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If you’ve been following along, you know I’m presenting the first draft my next book, The Liberal Backbone, chapter by chapter. This time, Chapter 4: “We Need to Talk About Marx.”
You can also find this at Substack. I hope you’ll follow me there. Those versions have links and footnotes as well.
As always, I welcome any comments, suggestions, or corrections you may have. Here we go.
Last time, I talked about the woke left’s belief that the Western worldview, including liberalism, amounts to a structurally oppressive illusion.
This time: where that belief comes from.
There are lots of sources we might look at, from Plato, the Bible, or the Hindu Vedas down to the present-day physicists who speculate that maybe we are living inside a Matrix-like simulation.
But one in particular has been influential on the development of Theory, the intellectual foundation of woke left thought. That is Karl Marx.
Hang on, does that mean that all those MAGA people are right? Are the woke just a bunch of Marxists?
No, but that claim isn’t based on nothing. Theory is complicated, but some of its key concepts are inherited from Marx, in modified form. And it becomes much easier to understand Theory if you understand something about Marx.
I’ll start with his concept of structural oppression.
Marx believed that in the original human society, there was no oppression. We lived in communal harmony with nature and other people, enjoying and sharing the fruits of our work.
This belief was common in Marx’s time (he lived from 1818 to 1883). It’s often referred to as the myth of the “noble savage” and attributed to the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But Rousseau in turn had other influences.
The myth was inspired by explorers’ encounters with indigenous people in Australia, Polynesia, and the Americas. Many Europeans projected onto these people their own fantasies of a primitive Garden of Eden, where human nature had not yet been corrupted by civilization.
For example, in 1770 Captain James Cook wrote this about Australian aborigines:
They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary conveniencies so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition.
Marx was influenced by a variety of such sources; Rousseau was one of the most significant. Another was the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who studied the Iroquois.1
Morgan believed the Iroquois still lived in the earliest form of society, which he described as matriarchal and cooperative. He theorized that history progressed through three stages: from the Iroquois’ state of unspoiled savagery to barbarism to civilization.
Marx’s theory of history was similar to Morgan’s. But Marx believed what he had wasn’t a theory, but an infallible science of history.2 That meant it could also predict what would come next, the way laws of nature could predict the paths of the planets. He compared his work to Isaac Newton’s, for both its method and its importance.3
Marx believed that the law of nature that primarily drove history was economic class struggle. What had caused humanity’s original fall from savage grace was the invention of private property, separate from the products of one’s own work.
First, early technology had enabled us to produce more than we needed. Some people claimed the surplus as their own: the first private property. And that brought oppression into the world. Once some people could own wealth they hadn’t produced themselves, they were motivated to exploit other people for profit.
The aboriginal commune would now be artificially divided into classes, with property owners on top.
As time went on, new technologies, or “means of production,” would be discovered, such as bronze or iron tools. Each new technology would create a new class of owners. They would struggle with and displace the old ruling class, until the next new technology and next new class of owners came along.
And so history had proceeded, from ancient Mesopotamia to Industrial Age Europe. No matter who emerged on top, oppression would persist. It was structural: built into any economic system based on private property.
So why hadn’t people just risen up against that kind of system, once and for all?
This is where illusion comes in.
Marx said that with each new, structurally oppressive form of society, new ideologies would emerge. And those ideologies always made the current oppressive system appear to be rational, right, and inevitable — just “the way things are.”
These ideologies might be religious, philosophical, or cultural. They composed what Marx called the “ideological superstructure” of each society.
Marx saw religion as particularly effective at making oppression seem normal. For example, it taught workers in the hellish factories and slums of his time that their suffering was the result of their own sin. They should hope for a better life in heaven after they died. Meanwhile, they should work hard, behave well, and obey authority — all of which worked out well for their bosses, who happened to enjoy comfortable lives right now, here on earth.
Marx had similar thoughts about secular philosophies, including the philosophy of liberalism.
Liberals claimed to stand for freedom and equality. But Marx pointed out that most liberals were members of the property-owning middle class, which he called the bourgeoisie. Thanks to industrialization, bourgeois manufacturers, merchants, and professionals were getting rich. As a result, they were challenging the dominance of the hereditary aristocracy.
That’s what the liberal revolutions in America and France had really been about, according to Marx: not liberal ideals, but the same old class struggle, replacing one set of oppressors with another.
For Marx, that was all you needed to know about why in the liberal democracies of his time, the right to vote was reserved for property owners.
But according to Marx’s science of history, the millennia-old cycle of oppression was coming to an end, and soon. Industrial capitalism had created so much misery for working people that they would finally wake up to their true reality.
In Marxist terminology, they would achieve “class consciousness,” escaping the “false consciousness” that had made them accept their oppression as normal.
In 1848, new liberal revolutions swept across Europe. Marx believed they were only the start. A global, communist revolution was imminent. This one would be led not by a new class of oppressors, but by the people at the bottom, the industrial workers Marx called proletarians. He and his collaborator Friedrich Engels issued The Communist Manifesto, with this warning:
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
But as we now know, there would be no global communist revolution. Not after 1848, and not even after 1894. That was when Engels completed the last volume of Marx’s magnum opus, Capital.
The communist revolutions that did happen in individual nations produced crushingly tyrannical governments.
Subsequent generations of Marxists would have to explain why history had failed to follow its predicted path. That effort would lead, via many branching paths, to present-day Theory.
We’ll get there next.