Marx famously said that Adam Smith’s theory of the “three sources of revenue” (labour, capital, and land) had “as little to do with one another as lawyer’s fees, beetroot, and music”. They were not only on different levels of abstraction, but got mixed up in a hellish cocktail of aporia, presuppositions, tautologies, and self-contradictions. Something so fundamentally wrong that these concepts could not only not explain wealth in capitalist society, but mystified it. And mystification is the air, water, sun and soil that capitalist society thrives on.
Marx has been dead for 137 years now. And we will probably not hear much from him for the forseeable future. In our modern world however, the mix up on different levels of abstraction and bad theorising more generally can still be noticed, especially in times of Corona, intersectionality, economic crisis, and all the rest of it.
This little Substack is dedicated to Marx’s legacy in going back to his understanding of critique of bad theories and bad theorising. I started this off with a critique of millennial left darling Asad Haider. More will follow. Maybe you can pick up some of my arguments and destroy Twitter wars with it. That would be fun.
Thanks for reading and stay based.
Elena