What are they Thinking?: Understanding the Mind and Values of the Woke – Part 2 The Failure and Reinvention of Marxism
The effort to resurrect a failed theory
In my previous post in this series: “What are they Thinking?: Understanding the Mind and Values of the Woke – Part 1 Living in ‘Escher’s World.’” I addressed how the contemporary Social Justice movement arose out of the convergence of Neo-Marxism and Postmodernism.
The Failure of the Marxist Vision
It is hard to overstate the influence that Marxism has had on the academy in the West and throughout much of the world. Marxist interpretations of history have been the assumed norm for much of the 20th Century, and the same can probably be said of many other disciplines as well. In many ways, Marxism can be understood to be the pinnacle of Modernist thought. Laying behind Marxism is the belief that the material world is all that really exists.
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) had taught that the world is inevitably progressing towards a more perfect ideal through a process of clashes that each led to a better reality. For Hegel, this was a somewhat religious progression of the World Spirit. However, Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his partner Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) removed from Hegel’s philosophy any idea of a Spirit and put materialism in its place. For Marx and Engels, the force that was driving the world forward was economics and that capitalist, industrialized societies were based on the wealthy (bourgeoisie) oppressing the working class (the proletariat). This would ultimately lead to the proletariat rising up in revolt and taking over the means of production from the bourgeoisie which would then bring about a world of perfect equality, prosperity, peace, and happiness.
The problem, however, was that as good as the theory of Marxism sounded, by the mid-20th century, it was clear that the promises of Marxism failed. This failure was heightened by the insistence of Marx, Engels, and their followers that their theory was scientific and therefore an irrefutable fact. However, by the 1950s, it was clear that Marx’s “scientific” predictions were wrong. In fact, this theory failed on a number of levels. The first issue was that no industrialized society had a Marxist revolution. Pre-soviet Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. were all preindustrial societies. Also, none of these “Marxist” revolutions were uprisings from below by the proletariat. All of these were led and organized by a party of educated upper-middle class (bourgeoisie!) men who organized and led those who were oppressed by promising them that if these poor would follow them, they would be released from their poverty and be given prosperity.
Another factor in the disillusionment of the Marxists came after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 and then the ultimate rise of Nikita Khrushchev in 1956. One of the moves that Khrushchev used to solidify his power was his famous 25 February 1956 “Secret Speech” in which he denounced Stalin’s purges. While the speech was supposed to be a secret within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it was soon leaked to the world. This revelation of the horrors of Stalinism caused widespread dismay within Marxist circles in the West as their images of a Communist Utopia were shattered. Hoping to find a good example, Western Marxist scholars took a hard look at Maoist China, and there they found similar examples of terrors rather than the predicted equality and love. On top of this, it was clear that while the Soviet Union was one of the victors in the Second World War and bore the brunt of defeating the German Wehrmacht, they were also largely dependent on the West for the production of arms and materials which showed that the Marxist economy was weaker than expected.[1]
During the first half of the 20th century, it also became clear to many of the Marxist thinkers that classical Marxism was too narrow in defining everything in terms of wealth and economic class. Clearly, they reasoned, there is more to life than wealth. Likewise, they realized that there are more forms of oppression than just economic oppression. Rather than discard the clearly discredited theory of Marxism, they set out to find a way to reformulate Marxism to fit reality.
From Marxism to Neo-Marxism
The founder of the next generation of Marxism, most commonly known as Neo-Marxism, was the Italian socialist Antionio Francesco Gramsci (1891-1937). Gramsci early on realized that pure Marxism was not working, so he tried to break the economic determinism of Marxism and turn to a more Leninist approach. In this, Gramsci took a humanistic turn, seeing Marxism as a "philosophy of Praxis" that transcends materialism and idealism. To this end, he developed the concept of “cultural hegemony”. Gramsci argued that capitalists maintain power not through violence, economic force, or coercion, but through using the cultural institutions, such as schools, publishing and churches, to make the proletariat satisfied with their subservient lot in life. According to Gramsci, the elites of society use the ideas and values perpetuated by the institutions to legitimate their power and enable them to suppress the majority of a society.[JH1] In order to contradict this, Gramsci argued that the proletariat must develop a counter-hegemony by taking over or replacing these institutions.[2] This movement was later named “The long march through the institutions” by Rudi Dutschke.[3]
One of the most influential organizations in the rethinking of Marxism, and one that was significantly influenced by Gramsci, was the Institute for Social Research first founded in 1923 and attached to the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The goal of this “Frankfurt School” was to bring Marxist thinkers from different disciplines together in order to coordinate and rejuvenate Marxist thinking. However, the rise of Nazism in 1933 forced the Institute to relocate to Columbia University, New York.[4]
The Frankfurt School created a “Critical Theory” that was designed to explain and transform all areas of society that are seen as enslaving people and thereby lead to an increase in freedom in modern society. [JH2] Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School explained that a critical theory must meet three criteria; it must be explanatory, practical, and normative.[5] This means that one of the key aspects of Neo-Marxism was to seek out injustice in Western society and explain where it came from, present practical solutions from a Marxist worldview and seek to change the world.
Another key aspect of the Frankfurt School, coming out of Gramsci, is that there are far more forms of oppression than just the economic oppression that Marx stressed. This shift led to Neo-Marxists arguing that things like sexism, racism and homophobia are really the natural products of Capitalism.[6] This turned these Marxists to start seeking as many forms of oppression as possible in order to undermine the citizenry’s trust in Western Society and thereby pave the way for a Communist revolt.
In my next post in this series, we will take a look at the rise of postmodernism.
[1] Stephen Ronald Craig Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism : Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, 1st ed. (Phoenix, Ariz.: Scholargy Pub., 2004.) 135-50.
[2] Author Karl Thompson, “Gramsci’s Humanist Marxism,” ReviseSociology, 23 June 2016, https://revisesociology.com/2016/06/23/gramscis-humanist-marxism/.
[3] Pincourt and Lindsay, Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond, Location 148, Kindle.
[4] “Frankfurt School and Critical Theory | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,” n.d., https://iep.utm.edu/critical-theory-frankfurt-school/.
[5] James Bohman, Jeffrey Flynn, and Robin Celikates, “Critical Theory,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2021. (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2021), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/critical-theory/.
[6] Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, 151-56.