Not Marxist but Marxian, the way I explain the distinction is that Marxians share the old man’s premises, while Marxists share his conclusions.

(Really though, he’s like Adam Smith, so foundational that even people who see him as the mascot of the enemy side are probably assuming a lot of his conclusions already.)

I mean I sure do seem to think that the world progresses through repeated oppositional cycles, that ideology is downstream from the distribution of resources and power, and that a study of history allows you to effectively understand the dynamics at work and predict coming events, don’t I?

Really I think Marx studied and extrapolated from the experience of early industrial England and the Ruhr Valley well enough that his predictions bore up through about the interwar period

I suppose that was the point of renewing and extending it as -Leninism or -Leninism-Maoism; I think Maoism offered a lot of insight on the dynamics of precapitalist societies esp. in contact with capitalist societies but that Leninism was more about the specific experience of replacing feudal east European structures with Prussian bureaucracy.

Am I a communist hahaha fuck no. I’m Marxian enough to understand my politics as downstream from my class position and that’s not my class position. As is I maybe could fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, and rear cattle in the evening but mostly I criticize all day long, and the spectre of proletarian revolution is if anything a threat against that.

I know there are less revolutionary, non-Marxist threads of communism - Fourier, Bellamy, etc. I think a lot of their or others’ ideas of how to reorder society would make it better. But the utopian literary tendency I followed through from them into the 20th century wasn’t communism, it was SF/F. “Wise, far-sighted reform in the popular interest, but without feverish, thuggish improvisation” isn’t communism, it’s Progressivism, Rockefeller Republicanism, clientelism, prewar aristocratic conservatism, Bourbonism. And I know enough history to realize that’s a very important distinction.

Monetizeyourcat (PBUH) once said that the way to determine your fundamental political allegiances was to ask if you would support a communist revolution to preempt a fascist revolution, and vice versa.

And in the first case I was like “fuck, as if that’s any better”

And in the second I was like “well, the Iberian states, Chile, Indonesia and the Phillippines at least decayed back into bourgeois democracies after a few decades; Russia/China/Cuba/Yugoslavia/the Norks just became these regimes-for-regimes’ sake”

So there’s your answer.