Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by beat 2572 days ago
One can engage with Marx's writings without being "Marxist", and certainly without being Leninist. I think of when Matthew B Crawford wrote his excellent Shop Class as Soulcraft. He used Marxist terminology about labor in order to critique Taylorism and the social harm of scientific management, in terms of removing worker control over their own production. And he got lambasted from some corners for it, even though his argument was not by any stretch of the imagination socialist, much less "Marxist". He responded by pointing out that if you're going to talk about the value of labor at all, you'd be a fool to not use Marx's terminology, because otherwise, you'd have to reinvent the wheel.