I wanted to know why you swear off Marx and the Marxist intellectual tradition. There are certainly aspects of Marxist thought that are authoritarian, as you have suggested in the past, but the different parts of Marxism are so variegated as to make an all-out repudiation appear confusing. For instance, Althusser's work (such as in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" or his non-essentialist overdetermination) seems extremely relevant to you in its consideration that class struggle occurs not merely on the material "economic" level, but rather takes place at every level and in every part of society. To not engage with the tradition in general seems like rejecting the entirety of phenomenology because Heidegger was a Nazi. But perhaps I'm missing something.
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Hi Nathan, thanks for this.
I wanted to know why you swear off Marx and the Marxist intellectual tradition. There are certainly aspects of Marxist thought that are authoritarian, as you have suggested in the past, but the different parts of Marxism are so variegated as to make an all-out repudiation appear confusing. For instance, Althusser's work (such as in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" or his non-essentialist overdetermination) seems extremely relevant to you in its consideration that class struggle occurs not merely on the material "economic" level, but rather takes place at every level and in every part of society. To not engage with the tradition in general seems like rejecting the entirety of phenomenology because Heidegger was a Nazi. But perhaps I'm missing something.
If this is still a problem you're considering, I'd suggest reading Humanism and Terror by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (https://bookshop.org/books/humanism-and-terror-an-essay-on-the-communist-problem/9780807002773), which does a really good job of articulating the difficulty of "means vs ends." If you have read the book, what was your reaction to it?
Thanks, and keep up the great work with Current Affairs!
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