[ The Right never seems to stop talking about “Marxism” and
its wily tricks. But for all their denunciations, conservative pundits
really just keep proving they don’t even know the basics of Karl
Marx’s thought.]
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HAVE ANY OF KARL MARX’S CRITICS TODAY ACTUALLY READ HIM?  
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Ben Burgis
May 31, 2023
Jacobin
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_ The Right never seems to stop talking about “Marxism” and its
wily tricks. But for all their denunciations, conservative pundits
really just keep proving they don’t even know the basics of Karl
Marx’s thought. _

,

 

Karl Marx deserves a better caliber of critics. I’ve thought that
many times in the last few years, but perhaps never more so than in
March when I saw the conservative James Lindsay post a picture of
himself pretending to pee on Marx’s grave in London.

I couldn’t help but notice the lack of any actual stream of urine in
the picture. In a way, that made it a perfect metaphor for the
Right’s approach to their greatest intellectual adversary. They’re
making a show of desecrating his grave. But they know too little about
his ideas to even make contact with the target of their critique.

Lindsay, Levin, Kirk, and Peterson

Lindsay isn’t some obscure right-winger. He’s a globally prominent
figure. He testifies before state legislatures explaining why they
should ban “critical race theory,” which he sees as Marxism in
disguise. His book, _Race Marxism_
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was a bestseller.

So was Mark Levin’s book, _American Marxism_
[[link removed]].
Levin was never quite as popular as his colleagues Rush Limbaugh and
Sean Hannity, but his talk radio show has blared out from hundreds of
AM stations around the United States for many years. Originally, I was
slated to cowrite a review of _American Marxism _with Matt McManus
[[link removed]], but after many attempts to
get through it, I ended up admitting defeat and letting Matt write it
by himself
[[link removed]].
The book feels like the transcript of an endless, breathless,
incoherent rant. I’d be surprised if Levin even cracked open
Marx’s magnum opus, _Capital_.

Right when I was trying and failing to ingest Levin’s book, I did
a public debate  [[link removed]]with
one of conservative media’s most omnipresent figures: Turning Point
USA founder Charlie Kirk. At one point, Charlie asked me what I
thought about Karl Marx. I responded that while I didn’t think Marx
was right about everything, he was right about a lot of important
subjects — in particular, his theory of history.

Charlie seized on that to say Marx’s theory of history was
“basically Hegel’s” — after all, he said, wasn’t Marx the
“president of the Young Hegelians”?

This could hardly be more wrong. G. W. F. Hegel had an “idealist”
theory of history — he saw it as driven by the progressive
self-realization of what he called the “World Spirit.” Marx did
start out as a Young Hegelian, but this was the name of a
philosophical current, not an organization with membership cards and a
president! More substantively, Marx — though deeply influenced by
Hegel’s methodology — came to reject idealism in favor of a
“materialist” theory of history in which the primacy is given to
economic factors: the “forces of production” and “relations of
production.”

Lindsay, Levin, and Kirk aren’t the only prominent conservatives who
insist on prattling on about Marx despite not knowing the ABCs. In
Jordan Peterson’s 2019 debate
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Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Peterson said that he’d prepared
for the debate by rereading the _Communist Manifesto _for the first
time since he was eighteen.

That in itself was an astonishing admission. Here you have someone who
wrote mega-best-selling books that contain strenuous denunciations of
“Marxism” admitting that he hadn’t read the _Communist
Manifesto_ — a short pamphlet that can be consumed in an afternoon
— in decades.

But even more striking was how little understanding Peterson seemed to
have of what he’d read. He expressed surprise that Marx and
Friedrich Engels “admitted” capitalism had spurred more and faster
economic development than any previous system — when in fact they
devote pages to the observation _because it’s a crucial part of
their analysis_. And in a swipe at the first sentence of chapter one
of the _Manifesto_, about how all “hitherto existing history” is
a “history of class struggle,” Peterson argued:

Marx didn’t seem to take into account . . . that there are far more
reasons that human beings struggle then their economic class struggle.
Even if you build the hierarchical idea into that (which is a more
comprehensive way of thinking about it), human beings struggle with
themselves, with the malevolence that’s inside themselves, with the
evil that they’re capable of doing, with the spiritual and
psychological warfare that goes on within them. AND WE’RE ALSO
ACTUALLY ALWAYS AT ODDS WITH NATURE, AND THIS NEVER SEEMS TO SHOW UP
IN MARX . . . . (my emphasis)

But the way that humans are “at odds with nature” is right at the
heart of Marx’s theory of history! Marx thinks the “legal and
political infrastructure” of any society is downstream from the
“relations of production” — i.e., the relationship between the
immediate producers (whether slaves or peasants or modern wage
workers) and the class in charge of the production process (whether
slaveowners or a feudal aristocracy or capitalists). And Marx thinks
these relations are themselves, in an important way, downstream from
the level of development of the _forces_ of production — roughly,
the capacity of a society to transform what we get from nature into
products that meet human needs.

Marx’s Theory of History

Marx’s account of history goes something like this:

Early hunter-gatherer societies lacked a class of nonproducers because
there wouldn’t have been enough to eat if there was a ruling class
that wasn’t out hunting or gathering. Absolute scarcity reined. The
agricultural revolution boosted human productive capacity to the point
where it could support a ruling class, but only if some of what was
created by the “immediate producers” was directly taken by force
— as in modes of production like slavery and feudalism.

The development of modern industry creates (and requires) a different
mode of production where the immediate producers are “doubly
free”— free in the sense of being free citizens with a legal right
to move around and make contracts with any employer who will have
them, and also “free” from any means of supporting
themselves _except_ for selling their working time to a capitalist
employer — so they end up submitting themselves to a new ruling
class. And yet, Marx says, capitalism pushes the forces of production
to such advanced heights that there’s a new possibility: workers
themselves can take over the means of production and create a better
future.

Marx is very clear that having to work to transform the deliverances
of nature into human “use values” is a necessity originally
imposed by nature and not by any particular social system. But those
systems force immediate producers not just to produce to meet their
own needs, but also to spend additional hours doing unpaid labor on
behalf of the ruling class.

This happens right out in the open in a system like feudalism, where
serfs are legally forced to spend part of their time toiling in the
lord’s field instead of the little plot of land with which they feed
themselves and their families. But Marx thinks the same thing happens
in a disguised form in capitalism — officially, you’re being paid
for every hour you work, but in practice some of the work you do
creates the goods and services that are sold to pay your own wages,
and some of it goes toward your boss’s profits. Under socialism,
when “free associations of workers” run the show, workers
themselves would get to decide how the proceeds of their labor would
be divvied up. Some portion would go to nonproducers like children,
retirees, and those unable to work, but none would be _taken _by a
capitalist class.

One of the crucial differences between Marxism and earlier forms of
socialist thought is that Marx doesn’t see capitalism as an
avoidable moral mistake. However ethically abhorrent, and however
desirable surpassing it might be, capitalism to Marx is a necessary
stage of historical development. That’s why Marx and Engels devote
such space at the beginning of the _Manifesto _to talking about the
amazing ways the forces of production have been developed under
capitalism. For the first time, there’s the possibility of something
better — not the combination of freedom and material hardship
experienced by early hunter-gatherers, or even by independent small
farmers who have to work all day every day just to produce the
necessities of life, but an egalitarian and democratic version of
high-tech modernity.

There are real criticisms you can make of Marx’s vision. Some people
argue, for instance, that to deal with the climate crisis we need to
roll back our industrial infrastructure — we need “degrowth.” I
disagree, but that’s at least an argument with people who know what
they’re arguing against. That’s not the argument we’re having
with the Right.

One way you can tell as much is that they’ll cite the failures of
authoritarian state socialist governments — starting with the Soviet
Union — as a great refutation of Marx. But what did Marx actually
say about Russia?

As Steve Paxton points out in his book _Unlearning Marx_
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Marx specifically wrote that it would be impossible for undeveloped,
semifeudal Russia to skip capitalism and leapfrog into the socialist
future unless a revolution in Russia was accompanied by a revolution
in industrialized western Europe. Don’t get me wrong. I know
twentieth-century Marxists would have preferred to see a politically
democratic and materially prosperous form of socialism take root in
the Soviet Union than see Marx’s theory confirmed. But that theory
being confirmed is exactly what happened.

Better Critics, Please

Iactually _want _better critics of Marxism. Everyone should want
that. Anti-Marxists should want it because they clearly think
criticizing “Marxism” is important — the contemporary right
never shuts up about it! — and you can’t do that effectively if
you don’t know what Marx’s theory of history even is_._ Marxists
should want it because the best version of our view will come through
engagement with the smartest criticisms. I want critics who can make
us think hard about our premises and revise the parts that need
revising. That’s how intellectual progress works.

Give me conservative intellectuals who’ve carefully read Marx —
who can formulate critiques that make me squirm. I might not like it
in the moment, but we’ll all benefit from the process.

Instead, we get the kind of right-wingers who say environmentalists
are secret Marxists and that the crypto-Marxist plan is to make us all
eat bugs for the sake of conserving the environment. Or who express
confusion about why Marx and Engels talk about rapid economic
development under capitalism in the _Communist Manifesto_. Or who
think Marx thought Tsarist Russia could skip to socialism. Or who,
dear God, say things like, “We’re also actually always at odds
with nature and this never seems to show up in Marx.”

Real critics can serve a useful purpose. The would-be grave
desecrators, though? They’re just wasting everyone’s time.

_Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor
at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and
podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books,
most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went
Wrong, and Why He Still Matters._

* Karl Marx
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* Right-wing politics
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* Ignorance
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* political criticism
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