cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2331989
I don’t really think he knows this site’s culture at all. No one is dissuading people from reading theory lol
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Yey or ney for him?
As someone said in the post
As far as I can tell, he’s a guy who spends all his time posting about how all leftists do is post.
And this ain’t the first time, Roderick’s a bit terminally online, arguing against other based progressive like JT (Second Thought) and Michael Hudson…
Michael Hudson is not a based progressive, he is a PB academic with a long background working for banks and other capitalist institutions. He posts his work on the literal fascist website Unz review (which he still does years after being notified it was a literal fascist website in case he was unaware) where the comments there are full of people picking up on his fascist and anti-Semitic dog whistles and running with them. All his focus on “finance capital” is quite interesting when you look at his writing about Jesus being killed by Jewish financiers and how his solution to fight finance capital is essentially empowering industrial capital. What other groups were very pro industrial capital and focused heavily on Jews as a financial elite? Probably some of the ones who are big fans of Unz Review, so Hudson seems to have chosen the right place to voluntarily publish his work online.
He was raised by Trots and his hyper focus on economics allows him to avoid any revolutionary analysis; Hudson is essentially pushing a patsoc/demsoc narrative about “fixing” the US economy by trying to roll back finance capital and do some New Deal shit which is caping for capital, not fighting it.
There may be value in his knowledge as an economist but he’s absolutely not based or someone I would look to for any info outside of very specific economic data that also isn’t super relevant in any organizing arena I’ve ever seen.
As far as Roderic Day goes, I’m not on social media to know about how terminally online he, his posts, or personality are, but I have read a few of his essays which I found very well done and informative.
The hell? I screwed up in thinking that… he may have abhored Larouchites, but I guess his economic policy and thinking is Larouchism…
He has been given a lot of space on many leftish / left adjacent platforms over the last several years which has given him a lot of credibility. I was very surprised to see Ben Norton giving him space on his channel for instance, someone I typically trust more than the majority of other influencers/journalists.
MH is very good at explaining how things currently work and why. I don’t think he can be ignored for that because there aren’t many who can or are willing to share his insights. That might be why he gets airtime. He does allude to being a Trotskyist. And he clearly knows Marx. But I’ve never really heard him say anything that I’d consider to be Marxist in terms of what comes next or how we get there. I always thought he was a bit vague on that but I haven’t read all his works.
I’m reading Capital right now, and it does not sound like he’s read it. Shouldn’t he know about TRPF, the origin of value, and the inherent contradictions (not someone managing it wrong) of capitalism? It doesn’t sound like he does.
I’m unsure what you’ve read or heard that gives the impression that MH doesn’t know about those things.
I don’t see how he could reach some of his conclusions without having understood Marx. You’ve got to remember that there’s a lot that people can take from Marx, and there are fierce differences of opinion within the tradition.
And there’s a way of writing that doesn’t use the jargon. I’d argue that approach can be a more effective way of communicating to a wider audience in many cases. Maybe that’s where your critique is coming from?
My critique comes from hearing him say silly social-democratic things on the Geopolitical Economy Report. Also, arguing with Day. Look at this if you haven’t: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2680725 https://hexbear.net/post/1826437
We had an exchange in that top thread. I’m still unconvinced. A useful exercise would be to consider the extent to which Hudson’s work displays an understanding and application of Marxism, rather than focusing on what he gets wrong, if anything.
It seems to need that there’s a purity thing going on here, criticising MH for not doing XYZ when the real question is, okay, ‘To what extent are his economic analyses correct/accurate?’
It’s a leap to go from MH misunderstands Marx, to MH isn’t a Marxist, to MH hasn’t read Marx.
The second thread leaves me leaning towards my original position. That MH broadly knows what he’s talking about and has clearly read Marx. I’m fairly sure that MH could go through Day’s work and find faults based on his perspective; in the same way as Day can go through MH’s work and find faults based on his perspective. But we couldn’t conclude that Day hasn’t read Marx just because MH would say he’s weak on this or that aspect of Marx/ism. Day is generally good and I love redsails but he’s not a final authority.
We all have to focus on something when we talk or write, which means deciding what to leave out. We all take different things from texts, too. It’s a bit futile to conclude that someone else is wrong or hasn’t understood something/anything just because they emphasise something different in an article or talk or take something different from a text than someone else.
Even some great Marxists have erred, spotted their errors, and changed their views. Including Marx and Engels. A more recent pair is Hindess and Hurst, who followed up a strong tract with an ‘auto-critique’. Some go the other way, like Kautsky. It’s dangerous territory to proclaim that someone isn’t a Marxist or hasn’t even read Marx on the basis of one-sided criticisms that emphasise errors or slips of which the writer/speaker may be aware. At the very least, we need to hear from the other side.
As for MH advocating reforms to reverse imperialism and return to industrial capitalism, I don’t necessarily see it. There’s another viable interpretation if you begin with the premise that MH knows Marx. Something like, for domestic progress to be made in the US, the US is going to have to retreat from neoliberal finance capitalism and move through a reindustrialisation phase under a socialist government as in China. Unless he’s explicitly ruling out socialist governance, I see no reason to conclude that he must misunderstand the historical chronology.
I also don’t see the issue with framing neoliberalism as a choice. There are a lot of factors that go in to making that choice, and there are myriad decision-makers. But it’s not inevitable. If it’s not a choice, the implication is that socialists may as well not bother fighting for a different future.
Advocating for a political economy with a better balance of industry/finance does not imply a belief that it’s possible by flicking a switch like turning on a light. From what I’ve seen, I have no reason to believe that MH is a light-switcher.
Again, maybe I’m missing something, but I wouldn’t be confident in claiming that MH thinks reindustrialisation is possible in the US as the US is currently constituted. I would give him more credit and assume he knows that shifting to a Chinese-style political economy entails massive change.
I encourage you to listen to his geopolitical hours with a critical lense. I have found great errors in the past ones, but I decided to listen to the recent interview with Jill Stein. He seems to think Stein actually has a chance of winning the election with the dissimilarity of Biden and Trump. They suggest the US is not currently democratic but previously was. They also imply that if elected, Jill Stein could legislate out neoliberalism and bring back good jobs (as under industrial capitalism!?). Desai think Stein could fundamentally change the nature of the state. Read state and rev lmao. I’m still listening, but it’s a little off. They really sound like social democrats far more than any Marxist, and I don’t even know if Hudson calls himself a Marxist.
Edit: who’s his audience that makes it ok with the Nazi website someone mentioned above?