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This time: the first draft of Chapter 5 of my next book, The Liberal Backbone. You can also find this and the other chapters at Substack. I hope you’ll follow me on Substack at substack.com/@SpencerCritchley.
As always, I welcome any comments, suggestions, or corrections, they’ve already been very useful.
Like many people of his time, Karl Marx believed that Isaac Newton had discovered immutable laws of nature. And he thought he had done the same with his theory, or “science,“ of history. That’s why he was sure the global communist revolution was coming soon — so sure that he believed it didn’t matter much what anyone tried to do about it, for or against. Communism was the goal of history, when humanity would awaken from its illusions and achieve full consciousness. He declared:
Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.1
But early Marxists found themselves in a position similar to that of the early Christians. They expected the Kingdom of Heaven any day now, yet that day didn’t come.
Decades after Marx died, there had been a revolution in Russia, but it had been far more complicated than the proletarian uprising Marx predicted. And it happened in the wrong country. Proletarians were industrial workers, and Russia had very few. The uprising should have begun in an industrialized nation like England or Germany.
Capitalism should have caused its own destruction, after making workers ever more miserable. Instead, it had adapted to reforms demanded by protesters, trade unions, and governments. Wages and working conditions had improved.
Revolutions did start in Germany, Hungary, and elsewhere, but they fizzled out. Given the choice, most workers rejected communism.
But the doctrine itself couldn’t be wrong — hadn’t Marx proved that? Confidence in Marxist thought was so high that the Third International organization of communist parties declared it to be a science of nature and history. That certainty was behind the use of reeducation in the Soviet Union: if you disagreed with the doctrine, you were simply wrong. It was early Marxist-Leninists who coined the term “politically correct.”
So Marx couldn’t have been just wrong. There must be some other explanation.
Marxist philosophers got to work on one. Several concluded that Marx had been right, but his predictions had gone wrong because he had underestimated the power of illusions.
Marx hadn’t lived to see the breakthroughs in psychology and sociology made by Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and others. Neither could he have anticipated the effects of the new mass media, like radio, movies, and advertising. All worked together to make capitalism look not only normal, but desirable.
Religion, philosophy, and culture were more than just the superstructure Marx described. They created a fully immersive reality.
The Hungarian Marxist György Lukács described how what we believe can become what’s real, or “reified.” So if we’re made to believe in capitalist concepts like property and individualism, those concepts become our reality.
The Italian Antonio Gramsci analyzed what he called “cultural hegemony.” The bourgeoisie didn’t need to rule by force, they could do it by controlling culture. All those pop songs, radio dramas, movies, and ads showed us a world of money, consumption, glamor, and entertainment, so we lived in that world.
In Frankfurt, a group now known as the Frankfurt School went further. As much as Marx criticized liberals, he shared their commitment to Enlightenment reason. But the Frankfurt School concluded that even reason could be a vehicle of oppression.
Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant had seen reason as liberating. By relying on reason instead of dogma, people would be able to think for themselves and rule themselves.
But the Frankfurt School argued that Enlightenment reason didn’t liberate our minds, it confined them. It trained us to think only in terms of scientific order, efficiency, productivity, and mastery. And thinking that way didn’t serve us, it served capitalism — or worse. According to the Frankfurt School’s Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Enlightenment reason had prepared the way for the mechanized horrors of Nazism.
Their essay “The Concept of Enlightenment” opens with this:
Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.2
The Frankfurt School philosophers believed that in order to truly liberate people, you had to liberate their minds. That was the purpose of what they called Critical Theory, a precursor of what’s now just known as Theory.
And here we come to another source of confusion for liberals.
Remember how we talked about the word “woke” having more than one meaning? Well, so do the words “critical” and “theory.”
Liberals usually think of those words the same way Enlightenment scientists and philosophers did, as expressing the search for objective truth. To think critically is to follow objective evidence and logic wherever they lead, independent of any biases or beliefs. Similarly, a theory is supposed to be based on objective evidence and logic.
This is not what the Frankfurt School meant by a critical theory – far from it. Their kind of critical theory attacks the very idea of objectivity.
Remember, Marx believed that in our natural state, we live communally, in harmony with nature and with our fellow human beings. Yes, it appears now that we must struggle to master nature and compete with each other. But that’s because we’ve been alienated from our natural state.
Even the belief that we are subjects, separate from objects, can be a symptom of our alienation from the rest or the world, according to the Critical Theorists and those who came after. Supposedly objective truths only appear to exist if we separate them from our subjective experience.
And that, according Critical Theory, is how you end up with capitalism, the most extreme alienation of all. It reduces life to what can be measured objectively, in this case with money. To live in a capitalist society is to be alienated from subjective reality, which includes everything that makes life worth living, like love, creativity, and community.
If you feel unhappy, all of the available solutions — success, luxury, entertainment – turn out to involve making or spending money, which will just keep you alienated from what really matters.
Liberal political reforms won’t work either, because politics keeps us alienated too, as separate, competing individuals.
The only true liberation is through revolution, according to Marx.
Or, through Critical Theory, according to the Frankfurt school.
Critical Theory can be thought of as an ongoing revolution of the mind. The point is to constantly reassert your humanity by challenging, or “critiquing,” everything you see or hear.
You do that by starting from the assumption that it’s all an illusion that serves the interests of power.
A theory that doesn’t do that only serves to maintain the illusion and therefore, oppression.
Since Critical Theory was formulated by the Frankfurt School, it has taken many forms. As I mentioned in Chapter 3, there are critical theories of race, culture, language, gender, colonialism, and potentially any other topic.
Critical Theory has also absorbed many new influences since the Frankfurt School got together in the 1920s. Fo our purposes, I’m only going to look at one of the most significant ones: postmodern philosophy, in particular as found in the work of Michel Foucault.
Foucault, who died in 1984, was influenced by Marx but went well beyond him. He once said “Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else.”3
Foucault argued that power doesn’t originate only in private property, or a class hierarchy, or any particular source. It operates everywhere, and in everything any of us does, says, or thinks.
Like other postmodernists, Foucault believed we can’t know anything for sure. All attempts to establish a secure foundation for knowledge have failed, whether that foundation was God, or science, or anything else, including Marx’s “science” of history. Therefore, according to Foucault, to claim to know anything is to claim power over reality.
He said that every society establishes a “regime of truth.” What’s true is defined according to what will maintain power in that society.
The Enlightenment had established the modern “disciplines” of knowledge, and he argued that they were in fact designed to impose discipline. He said, “Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.”
Even a person’s identity was not their own: it had been determined for them by their sanctioned role in society. It extended to whether they were male or female, healthy or unhealthy, sane or insane, innocent or guilty. He pointed out that being gay or otherwise sexually unconventional was considered a disease or a crime in most places and times.
For Foucault, every definition, every statement was a potential act of domination. Domination was even embedded in Western languages: subjects dominate objects. So saying anything at all might be an act of oppression, especially if your identity grants you extra power in society, like if you’re a straight, white, educated male.
By now you’re probably recognizing ideas you’ve encountered in day-to-day life. If you’ve been puzzled by them, I hope it’s now becoming more clear where they came from and what they signify. If I wanted to demand way, way more of your time, we could explore many other sources, including philosophers, historians, cultural critics, psychologists, linguists, educators, and more.
But I’ll close this quick tour with some examples of how the influence of all these sources shows up today among the woke left.
First, what’s become known as “cancel culture.” For liberals, the right to free speech is one of the most important of all: it’s essential to individual freedom and it’s essential to progress, which happens faster if we don’t freeze out potentially useful new ideas. But the woke left sees some free speech as potentially dangerous, or even violent. Remember, if the only thing that’s real is what we say is real, everything we say can be an act of domination.
“Lived experience.” Liberals tend to assume that in scientific research, courts of law, politics, and other domains where we must work together, we can use objective standards of evidence to come to an agreement. But you may hear people insisting that their lived experience contradicts whatever this supposedly objective evidence dictates. This is another term that can sound like something a liberal would readily endorse – why would anyone who cares about people deny the importance of their lived experience? But the phrase often carries an ideological payload with anti-liberal implications, as in someone claiming lived experience as a reason for rejecting evidence.
Gender identity. Most liberals have long since accepted that there are more than two gender identities, and they believe people of all identities should have equal rights. But gender theorists focus on how gender identity is determined by power, which may need to be taken back from society. Judith Butler goes so far as to say that gender is entirely a social construction, independent of biology. People who agree with this view are likely to argue for maximum freedom for anyone who wants to change genders, and to believe there should be few or no gender-based restrictions in sports, or anywhere else. And they may see addressing someone by the wrong name or pronoun as not just thoughtless or disrespectful, but hostile, a claim of dominion over their identity.
Identity politics. Liberals believe in equality: society should welcome people of all kinds, because they have equal, universal rights. But theorists think the liberal concept of equality erases people’s differing identities, which are formed by their differing cultures, genders, lived experience, and more. They see the concept of universal rights as typical of the structural oppressiveness of the western worldview. The European colonizers imposed their universal concepts on the peoples they colonized. Those people lost not only their land, but their cultures and identities, as they were expected now to live and think like Europeans.
“Latinx.” If language can create reality, that means a gendered language can create a reality in which one gender is dominant. This is why some people stopped saying “Latino” and switched to the gender-neutral “Latinx,” although that word hasn’t been widely adopted by Latinos.
“Defund the Police.” Some people who use this slogan mean they want to reduce funding for police and invest more in addressing the social factors, like poverty, that make crime much more likely. Most criminologists and many police chiefs agree with the general idea.
But many people influenced by Theory want to abolish the police entirely. They see police forces as structurally oppressive, serving and protecting power, not people. Many also refuse to use the word “criminal,” because they think that what gets called crime is only determined by power. Instead they’ll say something like “justice-involved person.”
The word “abolish” also has a special meaning in Theory, going back to Marx, and before him, to one of his biggest influences, the philosopher Georg Hegel. Liberals believe in progress through reform, but Marx thought reform just propped up the old order. He believed progress required abolishing the old order. He and Hegel called it a “dialectical” process. They meant that it always involved a clash of two opposites, which abolished the old order and produced a new one.
OK. I think you can see how this works: when you know some of the history behind the woke left, it’s a lot easier to understand what it stands for and why. Next, we’ll move on to what liberals stand for and why it’s different.
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