Marxism, what you got?

[Rev. Rye]

I actually had a philosophy teacher who claimed that Marx was probably the most misunderstood thinker since Jesus Christ, possibly worse because Marx actually had to spend decades realizing that people were misunderstanding his arguments before he actually got around to dying. Admittedly, there is a huge spectrum of beliefs considered Marxism, partly because of Marx’ beliefs evolving over time and partly because of thinkers like Lenin and Mao fucking with his ideology to make it fit the square peg of his ideology with the round hole of pre-industrial societies like Russia or China, but the way I understand it, the core is: the workers own the means of production. Not the bosses, not the financiers, those who actually do the work.

And, of course, in some circles, it’s come to mean roughly, “anything a few angstroms to the left of whatever chimera of Gilead, Galt’s Gulch, and whatever dystopia based around a cult of personality you can think of that starts with the letter
G that the conservatives want. And that’s horrible.”