The Paleomarxist Manifesto

An old philosophy for our new age

Just this morning, I congratulated

Morgthorak the Undead

for writing the fine paleomarxist analysis right here,

The real reason why illegal aliens have been allowed to flood into the U.S.

Edit to add: For the record, I disagree with his contention that getting rid of Donald Trump was the main reason for the Covid Plandemic. The whole pandemic was an authoritarian power play sponsored by both the Western neoliberal globalist order(think WEF, Bill Gates) and the Chinese Government. It only happened when it did when the Covid virus was accidentally released from a lab in Wuhan Province. That does not invalidate the rest of his analysis.

Now, my friend Morgthorak is no Marxist, but he does know how to follow the money, and once you start doing that, you’re already thinking like a paleomarxist. So just what do I mean by that, you ask? And you should.

Paleomarxism is just what the word implies—old Marxist presuppositions and analysis that come straight from Marx and Engels, and they are not complicated at all.

As a paleomarxist, I presuppose that there is an objective, material reality that we humans can strive to understand through the old scientific method. IOW, we can understand a lot by reason and experimentation. It certainly doesn’t mean we know it all, for we are human beings and that would be an absurd thing to even think.

Paleomarxists are primarily interested in who holds power over whom in any society, how they got that power, and how they try to keep it. Politically and economically, we believe that those who do the productive work should have control over the means of production.

IOW, we believe that employees should have control over the businesses that could not exist without their labor, their services, and their ideas. In fact, we think the employer-employee relationship is fundamentally flawed and should be replaced by things like worker-owned co-ops, just like the master-slave relationship was replaced by the lord-serf one, and later that was replaced by our current employer-employee model, which is called capitalism.

By extension, that makes us all anti-imperialist. If we don’t believe individual employees in our own country should be exploited for profit, we certainly don’t believe that entire nations and peoples should be exploited, either.

Paleomarxists are democrats in the original Greek sense of the word. We don’t believe a tiny group of people should be dictating to the majority in any system, governmental or private. IOW, we are anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist, and have a lot more in common with anarchists than we do with Leninists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, Fascists, or anyone else who thinks that a small number of people(which nearly always includes the advocates of these ideologies themselves) should tell everyone else how to live, how to work, or how to think.

That is why, towards the end of his life, Karl Marx said “I am not a Marxist.” He meant he was neither a Social Democrat nor a Bolshevik at the time. Now, it would mean he believes woke is broke as much as any conservative does. Maybe more, since Marx would instantly see wokeness for the tool of authoritarianism that it is.

When it comes to present day analysis of why those in power do the things they do, paleomarxism is focused on the system that we live in today—capitalism. What is capitalism?

Simple. Marx wrote huge volumes that all boil down to this: Capitalism is the economic and political system whose prime directive is more profits soonest. Everything else is secondary.

Capitalists make profits off of the labor, services, and ideas provided by their employees. They cannot exist without their employees, so they will always attempt to pay those employees less to serve their prime directive.

Now, for example, they see AI as the perfect employee, because they don’t even have to pay the things! They cannot help it. If they don’t constantly strive to keep their labor costs down and their profits up, then other capitalists will, to the detriment of their own businesses. The sickness is the system.

This is nothing new or groundbreaking. Anyone who has ever been laid off should know that from personal experience. It’s just the way it is, but it’s not the way it always has to be, which leads to the next question—just what would a paleomarxist like to see?

For that, I’ll direct you to the greatest living paleomarxist philosopher and economist we have, even if he’s never used the term himself, an American named Richard J. Wolff. He’s written numerous books, and if you’re interested I recommend Democracy at Work and The Sickness is the System.

Don’t freak out at the prospect of a difficult read. Wolff is American, not 19th Century German, and he’s a good writer who puts things as plainly as he possibly can. Far better than Marx himself, IMHO, and yes, I’ve slogged through all three volumes of Capital. Wolff also has his Economic Update show on YouTube, and if you give him a chance you’ll find he’s very easy to understand.

Notice there is nothing in here about abolishing markets. Of course there will be markets! There are always markets in every economic system because people are going to trade with each other. Would we even be human if we didn’t trade?

There is nothing cultural here. When it comes to popular culture, paleomarxists believe that is up to the people of a nation or region themselves. We don’t believe in a government imposing the moral values of those with authority on everybody else.

We don’t have a problem with religious people, so long as those folks don’t try to tell the rest of us we have any duty to believe as they do. Abortion? LGBTQ rights? Encouraging or opposing marriage? Family? That’s not for us, or anyone else, to impose or abolish. That’s up to the people themselves. That’s up to democracy—majority rule in each community.

I have my own opinions and values on such things, but I don’t have the right to tell you that my way is for you, or vice-versa.

As Emma Goldman once told a puritanical Bolshevik, “If I can’t dance, then to hell with your Revolution!”

Now I’ll sum it up. Paleomarxism is a philosophical materialist way of thinking. We believe in an objective, material reality which doesn’t give a damn about the fate of the human race. We scoff at the notion that what humans really really believe causes reality, and think those who do have caused a lot of needless suffering.

We have studied capitalism and concluded that it doesn’t work well for most of the human race, is destructive, causes wars and other Bad Things, and needs to be replaced by a system where the majority of people living in it have the power to make the decisions on how it should work for them, not the other way around.

We are anti-authoritarian democrats. We’re opposed to any system where a tiny minority controls the lives of a large majority. Authoritarianism sucks, be it Fascist, Communist, feudalist or monarchist.

We believe in government only by the consent of the governed, and generally that the best government is the one which governs least.

I hope this clarifies where I come from, and that you find this way of looking at the world beneficial to you. Thank you for reading, good day or night, and good luck.

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