They must give up on Karl Marx
A problem (another problem) with the left is that they keep going back — wave after “New Left” wave — back to Karl Marx.
Stop already. The Great Theorist was wrong about his interpretation of history, wrong about his labor theory of value, wrong about the “agency of social change” (industrial proletariat), wrong about the materialist dialectic, wrong about the goal of the movement (universal socialization of the major means of production). He was right about his critique of the capitalist system, but that’s kind of a no-brainer for any leftist.
The new New Left reads Jacobin Magazine. Their stuff finagling Marx’s “essence” can give a person a belly-ache:
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/birthday-old-man-karl-marx-later-years
The guy was wrong about most things. Old Karl was a huge fan of Lincoln’s Civil War. Never in a million years would he understand something like this:
or this:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29070769-emancipation-hell
Emancipation, yes. But as a military measure during a cruel war of invasion? Slavery once existed throughout the Western Hemisphere, but almost everywhere except the United States, it ended peacefully. Emancipation with no thought or plan for the unprecedented situation to be managed? With no real sympathy or interest in the people freed except their usefulness in controlling and exploiting the conquered South? Perhaps never in history, Kirkpatrick Sale demonstrates, has a benevolent act been so tainted with impure motives and disdain of consequences. Abraham Lincoln has a lot to answer for, says the author. His flawed proclamation doomed Americans to a century and a half of racial conflict and disparity that is still with us.
