Re: <nettime> The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put.

[Pit Schultz via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

The analytical rigor of Marx remains indispensable, yet the utility of
a purist Marxism today—amidst mutated geopolitical realities and
neoliberal ascendancies—demands scrutiny. While orthodox Marxism
calcifies into academic ritual, its hybrid counterparts thrive in
contexts like China and Vietnam, where state-capitalist engines trade
revolutionary poverty for hypergrowth, however uneven. Meanwhile,
identitarian counter-revolutions (Christian nationalism, jihadism,
bourgeois “wokism”) render Kantian-Confucian syntheses (via Mao’s
guerilla war) a grimly pragmatic horizon.

In the U.S., oligarchs rebrand neoliberalism’s failures onto phantom
“Marxist” villains—Eurocrats, of all entities—while media discourse
collapses into expressionist farce. MAGA communism weaponizes
working-class resentment, f.ex. funneling billions to privatized
healthcare oligopolies under the banner of class war (Kennedy Jr. nods
approvingly). Here, dialectics twist into parody.

Yet Marx persists as a method, not catechism. Consider
nettime-adjacent interventions: Scepanski (RIP) dissected Marxism’s
blind spots toward financial derivatives; Pasquinelli redeployed value
theory to demystify AI’s “abstract labor.” CAE’s electronic
disturbances channel Gramsci against digital hegemony; Bifo’s
pessimism summons the demons of Guattari and Autonomia. Lazzarato and
Alliez map capital’s war machines, Christian Fuchs reembeds Marx in
digital materiality, and Jason Moore’s Capitalocene counters degrowth
naivety. (A gendered lacuna here—suggestions welcome.)

Historical ironies linger: Lenin, dispatched by Ludendorff to
destabilize the Tsar, now inspires Steve Bannon’s Leninist disruption
playbooks. Carl Schmitt’s toxic sovereignty fetish infects left and
right alike, eclipsing class for geopolitics. No master plan survives
contact with planetary crisis—climate change mocks both
techno-determinism and conspiracist subjectivism.

Perhaps Marxism functions like functional programming: a rigorous
framework whose purity inspires but rarely scales. with Lambda
calculus possible underpinnings of reinforcement learning; could
Marxist design principles regulate algorithmic capital flows? To “use”
Marx, in a Deleuzian key, is to processualize him—orthodoxy as
compass, not cage. Vulgar (digital) Marxism weaponizes his tools
against capital’s own infrastructures, repurposing platforms against
their grain.

The transition of agrarian culture into early industrialization in the
late 19th century in a European capital, the post-Napoleonic hangover
of imperial France of Marx's Brumaire, might serve as an inspirational
hint, much like Athens vs. Sparta, or any Western mythological
narrative with a twist. But certainly not as a blueprint for today’s
collective Western, or arbitrarily located societal and cultural
stratifications. It's like turning today’s CNN headlines into the
advisory board of a civilization game, but an early version from the
90s.

In the end, Marx is less a blueprint than a hackable system—a syntax
for critique in an age of monstrosities.


human edited draft:
https://pastebin.com/jH0jcc4m
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