nothingness-and-names:

In left-liberal circles you often get Marxism being appropriated for some really strange purposes. It’s very common for people to appeal to Marx in some vague way when arguing that the way toward progress is to recognize different kinds of activities as labor and to pay people for that labor. On a very surface level this sounds alright but two things:

1) This whole line of discourse forgets that Marx’s whole point is that the status of “waged laborer” *isn’t good*

2) This discourse is effectively arguing for the commodification of literally every sphere of social life so Marx is surely spinning in his grave.

Marx in fact dealt with these sorts of arguments even in his own lifetime. The economic sections of “The Poverty of Philosophy” spend a lot of time critiquing the argument that the injustices of capitalism are due to “imperfections” in the law of value and that a “better implemented” version could bring about justice. For Marx, the law of value itself is implicated (and is even the source of) emiseration under capitalism. But today we have liberals basically repeating business school 101 platitudes about “valuing your work” and appealing to Marx as support… What a world!