There’s definitely a strain of marxist thought that’s committed to historical materialism as a nomothetic science and drains any role for normative discussion. This is pretty much intellectually bankrupt and even if it wasn’t, wouldn’t matter in political debates over the right and the good.
At the other end of the spectrum there’s another line of thought that ditches the ‘immortal science’ shtick and opens up talking about justice. They might claim that Marxist approaches are just better (normatively) at solving questions of distributive justice or whatever.
These are the left-wing of fascism types.
And there are others who try to split the difference through rhetorical legerdemain. Both the ‘scientific’ and the ‘normative theory’ strains are present in Marx (& Engels), and you need to jump through exegetical hoops and ladders to justify one or the other.
I bring up legitimacy specifically because even the ‘soft’ marxists would yeet that concept, even while keeping ‘justice’. ‘Legitimacy’ is hugely important to liberalism. At one obvious level, you already knew this because it’s a buzzword for an almost occult quality of international conduct or democratic procedure that normals have no other way of talking about. But even here in the hallowed halls of [checks sign above door] Higher Education
TM it’s of central concern to liberal divines like Rawls, Dworkin, et al. who use it to mean something like “what prevents the train full of masses from running off the rails”.
Molyneux here is actually being a dumbass in the normal way, by collapsing any distinction between ‘legitimacy’ and ‘moral rectitude’. And then he’s a dumbass in the molyneux way because Marxism has a different theory of violence too which he’d only know if he’d actually done the reading, but whatever.
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[waiting for Kara to get off work intensifies]
