Criticism Matters

 I tried reading Karl Marx's Capital when I was eighteen. I gave up and read Nietzsche instead. I started The Communist Manifesto decades ago, but only finished it in prison. I have read a little of Trotsky, and think he would have been more dangerous than Stalin - Leon might have understood Russia needed to be capitalist before it could be Communist. I think the best critique I ran into during my life is the movie Reds when Eugene O'Neill announces all Americans want to get rich. Marx on economics has - to my understanding - impeccable credentials, the opposite of Marx the prophet. I do not think he understood human nature.

But I have to agree with Ben Burgis' Have Any of Karl Marx’s Critics Today Actually Read Him? from Jacobin Magazine:

I actually want better critics of Marxism. Everyone should want that. Anti-Marxists should want it because they clearly think criticizing “Marxism” is important — the contemporary right never shuts up about it! — and you can’t do that effectively if you don’t know what Marx’s theory of history even is. Marxists should want it because the best version of our view will come through engagement with the smartest criticisms. I want critics who can make us think hard about our premises and revise the parts that need revising. That’s how intellectual progress works.

Give me conservative intellectuals who’ve carefully read Marx — who can formulate critiques that make me squirm. I might not like it in the moment, but we’ll all benefit from the process.

Instead, we get the kind of right-wingers who say environmentalists are secret Marxists and that the crypto-Marxist plan is to make us all eat bugs for the sake of conserving the environment. Or who express confusion about why Marx and Engels talk about rapid economic development under capitalism in the Communist Manifesto. Or who think Marx thought Tsarist Russia could skip to socialism. Or who, dear God, say things like, “We’re also actually always at odds with nature and this never seems to show up in Marx.”

Real critics can serve a useful purpose. The would-be grave desecrators, though? They’re just wasting everyone’s time.

My reading when I was younger told me Stalin did not let there be real criticism of Marx. Capital was treated like a holy text. 

There is another argument against book banning: if we do not read and do not criticize, there is the chance of a stagnant culture and the likelihood of a malignant political system destroying its people.

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