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This is spot on. I was a member of a Trotskyist organization for 25 years and am bemused by claims that wokeism is Marxist. Yes, there are parallels but the differences are too many to ignore. Most obvious is that the woke left wouldn't know a worker if they tripped over him and, as you say, aren't trying to overthrow the establishment: they *are* the establishment. Genuine Marxists are ostensibly hostile to identity politics, although clearly, much of that framework has seeped in.

More fundamentally, there's the different philosophical outlook. Marxism's original theorists and later followers considered it to be basically synonymous with Enlightenment values like rationalism and materialism. It is impossible to imagine a more anti-materialist movement than one whose central tenet is that a man is a woman if he feels like one.

I'm so glad you're writing this piece. It's more helpful than you can imagine to this ex-Trotskyist who's reeling and bewildered by this crazy world, trying to figure out what's true.

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Thanks, Kathleen. I'm going to explain the Enlightenment/Counter-Enlightenment differences when it comes to concepts of knowledge, power and language. I'm also going to raise the difference between the gender critical (radical) feminists and the intersectional & queer feminists because I think this will help people get an intuitive sense of the difference between materialism and postmodernism because they can see it there. Some may find the radical feminists too dogmatic and single-minded but you cannot confuse them with the queer theorists!

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Thank you! I feel I've been bashing my head against a wall. I assumed your second essay would take on the question of Enlightenment principles, but wanted to emphasize it since it is so absolutely central. My post-Trotskyist intellectual pursuits (including an often bemusing adventure in grad school) have left me confused about the merits and possible shortcomings of materialism.

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There has been a non Trotsky/Leninist tradition in the European left with a more idealist bent. Gramsci was the main inspiration and the Italian Communist Party to go the late 80s was the model for practical politics. With some Frankfurt school thrown in, it was kind of labelled "cultural Marxism". It still has an academic footprint in places like the European Journal of Social Theory. For the philosophical transition away from materialism (which I'm taking as an economistic reception of Marx) a guiding figure is Habermas. Habermas took on Postmodernism from the start in debates with Derrida. It could be argued he also opposed incipient versions of wokeness in the student movement in the late 60s. Habermas is difficult, but ultimately, arguably, rescues the critical tradition of the enlightenment reversing it out of some cul de sacs taken by Marx.

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That's really interesting. I think Gramsci, or readings of him, has a lot to do with the turn to what became postmodernism, but I see the Frankfurt School as where it really begins. The Holocaust shattered, especially, Horkheimer and Adorno, making them question everything including the Enlightenment. They didn't quite repudiate the Enlightenment in "Dialectic of Enlightenment," but it's suggested. Later thinkers ran with it. The collapse of the Soviet Union and consensus that communism had failed drove these Marxist-minded thinkers cuckoo, I think, to put it technically, and postmodernism triumphed.

I'd love to know more about these writers and debates. I'm not really familiar with Habermas. What should I read?

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Probably easiest to start with an introduction as the direct texts are difficult. There is a nice small introductory book by Gordon Finlayson. Habermas tries to rescue the enlightenment from Adorno's pessimism, really he opens up to much wider traditions in philosophy, such as pragmatism. Amazingly Habermas is still alive, so a lot of wisdom built up. Obviously I'm a fan!

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I’ll say it - as a 56 year old civil servant from a flyover area of America - I’m a Helen Pluckrose fan girl. Your brain! Thanks!

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Perhaps worth noting that in what I'd consider 'proper Marxism' (or at least a significant strain), the working class is not oppressed at all. Exploitation is a different category, and the separation between politics and economics under capitalism means workers can be exploited economically even as they enjoy full political and democratic rights. (Oppressed groups are those denied such rights.) So, the idea that Marxism is really no more than an earlier version of the oppressed-oppressor narrative is just false.

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That is worth noting but probably too far into distinctions for a primer. I'll use that language when I summarise the fundamental framework of Marxism though.

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Agreed!

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The person who most needs to hear this is James Lindsay, who has brought the zeal of Joe McCarthy to looking for Commies under every bed. Never mind that there's no evidence of a Marxist party or organized Marxist movement in the United States. I hope you speak to his unfounded theory of cultural Marxism.

Lindsay is giving gender critical people a bad name with his unhinged Twitter persona and by consorting with the American far-right. Genspect made a terrible error of judgment when they had Lindsay speak about the "Marxification of Gender" at their October conference in 2023.

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So true.

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The conflation of CSJ with Marxism never made much sense to me, but if I squint I can see the outlines, barely. Dishonest intellectual frauds like Jordan Peterson may actually believe it, but I think he/they also recognize that much of the heavy lifting to discredit and dehumanize their opponents can be accomplished by hanging Marxism on them. Accurate intellectual history is not the point. Excellent article, looking forward to parts 2 and 3.

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I think you're underestimating that in the US, "Communist" and "Marxist" are generally used by right-wingers to mean something like "anyone who favors any social services or has any concern about injustice". It's basically "not one of our tribe, hated enemy", rather than having any connection to the Communist Manifesto. Some of the more intellectual types know if they do this, they'll be considered lowbrow, so they've taken to making up a phrase like "Cultural Marxism". They basically want to use all the venom of the term, but without the backlash of coming off like a uneducated rube. I would suggest that the vast majority of these people know exactly what they are doing with their phrasing.

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I really don't understand why people go to such pains to deny the validity of the label "Cultural Marxism". It may not have the right lineage or etymology but descriptively it is 100% correct: Marxist economic conflict as applied to other social dynamics (by people who are members of the actually privileged group).

The fact the label has been popularised by the alt-right is unfortunate but in my opinion the term is correct. Wokeism, critical theory, critical social justice, successor ideology (Wesley Yang), post-egalitarianism: its all the same thing.

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Let's put it this way - do you think it's valid to talk about "multiracial whiteness"?

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/24/960060957/understanding-multiracial-whiteness-and-trump-supporters

"And all of these scholars share a view that I share, that whiteness is not the same thing as white people and that whiteness is actually better understood as a political project that has emerged historically, and that is dynamic and that is always changing. And so whiteness as an ideology is rooted in America's history of white supremacy - right? - which has to do with the legacy of slavery or Indigenous dispossession or Jim Crow."

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I am a Eastern European (living in Australia) so the American-specific neurosis about race is not a perspective I share. This preoccupation with racism-as-original-sin is one of the major reasons why other nations so strongly resent wokeness as a US-export. The world is bigger then America and although other places have their own race dynamics (eg Australia with its Indigenous issues) they do not neatly map over to US political fissures.

(I read the article - thank you or the link)

Some thoughts I have...

US is the only place in the world where Latino people are NOT considered "white" btw Europeans just see Sth Americans as white people with a tan, maybe they see themselves the same way? Have you considered what their pov is?

The true divider between groups is cultural belonging rather than appearance ie skin colour etc. The people you refer to as "multiracial whites" see themselves as belonging to the "white" cultural class within US society.

Very few people can/will discuss race in an intellectually honest way because it is so politically loaded - especially in the USA. Wokeism seeks to construct/maintain the dogma that European people are the villains of history and others are noble and deserving victims. This view becomes untenable once you widen your historical perspectives and see human history outside the limited West=Coloniser bubble American (Anglosphere) discourse is limited to.

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"Why, then, are so many people in the centre and on the right willing to accept uncritically that wokeism is Marxism despite the mountain of evidence that it is a thoroughly capitalist endeavour?"

Because

1) As you noted, those who say that believe "marxism <-> bad"

2) In this way, capitalism can go on unchallenged and blame the opposition

3) Many Social Justice Activists do indeed believe they are marxist or its legacy

Thank you for writing this, and I get that the audience may be less left-leaning than you, but I'd like to point out another thing. You write:

"I am a social democrat who supports a capitalist system rather than a socialist or a Marxist. I seek reform not revolution".

Socialism is not necessarily revolutionary, one can be a socialist and a reformist.

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Fair point. I should perhaps have written "I ALSO seek reform not revolution." so it was clear that I was not suggesting democratic socialists who wish to achieve a socialist state via democratic processes do not exist. I was setting out where I differ from Eric London who said "Based explicitly on a rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class and opposition to the “meta narrative” of socialist revolution, it is not accidental that identity politics and postmodernism have now been adopted as official ideological mechanisms of bourgeois rule."

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You make a very persuasive case why the woke aren't Marxist. However, perhaps some still sincerely believe in redistributing wealth and breaking up capitalism. Here's how:

Redistributing wealth to *individuals* doesn't work; we need to redistribute it so that each formerly marginalised community has the same wealth as the white cisheteronormative community. If they can use the state to enrich their group, that's no problem.

Is it reasonable to still call this philosophy Marxist? I don't think so, but it's not pure free market capitalism either; they're too eager to use the state to enforce their aims.

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The approach you refer to would be called "communitarianism". As to the objectives of the SJWs it is also a thought I have had.

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I agree but I also think that the elites in the Marxist movement know they have to call themselves Marxist and socialist to gain followers. The Marxist elite want to live like capitalist billionaires while they use the identity politics to get access to money. Maybe my point is confusing but just look at BLM. They have followed Marxist ideology while the elites hoarded the money.

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I always think the way some of these people use Marxism is like when someone calls themselves a “chocoholic” because they like chocolate.

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Ultimately, I think it just comes down to laziness. "I don't like these woke people, and I hate Marxism, so I'll just say they're both the same to make it easier in the short-term." It's like feminists who blithely assume that any man who is anti-feminist is a men's rights activist.

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For starters, t's worth pointing out that You've done precisely the same thing with the label "Woke[ism]" that this entire piece is aimed at calling out with regard to "Marxism".

"Woke" came from Black freedmen (ex-slaves) and their descendants in the U.S. South, where it was attested as far back as the late 1860s to mean, essentially, "streetwise"—but with a special emphasis on watching out for insidious influences meant to keep Black people immiserated in poverty and illiteracy.

Here's a 1937 blues song that uses the word in this longstanding original way, which—like plenty of other extremely community-specific uses (like "punk" meaning "a man anally raped by another man")—is something you still occasionally hear in Black communities in 2024, mostly but not entirely from the mouths of older folks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrXfkPViFIE

The reason why You use "woke" in its modern, [d]evolved, sense—which has been divorced from the original meaning for decades—is exactly, precisely, the same reason why so many self-styled Marxists use "Marxism" to mean things that have no meaningful rl to anything ever actually written by Karl Marx.

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The major reason why "Marxism" has become an almost limitlessly fluid label—ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness—is simply because communism as conceived by Marx himself is an absolutely laughable proposition, which any 7-year-old who has ever been on a playground could tell you is unworkable.

The class-analysis part of the Communist Manifesto is a masterpiece, and if Marx and Engels had quit while they were ahead then this all would have turned out quite rather differently. But noooOoOooo, they had to go on and propose a system in which the new politburo leaders—the same arrivistes who were ruthless, cunning, and caution-to-the-wind enough to seize revolutionary power three seconds ago—are now expected to turn around and govern "from each according to ability, to each according to need" ••even though they JUST became the single batch of people in the entire country with the greatest ability and the least need••.

Hahah... funny joke. That's obviously not EVER going to happen. It's honestly one of the dumbest, most idiotically quixotic ideas I've ever read.

Instead, the actual, feet-on-ground reality of Communism is that it WILL—always—devolve more-or-less instantaneously into something that's indistinguishable from Fascism, except for the part where all the government entities and indeed the government itself are labeled less honestly (and without all the to-do about birthrates).

This is just inevitable—it follows directly and obviously from the nature of any Lenin, Kim, Neto, Castro, or other opportunist who has the will and the wherewithal to "pick up power that's just lying in the street" (to paraphrase Lenin). And so •••IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT MARX WANTED COMMUNISM TO BE•••... because the reality of the thing is the thing, and so Communism is just authoritarianism with friendlier-sounding names.

The process by which "Marxism" has become something altogether distinct from what Marx (or Engels) intended is entirely parallel. Again, "Marxism" means what happens on the ground on account of those who purport to be Marxists—not what Marx wrote in a book way back in the XIXth century.

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Thanks for this. You make an important point that I will be sure to include in Part Three. It is undoubtedly true that terms and movements evolve and that trying to hold the current usage of a term true to its initial source can fall prey to the originalism fallacy and miss the point of a current reality. "Liberalism" as it is currently (correctly) used is a lot more than the original laissez-faire economics and limitations on governments because succeeding philosophers and social understanding have added important things such as the acceptance that all humans come into the world with the same right to life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness, the encouragement of a marketplace of ideas as a positive good for knowledge production and the recognition that freedom can be constrained by powerful forces other than government (e.g., Cancel Culture). I have also discussed the evolution of the term 'woke' from its African American usage which became widely used following the incident of the Scottsboro Boys and the term being used to address it by the musician Lead Belly to a contemporary understanding of it as a form of 'critical consciousness' of the CSJ theoretical framework as a depiction of how power dynamics work. In this way, it functions in the same way as 'red-pilled' and is just a variation on the common tendency of ideologues to believe that they alone have seen the light and need to awaken the rest of the world to it. It's why I use "Critical Social Justice" but I also accept that, for purposes of communication, it can be necessary to use the commonly accepted language even if it lacks precision.

Nevertheless, when it comes to Marxism and CSJ, we have less of an evolution and more of a branching and a divergence. Just as Marx and his followers both embraced as a necessary step and reacted against capitalism (which they referred to as 'the liberal economics') as something to be moved on from to a different end goal, so too did the postmodernists to Marxism. I've also likened this to the process of the emergence of Christianity from Judaism and the "New Covenant". Therefore, economic liberals (libertarians), Marxists and Jews continue to exist and the fact that their worldview has been used as a stepping stone towards some other 'truth' and end goal by a different worldview does not prevent the original one from continuing to exist in its original form and continuing to hold that the diversion and reaction against them is wrong even while those who adapted and branched off use their sources in a positive way.

I will make my case for understanding the relationship between CSJ and Marxism in this way in Part Two and argue for why I think it matters that we recognise these differences and that both ideologies exist and are opposed if we want to critique either accurately and effectively in Part Three and will be interested to see what you think.

On the level of intellectual history and for a deep dive into the stages of these branchings and divergences, this book is the one I have found that covers them most thoroughly.

https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/frankfurt-school-postmodernism-politics-pseudoleft/00.html

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Divergence, sure. That's the expected outcome for any concept whose original formulation is, like Marxism, impracticable in the real world—any such concept MUST quickly morph into something else altogether to survive on the ground, and of course that morphing isn't going to go in the same direction everywhere it separately happens.

Looking forward to part 2. Thanks for the link ❤︎

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From Cynical Thinking I gained the impression that postmodernism and Marxism share an intellectual root in 19th-century German philosophy. It helps to regard them as totalitarian second cousins?

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This is so good and I look forward to the next part. I have not been entirely convinced by this conflation but I still think that structurally there are similarities and even borrowings - I am open to correction on that. I think it is fair to say that insofar as there is confusion, it's not just on the part of critics. Would you agree that much of the rhetoric used by those influenced by post modernism is rooted in Marxism, for example the economic connotations behind concepts of privilege and equity? I realise that I could be conflating myself here.

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Interesting and helpful article, Helen! I've followed the web discussion of The Frankfurt School, Marcuse, Woke Smoke, etc... Your thoughts expand the picture nicely. I guess I should stop calling them Neo-Marxists and switch to Pseudo-Marxists?

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They are Marxists. They promote and endorse Dengism Marxist Communism.

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In what way is Transgender Ideology and the elevation to "most oppressed" of white men who claim to be women "Dengism Marxist Communism"? Is all capitalism a variant of "Dengism"?

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Hi Holly, I'll take a shot at answering this. It would be an error to assume all forms of the ideology must operate in the same way at the same time in all places. The west is still in its Cultural Revolution phase. Anything which disrupts and weakens western society is a win for Dengism, now Xi Jinping Thought. That includes gender ideology and the 'social justice' universities which have leaned heavily towards attracting Chinese students.

Unfortunately the woke and their antics in local government have now made western cities less safe and attractive for those Chinese students and their money. Let's consider that the purpose of Chinese students studying abroad is not to learn things that Chinese people don't know, but to spread influence and to gain understanding of competitor economies. Deng himself studied in France.

The reason why western Marxists don't recognise critical social justice as Marxism is that they have been left behind by Marxism's development in China and elsewhere. It isn't your great-grandfather's revolution any more. Meanwhile, the corporations which depend on Chinese manufacturing and raw materials are running the show. Look up the 'trans-ideological corporation', it's nothing new.

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No of course not. These ideologies exist on a continuum, hence the ability of one to transition to another. Without a central state authority control over a pseudo private entity (one that exists at the pleasure of a central authority), and is NOT wholly/majority privately owned and controlled, you are transitioning to a variant of Dengism. Simply stated, once the State Oligarchy/Central govt becomes the controlling owner of a entity that pretends to be privately owned, you have Dengism. We should never have agreed to do business with such entities.

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