Nathan Robinson instructs us

Last week we got Nathan Robinson's deboonk of the Marxist University. Most academics don't bother with Marx as an economist. The academy instead is centre-left. Therefore everything is fine. Those dumb MAGAts are just shouting at clouds. Because they're stupid.

I can strawman with the best of 'em.

I suppose I'll start with my pat distinction between the Marxian and the Marxist. The Marxian uses Marx's dialectic and consciousness of class struggle as tools, for historiographic models. Bernard Lewis, for one, was a Marxian; maybe we all are. The Marxist takes Marx seriously that "surplus value" is a problem which an economic policy can, or should, solve. The latter are few among smart people. This much, Robinson gets right.

An intellectual Right does exist; this Right holds a pedigree that gives to the dead a vote. Robinson pretends he's somewhere in the centre. To that: the Right argues that the Right is the centre; as Yarvin once put it, Hobbes belongs on the Left (and Locke needs to be hanged next to Cromwell). Surely among Robinson's peers are those who can teach him that extremism depends on where you sit. Claiming your own stance as the baseline is an act of smuggery.

Robinson ends with the Right's dismissal of the Left's Marxian oppressed / oppressor dynamic. He thinks this is his kill-shot - that the Right doesn't care! A better Marxian response would be to step back and consider that the Right might consider other groups who are being oppressed, for whom their sympathies are more directed. Victims of "crime" for instance, where the regnant party has chosen to ignore it. The Right proposes that unpunished crime represents policy. It was not the Wehrmacht who enacted the Night Of Crystals; in Robinson's world, does that absolve the German state?

Robinson may have a point that mainline American Conservatives don't have the belly to draw these lines. But... how well would a Moldbug perform in Robinson's woke madrassa?

THAT LAST LINK 5/28: In case you were wondering why I entered Pinker's "defense" into evidence for the prosecution: Kaus. Those on the "rational right" taking Pinker seriously simply aren't paying attention