Leftist Reading: Post-Scarcity Anarchism Part 11

Episode 131:This week we’re continuing with Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin.You can find the book here:https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post-scarcity-anarchism-book[Part 1 - 4]Post-Scarcity AnarchismEcology and Revolutionary Thought[Part 5 - 8]Towards a Liberatory Technology[Part 9 - 10]The Forms of Freedom-The Mediation of Social Relations[Part 11 - This Week]Listen, Marxist! - 0:29-The Historical Limits of Marxism - 11:15[Part 12 - 15]Listen, Marxist!Footnotes:38) 7:23These lines were written when the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) exercised a great deal of influence in SDS. Although the PLP has now lost most of its influence in the student movement, the organization still provides a good example of the mentality and values prevalent in the Old Left. The above characterization is equally valid for most Marxist-Leninist groups, hence this passage and other references to the PLP have not been substantially altered. 39) 8:19The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, part of the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers.40) 12:34Marxism is above all a theory of praxis, or to place this relationship in its correct perspective, a praxis of theory. This is the very meaning of Marx’s transformation of dialectics, which took it from the subjective dimension (to which the Young Hegelians still tried to confine Hegel’s outlook) into the objective, from philosophical critique into social action. If theory and praxis become divorced, Marxism is not killed, it commits suicide. This is its most admirable and noble feature. The attempts of the cretins who follow in Marx’s wake to keep the system alive with a patchwork of emendations, exegesis, and half-assed “scholarship” à la Maurice Dobb and George Novack are degrading insults to Marx’s name and a disgusting pollution of everything he stood for. 41) 14:41In fact Marxists do very little talking about the “chronic [economic] crisis of capitalism” these days—despite the fact that this concept forms the focal point of Marx’s economic theories.Citations:28) 5:05Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 2, p. 318