You might be a Marxist if...

Random thoughts on the meaning of Marxism

On Wednesday, I published an interview with

Freddie deBoer

in which we discussed his new book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, which you should read. Among other things, it explains why social reform stalls, how it can succeed and why the Black Lives Matter movement was a failure. One reader, Edward Lothman, commented:

I wonder how a person can be “a Marxist and a sharp writer” at the same time. Seems impossible to me. Anyone with brains knows that system has not and will not work - ever. It flies in the face of human nature, and is solely responsible itself for the killing of countless millions of people.

To which deBoer himself replied:

Eat shit.

Hi there, Edward. I began to write a reply but it was getting a bit long, so I decided to make a post of it and here we are. I hear what you’re saying about supporting an ideology that has killed countless millions. But it has been counted! This week, I interviewed Elizabeth Spalding, chair of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who noted communism has killed over 100 million people and explained the breakdown. I’ll publish that interview soon and I hope you enjoy the discussion.

That said, I think you may be confusing Marxism with communism. More precisely, with Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism or other violent forms of communism. Not all communism is violent and not all Marxism is communist. In fact, I would go so far as to say most folks are Marxist, in a certain sense, because Marxist ideas have become so deeply embedded in society that people not only embrace them without recognizing them as such, they even view some as common sense. But it wasn’t always this way.

Strictly speaking, Marxism is a method of socio-economic analysis. Let’s consider a few of its major themes that are mostly taken as “well, duh” statements today.

First, there’s the materialist conception of history. Marxist theory considers material conditions to be the primary drivers of change. Our economic base, or the way production is organized in society, largely determines what Marxists call the superstructure—the social, political and ideological aspects of our world. If you change the way production is organized, you change the superstructure.

Consider the Agricultural Revolution. Around 10,000 BCE, humans went from nomadic hunting and gathering to farming and domesticating animals. That’s a change in the means of production. People then began to form permanent settlements, which became the first cities, allowing the development of complex societies. As agricultural surplus grew, the haves and have-nots became more distinct. This accumulation of wealth had to be protected, which led to the development of centralized governance and the rise of kings and armies. This gave way to great wars, which left corpses in dense urban environments, and some early faiths evolved essentially as funeral services with built-in purity rites. Urban hygiene, basically. Later, this was symbolized as spiritual cleanliness.

By the way, that last bit about early faiths was my master’s thesis.

So the means of productions changed and, as a result, we got urbanization, social stratification, political centralization, early monarchic rule and organized religious groups. So yeah, one could definitely say the superstructure changed.

Consider too the Industrial Revolution. In the late 18th century, we began to shift from agrarian economies based on manual labor and handicrafts to industrial economies based on mechanized production in factories. This led to a new wave of urbanization, oppressive factory work gave birth to labor movements that demanded better wages and working conditions, new theories such as Marxism itself emerged, which led to communist political movements and the transformation of societies such as China, Vietnam, North Korea, Ethiopia, Romania, Cuba and Cambodia.

Again, change the economic base and you change the superstructure.

Then there’s the notion of class struggle, or the belief that history is defined by conflict between the classes—peasants and lords, tenants and landowners, slaves and masters or, in capitalist societies, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In each case, more abuse by the dominant class usually means greater risk of an uprising by the oppressed class. You don’t have to know Marx to see this. Just browse the pages of history and read about the revolutions in Haiti, France, Russia, America or China.

Then, of course, there’s the Marxist critique of capitalism. This is the idea that capitalism inherently exploits the working class, as the surplus value they produce is expropriated by capitalists. This one is at least debatable. Marxists will tell you that workers (the proletariat) produce goods or services for capitalists (the bourgeoisie) but are compensated for only a portion of this value through wages. Neoclassical economists will tell you that in a free market, workers are compensated according to their marginal productivity, and that if they had rare skills in high demand, they would make more money. But neoclassical economics assumes people act rationally to maximize utility, famously depending too much on rigorous mathematical models and advanced calculus and too little on Psychology 101.

Keynesian economics recognizes that neoclassical analysis is flawed and that a little state intervention is sometimes needed to redress the balance, such as with subsidies to help stabilize economies and prevent large-scale unemployment or with public works projects during economic downturns to provide more jobs at fair wages. Of course, critics point out that Keynesian economics leads to inefficiencies that a more hands-off approach would resolve. Not to mention, while Keynes himself argued that governments should save during economic booms and spend during slumps, what we end up seeing in reality is a lot of deficit spending and spiraling debt.

But the Marxists have a point. In many capitalist economies, there has been a divergence between wage growth and productivity growth. Sure, worker productivity may rise due to technological advancements and such, but wages do not keep pace. This means workers are producing more value without making correspondingly more money, because more and more of these profits are going to fewer and fewer owners and shareholders. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French economist Thomas Piketty examines the history of income inequality in Europe and the US since the 18th century and concludes that when the rate of return on capital (r) exceeds the rate of economic growth (g) over time, we see greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands, which results in increased inequality.

And, as we have seen, increased inequality tends to increase the chance of revolution. Another Marxist concept talks about how such uprisings are likely to manifest. This is known as the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the idea that after the bourgeoisie are overthrown, a transitional state will be necessary in which the proletariat holds power. In other words, if the rich keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer, eventually some poor people are going to rise up, and if they succeed, then they are going to run things for a while and they’re probably not going to be very nice about it. This is just a sociological observation, and a fairly obvious one, but Marx then makes a shift from sociology to morality, and this is where he loses a lot of folks.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not the endgame. Rather, Marx believed it was merely a necessary step before achieving a classless and stateless communist society in which the means of production are commonly owned and goods and services are distributed based on need rather than profit.

But putting this aside for a moment, the earlier points I listed are entirely reasonable, if not obviously true, and doing this kind of Marxist analysis does not make you a communist. In fact, you could embrace the above points and call yourself a Marxist while also being a fat cat CEO who sits atop a mountain of cash and gold coins with the literal smokestacks of your corporate wealth spewing pollution behind you and it would not be a contradiction.

Yes, Marx used his analysis to advocate for communism, but you can absolutely use Marxist analysis without doing so. In fact, I dare say one cannot understand the modern world without being Marxist, at least to some extent. Sure, you can say that despite the pervasiveness of Marxist thinking, it’s an oversimplification to suggest everyone is a Marxist simply because we all traffic in Marxist thought. But even if we reflexively reject the term, which seems a bit silly to me, we cannot avoid the influence of his work.

On a deeper level, you could also say that we not only use Marxist analysis, but we often use it for the same end. Not communism, but the hope for a collective well-being that shapes the horizon of our aspirations. In this light, perhaps, even if we reject communism, we still see our world through the lens he crafted and are bound by a vision he preached of a just and equitable world and, in that way, we are all Marxists.