Marxism is a social science, or a system of sociology, and hence deals with societies. Societies are a phenomenon which emerge out of the productive process; a group of people only becomes a society when they are organized in such a way as to direct the labor process (be it on a mutualist, primitive communist basis, a slave society basis, feudal or capitalist basis, etc).

On materialism

Materialism is essentially the "science of socialism". It's a lens to view the condition of a person (or a city, or an industry, etc) as the result of complex real world relationships and historical decisions and social structure, and not just some foregone conclusion based on metaphysical idealism about a god's plan, or a Great Man Theory of people being in whatever position they choose.

So to use a simple modern analogy, a right wing pundit might say homelessness is a choice and a result of some moral failing in the spirit of a person. While a materialist marxist view would be that homelessness is caused by a specific set of observable policy decisions and material conditions created by the inherent tensions in a capitalist hierarchical class-based social structure.

On idealism

Marx was concerned with social structure and historical causality, not accounting for all human ideas. Marx was a historical materialist, Hegel was a historical idealist. Hegel considered historical movement to originate in the unfolding of a collective consciousness, while Marx situated it in the changes in the material conditions of human productive life. Hence, it's really the struggle between classes that's animated history, not some grand pronouncements about human progress and betterment or whatever.

What's wrong with idealism is not that ideas don't have influence or power, but that they're unlikely to take root unless the material conditions for them are amenable. But, we aren't "vulgar Marxists" who think that the economic situation causes everything in the world of ideas. Marxism doesn't imply that the ideas that form the collective consciousness at any given time were somehow causally generated from material conditions. As Marx said, people (as agents with free will) do create the world, but they don't start from circumstances of their own choosing. To use some more modern terminology, you can say that things are "overdetermined" by multiple factors, including material conditions and ideas.

On essentialism

The conflict between "identity politics" and class is pretty simple. You have to believe one is the outgrowth of the other. Either people have fixed identities based on some metaphysical "essence" within their race, ethnicity, sex, etc, and that therefore dictates everything in their lives including their class status (the position held by both far right nazis and, ironically, "woke" liberals). Or you take a materialist view that a person's class is determined by historical trends and the way society is structured, and that their "identity" is largely shaped by that as well. To be black or white or queer, is really just to define yourself along the boundaries of power in the capitalist structure. Irish and Greeks weren't "white" 100 years ago, and some of the staunchest supporters of the Bannon/Trump conception of white nationalism are brown-skinned immigrants. You need a kind of historical materialism to understand any of this shit.

In reality, ideas like race can only be understood as the consequence of historical and material conditions. Which is also why they are infinitely flexible and change from one generation to another. If the current conception of race and "whiteness" are outgrowths of the 15th century transatlantic slave trade and everything that's happened since, then obviously nothing about the race of someone is "essential".

Radical Liberals and postmodernists (generally) view identity categories as epistemologies in themselves, hence queer or black ways of knowing, etc.. Blackness in this view is both monolithic (out there governing over black people) and within each black person. Marxists are not going to win this game because we aren’t playing this game at the core— materialism and identity reductionism can’t be reconciled.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need to adjust and listen to how particular legacies are reflected in our current situations. Nevertheless, liberals take voices and meta narratives as the thing in itself and as the activism itself— what is reflected in discourse and culture is reflected in daily life. Anything that doesn’t fit in this frame becomes class reductionism. We can’t pretend we can lift an Adolph Reed, Cornell west, etc. And expect to trump their frameworks.

On good and evil

For Marxists, there is no "purest form" of humanity. Humanity is a construct shaped by the material conditions that surround it. Your understanding of the world doesn't exist in some pure and proper state, and then twisted away from that. Your existing state is a product of the conditions under which you exist.

The wealthy bourgeois are largely incapable of understating or existing in a world that does not elevate them, as it has thus far. In their existences, there isn't a guilty voice in the back of their head saying "this cant be right" because they dont experience their own injustice in the same way you or I might see it -- they see their actions as just and necessary and righteous, because without their actions there would be chaos and disorder and discontinuity, and only as a result of their 'righting' of the world (in their minds) is the world alleviated from catastrophe. They cannot but literally see themselves as the job creators and benefactors of the lesser humans existing beneath them.

On human nature

Human nature isn’t transhistorical. While people will behave somewhat predictably under similar conditions, those conditions are historically contingent. Most of history has people acting hatefully and brutally toward one another because most of history has people struggling to survive under conditions of extreme scarcity and insecurity. Change the conditions, change the behavior.

On liberation

The serf possesses and uses an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he gives up a part of his product or part of the services of his labor. The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it. The serf liberates himself in one of three ways: either he runs away to the city and there becomes a handicraftsman; or, instead of products and services, he gives money to his lord and thereby becomes a free tenant; or he overthrows his feudal lord and himself becomes a property owner. In short, by one route or another, he gets into the owning class and enters into competition. The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences.

On the service industry

In the capitalist mode of production, workers in education, healthcare, etc. produce the means of subsistence of the labor-power of all workers in society. Same thing with roads. Capitalists can't buy the labor-power of a laborer if they aren't healthy and educated (level of education depends on the type of labor). Capitalists can't buy labor-power if the laborer can't get to the workplace, thus roads are necessarily part of the means of subsistence. They might not be commodities, but they necessary for maintaining the production of commodities through private expropriation of the products of labor. The value of education and healthcare is determined by the labor required to produce them, i.e. the labor required to educate doctors, build hospitals, etc., and this is all factored into the value of socially-necessary labor power required to maintain commodity production.

On anarchism

Aside from Marxism, anarchism is probably the most notable radical left tendency, but unlike Marxism, it doesn't necessarily centre material concerns vs other understandings of oppression, e.g. those rooted in social identity. That isn't to say that anarchism is mutually exclusive with materialism — there are a lot of Marxist an-coms for instance — but it does allow for critiques that Marxism would understand as purely superstructural; that is, not pertaining directly to the material relations of production.

Perhaps because of this, it tends to attract people who are coming into radical politics with specific concerns, often defined, at least originally, by the hegemonic liberal values of wider society. In a more general sense, it also tends to attract people of radical temperaments but who may lack a coherent worldview, and will therefore glob on to whatever the cause du jour is. Again, this isn't necessarily true of all strains of anarchism or all anarchists, but historically the lack of a unifying critique has often led to tension between Marxists and anarchists over a whole host of things, idpol simply being the most recent.

On fascist ideology

Marxist thought is materialist and dialectical. Jungianism and Campbellian mythologies appeal to some sort of "intrinsic" undergirding structure of human thought (they usually refer to them as "archetypes"). It's quasi-religious because it isn't a material thing. The archetype can only be represented as some kind of idea and is hence idealist. It's not a coincidence Peterson keeps trying to reinsert religion as some sort of structuring thought process (see: his debate with Matt Dillahunty).

That's totally the opposite of how Marxists see the world; we don't believe in a human nature or whatever because we think that's religious ideology. Humans are social beings, by definition, and therefore there can be no human outside of society. Feral children are qualifiably different from socialized people; our thought processes aren't outside of society ordained by some invisible nature or god, but rather structured by our relationship to society (often a working relationship).

Because society is composed of people but people are structured by society, we take a view of development that is called the "dialectic". That is, a view that individuals and society cannot be separated, and that their evolving relationship constitutes the reality we actually experience. An implicit conclusion here is that nothing is eternal, theres no god, no real separation between man and nature, and social forms are contingent and evolutionary. Capitalism presents itself as a logical, necessary reality but a dialectical view of historical development reveals it to be an expression of the relations between people and productive processes that is constantly changing.

We call obscurantism, mythology, and metaphysics fascist-adjacent because it seeks to obscure the reality of dialectical materialism; where Marxists find a class relation, mysticists like Peterson attempt to assert a "natural hierarchy". Fascism is in our view the effort of the ruling class to assert an ideal, be it natural hierarchy, racial hierarchy, etc to undermine the class struggle by establishing a fake basis for collaboration between the classes (maintenance of racial, national, or "natural" hierarchy).

Common reactionary talking points

  • Natural, non-tyrannical hierarchies have existed for hundreds of millions of years.

Projecting the concept of a societal hierarchy onto non-societal organisms is a longstanding fallacy. It was old in the 1920s even! Bukharin sums up this type of argumentation and why it's fallacious in Historical Materialism.

To guard the "sacred traditions" is an imperative necessity for the bourgeoisie. It is for this reason, particularly, that phenomena that owe their origin to a specific historical stage are considered to be eternal, to have been handed down by God, and therefore insurmountable. We shall take three examples.

I. The State. We now know that the state is a class organization, that there cannot be a state without classes, that a classless state is a round square, that the state could not arise until a certain stage in human evolution had been reached. But listen to the bourgeois historians, even the best of them! Eduard Meyer says: "How far the formation of organic groups can proceed in the case of animals, I often had occasion to observe, thirty years ago, in Constantinople, in the case of the street dogs; they were organized in sharply distinct quarters, into which they would admit no outside dogs, and every evening all the dogs of each quarter gather in an empty lot for a meeting of about half an hour, in which they bark loudly. We may therefore actually speak of dog states of definite outline in space." (Eduard Meyer: Geschichte des Altertums, vol. i, first half, 3d ed., p.7,) It will therefore not surprise us to find Meyer accepting the state as a necessary property of human society. If even dogs have states (and therefore, of course, laws, justice, etc.), how could men get along without one?

II. Capital. On this subject the bourgeois economists show the same idiosyncrasies. It is well known that capital has not always existed, nor capitalism either. Capitalists and workers are a phenomenon of historical growth, by no means eternal. But the bourgeois scholars always defined capital as if it - and also the capitalist regime - had existed from all time. Thus, Torrens wrote: "In the first stone which he (the savage) flings at the wild animal he pursues, in the stick that he seizes to strike down the fruit which hangs beyond his reach, we see the appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another, and thus discover the origin of capital." (Marx Capital, vol. i, Chicago, 1915, p.205, footnote.) The monkey beating nuts out of a tree is therefore a capitalist (but without workers !). Modern economists are not much better; in order to prove the eternity of the state power, these poor wretches are obliged to endow their dogs with the capacities of Lloyd George and their monkeys with those of the Rothschilds!

III. Imperialism. Bourgeois scholars who take up this question often define imperialism as the effort at expansion in any form of life. Of course, imperialism is the policy of financial capital, and financial capital itself did not arise as a dominating economic form until the end of the Nineteenth Century. Little the bourgeois scholars care about that! In order to show that "things have ever been thus", they elevate the chicken which picks up kernels into an imperialist, since it "annexes" these kernels! The dog state, the capitalist ape and the imperialist chicken are an excellent indication of the level of modern bourgeois science.

Lobster thought has literally been BTFO for like almost 100 years now but Marxist works, believe it or not, aren't actually taught at the institutions of higher learning supposedly responsible for postmodernist neomarxism. Those institutions are liberal capitalist centers of indoctrination.

  • Are all hierarchies invalid?

We have to establish what a "hierarchy" is. As a way of organizing society and getting things done, electing leaders is just fine by me. Equating that with things like oppression on the axis of class, gender, etc. is an argumentative sleight of hand.

  • Mythology predates capitalism, so how is it fascist?

Of course it does, that's why it's mythology. A principle aspect of Marxism is that we study the relations of things primarily. Zeus himself is not fascist, he doesn't exist. Believing in Zeus isn't an act of fascism, it just makes you stupid. However the ahistorical revival and misapplication of mythological beliefs to try and find some sort of deeper truth about immutable human characteristics is different. Proclaiming we are the same as we were as Ancient Greeks, Incas, (or for that matter, fucking lobsters) etc and unable to escape our inherent nature is at least partially fascist because the purpose of fascism is to stop progress and preserve class rule.

Put simply, there are no "immutable human characteristics" because there are no such thing as "human characteristics" in a vacuum; human characteristics are a relationship to society, and society changes.

On memes

Dialectical thought needs a certain degree of authenticity. Most memes are satirical in nature so they sort of defer any genuine discussion/engaging with contrary opinions to attempts at wit or undermining the framework of any particular dialectic. I can imagine dialectical thought going on with memes. It's easier to imagine dialectical thought being obstructed when memes are in play.

I mean, satire has been used throughout history to promote all kinds of dialectical discussion (cf. any Platonic dialogue), but I do think, if there's any possibility of a forum being a "medium of dialectical thought", that there's something to the idea that memes break that shit down in various ways. I could be persuaded otherwise.

A regressive form

Memes are inherently regressive as a form, regardless of their content. The meme functions through opacity and the arbitrariness of its meaning; it absolutely opposes discursive thought. Everything a meme expresses or represents turns into fixed ideology, because the existence of memes depends on the unmediated fixation of image and idea. There can be no leftist politics based on memes.

I'm not saying "never ever use memes," since tactics are always determined locally. I am saying that memes as a form (i.e., in the logic of their structure, in how they work as memes as opposed to as slogans) are always regressive, and we cannot hope to build a leftist movement through memes like the right has built their movement. There is no symmetry possible there.

Tautological emptiness of a Master's wisdom

Memes are by their very form reactionary (after all, as McLuhan famously declared, "the medium is the message"), and I would even propose that any anti-capitalist movement founded upon the consumption of memes is bound to degenerate into mindless totalitarianism, fascism in short. Memes convey exactly what Žižek calls "the tautological emptiness of a Master's Wisdom" (The Abyss of Freedom, p. 71); in other words it can never convey any content insofar as its very form (qua a message whose only purpose is to be perpetuated) is an exercise of the Master's power. In this regard a meme is of the same type as slogans and proverbs. A leftist meme criticizing capitalism is no more true or real than a rightist meme lambasting leftists; it seems only "true" to us insofar as it is symbolically backed by the Master, and it is this Master's command which tells us to perpetuate the meme (which is after all the very point of the meme as the term was coined in analogy to gene, a message to be perpetuated), and in its perpetuation it is not the content, whether leftism or fascism, that is perpetuated but this very authority of the Master, the air that there is someone who knows, who grounds the symbolic order and gives meaning to our signifiers.

In a sense, memes are anti-capitalist in the same way that fascism is anti-capitalist, because in its stupid submission to the authority of the Master it resists the capitalist impulse to rationalize, to encompass everything in the relationship of exchange that defines capitalist society which precludes the position of the Master as such. This is akin to what Lacan meant when he notoriously declared to the French student revolutionaries of mai 1968 (despite his support for the movement) that, "as revolutionaries, what you long for is a Master". Indeed as producers of memes today's "Internet revolutionaries" of the LSC type long for a Master of the same kind as the Maoist students and the Stalinist PCF of 1968's France. Herein lies the kernel of truth of the form of memes, the third plank in Žižek's explication of Freud's theory of dream-work (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 5-6) as containing "the manifest dream-text, the latent-dream content or thought and the unconscious desire articulated in a dream". Is the desire to perpetuate the meme for the gaze of the Master, which sustains the possibility of the form of memes as such, not the third part of the meme-work where the truth of memes is located? Just as dreams all have to do with desire regardless of what the latent dream-content conveys, e.g. guilt at the mistreatment of a patient, so, too, memes all have to do with establishing the authority of a Master regardless of what the meme-content conveys, and as such I propose that memes cannot be but reactionary and totalizing discourse of the sort that fascism thrives upon.

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Pub: 16 Jul 2021 19:06 UTC
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