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?
Functionally, a Marxist is anyone who has at least a partial understanding of the real material workings of capitalism, while a non-Marxist is usually someone who is mystified by the nature of capitalism and follows one of many false abstractions that justify the continued existence of capitalism, regardless of evidence
It’s not a matter of whether one opinion Marx held was right or another was wrong, Marx was simply the first to glimpse the beast in its near entirety and as a result the field bears his name