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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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 ***** 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 ***** 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.
...
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.
...
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).
...
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. ...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).
...
More:
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/co...xism-wokeness/
Connect With Us