Disruption and Despair: The Dark Logic of Critical Marxism
After a slow march through our society’s schools, businesses, and courtrooms, critical Marxists are in retreat, facing political backlash for movements like transgenderism and critical race theory that they inspired.
But political fortune runs in cycles, and Marxist critical theory has sunk roots deep in our institutions; its return may only be an election away. Rather than complacently trust heavy-handed politicians to undo it, conservatives need to continue the hard work of understanding why it has won over so many people, and of answering it.
An excellent place to start is Carl Trueman’s recent book To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse. Trueman explains not only the logic of this movement that rejects the very notion of truth, but its appeal to the darker emotions of the heart.
From Traditional Marxism . . .
Trueman begins explaining critical Marxism by reviewing the original, “traditional” Marxism of Karl Marx.
Marx learned from philosopher G. W. F. Hegel that “[h]istory was a story of becoming, not being”: there are no unchanging, transcendent truths that all human beings know; rather, “the way people think about the world” develops directly from “the underlying social conditions” in which they live. The aspiration for universal freedom never occurred in pre-twentieth-century China, because China’s people lived in servitude to the emperor; political freedom first developed in the West, where Christianity and economic changes had eroded aristocracy.
Hegel also taught Marx that changes in society, and therefore in ideas, issue from a back-and-forth process of conflict or “dialectic”: a social status quo arises, it ossifies, it calls forth an opposing reaction, and a new status quo emerges from the two, out of which new ways of thinking come to be. One man sets himself up as king, his rule becomes rigid and tyrannical, an aristocracy rises up to overthrow him, and the aristocrats conceive more expansive notions of freedom. Over time the aristocracy itself becomes tyrannical, and the process repeats. With each cycle, history gets a little better until, Hegel hopes, society achieves perfect liberation.
Marx added to Hegel’s thought a revolutionary insight: the historical process of change could be accelerated. Men who transcended their circumstances (although it’s not clear how that could be in Marx’s deterministic universe) might imagine a more liberated society of the future and move people to overthrow the status quo now. Indeed, without revolutionary leaders, change could hardly happen in a world where (allegedly) people’s thinking conforms slavishly to their existing social situation: someone has to “think outside the box” for them so they can break the box down.
Marx also drew out the pessimism of Hegel’s historicism: if thought depends radically on social circumstances, it reinforces those circumstances and helps constitute the status quo. If a society’s current situation is oppressive (as it may have been for many factory workers in nineteenth-century Europe), then the moral norms of that society are themselves oppressive, as though designed to keep people in servitude to their masters. Those norms are not truth but “ideology: . . . a set of ideas that hides what is really going on in the material circumstances of the world by a process of what Marx calls ‘mystification.’” Ordinary people are told they should follow civil laws because God commands them to do so; but “God” is just a projection of society’s status quo into a “mystical” concept, as though it were transcendent and deserved complete obedience. To take an instance that might support Marx’s view, in the slave economy of the pre–Civil War American South, “assumptions of racial hierarchies, of the ‘natural’ fact of slavery, even perhaps notions that slavery is good for the slaves” both “reflect[ed] the economic structure, [and] also reinforce[d] and perpetuate[d] it.”
Ideologies are “as though” designed to oppress, because thought, being the product of circumstance, is not “intentional” in Marx’s theoretical universe; it is therefore not the act of an unchanging, transcendent reality like the soul (just the sort of mystical concept that could justify an oppressive theory of unchanging human nature). All people in society, whether oppressors or oppressed, labor under “alienation”—estrangement from their real selves and desires, under the deception or “false consciousness” wrought in them by the ideology of their society. They do not belong to themselves. To escape alienation, and to liberate their minds from ideology, men must be liberated from their circumstances—not guided to “truth,” which is, again, just a tool to reinforce social circumstances. Hence Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers [up to Hegel] have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Until politics change, there will be no new, freer ideas, only reformulations of the ideology of the status quo.
. . . To Critical Marxism
Marx may have looked gloomily on society, but he hoped that at least it would inevitably evolve in the right direction, even if it needed to be helped along. Actual events, however, shattered that hope.
Marx never saw the liberated, communist utopia in his lifetime: revolutions happened, but when the dust settled, capitalism was still in place, though softened by more humane labor laws, unions, and social welfare programs. More damningly for classical Marxism, the actual progress of history defied the socialist economic theories that Marx had endorsed in the latter part of his life. According to socialism, Marx’s home country, Germany, with its advanced economy and democratic, bourgeois society, should have been the most ripe for a proletarian revolution as the next step in the dialectical historical process. But the first successful communist revolution occurred in a place of the opposite sort—agrarian, despotic Russia—and it produced a totalitarian dystopia. Still more surprisingly, the regime to which nineteenth-century Germany did give rise was violently opposed to Marxism: the National Socialist Third Reich.
The failures of traditional Marxist theory sent Marxists back to the drawing board. They concluded that Marx had not gone far enough—false consciousness ran far deeper than he supposed. Marx himself remained captured by bourgeois society’s ideology, by his adherence to socialism, with its commitment to a theory of timeless (i.e. transcendent) economic laws. If even he was deceived, one must need to unmask ideology by more thorough psychologizing. This was the project of Critical Marxism.
Critical theorist Karl Korsch, for instance, noted that factory workers resisted Marx’s call to revolution because they wanted to work in the factories, to support their families, and to fight in the state’s armies to serve their country. Mobilizing people for revolution therefore required not just breaking down oppressive economic and legal structures, but showing people the necessary connection of those structures to cultural norms (like family life and patriotism), so that people would shed the norms as well.
But to do that does not mean to “disprove” those norms; that would be to appeal to unchanging truths of human nature and logic—to replace one set of norms with another, setting up a new oppressive status quo. The solution is rather to disrupt the status quo, and keep on disrupting, so that no false consciousness has the chance to harden. Life must become continual revolution in all respects, not just in economics and politics, but in culture, the family, and today in human nature, as contemporary Marxists seek to disrupt the very reality of being male or female.
Critical theorists even aim to disrupt the way people think by writing “disorienting” texts—so difficult to understand that no “dominant idea” could come from them to create a new false consciousness. “Orthodox Marxism,” according to critical theorist George Lukács, is not a set of beliefs, but a “method.” The goal is not to understand but to change, until utopia arrives.
Grains of Truth . . .
As deeply pessimistic and disruptive as Marxism is, Trueman says, its criticisms often contain grains of truth.
Nineteenth-century Marxists helped draw public attention to objectively oppressive economic situations—child labor, unfairly low wages, etc. George Lukács pointed out how laissez-faire capitalists can “reify” “the economy,” treating it as though it existed independently, as an end in itself; they forget that economies are fundamentally relations between people that serve people, not wealth for its own sake. More recently, Marxists have helped raise awareness of the subtle ways in which racial stereotypes can inform people’s thinking.
Critical theory acknowledges the fact that the world is not as it should be. People suffer; sometimes they suffer a great deal, even at each other’s hands. Often their suffering goes unnoticed, even deliberately ignored. As Trueman points out, the founders of critical theory—Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and many others—suffered as Jews living in Germany under the anti-Semitic Third Reich. The development of their theories, Trueman suggests, cannot be dismissed as mere derangement—it was their (very flawed) attempt to grapple with their people’s terrifying experience.
Many contemporary academics who espouse critical theory have perhaps also suffered a great deal. For others, however, adopting critical theory is simply “a rather useful career move,” or perhaps a rationalization of their darker, selfish desires. In any case, Trueman’s cultural analysis of the original critical theorists shows how complex Marxists’ motives can be. He reminds us that those who (rightly) reject Marxists’ approach should not dismiss Marxists, or those they mislead, as beyond hope. Part of them, buried deep inside, is trying to find truth and peace.
. . . In a Philosophy without Hope
But whatever the inscrutable motives of its adherents might be, critical theory is, objectively, deeply misguided. It is not simply healthy pessimism about the human condition. Despite its apparent hope for a future utopia (which it scarcely defines, perhaps for fear of creating a new ideology), Marxism is a philosophy of despair. By denying agency to the person, and viewing oppression as the default mode of society, Marxism destroys hope: hope in the possibility of being free interiorly even amid exterior oppression; hope that, despite others’ flaws (and our own), there is good in people, and they can repent and be forgiven; hope that evil can be overcome through the power of love; hope that, whatever its past sins may be, the human soul is made for truth. This hopelessness has, tragically, ended up producing violence, like that of the Third Reich, that would have horrified the founders of critical theory—even mutilating children to “liberate” them from the “alienating” constraints of their bodies that contradict their “gender identity.”
Occasionally To Change All Worlds, I think, adopts too much of the critical theorists’ way of thinking. For instance, speaking to Christian readers, Trueman applies critical theory’s term “alienation” to fallen humanity outside the Church. True, sin deeply estranges man from himself and others, but I should think that such estrangement is not complete, as the Marxist meaning of “alienation” would suggest. As long as he lives, man continues to bear the image of God in himself and can experience the goodness of life in communion with others, albeit overshadowed by sin. Notwithstanding this and similar lapses, Trueman recognizes the risks of borrowing terms from Marxism and clearly warns readers against it. The theory is so tightly constructed that, as Joseph Ratzinger once said, to accept one part is to accept the whole.
In any case, Christians would do well to heed Trueman’s warning to take seriously the way their infidelities to God and the Law of Love “damage the church’s plausibility, even if they do not disprove the gospel.” This warning goes especially for those Christians who today openly use Marxists’ own Machiavellian tactics of “disruption” against them, doing evil that good might come about. Such Christians have become, as it were, Marxists of the right, driven not by hope in truth and charity, but by rage born of despair. They only perpetuate the pagan cycle of vengeance that Marxism has brought back to life in the West, and they risk calling forth a severe backlash of the Marxist left in the future.
Christians cannot ignore critical theory; it is a mysterious cry for help, from human hearts wounded by evil and searching for answers in the wrong places. We must try to understand it, refute it—by proclaiming the truth in love, even if it means suffering at the hands of those who misunderstand us —and bring to the broken souls of our times the peace that no worldly liberation can give.
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