#not just marx and lenin but pick up some contemporary political philosophy

[leninisms]

real-life activism is so much more enjoyable than internet activism btw. if you’ve only ever engaged in political/social activism online, i really recommend trying to find a real organization and getting involved in-person if you can

[edwad]

I think to seperate these things from marxism is pretty silly and you can tell considering you couldn't even give a counterexample, maybe jacobin articles about building a new party? most questions as to why communist groupings shouldn't be reformist and insular into the capitalist process have pretty explicit roots in the marxist tradition, regarding domination, the nature of the state, class position - I'd call that "philosophy" - I'm willing to be open but frankly I find more usage in a materialist practice of philosophy in daily work more than anything else, although if you have anything I'll give it a look

what kind of counter-example would you like lol i didn't know i was entering a debate. anyway it'd be meaningful if there were coherent marxist positions for any of these things, rather than internal feuds the size of entire disciplines. the history of socialism (before marx was even writing) already had many of these things and for similar reasons. for the rest of it, marx is explicitly pulling from the liberal tradition. if anything, at his best, his entire life trajectory can be seen as him slowly thinking through and trying to ground/justify the claims he uncritically picked up in his youth from the people he was reading. he was using ricardo as a stick to beat proudhon with. the class dynamics and language of the "proletariat" comes from sismondi. the working class as the revolutionary force comes out his friendship with engels and the latter's interest in the chartist movement. his republican conception of socialism is owenite through and through. etc.

he's not a great man of history, he's sorta a hodgepodge (like everyone else!) so if you want to justify a claim about marxism which in turn becomes hegemonic in the communist movement, rather than a communist movement which begets marxism, you need to be able to say something about marxism which didn't already exist in the movement it apparently recreated in its own image. i guess you could make a historical case out of leninism, which would have some merit as a political force of the time, but then marxism would be a 20th century product and you couldn't even account for lenin's own marxism. or marxism ends up having little to do with its namesake, which is fine, but at that point the specific contributions of marx are irrelevant.

at best marxism refers to a handful of vague positions/debates, but pretending the socialist movement contemporary to those debates was somehow passive to marxism's influence or that those debates weren't somehow structured by the socialist movement of the time is ahistorical imo. and this isn't to say "marxism doesn't exist" simply because it has influences, it's just not a very specific label so if you want to make particular claims about it i think it's open to interrogation. it's open-endedness makes it hard to pin down in this way.