#108 Marx's Critique of Politics - Part 1
This week Grant from Swampside Chats and his friend David Rylance to the show to discuss Gary Teeples really brilliant book: “Marx’s Critique of Politics’. This is the first of a three parter, the last installment of which will be a patreon episode. Teeple’s book is really a Marxist tour de force in my opinion, and all good Marxists looking at the tawdry state of left politics today would do well to read it. We go off on a Brexit/UK Election tangent in this episode, but don’t worry, we return with great unfettered force to the main seam in the following parts.
Comments (6)
PDF of what is being discussed would be a nice companion :P
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fUkN3zuhP0BTDiO70znM8JLf4ulcSmsh/view
I listened to this episode, am intrigued... but I feel like I still have no idea what Marx’s critique of politics is. Hopefully there’s more on this in later episodes.
More in the next episode, and appreciate the interest. But the hope with something like this, for me at least, is less to lay out comprehensively something Marx articulates better than I could and more to poke at that interest and hopefully provoke reading of the “early” works — not as Marxology for political communists to perfect, either, but hopefully as something valuable among people who might be questioning what they really get out of loyalty to the left who are looking for a framework that allows them to maintain a commitment to emancipatory aims in and *through* their rejection of fidelity to the left, instead of merely swinging right or “Post” left. That all said, Tad Tietze’s written a good book on contemporary antipolitics that should come out this year with Verso, and I’m sure someone will take on the project of bridging Teeple’s period of study with the rest of Marx’s work some day.
I'm afraid I'm yet to gain much understanding out of anti-politics stuff beyond "we need the social [first]" and "people hate politics atm", and taking those points very seriously (which is valuable for sure). Every specific point made seems to fall into one or the other. The points about Trump and the UK seem to just be comments on a socially detached bourgeois political theatre from an anti-politics lens. Also someone must have written on this stuff between Marx & The Other Guy and Tietze, surely.
I think it is telling that the critique of politics stuff of Marx is only really seeing the light of day, now that Leninism has fallen flat, people are drifting away from both Trotsky and anarchism and that social democracy has shown itself to be not able to withstand the falling rate of profit. I think the vast majority of the left doesn't take this point seriously at all....