vulgar.digital.marxism.raw.draft

besides the historic analytic relevance of marx, it needs to be questioned what the purpose of a purist marxism could be today, in its most orthodox forms, when its counter forms have mutated and morphed.
geopolitically, marxism has turned into an academic pastime, while political practise at best has led to hybrid forms such as successfully applied in vietnam/china, where poverty is replaced by extreme economic growth rates.
the rise of atavistic cultural identitarian revolutions, such as in christian nationalism vs. radical islam vs. neoliberal (burgeoise) wokism leaves kantian confucianism (cum mao´s reading of marx) as probably the best realistic option.

the increasingly confused and ridicolous decline of in intellectual literacy in an increasingly polarized american dominated discourse has led to leading oligarchs blaming the most neoliberal, statist and opportunistic social democratic eurocrats "radical marxists".
the window of media bias is so skewed that even the most expressionistic stage design looks laughably inappropriate to describe what´s happening with the north american mindset in realtime on my twiX timeline every day.
or take MAGA communism and JDV taking the side of white trash class war in order to pay private medicare another double digit billion tax dollars to nurse the rich. (with the nodding of Kennedy junior)

as a guidance, not as a political catechism, as a point of departure, not as a rigid blueprint.
there are quite a few struggles and conflict scenarios where digging deep into marx have been productive.
especially when combined with the question of technology, of war, of revolution.
just a few examples from the nettime sphere.

scepanski (RIP) has shown the limitations of marx in describing financial derivates and the neoliberal abstractions of financialisation.

matteo pasquinelli has worked on abstract labour in AI, applied marx labour theory and value theory.

electronic disturbance by CAE could be read as a result gramscian crossreading against the cultural hegemony of digital technocracy.

bifo´s cultural pessimism jumps into the big footsteps of felix guattari, and autonomia operia.

maurizio lazzarato & eric alliez´s work on unrestricted warfare is very timely, taking the turn the world economy takes.

or take the meticolous reembeddings such as by Christian Fuchs digital marx.

jason moore has developed the concept of the capitaloscene as a valid counter narrative to degrowth movement.

sorry no girls in the list. feel free to help and extend it.


there are historic backplanes, such as ludendorff sending lenin to moscow to bring down the emperor, which turn the revolutionary hero into a questionable role model, with leninists tacticians like steve bannon today.
very much like carl schmitt serves as a toxic recipe for left and right to replace political economy of class war with the geopolitics of sovereignty.
there is likely no simplistic, reductivist, dichotomic master plan, which can be put onto the table whenever real world complexity poses creative pragmatism and revolutionary theory to coalesce, even with problems such as the technological determinism of climate change, challenged by those who abitarily prefer subjectivist constructivism and oedipal conspiracies before universal scientific rationality.

for programming, one could compare marxism with a specific orthodox school, such as functional programming, which in its influences are very productive but in its purest form, merely an inspirational academic laboratory excercise.
the lambda calculus could even be at the core of validating reinforcement learning methods, such as marxist design principles could guide regulatory superintelligence controlling stock markets capital flows or federal bank policies.
so the most marxist way of using marx, in the deleuzian sense, would be processual, creative, productive, where orthodoxy has its place of course, reminding everyone to keep on track - but not as a scholastic discipline in itself.

vulgar (digital) marxism so to say is the application of marxism to itself (using any digital means of production available, preferably used against the grain)