The claim that Marx “abandoned alienation” collapses the moment you actually read Marx across his full development instead of relying on caricatures.

The terminology evolves, and the analysis becomes more rigorous. But the underlying problematic remains remarkably continuous. Already in 1844 Marx roots alienation in:
- exchange
- private property
- money
- division of labour
- labour-for-survival
- value mediation

This is not vague psychological existentialism. It is already critique of political economy and capitalist social mediation.

Marx deserves better critics.

The claim “Marxism collapses when applied to real human behavior” is rhetorical fog. Name the proposition that allegedly fails. Which prediction? Which mechanism? “Human behavior” isn’t an argument.

https://twitter.com/rockchartrand/status/2018401993924985303

“Marx says exploitation is immoral.” Textually sloppy. Marx’s critique is primarily structural: wage labour + property + market compulsion leads to surplus extraction + objective (structural) alien domination. That’s not “moralism,” it’s basic social theory.

Capital Vol. I asks how can profit arise if commodities exchange at their values? Marx’s answer is that exploitation happens in production, not exchange. Capital expands by purchasing a unique commodity, labour power, whose use creates more value than it costs.

https://twitter.com/drumm_colin/status/2001331490265936015

@EgmontHandtke @ab202r Material inconsistency: you conflate realization with generation. Showing that realized monetary profit requires net spending does not show that surplus labour does not exist or fails to map into surplus value. That’s an accounting constraint, not a production theory.

Marx and Engels wrote intersectionality before it had a name.

Not as “identity politics,” but as a materialist method, a way of understanding how race, gender, nation, and ideology mediate the universal contradiction between labour and capital.

🧵

https://twitter.com/ygzgzot/status/1983935826053472383

Engels to Joseph Bloch (1890):

“If somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.”

Marxism ≠ economism.

1/ Noah Smith argues Marx is outdated—useful for history, but irrelevant to modern economics. But is Marx really just a relic? Or does his critique of capitalism still have something vital to teach us about our world today? 🧵

https://twitter.com/noahpinion/status/1878732659607896082

2/ First, Marx wasn’t just an economist. He was someone obsessed with understanding how capitalism shaped every part of life—work, relationships, power, even our sense of self. His big question wasn’t just “how does this system work?” but “what does it do to us as humans?”