False consciousness revisited

In a recent IEA Insider piece, our Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz examined and critiqued the Marxist concept of ‘false consciousness’. In short ‘false consciousness’ is a term given to an explanation of why workers do not begin socialist revolutions despite obtaining the necessary material conditions.

Marx’s initial example was the English working class, whose lack of revolutionary fervour he blamed on a successful scheme cooked up by the British ruling class to stoke division between them and Irish immigrant workers. Long since Marx died in 1883, his devotees across the world have adapted this false consciousness thesis to a wide array of cases in which the working class weren’t too keen on their ideas.

Kristian’s piece critiques a modern argument, based on false consciousness, made by modern Marxist thinkers who contend that many of the cultural concerns (including opposition to immigration, gender politics, and general ‘wokeism’) are actually rooted in deeper economic anxieties. He argues:

“The idea that ‘the ruling class’ has the ability to manufacture culture wars in order to distract and divide the proletariat is risible. Culture warriors, whether they are in the right or in the wrong, are not engaged in culture wars because they think winning them will make them rich (...) What really happens is simply that people have cultural as well as economic preferences, and they sometimes form alliances on the basis of the former rather than the latter.”

For the most part, I agree with him. False consciousness advocates are usually engaging in motivated reasoning. They believe that workers of all backgrounds are the victims of systematic oppression by the capitalist ruling class and their political allies. They believe that workers have more in common than that which divides them and if they were able to successfully seize the means of production and bring about Marxist utopia, those differences would wither away. I have some sympathy with this, given that I believe people of all backgrounds suffer systematic oppression by governments and their cronies and wish they’d turn their ire on the state rather than businessmen, landlords, and immigrants.

But unlike the Marxists, I’m under no illusions that most people genuinely don’t see it that way. Where I disagree with Kristian is that I think economic and social concerns are more difficult to separate and that therefore, they are more closely linked than his analysis suggests.

The Great Realignment

As the IEA’s Steve Davies has been explaining for almost a decade, most of the liberal democratic West is in the process of a political realignment. Traditional post-war coalitions based on aligning economic interests are giving way to coalitions based on cultural values. This is why the Conservative Party went from winning a Parliamentary majority in 2015 based on winning traditional middle class and rural swing seats to a landslide in 2019 marked by victories in Brexit-voting Labour Party homelands. It’s why the Republican Party in the US went from being dominated by country club tax cutters like Mitt Romney to being a right-wing populist party driven by working-class grievance politics led by Donald Trump.

You might ask, then, doesn’t this support Kristian’s argument? Don’t people just care about culture wars now instead of taxes and spending? To some extent, yes. But this realignment is underlined by some distinctly economic themes.

Firstly, the loss of relative economic status in an era of globalisation seems to have propelled traditional working class communities towards the right. A 2017 paper by Noam Gidron and Peter A. Hall in the British Journal of Sociology analysed data across 20 developed democracies and found that lower subjective social status among working class voters without a university degree correlated with support for right-wing populist parties. Part of that decline, they argue, is the fall in secure low-wage manufacturing jobs and the rise in knowledge-economy jobs concentrated in urban centres.

A 2019 Institute for Labor [sic] Economics paper which found that exposure to robots and automation across 14 Western European countries led to lower perception of economic conditions, lower satisfaction with democratic institutions, and, ultimately, greater support for right-wing populism. A 2020 American Economic Review article found a clear shift towards the Republican Party between 2000 and 2016 in areas with the highest exposure to trade with China. Another 2019 American Economic Review article concluded that areas which experienced the deepest cuts during the coalition government registered stronger support for leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum. The reliance of those areas on government funding is in large part a product of general economic decline.

None of these case studies overwhelmingly affirms an interpretation of realignment that is purely economic; plenty of literature concludes the opposite. But they do show the influence of economics in the growth of populism and culture-focused political cleavages.

Another less-studied economic force that may also play a role here is the increasingly zero-sum backdrop against which politics has taken place across the West since the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008. Since the GFC, most of western and central Europe has experienced weak economic growth and greater state intervention in the economy through both redistribution and regulation. The theory goes that if there is less economic growth – and therefore, fewer resources to go around than otherwise expected – and the government does more to manage and distribute those resources, there is likely to be more political resentment between groups competing over them.

As noted above, so many of the findings linking economic factors to cultural backlash relate to a loss of relative status, an inherently zero-sum concept. A 2016 paper published by the Harvard Kennedy School found a link between economic stagnation and the intensity of feelings of comparative status loss, fueling the rise of right-wing populism in the United Kingdom and the United States.

A 2021 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that negative opinions towards immigrants was linked to lower support for redistributionary policies. In his 2019 paper examining the effect of austerity on support for Brexit, Thiemo Fetzer found a clear correlation between the level of local governments’ budgets and hostile attitudes towards immigration in those areas.

There are, of course, some cultural issues which have almost nothing to do with economics. It’s hard to see much of an economic angle to the rising anti-trans movement or ‘wokeness’ in prominent cultural institutions like universities and the creative arts, for example.

Likewise, the question about hot-button culture war issues is not ‘would better economic conditions put them to bed?’ but ‘would better economic conditions reduce their salience and intensity to some degree?’. I think the answer based on evidence about their root causes is yes.

False Consciousness Meets Public Choice

Any liberal worth their salt will agree with Kristian’s rebuke of the Marxist false consciousness doctrine but that should not tempt us into having too rosy an outlook on the rationality of public opinion. As George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan has argued in his The Myth of the Rational Voter, voters are irrational in political affairs. The reasons, Caplan believes, are:

1. When people are voting, the costs of their prejudices and lack of knowledge are virtually zero. In the real world, these have costs.

2. Each person’s vote is worth almost nothing to the outcome of an election, giving people little incentive to improve their understanding of the issues and ways of evaluating them.

To simplify, think of the difference between buying a carton of milk and voting. If I am the person buying milk, I have a very strong incentive to develop knowledge and heuristics about the purchase and consumption of milk. I know that I have a preference for whole milk, so I’ll buy the blue labelled stuff instead of the green or red (in the UK). Before each purchase, I’ll have a pretty good idea of how much milk I plan to consume in the near future, so I’ll base the amount I chose to buy on that knowledge. If I get it right, I benefit. If I get it wrong, I will lose out.

But when it comes to voting, I have none of the same incentives. Whether I base my vote on logically sound, evidence-based thought or not, it still counts the same and it’s unlikely anything will happen to me that wouldn’t have if I’d voted differently or not at all. Even if that wasn’t true, the nature of politics is coercive, redistributive, and zero-sum, meaning that I can vote in a way that delivers benefits to myself at other people’s expense.

Given the incentive structure of voting and the endless complexity of politics, should we really expect people to have political preferences that are based on solid foundations? Of course not.

The Myth of the Rational Voter persuasively argues that four central biases are widespread among the voting public: anti-market bias, anti-foreigner bias, make-work bias (equating prosperity with employment rather than production), and pessimism bias. Kristian certainly would not dispute Caplan’s central thesis. But what it shows is that in rejecting the Marxist false consciousness doctrine, we should not risk overlooking the systematic factors influencing political opinion and decision making.

Neither of these points should be interpreted as to defend a materialistic theory of the culture wars, nor to defend the Marxist conception of false consciousness. My hope is that they will encourage liberals not to ignore economics or democratic irrationality when they think about culture; they are not as distinct as they may first appear.