Marxism's unserious detractors cheapen the discussion

By failing to try to understand even the basic fundamentals they sideline what could and should be serious discussions about how best to organize and fight against capitalism in modern society

There’s a running joke in our family anytime anyone shares an idea or thought that sounds a bit complicated or might take a bit of mental effort to understand:

“That sounds like Marxism.”

Unfortunately, this accurately sums up the way a large portion of the public interact with Marxism in our current political climate. Anything that questions whether the current social and economic systems are just or offers suggestions on how to increase equality, or—god forbid—equity is immediately labeled a Marxist existential threat.

This is the tone and tenor of much of the discussion around Marxism, especially in the US, where professional grifters such as Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay have made a cottage industry around bastardizing and misrepresenting Marxism for their eager audiences with the help of propaganda outlets such as PragerU and the Daily Wire, along with hundreds of other podcasts and blogs all over the internet. These pseudointellectuals cloak their Red Scaremongering, racism, misogyny, homophobia and bigotry in professional and “intelligent” sounding rhetoric, constantly feeding the fire of ignorance and political grievance.

For these propagandist mouthpieces and their followers, “post-modern neo-Marxism” is a clear and present danger to everything they hold dear in life. To hear these people tell it, Marxists have taken over the universities, the government, and the media. These Marxists would like nothing better than to indoctrinate our children with false ideologies about racism, sexism, and transgenderism. If given full rein, they will turn the US into Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, packing off all conservatives into concentration camps. You see, they hate the US, they hate Western Civilization, they hate capitalism, they hate rationality, civility, the rule of law, human rights, all the stuff that makes America great. Most heretical of all, they even hate God.

The terms “socialist” and “Marxist” are bandied about constantly in political speeches and legislative bodies (both here in Aotearoa and in the US) until they have lost all meaning. For its detractors, Marxism is basically anything politically left of hard right. Marxism and socialism are the same thing as the vaguely-defined and catch-all “woke” agenda. For those who sling these terms around, it is not necessary to distinguish whether something is actually Marxist, how that differs from socialism, how both of those things differ from critical race theory, and how they differ from “wokeism” or what that even means.

In other words, the ambiguity is the point. The lack of a solid definition of Marxism is a crucial aspect of the vague, slippery wordplay and the catch-all of “oppression” that characterizes the discourse of the right-wing commentariat. Marxism is anything you need it to be. The vagueness makes it malleable and able to conform to anything you need it to conform to. The lack of specificity is purposeful.

For those of us who feel it important to accurately define your terms before engaging in a discussion, this is maddening. I have spent far too many hours (to what end, I do not know) becoming involved in trying to correct incorrect statements related to Marx and Marxism online. I (almost) always start off politely, simply offering correction or trying to define terms. Most often, the commenter or poster simply ignores my comments. Sometimes, I’ve had cordial discussions with people. Other times, people have piled on, either personally attacking me or claiming ridiculous things like Karl Marx was evil or verifiably possessed by a devil.

Obviously social media is not the best venue to have any of these types of discussions, but for some reason I have felt compelled to enter the fray more times than I can count. Surely if someone gently points out a misunderstanding, people will appreciate the new information?

Not the way it ever works.

I’ve had slightly better luck in face-to-face conversations, but no one really wants to talk about Marxism, they really only want to scapegoat Marxism for something about progressivism that they don’t like. I should have a bingo card for these conversations because it’s quite predictable the way they play out, with people constantly moving from topic to topic and talking point to talking point without any real coherence.

For those keeping score, there are exactly 0 topics here that are fundamentally about Marxism. And yet, these are the things that a great many people associate with Marxism and will discuss when Marxism is brought up.

“Owning” Karl Marx

So when I came across this provocatively-titled post on my Substack feed the other day I rolled my eyes.

Karl Marx Was Wrong

I get the provocative title. We all engage in this bit of advertisement or click-baiting from time to time. We want people to read our stuff. But it’s funny how many pieces have this same basic title. As if the writer is going to come up with the smoking gun with which to disprove Marxism.

Well, this piece didn’t find any smoking guns. What is abundantly clear from this brief piece is that the author has either not read Marx or has fundamentally misunderstood him. He spends a great deal of the piece differentiating between different types of market economies, concluding that both liberals and Marxists were wrong in their characterization of market economies, and therefore in their characterization of capitalism.

He bases his critique on a definition of capitalism by sociologist Max Weber, where Weber defines capitalism as

Capitalism is present wherever the industrial provision for the needs of a human group is carried out by the method of enterprise, irrespective of what need is involved. More specifically, a rational capitalistic establishment is one with capital accounting, that is, an establishment which determines its income yielding power by calculation according to the methods of modern bookkeeping and the striking of a balance.

So for Weber, capitalism simply means that provisioning of needs is met by enterprise, and there are accounting records kept of debts and exchanges.

Here Weber demonstrates that what makes modern capitalism unique is the conception of the economy as a system of accounts. The word “account” means not just a financial balance sheet, but also “personal account” in the sense of individual economic agency and responsibility…

That’s the general sense of a “market economy.” There have always been markets and even capitalistic enterprise throughout history. But the contemporary economic regime we call “capitalism” or the “market economy” derives from this economic individualism and social entrepreneurialism that has characterized Western societies since the early modern era.

For Jason (can I call you Jason?) this definition pulls the rug out from under both liberalism and Marxism. And it all comes down to their failed understanding of a market economy

For liberals, the market economy was a “scheme of ordered liberty” with fixed principles and institutions that cleared the way automatically for the invisible hand of the market.

For Marxists, the market economy was an historically-determined economic idea (“capitalism”) that evolved from other ideal regime types (slavery, feudalism, mercantilism).

Because according to his preferred Weberian definition, capitalism is constituted by any situation under which people’s needs are met by enterprise, liberals’ “scheme of ordered liberty” and Marx’s “historically-determined economic idea” are both wrong on the face of it, and irrelevant

The market economy is not a definite regime. We are not eternally subscribed to the current economic regime that goes by the name of capitalism.

We don’t have to “overthrow” capitalism, because there is no such thing as “capitalism” in the sense that Marx imagined it. Neither is capitalism synonymous with the regime imagined by Margaret Thatcher and other neoliberal market fundamentalists

Capitalism just means individuals—like me and you—who come together to form our own societies, on our own initiative and for our own accounts. That’s a market society…

We can give society new forms, in other words. Margaret Thatcher and Karl Marx were both wrong—we do have alternatives, we are not bound to historically determined theoretical regimes.

Aside from the fact that privileging a definition of capitalism that was developed in large part in opposition to Marx’s ideas and theory doesn’t give you grounds to summarily dismiss Marx’s perspective, Jason doesn’t even get the basics of Marx’s definition of capitalism right. It would be unfair to expect a thorough and accessible exploration out of what is essentially an introductory lay treatment in a short post (Kevin Thomas is able to do this like few others). But it should not be too much to expect an appreciation or even a critique of Marx’s basic ideas as Marx conveyed them. For Marx, the defining characteristic of capitalism was not that it was the product of a particular historical or material context (although he did say it was). It was that capitalism is characterized—indeed depends—on the exploitation of workers by capitalists. Everything else in his theory revolved around that dynamic. It is this fundamental aspect that makes Marxist analysis applicable to any historical epoch and mode of capitalism. Jason seems not to understand or appreciate this basic fact.

I restacked this one cheekily with the note “Tell me you’ve never read Marx without telling me.”

Marxism is irrelevant… because

Jason responded with another post the next day

Why I'm Not a Marxist

My last post about Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher caused a minor stir. Not from Thatcherites—I haven’t heard from any of them—but from Marxists.

Thanks to Mateo Leche, Ryan Ward, theory.talk, Kevin Thomas for reading and responding.

In this follow-up, I want to elaborate on Karl Marx’s legacy. Here’s the key question I want to answer:

What exactly are we talking about when we talk about Marxism?

Yes. Jason is correct that he should start by defining terms. But he never quite gets there. First, he situates himself as a member of the working class. All well and good. He then indicates that Marxism doesn’t appeal to him

To the extent that Marxism proposes itself as a serious political ideology and economic program for the twenty-first century, it has to appeal to me and people like me.

But it doesn’t.

For Jason, Marxism cannot be a serious political ideology or economic program (not to quibble, but it never claims to be either) because it doesn’t appeal to him (and he says people like him, although I’m not sure how he is speaking for all of those other people).

He then goes on a lengthy diatribe about Marxists, calling them snobbish (calling me out personally), obsessed with identity politics, and belonging to “a subculture for the propagation of identity and mission among the declassed and alienated.”

To the extent that he defines Marxism, he defines it as “a form of identity politics and social gnosticism.” I don’t know what he means by social gnosticism but it’s clear from the rest of the piece that he still fundamentally misunderstands Marxism.

Maybe I am falling into the trap of being the exact kind of snobbish elitist Marxist he can’t stand, but seriously, if you are going to critique Marxism, get your definitions right. Marxism can’t be defined however Jason chooses. It has a very specific definition. Marxism is a political philosophy and an empirical methodology for conducting socioeconomic analysis. As I said above, because it deals specifically with the internal workings and conditions of the capitalist system, it is relevant to any manifestation of capitalism in any age.

But Jason goes on to make a labored comparison between Marxism and Christianity, claiming that what Marxism lacks is an impactful kerygma

What Marxists lack in the twenty-first century is what Christians would call a “kerygma.”

“Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” That’s a kerygma, a core proclamation.

Karl Marx’s own historical kerygma was this—“Workers of the world, unite!” That Marxian kerygma simply doesn’t resonate anymore.

The industrial workers of the world have been deindustrialized and relegated to the backwards sectors of the economy. They can’t be reconstituted around the call of the Marxian kerygma.

Industrial workers aren’t the tribes of Israel. That’s not how political economy works.

Jason then argues for the irrelevance of Marxism based on the fact that the industrial mode of production that defined the capitalist system during Marx’s day was superseded by what he terms a “knowledge economy.”

By the 1970s, Fordism was giving way to the Information Revolution. The Bolshevik revolution would not survive the 1980s. The Soviet Union was an historical experiment in Marxist ideology in the name of the industrial proletariat. As the industrial proletariat faded into history, so too did Marxism-Leninism.

The Information Revolution marked the dawn of the knowledge economy as today’s advanced practice of production—displacing mechanized manufacturing and Fordist mass production. China carried on the ideological model of Marxism-Leninism, largely because China was such a backwards country which assumed the West’s former role as the workshop of the world.

Western countries rotated to the advanced practice knowledge economy and outsourced manufacturing to backwards and developing countries. The former industrial proletariat in the West was deindustrialized, rotated into the service sector or integrated into the middle class of the new knowledge economy.

Setting aside the frankly racist characterization of China, for Jason, Marxism is no longer relevant because the industrial mode of production is not the dominant manifestation of capitalism in many areas of the world. It is only relevant in the sense that it appeals to workers in economies characterized by a push towards industrial development. For anyone else, it doesn’t appeal because they aren’t the same kinds of workers that Marx was dealing with

Marxism is no longer taken seriously anywhere in the world, except as a useful ideology with a powerful kerygma for those segments of the population in the backwards sectors of the economy, and for the post-colonial poor of the Global South.

That’s the essential function of Marxism today—a kerygma for the masses of people who have been deindustrialized and/or left behind in the new advanced practice of production. But Marxism is not a serious political ideology or economic program except for leftists who operate in radical subcultures and on social media.

Wait now I’m confused. Because he’s spent the piece arguing that the reason that Marxism is irrelevant is because it is not applicable to the conditions of the modern worker, but here he says it is a kerygma for those who have been deindustrialized or left behind by new means of production. So is it for those in backwards economies or those who are in more advanced “knowledge economies”?

The answer, if he would care to actually study just a bit of Marx (which he still doesn’t mention whether or not he’s actually read) is yes. Marxism is relevant for both types of workers because the specific type of worker is not important for a Marxist analysis of capitalism. What is important is a mode of production in which capitalists exploit workers and take profit from their labor. That is a system that exists in myriad iterations all over the world, be they classical industrial situations or workers in modern-day cubicles.

Serious discussion wanted

I’ve belabored my point enough. While it’s irritating enough when people either misread or misrepresent Marx, what makes it even more disconcerting is that these kind of essays and posts serve as confirmation bias for people who have been convinced that Marxism isn’t relevant or is an evil or undemocratic political system. Furthermore, they muddy the water for people who may be actually interested in understanding Marxism as a viable political philosophy and approach.

Jason and others contend that Marxism isn’t taken seriously anywhere in the world, and that it needs to be consigned to the rubbish heap of history. But all he needs to do is take the modern political temperature to see that Marxist ideas of class warfare are incredibly popular right now. Bernie Sanders, though not self-identifying as a Marxist, leveraged class politics in a hugely successful campaign that was only narrowly stopped by all the might and money of the Democratic establishment. The most popular messages in Kamala Harris’s election campaign were around economic populism, a political strategy that leverages many Marxist ideas around class struggle. As it becomes more and more evident that billionaires and corporations seek to commodify and profit from all aspects of our lives, while exploiting workers and suppressing their wages, all while CEOs and shareholders get record bonuses and dividends and corporations rake in record profits, more and more people are waking up to the fact that our modern social and economic system is characterized by precisely the relationships that Marx specified. One might call it the development of class consciousness.

For Jason, this has nothing to do with Marx. Marx is irrelevant. But this opinion says more about his lack of understanding and unserious engagement and critique of Marxism than it does about the relevance and viability of Marxism in today’s world. The ruling class knows full well that Marx’s ideas are relevant in any day and age. This is why they have worked so hard to suppress and distort them. Jason and those like him who proudly declare that they are not Marxists might actually try reading and understanding him before passing sweeping, ill-informed, and ignorant judgment.

It is ironic that the contrast Jason uses for Marxism is Christianity, claiming I guess, that the kerygma “Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand” is self-evidently more effective than “Workers of the world, unite!” Using Jason’s own logic, we might just as easily argue that the Christian kerygma is no longer relevant because it only applied to a small band of peasants in the ancient Roman empire. And that it lost its relevance when its prophet was killed by the Romans and then failed to return and destroy the unbelievers and save the believers within their lifetimes.

But that would be ridiculous, because history has shown that Christianity is extremely resilient. And it is precisely because Christians throughout history have reinvented the meaning of this kerygma, applying it to their particular social and historical circumstances.

Marxism’s kerygma can be just as applicable when one realizes that it applies to workers no matter the specific industry or social and historical circumstances. But Jason would have us believe that Marx’s kerygma is to be understood to say “Workers of the 19th century industrial complex unite.” Once the 19th century industrial mode of production is superseded, so is Marxism. This interpretation is only possible because he has either not read, or not understood, the theory.

The reason why understanding is critical is not so we can impress the theory bros or our online groups, but because getting the specifics of theory correct (and pushing them via ongoing critique) allows us to see how capitalism really functions in our modern day (and yes, it is different than in Marx’s day, which is the reason why serious theorizing is needed). There are plenty of disagreements among Marxists about how to apply Marxism to the modern-day manifestation of capitalism. But they start by getting the basics. During the civil rights era, some revolutionary groups required members to read theory so they were all on the same page and could start from the same basic understanding.

While some people might view their understanding of theory as a badge of honor and a way to belittle others, there are those of us who really want to have discussions about how to make society better. For many of us, Marxism provides a powerful lens through which to view the class conflict that comprises the arrangement of modern social and economic systems. We seek to understand capitalism in order to replace it with something that allows all to flourish. But only in truly understanding what Jason mocks as “the grand conspiracy of so-called capitalism” can we construct a strategy to fight it. We all miss out on valuable opportunities for discussion and solidarity-building when we spend our time online fighting with one another about what is and isn’t Marxism.