but is he open-minded?

are almost as bad as thatcher loving smiths fans.

trust fund kids

(i am not being totally serious today)

OR AM I?

(no)

OR AM I?

(probably not)

Had to reads loads of stuff by other 'Marxist' writers though.

with a completely different system as I live in NZ. No I haven't read any of his original writings, but I probably will out of interest. I'm taught by a Marxist lecturer and have read a few of his own papers.

tends to, for good or ill, imply a wide range of post-Marx thinking too so it's probably as relevant as it should be for a Marxist to have actually read Marx.

you make some good points. I still think that using Marxist theory is a good way to make sense of the economic/political world, but yeah it does become problematic when Marxists try to apply it to other things.

But a) isn't a problem, because the whole point of Marx is that he explains all of human interaction as being material and economic in nature, giving rise to the superstructure etc etc (as stated in the Preface to Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, among other places). I'm a bit of a Marxist sympathiser - some of his thinking I find genuinely brilliant and hard to discount, and similarly some of the thinkers who followed (I have a soft spot for Gramsci in particular), but I couldn't embrace it fully.

I'm an anarchist, which is why I'm sympathetic to some of his writings, but not his implorings towards active revolution. It's clear to me from speaking to other people on the far left (not that anarchism is inherentley left-wing) that not even those who seem most dedicated to change have little to no idea of the grand scheme of things. I don't think I do, either, but at least I don't use what understanding I do have to claim to have the solution to everything. I used to be a member of Greenpeace until I read more about GM crops and nuclear power. I HATE the idea of nuclear power, but to think that there can't be compromise this once drives me up the wall.

But yeah, my politics? Quite radical, in that I think a state is inherently unjust by its very nature. Definitely didn't come from my parents, who are typical centrist Tories (ie, vote for that party because they always have, and not for the policies - try to pin them down on what they truly believe and the Lib Dems and Labour share most of the same positions anyway). It's more that, from a young age, I've never thought that the way the world works sounded right, and no matter what justifications were given for certain actions by those older than me certain people always ended up getting screwed. So I went to the left, as a typical liberal at first, then slowly drifted, flirted with Marxism, then discovered libertarianism, and then anarcho-syndicalism, and now I'm hovering somewhere around what's called anarcho-capitalism. It's basically anarcho-syndicalism with a free market, because people on the left who think capitalism is inherently unjust don't seem to know what capitalism actually is, treating it as a synonym for consumerism.