I was recently asked by someone reading my forthcoming book with Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, if I would explain the relationship between Marxism and the Critical Social Justice ideology we trace a partial history of in that book. The reason for the question is that Cynical Theories obviously focuses upon the postmodern elements of Critical Social Justice scholarship and activism, and yet many people, particularly among conservatives, identify obvious relationships to Marxism within that scholarship and activism that seems poorly accounted for by talking about postmodernism. This confusion makes sense because postmodernism was always explicitly critical of Marxism, naming it among the grand, sweeping universalizing explanations of reality that it called “metanarratives,” of which it advised us to be radically skeptical.
The goal of Cynical Theories is to add clarity to this admittedly complicated discussion and lay out how postmodernism is of central importance to the development of what we now call “Critical Social Justice” or “Woke” scholarship and ideology. This is actually only one part in a far broader history that certainly draws upon Marx (and thus all the German idealists he drew upon), though in a very peculiar way and through a number of fascinating and, themselves, complex historical and philosophical twists.
One of these is the development of postmodernism, upon which we write, and another is the development of “neo-Marxism,” which is sometimes referred to as “Cultural Marxism.” This is a development of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, and it too was explicitly highly critical of Marxism in its economic particulars, though it retained the underlying ethos and ambition of overthrowing the ruling classes and establishing some variation on communism. Clearly, a third line of thought that bears some relevance is the long and, again, complex history of “social justice” thought, which can be approached in any number of ways, including religious, liberal, communist, and, as we explain in the book, “Woke,” which must be understood to be its own thing in its own context, whatever its intellectual history.
Because we had to pick a narrow enough focus to fit the book into fewer than 100,000 words, we did not do much development into the Critical Theory side of Critical Social Justice, though it is hopefully obvious that that is where the “critical” part of the terminology comes from. Postmodernism used criticism, or critique, in this fashion, but it also used other tools, including what Michel Foucault called “archeology” and “genealogy,” though these were obviously heavily tainted by the “critical” mindset and mood. Nevertheless and obviously, the title of Cynical Theories plays off the fact that Critical Theory is somehow key to it—and the cover art makes this explicit—and the argument we make, though in a rather different fashion, is that Critical Theory and postmodernism fused in the late 1980s and early 1990s into what we named “applied postmodernism.”
Whether one sees this fusion as Critical Theorists in the “liberationist” tradition taking up postmodernist tools to deconstruct oppressive power or as postmodernists taking up the Critical Theory worldview as a point of solidity in an otherwise completely liquid formulation of society and everything in it is, perhaps, a matter of perspective and debate (Helen and I differ somewhat on this point, for example). It may be of importance, but for the present discussion it is not. What matters is that this particular fusion, applied to the specific question of increasing social justice, is what became the “Critical Social Justice” scholarship and activism that we dedicate the book to exposing, explaining, and providing a clear alternative to. (You’ll have to pardon me that I’m using my updated terminology for it here, “Critical Social Justice,” whereas we only called it “Social Justice scholarship” when we wrote the book.)
People who observe that Marxism is somehow tied into all of this Woke stuff, then, are certainly not wrong, but it just as certainly isn’t Marxism. Marxists, like the real thing, might be behind this whole “Social Justice” phenomenon, or ready to come in after it tears society apart, as it does, but the Woke themselves are not Marxists, proper, and neither are the Marxists Woke. The simplest way to put this would be the following:
- Critical Theory is “neo-Marxism,” or, as it’s sometimes phrased, “Cultural Marxism,” which plainly derives from Marxism and retained much of what was core to its thought while completely modifying other aspects of it in the hopes of achieving communism.
- Postmodernism is a particular form of “post-Marxism,” which had given up more or less entirely on Marxism and thus everything else, though it was still a fairly significant fan of communist efforts as they played out in the 1950s and 1960s, and it was no friend to liberalism.
- Critical Social Justice is the intentional fusion of these two schools of thought with the goal of achieving its ideas about “Social Justice” through radical identity politics.
None of this is simple, though, unfortunately, and so it all requires more elaboration. A quick history might therefore be in order. The relevant object to understand, though we don’t develop this specifically in Cynical Theories, is Marx’s “conflict theory,” which he derived from Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.
Conflict theory applied to industrial capitalist economics is Marxism proper. That didn’t work, and people noticed. The neo-Marxists arose to try to explain why it didn’t work while retaining hope for the revolution. The post-Marxist postmodernists arose somewhat later to explain why everything is hopeless and so the only conclusion we can possibly reach is that nothing means anything and we’re all living a lie that should be taken apart on every conceivable level.
As for the neo-Marxists, they understood that Marx was wrong to say that economics were the relevant object upstream of politics. They realized it is culture and thus the impacts culture has on individual psychologies that is upstream of politics. (Andrew Breitbart didn’t come up with this idea; he read it from the Critical Theorists before deciding that they were right and putting it into his own applications!) Critical Theory, then, arose as an application of conflict theory to ideology and culture, as analyzed partly through (psychoanalytic) psychology and the emerging field of sociology. They blamed Marxism for failing to understand people and society just as much as they blamed liberalism for producing a means by which people could see society as essentially fair and success as essentially the result of talent and effort.
So, neo-Marxism is Marxian but not Marxist, in that it continues the conflict theory-style analysis of Marx into a different realm and does so toward essentially Marxist ends. One could say this is a distinction without a difference, but that is incorrect. The consequence of this shift is profound. It means that rather than attempting to unite workers and seize the means of economic production, as the Marxists had envisioned, the neo-Marxists wanted to change culture itself. This led them to find multiple sites of the oppressor/oppressed dynamic in society and get inside peoples heads with it, which they derived from the intentional forced marriage of Freudian psychoanalysis into Marxian social theory. They led them to understood the importance of seizing the means of cultural production—education, media, arts, journalism, faith, and entertainment—though, in many respects, they weren’t particularly good at it. For that, they would need the postmodernists and the critical pedagogists, as we shall see.
Of course, this is an oversimplification rather in the extreme. The neo-Marxists were critical of Marxism but not all that far from it, and they explicitly sought to agitate for a genuine Marxist revolution by means of agitating for it culturally instead of economically. That is, their goal was to use culture and ideology as a proxy by which they could effect the revolutions of the various underclasses. These they hoped to unite under a banner philosophy of “liberationism,” where by “liberation” was still very much meant liberation from the abuses of a capitalist post-Enlightenment society. Thus, the neo-Marxists merely moved the site of analysis a step back from economics to underlying culture, specifically targeting elite culture as bourgeois and middle or popular culture as a commodity produced by the elites to keep the masses dumb and content, thus not revolutionary. Their underlying assumption is that the elites define what constitutes the ostensibly “authentic” culture in a way that brainwashes the masses into working, voting, buying, and living against their own best interests, and the masses need their consciousnesses raised and made critical so they’d start hating their lives, as the Critical Theorists believed was right and proper for them, and then revolt.
In Cynical Theories, we focus on postmodernism, however, and only touch lightly upon the neo-Marxist line of thought. Postmodernism is, in some sense, a very cynical and pessimistic offshoot of Marxian and even neo-Marxist thought that took up very deeply with French structuralism, which saw the construction of society through the way language is organized in complicated webs of meaning called “discourses.” The postmodernists read a lot of power into discourses, as they would coming from a broadly structuralist mindset, and their Theory is roughly the idea that the real source of Marx’s “superstructures” of society are constructed in language, discourses, and claims to knowledge. For them, knowledge is all socially constructed, and therefore truth claims—whether true or not—are all mere applications of the politics of those who happen to hold power at that particular time and place in human history.
In that sense, postmodernism could almost be thought of as conflict theory applied to knowledge generation and discourse validation, but the original postmodernists were too pessimistic and thus nihilistic for “conflict” to really fully fit as a description of their project. They couldn’t really do conflict theory—seeing society as stratified into powerful groups who held those they oppressed down in a zero-sum conflict for opportunities and resources—because that would have required hope that there was anything of value in the “sum” at all. Because the postmodernists had given up on more or less everything, rather than seeking to analyze power structures and flip them in revolution, they opted to dissolve them entirely. This is a significant shift in thought, and, as can be seen, it isn’t quite strictly “critical” and yet retains that critical spirit.
The nihilism of postmodernism follows its conclusion that power works through everyone all the time because we—most importantly by means of how we make meaning and share it through language, thus discourses—are all agents of power, which is everywhere and fully permeates society. Thus, the postmodernists didn’t so much hold out any hope of a revolution that overturned oppressive power and, instead, sought to tear down every edifice of society to the level of personal lived experience, which was the only not-mediated thing they could imagine. (Therefore, existentialism, another French invention, is felt here rather profoundly.) This postmodern pessimism was more or less universal, though, and extended to Marxism as well as to capitalism, liberalism, and everything else, all of which Jean-François Lyotard named as “metanarratives” to be radically skeptical of. It is in this sense that postmodernism is actually more post-Marxist than it is anything else.
So, that sets the history of both the neo-Marxist and postmodernist (post-Marxist) schools of thought and explains their connection to Marxism, including what they kept from Marx and what they rejected. The Marxian roots are obvious, and yet it isn’t Marxism, and this antagonistic relationship between the theoretical approaches goes in both directions.
One of the main points of criticism of both neo-Marxism and post-Marxism, i.e., Critical Theory and postmodernism, is Marxism itself. Both saw that Marxism had failed in certain ways and for certain reasons, and both were content to very viciously attack Marxism as a failed theory whose broader ambitions either could (neo-Marxism) possibly be realized by agitating culture enough, or could not (post-Marxism) ever be realized (and thus advocated giving up on essentially everything except lived experience and cynical, pessimistic play, especially with words and symbols). Of course, to be completely fair, the post-Marxists weren’t quite so thoroughly pessimistic as their theoretical approach, though, in practice. Whatever their Theories said, they still, at least for a time, drew heavily off the successes of Mao in his Cultural Revolution and used them to inspire Pol-Pot, who studied alongside them at the Sorbonne in Paris at the time, to go after a deconstructive Year-Zero campaign of his own.
Nevertheless, both of these traditions had major problems, as one would expect from even hearing a superficial description of their ideas, and both of them more or less burned themselves out in public popularity pretty quickly. The French postmodern Theory was rejected completely in France and more or less ignored everywhere else outside of English departments in North America and Australia, it seems. It became something of a philosophical backwater that had mostly been taken up as a kind of plaything by feminists and sophists until it became more or less synonymous with “intellectual impostures” and was wrongly declared dead by the academy as a serious intellectual pursuit by sometime in the 1990s.
Neo-Marxism, on the other hand, turned radical and violent under Herbert Marcuse, who even claimed himself that it had gone beyond his vision, and it burned itself out in terms of public support. (His influence, combined with that of the French postcolonialist and psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon, is, to decent approximation on its own the origin story of the radical anarchist project called Antifa.) Critical Theory then went underground into the universities, in that whole long march through the institutions project, starting in the early 1970s, working its way first into feminist and then other forms of critique, mostly in English departments, under headings like women’s studies, gender studies, African American studies, and ethnic studies.
Thus, again, it’s our avant-garde humanities scholars who remained interested in this at the time, mostly feminists who were radical in spirit but not technically “radical” as the term is meant (ones who were deep in socialist and materialist analyses of the patriarchy, for the most part, but not the angry lesbian separatist stuff) and black liberationists (nb: “liberationism” means neo-Marxism, by definition). These went on to establish and grow those various “studies” departments and thus started the long process of idea-laundering identity-based Critical Theories within our academic presses, universities, and their classrooms. More or less everyone else ignored it even as they believed themselves more and more crucially relevant within the academy, with one horrible exception, to our peril, until quite recently.
The one notable exception is the schools of education, particularly following the “critical turn in education,” which sought to make education about “consciousness raising” and instilling a “critical consciousness” into children as an educational priority. Some of this was explicitly anti-capitalist, and thus Marxist in origin, but it was mostly much more subtle. Critical pedagogy, as the result came to be called, was much more interested in undermining the national metanarratives, if you will, and getting students to be “educated” in a way that would lead them to be critical of their own national histories, culture, and civics—or, more explicitly, to get them to learn to see their home nations as oppressive bad actors rather than as imperfect leaders of spreading a liberal order throughout the world and thus come to doubt or even hate them.
This turn, which also sought to “empower” students in their relationships with teachers in the classroom and beyond, was initiated by the radical activist Henry Giroux mainlining his own takes on the Brazilian education “reformer” Paulo Freire into our educational programs around 1980. Giroux, at the time, was a leftist radical activist in education, but seemingly of a fairly nondescript sort, at least until he discovered Freire’s book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which he described as sparking a revolution in his thinking.
For his part, Freire is usually described as post-Marxist, but he was in some ways a different sort, drawing heavily off the South American Marxist and neo-Marxist traditions that had kind of hybridized in that particular cultural context. Though the details remain unclear to me at this time, this mishmash of leftist ideologies predicated on Marxism in South America probably resulted from leftists in the region having taken up liberation theology first and then inserting it into everything else in society from there. Surely, Marxists and neo-Marxists who fled various European countries for South America, particularly during World War II would also have deepened this particular Marxian/Marxist line of thought, within which Freire incubated his own ideas.
Freire, I’m told, ruined Brazilian education more or less singlehandedly, and it was his approach that Henry Giroux found so inspiring that he dragged it and its influence into North America. Giroux then incorporated first neo-Marxist and then postmodernist ideas (“the European theorists”) into education and educational theory, though the latter of those projects happened much more extensively later under the hand of another critical pedagogist named Joe Kincheloe. Thus, our schools of education turned heavily in the “critical” direction (meaning a blurry mix of Marxism, neo-Marxism, and postmodern post-Marxism, plus Freire’s own slightly tangential post-Marxist ideas) by the early 1980s, when Giroux became massively influential after publishing his first book, Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling, which was first published in North America in 1981.
A lot was going on in the 1980s and into the 1990s in this regard. By then, the (liberationlist, i.e., neo-Marxist) black feminists (this is a school of thought, not black people who happen to be feminists) had taken up quite a bit of interest in postmodern Theory, as had some other fairly radical feminists, especially those like Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, who would go on to lay the foundations of queer Theory. You had, for example, scholars like bell hooks who were tied into nearly all of these streams of thought at once gaining tremendous influence, and all three of them can be clearly read in her landmark education book in 1994 titled Teaching to Transgress. hooks’ thought was particularly influential in the development of critical race Theory as well as in bringing black feminist and critical race Theory perspectives into the critical turn in education, and she was explicitly liberationist (neo-Marxist) and very experimental in the relevance of postmodern Theory to her thought, activism, and teaching.
This generation of activists saw postmodern Theory as somewhat incorrect but intrinsically useful for deconstructing the power dynamics their underlying neo-Marxist and radical feminist worldviews believed dominated society. To be clear, I’m glazing over a lot of complicated history and thought in this paragraph, but the ascendancy of a postmodernist critical race Theory and queer Theory from within specific sects of black feminism and gender studies, in particular, is central to the fusion of neo-Marxism and postmodernism that forms one of the key observations and claims of Cynical Theories.
The big idea these particular Theorists had was to limit the deconstructive potential of postmodern Theory so that it couldn’t be applied to any identity factor that’s on the “oppressed” end of the neo-Marxist liberationist view. They outlined the idea that to deconstruct a site of oppression, as it is understood through lived experience, is itself a luxury, thus application, of oppressive privilege. That removed systemic oppression, as the liberationists (neo-Marxists) defined it, from the acid bath of postmodernist deconstruction.
That is, a moral rock—the imperative to liberate from oppression—was inserted into the philosophical universe touched upon by these varied Marxian lines of scholarship, thought, and activism. That reification of systemic oppression, as understood through its lived experience (the one thing the deconstructionists said would be left when everything else is deconstructed), created a neat package by which postmodern Theory could be simplified and packaged up for activists.
At this point, we reach the crucial and yet probably utterly unimportant question: were these activists postmodernists or neo-Marxists, in the main, who incorporated the other line of thought into theirs? My answer to this question is that—because they were activists—they were ultimately neo-Marxists, and their philosophy is one in which those who experience systemic oppression are to be made aware of their oppression and its systemic nature and thus seek a revolution that would liberate them from it. The evolution of Critical Theory had, by the 1960s even, laid out the sites of genuine systemic oppression as being those oversimplified stratifications of society rooted in factors of personal identity. Nonetheless, the continuity of postmodern thought is abundantly clear, and this continuity forms the central thesis of Cynical Theories.
Thus, “liberationist” politics were even by then, and much more by the time in 1989–1991 when postmodernism was fully and formally incorporated into them, unapologetically centered upon a narrowly particular and aggressive approach to identity politics that sought to forward social responsibility at the level of identity groups as the answer to the question of systemic oppression. The postmodern view that knowledge is just another application of unjustly empowered politics effectively liberated neo-Marxism from any obligation to making true statements about the world in service of its liberationist agenda. Instead, it elevated for these rather cutthroat activists the power of both unfalsifiable claims to lived experience (of systemic oppression) and the problematizing (i.e., offense-taking) that the Critical Theorists had forwarded as a means beyond defeasibility and falsification for invalidating undesirable (note: not “incorrect”) statements about the world and social reality within it (these, of course, would be those that are “not liberationist,” in the sense of producing a communist, or ethno-communist, revolution).
Hopefully obviously, this approach could not possibly be like that defining the liberal core of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s (in the United States), or of Gay Pride (which sought to normalize LGB and later T identities, which has always been vigorously opposed by queer Theory), or of liberal approaches to feminism in the second wave. Rather than appealing to individualism and universal humanity, this “applied postmodern” approach took a tack closer to that of the Black Power movement, which ran in a less-liberal parallel to the Civil Rights Movement.
This very radical approach as it appeared in the 1990s makes the Black Power movement from the 1960s and 1970s look quaint by comparison. It ultimately carried the goal of earning liberation for those who endure systemic oppression, not just from their oppressors but from oppression itself by seeking a complete overthrow of the existing system, in part through a complete deconstruction of anything that confers, produces, legitimizes, or upholds systemic power in any regard whatsoever. Whiteness itself, in all of its various manifestations, for example, must be unmade to end systemic racism, it contends. Here, then, is where postmodernism (post-Marxism) and neo-Marxism fused into “Critical Social Justice,” and this fusion can be read quite explicitly in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s landmark 1991 paper, “Mapping the Margins” (pdf).
That was the official birth of the Critical Social Justice school of thought, what we called “applied postmodernism” throughout Cynical Theories (although applied postmodern thinking predated Crenshaw’s 1991 paper by some time, especially in postcolonial Theory, that paper marks a very clear turning point and birthmark for the dominance of that line of thinking). In that sense, Marx’s influence is obvious in Critical Social Justice in the form of conflict theory applied across the stratification of identity groups (theorized as “positionality”) and the postmodern (really, poststructural) techniques of deconstruction were set to be applied only to oppressive power structures, as the Theory defined them.
In all of this, Marxism, though, which is conflict theory applied to Industrial Age capitalist economics, is more or less completely lost, except as a thing that people occasionally yell about without any apparent deep understanding. Class struggle, to Marxists, unites people across identity groups—“workers of the world, unite!”—so identity groups are mostly irrelevant to Marxism except in the effort to outline the specific ways that capitalism might uniquely exploit them. In fact, the proper Marxists of today don’t like Critical Social Justice at all because of its divisiveness around identity within class and its overwhelmingly obvious bourgeois language, position-seeking, elite-status origins, disregard for reality, and seemingly unmatched disdain for the working class.
So, in that sense, the Critical Social Justice that we describe in Cynical Theories (under the moniker “Social Justice scholarship and activism”) is profoundly Marxian in more than one way at once but is very expressly not Marxist. In particular, Marxism is an economics-based social theory, and Critical Social Justice actually usurps economic analysis and obscures it to use it as a proxy for its peculiar approach to identity politics. To be more specific on that, for example, it’s overwhelmingly obvious that economic causes are the sources of many of the phenomena Critical Race Theorists name as “systemic racism,” but they use the fact that there are statistical economic differences by race to claim that racism (not capitalistic exploitation) are the ultimate causes of those differences. Thus, they make class a proxy for the site of oppression that they’re actually obsessively focused upon, race, and thereby obliterate any possibility for liberal, rational, or even materialist or Marxist analysis of the underlying issues.
There’s something of an exception to that point, however, as though this isn’t already complicated enough. As Critical Social Justice not particularly suited to do much of anything except tear things apart and seems positively disinterested in building anything at all, the truly Marxist underpinnings of the movement do tend to show through a bit when its activists try to do anything practical in the sense of building something. We see this, for example, in demands for equitable and diverse hiring, as those ideas are quite obviously related to Marxism but only as filtered through identity-based lenses, which Marxism would reject on principle (not for bad reasons). In this way, it’s probably more accurate to describe the efforts of Critical Social Justice not as Marxist but as ethno-communist, where “ethnicity” here applies to the “culture” of any particular “systemically oppressed” identity group.
I know it’s confusing, but hopefully this helps clarify the complicated relationship between Marxism, neo-Marxism, postmodernism, and their kind of mutant-hybrid descendant, Critical Social Justice scholarship and activism. So it goes when radical Marxian-Utopian activism evolves against both reality and the solid liberal societies that successfully push back at all of its many endless attempts to undermine society from within.
Interested readers can get Cynical Theories here.
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Of course the Woke have discovered that the canonical texts of Marxism are themselves oppressive. Th following article is so perfect in its distillation of Wokeness, that I offer it here complete. I wanted to edit it, but did not have the heart, because I feared marring its perfection. After you have read it you may want to pound your head on the table. Please don’t
Occupy the syllabus
Last Updated January 20, 2015
http://www.dailycal.org/2015/01/20/occupy-syllabus/
We are calling for an occupation of syllabi in the social sciences and humanities. This call to action was instigated by our experience last semester as students in an upper-division course on classical social theory. Grades were based primarily on multiple-choice quizzes on assigned readings. The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.
We have major concerns about social theory courses in which white men are the only authors assigned. These courses pretend that a minuscule fraction of humanity — economically privileged white males from five imperial countries (England, France, Germany, Italy and the United States) — are the only people to produce valid knowledge about the world. This is absurd. The white male syllabus excludes all knowledge produced outside this standardized canon, silencing the perspectives of the other 99 percent of humanity.
The white male canon is not sufficient for theorizing the lives of marginalized people. None of the thinkers we studied in this course had a robust analysis of gender or racial oppression. They did not even engage with the enduring legacies of European colonial expansion, the enslavement of black people and the genocide of indigenous people in the Americas. Mentions of race and gender in the white male canon are at best incomplete and at worst racist and sexist. We were required to read Hegel on the “Oriental realm” and Marx on the “Asiatic mode of production,” but not a single author from Asia. We were required to read Weber on the patriarchy, but not a single feminist author. The standardized canon is obsolete: Any introduction to social theory that aims to be relevant to today’s problems must, at the very least, address gender and racial oppression.
The exclusions on the syllabus were mirrored in the classroom. Although the professor said he wanted to make the theory relevant to present issues, the class was out of touch with the majority of students’ lives. The lectures often incorporated current events, yet none of the examples engaged critically with gender or race. The professor even failed to mention the Ferguson events, even though he lectured about prisons, normalizing discourse and the carceral archipelago in Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” the day after the grand jury decision on the murder of Michael Brown.
Furthermore, the classroom environment felt so hostile to women, people of color, queer folks and other marginalized subjects that it was difficult for us to focus on the course material. Sometimes, we were so uncomfortable that we had to leave the classroom in the middle of lecture. For example, when lecturing on Marx’s idea of the “natural division of labor between men and women,” the professor attributed some intellectual merit to this idea because men and women are biologically distinct from each other, because women give birth while men do not. One student asked, “What about trans* people?” to which the professor retorted, “There will always be exceptions.” Then, laughing, the professor teased, “We may all be transgender in the future.” Although one might be tempted to dismiss these remarks as a harmless attempt at humor, mocking trans* people and calling them “exceptions” is unacceptable.
This was not an isolated incident. In another lecture, the professor cited the highly racialized case of the Hurricane Katrina fallout as an example of people in a poor, brutish, Hobbesian “state of nature.” Moreover, he talked about Native American traditions and beliefs as examples of illogical and irrational superstition. All of these incidents are connected to a larger systemic problem with inclusion in classroom spaces at UC Berkeley. In the 2013 campus climate survey, 26 percent of respondents reported that they had personally experienced exclusionary, intimidating, offensive and/or hostile conduct. The survey also found that marginalized students, such as trans* and black students, had experienced exclusionary conduct at rates much higher than average.
We need to create classroom spaces where everyone can feel welcome. We recommend that instructors attend workshops on inclusivity in the classroom, such as those offered by the Gender Equity Resource Center. Beyond that, we must restructure the way social theory is taught. We must dismantle the tyranny of the white male syllabus. We must demand the inclusion of women, people of color and LGBTQ* authors on our curricula. We must break, systematically and explicitly, the epistemological assumptions on which this exclusionary education rests.
So, if you have taken classes in the social sciences and humanities, we challenge you: Count the readings authored by white males and those authored by the majority of humanity. Then ask yourself: Are your identities and the identities of people you love reflected on these syllabi? Whose perspectives and life experiences are excluded? Is it really worth it to accumulate debt for such an epistemically poor education?
Rodrigo Kazuo and Meg Perret are students at UC Berkeley. Perret is also an intern at the Gender Equity Resource Center.
I think Yoram Hazony did an excellent job of explaining the essence of Marxism that has permeated leftist thought since the beginning of Marxism as a distinct phenomenon in his Quillette article: “The Challenge of Marxism”. https://quillette.com/2020/08/16/the-challenge-of-marxism/
II. The Marxist framework
* * *
… recognize the movement presently seeking to overthrow liberalism for what it is: an updated version of Marxism. …
The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by 19th-century Communists. They don’t talk about the bourgeoisie, proletariat, class struggle, alienation of labor, commodity fetishism, and the rest, and in fact they have developed their own jargon tailored to present circumstances in America, Britain, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism (what Marx calls the “ideology of the bourgeoisie”) and overthrowing it. We can describe Marx’s political framework as follows:
1. Oppressor and oppressed
Marx argues that, as an empirical matter, people invariably form themselves into cohesive groups (he calls them classes), which exploit one another to the extent they are able. A liberal political order is no different in this from any other, and it tends toward two classes, one of which owns and controls pretty much everything (the oppressor); while the other is exploited, and the fruit of its labor appropriated, so that it does not advance and, in fact, remains forever enslaved (the oppressed). In addition, Marx sees the state itself, its laws and its mechanisms of enforcement, as a tool that the oppressor class uses to keep the regime of oppression in place and to assist in carrying out this work.
2. False consciousness
Marx recognizes that the liberal businessmen, politicians, lawyers, and intellectuals who keep this system in place are unaware that they are the oppressors, and that what they think of as progress has only established new conditions of oppression. Indeed, even the working class may not know that they are exploited and oppressed. This is because they all think in terms of liberal categories (e.g., the individual’s right to freely sell his labor) which obscure the systematic oppression that is taking place. This ignorance of the fact that one is an oppressor or oppressed is called the ruling ideology (Engels later coined the phrase false consciousness to describe it), and it is only overcome when one is awakened to what is happening and learns to recognize reality using true categories.
3. Revolutionary reconstitution of society
Marx suggests that, historically, oppressed classes have materially improved their conditions only through a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large—that is, through the destruction of the oppressor class, and of the social norms and ideas that hold the regime of systematic oppression in place. He even specifies that liberals will supply the oppressed with the tools needed to overthrow them. There is a period of “more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution” and the “violent overthrow” of the liberal oppressors. At this point, the oppressed seize control of the state.
4. Total disappearance of class antagonisms
Marx promises that after the oppressed underclass takes control of the state, the exploitation of individuals by other individuals will be “put to an end” and the antagonism between classes of individuals will totally disappear. How this is to be done is not specified.
Marxist political theories have undergone much development and elaboration over nearly two centuries. The story of how “neo-Marxism” emerged after the First World War in the writings of the Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci has been frequently told, and academics will have their hands full for many years to come arguing over how much influence was exerted on various successor movements by Michel Foucault, post-modernism, and more. But for present purposes, this level of detail is not necessary, and I will use the term “Marxist” in a broad sense to refer to any political or intellectual movement that is built upon Marx’s general framework as I’ve just described it. This includes the “Progressive” or “Anti-Racism” movement now advancing toward the conquest of liberalism in America and Britain. This movement uses racialist categories such as whites and people of color to describe the oppressors and the oppressed in our day. But it relies entirely on Marx’s general framework for its critique of liberalism and for its plan of action against the liberal political order. It is simply an updated Marxism.
The best history of Marxism as a 19th Century intellectual movement is “Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study” By George Lichtheim. (1964) Available as a Kindle Book from Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Marxism-RLE-Historical-Critical-Routledge-ebook-dp-B00XCKWUEE/dp/B00XCKWUEE/
“The author takes the view that Marxism is a movement and a body of doctrine which belongs essentially to the 19th century, which came to an end with the First World War and the Russian Revolution …”
One of the first 20th century mutations of Marxism was Georges Sorel, who was noted for his rejection of the intellectual superstructure of economic and historical determinism and who propounded the General Strike and Syndicalism. He was a major influence on Mussolini and Lenin. The Russians were well known for propounding a 19th Century version of classical Marxism as a religious text. Of course they were beating a dead horse.
Lictheim is interesting because he translated Gershom Scholem’s “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism”. Scholem explained the development of the Jewish mystical tradition (Kabbalah) and showed that its most important text, Zohar was written in Spain in the 13th century by Moses de Leon, not in Judea in the 2nd Century by Shimon bar Yochai.
Scholem was not a Marxist. But, he did explain Kabbalah. one of its central teachings is that God made the world with words and that the words of sacred text contain the hidden mystical meaning of creation. Is this belief the source of the linguistic turn in postmodern theory? Let me show a real connection.
Scholem’s close friends included Theodore Adorno and Walter Benjamin, two of the key members of the Frankfurt School. Major Trends is dedicated to Benjamin, who suicided at the Spanish Border fleeing the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, the year before Major Trends was published.
The Frankfurt School arose because of two great challenges to the classical Marxist were the failure of the German revolution in 1918 (the collapse of the Imperial regime) to produce a socialist state and the rise of Nazism. They need and created a new framework to explain the situation.
Another member of the Frankfurt School was Herbert Marcuse. All of the 1960s New Left radicals read Marcuse, even if they did not understand his impenetrable gobbledygook. One of them was Bill Ayers, who should have been imprisoned for felony murder in connection with the death of his lover and two other conspirators in a bomb-making accident in Greenwich Village in 1970. Instead, Ayers became a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois Chicago Campus. Ayers mentored Barack Obama in the 1990s and is widely believed to have written large portions of Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father. One of Ayres’s 1960s co-conspirators was Kathy Boudin, who later did hard time for murder and robbery in the 1981 Brinks Robbery in Nanuet NY. While Boudin was in the slam, Ayers and his co-conspirator wife Bernadine Dohrn, raised Boudin’s son Chesa, who was elected District Attorney of San Francisco in 2019 and is now engaged in abolishing law enforcement in that formerly great city.
In the Coen Brother’s Hollywood satire, a Professor Marcuse lectures the communist cell. The movie is a wicked send-up of Hollywood sacred cows including communists and homosexuals. If you haven’t seen it, do so.
What shines through all this is the ‘sheer tedium’ of it all. An hyper-sensitised ‘Sense of Outrage’ is obviously an essential motivation for it be one’s “lived experience!”
There are so many ‘injustices’ to be called out, that counting the grains of sand on the seashore, would be a far easier proposition.
I’m literally using this for an essay about critical pedagogy, my prof talked about Freire like he was a god, I naturally assumed he wasn’t lol, but this makes it much more clear. Thank you daddy James, I wouldn’t be able to get through education without you.
Its refreshing to see a young scholar with such a good grasp on the current situation in the continuing assault on the results of over a thousand years of Western Civilization, the leap forward in the progress of humanity called the Enlightenment and Age of Reason, the temporary triumph of Reason and Liberalism.
Being an old Cold War veteran I tend to stand back and look at the overall view of the forest rather than look too close at the tree bark, as you and your associates do. Nothing wrong with that though, your analysis is spot on and historically correct, history being more of my field of expertise, with philosophy coming in third, my professional career focused on educational film.
Like a lot of my generation, with some military and police background, I tend to look at the overall strategy rather than just the on the ground tactics. As the one commentator said, “I could no longer stomach keeping up with the latest twists and turns..” and I understand the frustration. That is why it is important to stand back and take an overview of the situation, look at the broad view of the forest…or battlefield.
Let’s look at communism, or socialism, what is its role, and as the wise Roman pointed out, who profits from its rise.
At the end of the Age of Reason, the Napoleonic Wars sounding its temporary death-nell in Europe with the formation of the Holy League, it would seem that the Counter-Enlightenment and Counter Reformation had succeeded. Monarchy restored, the church for the time being restored to its ancient position, the Inquisition even restored at least in Spain.
In the early part of the new century we saw the rise of socialism, so named by then, and what was the reaction of the remaining liberals? To immediately expose it as just another form of tyranny and enemy of liberalism. Yes, socialism used the language and ideas of liberalism to point out the problems of the old regimes and order of conservatism, but its solution was just to kill the old lord of the manor and set up new ones who would govern, and reap the financial rewards, of the new order.
So along comes Marx and Engels, and here is where it gets interesting, who funded them? As I learned years ago during the Cold War, and this was something a lot of conservatives did not want known, it was the financial powers that be at the time. Move up to 1917, powerful financial backers made sure Lenin got back to Russia. Interesting not to say and this sort of changes one’s outlook at the purpose of socialism, Marxism/Communism. Shortly before the First World War, even at the end of the 19th century, the Jesuit publications were hinting at a new menace that was going to arise, and it was the will of God that this happen as a corrective to deal with the new democratic ideas and liberalism that had re-arisen in Europe and infected even the monarchies, ‘that many a crown, and nation would sink into oblivion with the upheaval coming.’
I will not bother to try to index this information, I saw the intelligence back in the 1960s, and later while in my short tenure at a theological institute, I researched the part of the Jesuits in working behind the scenes to restore the “Ancien Regime” and power structure, it was chilling to read their comments.
Now, the Liberation Theology that was promoted in South America by the Jesuit Order was mentioned on here, think about that, what is the M.O. of this old order, but play off on both sides of the battlefield of ideas, or war, to work in conjunction to assure that the Holy Church benefits in the end game. Like the current Pope, a good conservative Jesuit, then when he becomes the White Pope, suddenly he is a liberal? And look how the traditionalists are eating this up, not unlike when a group like Antifa comes into the mix, stirring up riot and excesses so that the conservative media can cry out, oh how terrible, crush them, restore law and order…etc. Antifa did this back in the 30s, Hitler used their extreme behavior as one of his excuses to restore law and order. Yes, they are an old organization, been around. This is why agents provocateurs are used by fascist minded police, to get a riot going so they can break up lawful and peaceful protest.
Playing both sides is an ancient strategy, and it has always worked, because as Machiavelli has so well pointed out, ‘advantage can be taken of those who trust to honest dealing,’.. off of the top of my head quote there.
Yes, its hard “…keeping up with the latest twists and turns..” of those who are trying to destroy the great work of liberalism to liberate humanity. P.C. CRT, Woke, Identity Politics…all part of the swarm of isms spawned from the same evil seed that dates back more then two hundred years in the current attempt to destroy liberty of the mind and body.
I do hope that your readers will take the time to step back, take a look from more afar at the current events and see the overall strategy at work here, it helps one to focus their energies and efforts to be more effective.
Very little happens by chance, the events of history are too often well orchestrated, with some
unpredictable events thrown in that can either promote those machinations, or even derail them. Maybe, as our Founders thought, a Providence does over rule in the affairs of men at times to accomplish good? Time will tell, as it always does.
Once again, I applaud your work and you can count on my support!
Sapere aude [ “Dare to know” ] ~Kant
> Like a lot of my generation, with some military and police background, I tend to look at the overall strategy rather than just the on the ground tactics.
And like them, you don’t trouble yourself much with distinctions between socialism -which is worker control of means of production – and Soviet style totalitarianism, which is anything but.
Please go through my work on Anthropological Economics. It is available on the internet.
Really good stuff. You are so smart. I love watching your videos on YouTube and loved your book. But, I think you are way off about Marxism in Latin America.
Neither Marxists who fled Europe nor Freire are responsible for the Marxists movements in Latin America. Fidel Castro can single-handedly be given credit for those. Cuba had a sophisticated guerilla training operation for decades, to export its Marxist revolution around the world, especially to other third world countries. The Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Zapatistas in Mexico, Tupamaros in Uruguay, Montoneros in Argentina, the FARC in Colombia, the MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement) in Chile, the Farabundo Marti in El Salvador… were all funded by and trained, in Cuba. Fidel is also responsible for what has happened in Venezuela. And it wasn’t only Latin American guerrillas but north American and African as well. Members of the Black Liberation Army, the Black Panthers, and Weather Underground trained in Cuba, as well as many other terrorist groups (separatist/non-Marxists) such as the IRA and ETA (in Spain). It’s a shame that people don’t know the damage Fidel Castro did to the free world. I might write a book about it. 🙂
Liberation theology did not come first. That movement started in the early 60s and did not take hold until a decade or two later and it was within the Catholic church. If you want to watch something fun (I think it’s fun), watch the video of Pope Jean Paul II (born in communist Poland as you probably know) scolding Liberation Theology priest Ernesto Cardenal in public, during his visit to Nicaragua in the 80s. Never gets old!
*John Paul II
A very good article but I have one recommendation for a future project to clear up one unexplained ambiguity raised in this article. Perhaps this might not be your forte, Dr. Lindsay, but I was wondering whether you could analyze to what extent subversive activities by the KGB directed at academia may have played in the formation of Critical Theory/Postmodernism.
Yuri Bezmenov describes the process in his lecture on communist subversion and what each stage of the process looks like and how it is accomplished:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLdDmeyMJls
As he reports, the subversion itself need not be explicit Marxist propaganda; all that’s needed is for it to effectively destabilizes society by undermining its moral framework and increasing political polarization. While it may simply be a case of me finding a hammer and looking for nails, I can’t help but think that such subversive efforts might explain the curious but seemingly unexplained fact as to why Critical Theory and Postmodernism were broadly Marxist-aligned despite the fact that they did not spend much of their time advocating for Marxism/Socialism proper and even sometimes criticizing them.
To what extent these schools of thought were influenced or shaped by active efforts by the KGB to ideologically subvert America in order to destablize it back in the 70s/80s is more of a question for a historian than a philosopher, however, so I respect if such a project is outside the scope of your interests.
Thanks for the article.
Go back in time about 40 years to 1980, UK. Communist Parties still existed – both Stalinist and Trotskyite. Neither of these 2 flavours of Marxism saw Frankfurt critical theory as ‘Marxist’. Postmodernists were anti-Marxist. Stalinists/Trotskyites saw CT as anti-Marxist because:
1. CT ignored the economy. It was entirely a theory of culture. Very pessimistic one too. (try reading ‘One-Dimensional Man’ or ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’; Ultra pessimist if you ask me )
2. Many of the New Left who embraced CT were opposed to Marxist politics (class struggle).
3. Foucault was an anarchist, and anti-Marxist. Postmodernism was explicitly anti-Marxist with its famous and loud ‘suspicion of grand narratives’.
4. CT had no theory for the revolutionary transformation of society to the socialist Utopia. Many CT thinkers were suspicious of the very idea of revolution. Adorno is better described as Nihilist rather than Marxist. Calling you book ‘Negative Dialectics’ does make it Marxist. Adorno was as influenced by Nietzsche too more so than Derrida, not as much as Foucault.
The Marxist influence on CT was entirely due to them reading Marx. But not the later Marx of Capital; which actually made ‘Marxism’. CT was influenced by the younger Marx who was really just another Left Hegelian. One might almost call CT and Postmodernism anti-Marxist. Pretty much everything was; because none of the left (apart from the Stalinists) wanted anything connected to ‘actually existing socialism’.
Zoom 40 years forward again to today. CSJT is really a kind on pro-statist socialist ideology – like Fabianism. Today, people call CSJT ‘Marxist’ because everything in politics lacks nuance. Just like liberals, such as Lindsay calling libertarians “far farout alt-right racists”. Mid-1990s saw the left turn against libertarianism with a vengeance. Before then, there had even been a thing called ‘Left Libertarianism’. Politics polarizes everything into us/them.
Although interesting as an exercise, this article pays too much tribute to critical theory by constructing an intellectual genealogy for power obsessed gobbledygook. As though the adherents and the tenured radicals spouting this would suddenly give up their selfserving doctrines having realized its Marxist origins.
This is fascinating stuff James. I’m a mere reality miner, a Scientist and appalled by the whole of Woke, their denial of the Enlightenment most particularly. They are children smashing what they do not understand or appreciate whilst they take every advantage of the products of Enlightenment technical science.
They really should reject technology for the gold standard of interpersonal activism. That they don’t tells you all you need to know about the inauthenticity of their program. Like a Vegan wearing leather because it’s practical.
I’m an idiot.
Could you be any more obtuse? Next time I want to scatter my guests like chickens I’ll start by saying: The reason for the question is that Cynical Theories obviously focuses upon the postmodern elements of Critical Social Justice scholarship and activism, and yet many people, particularly among conservatives, identify obvious relationships to Marxism within that scholarship and activism that seems poorly accounted for by talking about postmodernism. This confusion makes sense because postmodernism was always explicitly critical of Marxism, naming it among the grand, sweeping universalizing explanations of reality that it called “metanarratives,” of which it advised us to be radically skeptical.
It isn’t James Lindsay’s fault that your dinner guests are intellectual lightweights or that you would be so crass as to misread the room by talking like that.
I still feel that “Critical Social Justice” cedes a favorable terminology for the sake of an esoteric accuracy. Something like Social Destructionists would be equally accurate, while also painting the movement in a more appropriate light.
Excellent piece, but sadly – as you so correctly state about the subject is so complex – it needs more citations or references.
Well, if there is one thing the left does really well is doublespeak. The Soviets were great at it. For example, when they invaded Poland they said they “liberated” Poland. I think the constant doublespeak is one of the things that makes living in a “communist” country so… dysphoric. You start to question your own sanity after a while.
I just don’t even feel worthy reading you! You have given words to the way I have felt for so long. I feel so validated, I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand anything that’s going on! But I’m forever grateful for you & what you’re doing! Will be ordering your book asap& shipping it to France where I live ❤️I’m American from South Carolina and you have given me so much confidence to stand up to wokeness.
Old Testament
New Testament
Critical Testament
As a one-time ‘warrior’ in the academic theory wars of the 1980s, I have been delighted to discover the work of yourself and Helen Pluckrose. Essentially, you outline very well the story of my life in a Philosophy Department from the mid-seventies until the early 90s at which point I could no longer stomach keeping up with the latest twists and turns and analysing intellectually dishonest and deliberately obscure tracts. Like you, I believe the rot set in with what became known as ‘postmodernism’ or Theory as it was then called.
However, I would like to make a few small modifications to your account of the pre-history of the union between the ‘Critical Theorists’ influenced by the Frankfurt School and the postmodern thought centred mainly on Foucault, Derrida and the Belgian French feminist, Luce Irigaray.
First, you don’t quite do justice to the Frankfurt School and those who, in the late 1970s and 80s saw themselves as working in its tradition of ’emancipatory’ theory (their term). The Frankfurt School was, for the most part, firmly rooted in a defence of the Enlightenment, a commitment deepened by their most prominent exponents experience of Fascism. The ‘theory wars’ in the 80s were largely between these ‘neo-Marxists’ (your term) and the post-structuralists (later referred to as ‘postmodernists’. There were two central poles of that conflict. The first was the possibility of ‘truth’ or ‘objective knowledge’, strongly defended by Critical Theorists and denied by the postmodernists. The second was the possibility of ’emancipation’, defended by Critical Theory and attacked by the postmodernists who favoured ‘transgression’ via ‘endless deconstruction’, a politics grounded in their theory of meaning. (So it is not quite correct to say they aimed to dissolve power – every dissolution of one power structure was to be followed by its own later dissolution.)
The reason I would stress this point is because in the eventual union of the two theoretical trends, the postmodernists won on both counts. Most significant, I believe, was the defeat of any commitment to truth, or objectivity, in theorists of the ‘left’. What was once an academic philosophical discussion has since spilled out into the wider community in a way which has been disastrous. Those of us who intuited the dangers of that shift could not have imagined then how sound those intuitions were. My own department was fortunate enough to have Gyorgy Markus, a one-time student of Lukacs, one of the most significant philosophers loosely associated with the Frankfurt School. As a child, Gyorgy had experienced the Budapest Ghetto and it was with some passion he warned us against the dangers of giving up on the Enlightenment tradition. In the overall picture you paint so well, this is perhaps a detail but it is an important detail in view of the fact that you – in my view rightly –see the abandonment of objectivity in thought as politically significant.
Good points, thanks for the post.
Typos. Feel free not to post this comment.
“They led them to understood the importance of seizing the means of cultural production”
In context I think this sentence should begin “This led them to understand”.
“philosophy of “liberationism,” where by “liberation” was still very much meant liberation from the abuses of”
I’m not totally sure if this is grammatically wrong, but it seems off.
“the real source of Marx’s “superstructures” of society are”
Should be plural, “the real sources … are”.
“liberationlist” -> “liberationist”.
“As Critical Social Justice not particularly suited to do much of anything”
Should be “… Justice is not”.
The following is not a typo:
“ethno-communist, where “ethnicity” here applies to the “culture” of any particular “systemically oppressed” identity group.”
I am predicting that some neoreactionaries are going to take this summation to be roughly an independent confirmation of their interpretation of this pattern, which they call “bio-leninism”.
“Freire, I’m told, ruined Brazilian education more or less singlehandedly”
Can you provide a source for this? From a quick look at some biographies online, it looks to me like his pedagogical activity in Brazil was small-scale and predominantly in adult education. He doesn’t appear to have ever been put in any position with the scope one would imagine would be necessary to effect such a dramatic outcome as ruining the education of a whole nation.
Freirian educational structures were implemented universally across Brazil over the past decade and a half. He is perhaps the most influential paedagogue in Brazil, both in adult and child education systems, and it is almost impossible to escape his influence. He is generally understood to have entirely subverted the educational enterprise. It is impossible to overstate Freire’s influence over the past decade+ in Brazil.
I am so grateful to have found this site. Thank you for your work.
Excellent article. Your work keeps getting better.
This was superb. Shared.
Great article. Can’t wait to get the book.
I’m not sure if this was intentional, but Bell Hooks’ name is not capitalized?
She doesn’t capitalise it herself.
Yeah, it was intentional. It was a pen-name that they used and intentionally didn’t capitalize it.