cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/26974766
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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He worked for various newspapers and published a bunch of books.
But he never worked a typical proletarian job
How many other economists worked typical proletarian jobs?
Five. Six if you count Adam Smith
What's that a reference to?
Also Adam Smith was a college professor, that's not a typical proletarian job.
People who went to college in the 17 and 1800s and had the means to gather data aren't the sort to have typical proletarian jobs.
It doesn't reference to anything, I'm just fooling around. But to enter serious mode: It doesn't matter how many economists worked a proletarian job. The point is that Marx made statements about the proletariat without experiencing it or doing field studies. Neither did I btw but Simone Weil wrote a great critique of Marx. For example Marx thought that the most oppressed are the ones most likely to begin a revolution which is wrong. The most exploited don't have the energy to do anything after work. This doesn't destroy the Marxist framework, obviously. Later Marxists made up for this, like the Marxist feminism which also rectified that Marx only had men in mind. There are eco Marxists applying the framework to a topic, neither him nor his contemporaries had in mind.
To position myself: I'm not a Marxist but I find myself aligning with some Marxists more than others. I'm a huge fan of John the Duncan for example.
Every economist has made statements about the proletariat, how could you write any economic work without including the working class?
But also Marx was around during 1848 and went to Paris in the wake of the Paris Commune, he wasn't Che or Stalin, but he certainly wasn't sitting in an ivory tower writing theories without any input from the reality on the ground.
No, Marx thought the industrial working class were the ones most likely to begin a revolution, as opposed to the farmers who (in france, britain, and germany) were much more atomized due to their means of production, which was accurate to France and Germany, though South America, Russia, China, and Korea all proved that the peasant class had revolutionary potential.
Marx's framework was examining society from a materialist lens, specifically related to the means of production to understand things, as opposed to idealism; a Marxist historian analyzing the french revolution focuses on the contradiction between the bourgeoisie's economic power and the aristocracy's power within the government. A non-marxist focuses on the personalities of individuals involved and the ideas they professed rather than structures. To paraphrase Engels mocking Great Man Theory, it's a shame Steve Jobs wasn't born in ancient Egypt, then we could have had iPhones 4,000 years ago.
When something is labeled marxist feminism, it's not adding feminism to marxism, it's applying a marxist analysis to feminism.