"Sandwichmann, would you consider yourself a follower of Dilke?"

Every few days I check my dormant eX-twitter account to see if there were any replies to old posts. A great series of questions showed up a couple of days ago.

Neon Nova asks:

Sandwichmann, would you consider yourself a follower of Dilke? What does Marx offer that Dilke doesn't? I know Marx revisits some of Dilke's ideas on leisure time, but do you think there are flaws in Marx's approach? Does Dilke ultimately surpass Marx in your view?

I've noticed you've traced Dilke's views on leisure time back to Godwin, and Godwin's ideas to Calvinism. But if Marx's "great ideas" are merely a rehash of Dilke or Godwin's thoughts, what makes Marx's contributions unique or great?

Yes, I would consider myself a follower of Dilke and of Godwin, in that they initiated a discourse that had greater theoretical consequences than they could have ever foreseen. What Marx offered that Dilke didn't is a theory of capital and of crisis that is far more substantial and consequential than Dilke's. There are indeed "flaws" in Marx's approach, most significantly related to how he resolved -- or didn't resolve -- the difficulty of presenting his conclusions. Whether those conclusions are ultimately "right" or "wrong" is another matter, which I am not qualified to judge.

No, Dilke does not ultimately surpass Marx but there is a sense in which readers of Capital arrive at an understanding that may be closer to Dilke's than to Marx's. This is a bit hard to explain but Dilke's presentation was more "common sense." People reading a non-intuitive, theoretical presentation tend to mentally translate it into common sense terms. This is true, for example, of "socially necessary labour time," which incorporates within itself the inversion of the necessary and the superfluous, so that "socially necessary" is at once both "necessary" and "superfluous." That is to say it expresses the essential contradiction of the concept.

Just what is it that makes Marx's contribution so different, so appealing?

I have moved that discussion to a separate post.