Sorry if this is a stupid question but fortunately I’m uneducated.
You have “Marxist economists” like Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson, and you have “non-Marxist leftists” like Noam Chomsky and Carl Oglesby. What do Marxist and non-Marxist mean in this context? Is it like, Marxists think that everything Marx thought was correct and non-Marxists think everything he thought was wrong? Or is it like a >50% thing, if you think Marx was right more than half the time you’re a Marxist and if not then you’re a non-Marxist?
This is probably the wrong community to ask but how is it possible to be a non-Marxist (assuming that means you think Marx was wrong about everything) when fictitious capital and a reserve army of labor are staring you in the face?
Non-Marxist =/= Anti-Marxist. An anti-Marxist specifically believes Marx was wrong, a non-Marxist simply doesn’t follow the Marxist framework. Additionally, you can be a Marxist and think that more than half of Marx’s conclusions are wrong, what matters is the framework you’re using (historical materialism/scientific socialism). You can also agree with most of Marx’s conclusions and not be a Marxist, because you arrived at those conclusions by a different framework or just arbitrarily chose them (this is a simplistic characterization of incoherent ideology, but it’s good enough).
If you are curious about the prevalence of anti-Marxism, consider the fact that most people in a place like America have literally never heard the phrases “fictitious capital” or “reserve army of labor,” or perhaps they heard it in passing once but don’t remember hearing it.
Regarding Chomsky, it doesn’t answer your question directly, but there was an excellent series of essays called “Noam Chomsky and the Compatible Left” that used to be easily accessible online but appears to have been taken down. Perhaps an archival site has it. Here’s an archive of the first part: https://web.archive.org/web/20191115222100/https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/2019/03/04/noam-chomsky-and-the-compatible-left-part-i/
It looks like it was only online for a brief period of time, so I guess I’m lucky that I happened to download it. I wish I had the same foresight with “In Search of a Soviet Holocaust” but, in fairness, that article was much older at the time and hosted on a reputable website.
Thanks for your answer.
Yes, this is a great success of class warfare :/