Academic marxism seems to me to have abandoned what I consider the valuable parts – an account of the formal, social limits to capitalist growth (and the choice this puts before us, of further human liberation, via socialism, or sliding back into, at best, a new kind of feudalism) and has eloped with a kind of soft pinko morality, barely – if at all – related to Marx’s work. My rough guide to who gets the basics is this: there’s a divide between those who appreciate why Sraffa’s critique of marxian value theory makes a schoolboy Ricardian error, and those who find they have more important things to think about.

In any case, I’m coming around to a firm conviction that marxism and libertarianism are just a hair’s breadth apart, but that this distance shall always separate them. Neither expects a fundamental change in human nature (though both have somewhat unusual conceptions of what human nature consists in, today). Those conceptions are opposite, and probably irreconcilable – marxism finds individuals to be woven from society, while libertarianism believes that it is society that is woven from individuals.

But away from such abstract distinctions, marxists and libertarians can find a great deal of common purpose in the present, when mainstream political dynamics are militating against individuals. Both systems of belief have a powerful central desire to liberate the human potential, and both require that individuals be permitted to be strong, independent, politically responsible and motivated – upholding a sense of an agentful human self that is increasingly regarded as irresponsible, and perhaps even toxic, in official discourses.

Take the UK’s spiked-online as an example of what this kind of joint effort between libertarians and marxists (or possibly post-libertarians and post-marxists) might look like. There isn’t a name for the hybrid yet, but it surely beats liberal.