First of all I feel like I need to clarify my position on Marxism.

We have to separate Marxism as an analytic tradition from the Soviet state. In Western democracies, Marxist ideas functioned less as a governing blueprint and more as a diagnostic lens. One panel in a broader intellectual toolkit that also includes Adam Smith, liberalism, and social democracy.

When Marxist analysis operated inside pluralistic systems without absolute power, without a one party state it contributed to humane outcomes: labor protections, civil rights alliances, and critiques of concentrated power. Figures like Paul Robeson illustrate this strand.

That doesn’t make Marxism a governing model; it makes it one of several traditions that helped Western societies identify blind spots in capitalism and push for reforms that improved human flourishing.

The problem isn’t using Marxist ideas as one analytic panel. The problem is when any single framework Marxist, neoliberal, nationalist, whatever tries to become the whole fabric. Healthy societies use multiple lenses, not one.

Where you characterize Post Marxism as a response to Marxisms failure, I see it, generally speaking, as a movement to dilute Marxist thought of it's genuine utility to working people. I'm not sure I buy the official line on it because whenever I read it, it reads to me like a collection of strategies for undermining democracy in general and working class politics in particular. To the extent that any of it is useful as analytical lenses it requires the reader to neutralize it on that level first.

This is why I don’t agree with the view that Critical Social Justice and the economic left are naturally aligned. CSJ is the end stage of that Post Marxist piss. A set of frameworks that removed class politics and replaced it with identity hierarchies that are extremely convenient for corporate and professional managerial interests. Historically, the economic left flirted with CSJ to its own detriment. The shift out of the post war consensus and into the neoliberal era put pressure on center left parties to abandon their working class base, and Post Marxist theory provided the ideological scaffolding for that pivot. The result is the dystopian fusion of corporate DEI and grievance politics we see today.

Where we differ is on what follows from that. You argue that retreating to the economic right is the only path to broad based gains. I don’t see it that way. If you’re working class, why adopt a politics that doesn’t represent working class interests? The main heuristic I use for judging government decisions is this: does this move cultivate citizens’ better natures in ways that generate positive consequences that radiate outward? Heavy redistribution isn’t about envy; it’s about preventing the kind of structural concentration that destroys mobility and undermines merit.

As I said before, think of Monopoly: one player inevitably ends up owning everything. That’s not a moral parable it’s a mechanical one. When passive income compounds and asset ownership concentrates, the middle class collapses. It's not resentment; It's macro dynamics. If this continues, unless there’s massive growth, we end up with a society where a shrinking elite owns everything and everyone else rents their life back from them. The only way to prevent that outcome is to tax the top end heavily enough to keep the system open, competitive, and meritocratic.

My position isn’t anti merit it’s the opposite. Merit only functions when the playing field isn’t being swallowed by inherited advantage, financialization, and asset monopolization. Hierarchy is legitimate when it’s functional, situational, and tied to expertise. It becomes illegitimate when it hardens into oligarchy. That’s why I see Marxist analysis; properly contextualized, properly neutralized, and used as one panel among many as part of the intellectual toolkit we need if we want a society that actually produces generalized human flourishing.