Marxism is a critique of capitalism, but not my critique of it.

I’m not a Marxist for one simple reason.

A Marxist wants you to think of yourself as a worker, and to stand in class solidarity with other workers–Unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains, and all that.

The problem with this formulation, from my perspective, is that identifying as a worker means you already identify with the conditions of your enslavement–you accept that you are a slave, to the wage at least, even if as is likely you commit to changing that grim reality in some way.

This may very well be a much more realistic view of things than my own.

I accept the costs involved in my deficit of realism.

I do live under a system that runs on coerced labor, and legalized enslavement.

I have spent years picking massa’s cotton and that’s the truth.

A Marxist would say that running away from the plantation and into employment at a machine shop in Detroit is an act of progress toward freedom.

I see Alabama chains and Michigan chains and I can’t tell the difference. My eyes, you see, not so good.

His vision is acute, hopeful, and aspirational.

Mine is chronic, static and merely poetical.

We both hold stock in the revolution, and maybe even have faith in its promise.

He just wants to get there by seizing control of the means of production.

Whereas I want the buffalo back, and all the Cambodians and Iraqi children and the girls who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire to be resurrected into a paradise earth where rulers are extinct instead of polar bears.