level. There's a few good examples
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed https://twitter.com/SegaCD8/status/1327762886643605505
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed https://twitter.com/SegaCD8/status/1327762886643605505
2. of this. The first is the labor theory of value. When read in a limited, Ricardian sense, applied to the lowest level of social organization, the entire thing falls apart. On the level of the firm there's no way to get from value to price (the
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
3. famous transformation problem), which caused many economists to claim that Marxism had been refuted altogether. But there's good reason to believe that Marx never intended for it to, that value only functions on a total social level, or at the
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
4. level of the entire global economy (see Mattick's Theory as Critique). 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
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
5. exploited ect. ect. even if the truth is likely much more complicated. Class functions much the same way. There have been attempts made by Marxists to assign every person in a society a class. The Maoists did this during the socialist period
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
6. and wound up with something like 60 classes. A few of those were purely political (war hero ect) but most of them were supposed to be sociological. The system was a complete disaster and quickly devolved into a moral system instead of a
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
7. sociological one. The result was that class background, which was slippery to begin with and often included people like petty artisans as people with "bad" class background, became a kind of race system, divided into people with "red blood",
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
8. who came from a "good" class background and people with "black blood" who came from "bad" class backgrounds. This led to students with "red blood", the now privileged children of cadre, attacking students with "black blood" in the streets and
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
9. became the undercurrent of much of Cultural Revolution politics. The slipperiness of class on an individual level (Is a janitor who won the lottery still working class? What about doctors and lawyers? Managers with no firing capability?
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
10. Construction worker with a rich family? Student estranged from rich family? Retiree living off of the capital gains from their retirement funds?) makes for endless, shitty left twitter discourse, compounded by the fact that Left Twitter
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
11. doesn't care about about class in a sociological sense. What it cares about is class in a moral sense, understood through as a bunch of symbols and affects and a conception of "normal" that essentially means cis, straight, white, and abled and
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
12. almost exclusively gives you members of the labor aristocracy if it gives you workers at all. The abandonment of sociology in favor of affect also leads to an essentially right-populist or fascist conception of class in which the petty
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
13. bourgeoisie are considered to be the working class and grad students, journalists, and Hollywood (really anyone involved in cultural production except podcasters) are considered the bourgeoisie. All of this makes discussions of class or
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
14. intertwined phenomenon like looting completely insufferable (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
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
15. 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) and inhibits basic solidarity with the oppressed in favor of the oppressors.
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
Moreover, ICE must be destroyed
