Comradeship // Freechat @lemmygrad.ml proletarian_girlboss @lemmygrad.ml 1 yr. ago

Favorite authors

They not have to be marxist specifically, but all of mine are. My favorites are: Walter Rodney, Lenin, Anuradha Ghandy and Vijay Prishad. I have been thinking of Red Star Over the Third World again recently, and I may decide to reread it soon.

You're viewing a single thread.

22 comments

Bordiga was a pure genius, but it's quite a difficult read because of his idiosyncratic writing.

Among the non Marxists, I like Polanyi a lot.
- Bold to imply that Polanyi was not a Marxist. Certainly not an orthodox Marxist, to be fair. But due to McArthyism he had to use a lot of euphemisms for more explicitly Marxist terms (I remember reading that he had to live in Canada and commute into the USA to teach because his wife was a radical forbidden from entering the US).
  
  Further, Polanyi's concepts of embeddedness and the indeterminacy of capital became pivotal to the Marxist labour process theorist like Braverman and Burawoy. You can't read a single Marxist anthropology paper without seeing Polanyi's influence either, he is thoroughly a part of the Marxist anthro / soci canon.
  
  Yes, Polanyi was not a Marxist, and literally nobody would say he was. He had distanced himself from Marxism at a personal level after an initial flirtation with it in his youth. Polanyi turned away from Marxism in the years leading up to the First World War.
  
  Certainly, he was somewhat of a socialist, though his theory differed significantly from Marxism. His theory revolved around conflict, similar to Marx's theory; however, the terms, dynamics, and mechanisms were all distinct. Upon rereading "The Great Transformation," it becomes clear that the second Karl (Polanyi) had deviated considerably from the first Karl's (Marx) fundamental insights on various critical points: the emergence of capitalism, the origins of the Industrial Revolution, the dialectics of commodification, the exploitation of labor, concepts of value and money, class power, and class struggle.
  
  Some Marxist authors were indeed inspired by Polanyi, as with the already mentioned Burawoy, Nancy Fraser, etc. However, that doesn't retroactively make Polanyi a Marxist. Aside from that, Polanyi was very religious; he converted to Protestantism and remained a Christian for the rest of his life. He leaned much more towards being "communitarian" than "communist".
  
  edit: https://sandbroo.faculty.politics.utoronto.ca/why-polanyi-and-not-marx/ here's a text with a better explanation.
  
  Thanks for the fact-check.
- i like your choices. I'd love to see how Bordiga reads in italian tho

You've viewed 22 comments.