There’s a great and frustrating irony about Marxism. On the one hand, it is extremely simple—almost cartoonishly so. On the other hand, millions of pages of extremely complicated writing exist trying to make it true. Simplifying Marxism, then, is no simple task. Truly, being one of the most influential pseudo-intellectual religious currents of the last century and a half, a great deal could be said about Marxism in an attempt to simplify it to its basic essence. Most people go about this incorrectly by assuming Marxism is a complicated economic and social theory of political economy.
Marx certainly wrote quite a lot in that direction, but something that can be said for certain is that the basic essence of his work is not an economic or even a social theory. In fact, it’s not a theory at all. Instead, it’s something much deeper that uses economic and/or social theories as the relevant moving parts. That’s its own complicated story, and one for another time. To keep the matter relatively simple, however, let’s start by saying that what constitutes the belief system identified with Marxism is, essentially, a theory of man and a theory of the world.
For Marx, these theories are not actually separate. As he wrote in his 1844 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society.” That is, what makes man human is that he is the product of the world that he, himself, creates. Marxism is a circular theory of Man’s self-creation. The theory of the world at the center of the Marxist belief system is therefore wholly dependent upon the ontological and teleological theory of Man that is also at the center of Marxist faith.
Nevertheless, these can be teased apart and at great generality, and the result is a clarified understanding of Marxism that makes a tremendous amount of sense out of the myriad “bizarre” features of today’s world. These include Critical Race Theory, Queer and/or Gender Theory, and all the other Theories of Identity Marxism and also what’s happened to our educational systems and even political currents presently flowing at the supranational level.
Marx’s Theory of Man and the World
The world of man—state, society—as Marx had it is the social structure that he creates for himself and that he, indeed, imprisons himself within. Man creates society and embodies that creation in the State, and the society, shaped by the State, in turn creates Man. Marx called the creation of society “praxis” and the creation of Man by society “the inversion of praxis.” Praxis is theory-informed activism, so activism or “the work” done in light of Marxist Theory. It is the transforming activity done by Man on the world of man. The inversion of praxis is social conditioning. The society that Man has created for himself socially conditions him almost completely deterministically. Man is limited and thus psychically incarcerated by the limitations of his social conditioning through the inversion of praxis.
Power in the world of man is not equal, however, thus neither is the capacity to create society and through it to create Man. There is a division of labor, which, like the Fall in Genesis, has estranged Man from other men and, in fact, from himself. As he wrote in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Communism is the answer to Man’s estrangement from himself, and thus man’s estrangement from man:
Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man—the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. (pp. 96–97)
Because Man is estranged from himself and from others by the existence of private property, power is unequal. He is forced to live in an alienated state in an alien world in which the power dynamics that maintain private property prevent him not only from his birthright (in the Garden, where no one works) but also from knowing himself as a perfectly social being, which is as someone entitled to be there, in Eden, on his own terms. Thus, strange as it sounds, by maintaining his belief in private property, Man condemns himself to toil and death so that the Original Sin of owning things as individuals can be maintained.
These power relations flow from property, however, because ownership confers power. The owners are the ones who set the terms of society, and thus they set the terms to justify the injustices that make their lives possible. They, through ownership, stratify society and place themselves in the position of exploiting all but themselves while excusing themselves from any recognition that they engage in wholesale dehumanization for their own benefit. In this regard, property owners declare themselves the demiurgic creators of a corrupt and evil society. They do this by writing a religious mythology justifying their own privilege, what Marx called “ideology.” At the bottom of ideology is the belief in property ownership itself, by which the demonic forces of privilege fool people into believing the division of society—of man from man and thus (Social) Man from himself—is fair, just, and even natural.
Society, then, which conditions man through the inversion of praxis, is stratified. It’s separated into a class of people with access to that special form of property and those who are excluded from it but forced in some way to maintain it—to the sole benefit of the people who have access to it. The property holders grant themselves access to property effectively by fiat. They then write their ideology to rationalize this hierarchy of society and their position within it as natural and just, and people on both sides of the line of stratification are induced to accept it as “just the way it is.” Where religion is the opiate of the people, wrote Marx, ideology is the medical theory that prescribes it.
Society, as the world of Man, then, is ordered in an illegitimate hierarchy by people who had not right to claim status over others in the first place, according to Marx. Certain people, having laid privatizing claim to a special form of property that advantages them, have structured society so that their privilege and the exploitation that enable it are accepted. They get to write history, and they write it so that their divisive sin is rationalized and they’ll continue to be the winners. Society is stratified into those privileged by access to the special form of property and those who are oppressed by exclusion from it so that Man forgets who he truly is, creator and product of a social system called society and thus a perfectly social being. In one of his great rejections of God and, both presumably and ironically, his parents, Marx wrote,
A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life, but if he has, moreover, created my life—if he is the source of my life. When it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside of it. The Creation is therefore an idea very difficult to dislodge from popular consciousness. The fact that nature and man exist on their own account is incomprehensible to it, because it contradicts everything tangible in practical life. (EPM, p. 106)
The direct reading of this passage is easily understood in the singular personal I Marx writes it in (even while he lived completely dependently on his family, his wife’s family, and his collaborator Friedrich Engels). When we realize it actually speaks not of the individual Marx but of Man as a collective—mankind itself—using Marx as an example, and remember that through creating his own society (collective) Man creates (collective) Man and (individual) men, it takes on another meaning. Man isn’t independent; he is interdependent. Man owes his existence to society, neither dependent (as its object) or independent (as its sole subject), but interdependent (subjectivity and objectivity in dialectical relationship). Self-appointed property holders have no right to create or maintain the lives of others, forcing them into dependence and life by their grace. Man is therefore Socialist in his nature, as this is the only possible solution to this “riddle of history” in which the source of Man’s life becomes Man, not in the singular but in the collective. Men, in the individual, owe their lives to Man, in the collective, which is only possible when men understand who they always were and thus who they are intended to become through the magical cycle of praxis and its never-ending inversion.
Marx’s Purpose for Being
Throughout his writings, Karl Marx was obsessed with explaining why Man is no mere animal. There may be no God, but Man is not an animal (or a machine). He is something higher. He is, in fact, the one species on the planet that creates himself. What makes Man into Man, rather than mere animal, is his capacity for bringing into existence that which he can envision in his imagination. His subjectivity is what makes him human, and his capacity to be a conscious subject aware of his own subjectivity and capacity to create from within it is what defines his humanity.
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx gives a long and fairly tortured account of the genealogy of man that utterly fails to account for the infinite regress he invokes.
Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said: You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings—a species-act of human beings—has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect—the infinite progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father? Who his grandfather? etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation, man thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist? (EPM, pp. 106–107)
Needless to say, Marx was weird and weirdly imperious when confronted with an obvious flaw in his self-begetting conception of Man. The false resolution Marx seems to have had in mind, however, is that Man became human by lifting himself out of animality bit by slow bit through the endless dialectical cycle of praxis and the inversion of praxis. Thus, Man made himself, though mostly unconscious of the fact that he was making himself and of the (dialectical) means by which he was making himself. How, though, did Man make himself and thus sublate himself above the other animals? Sociality. Man made himself socially, through his society, which he created for himself in the first place. Thus, Man is a social being, and if he hadn’t fallen through the invention of private property and thus his own self-estrangement, he would still realize he is a social being. Marx’s antiquated word for this is “species being,” a man who lives for the benefit of his species and who knows it:
For labour, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need—the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species—its species-character —is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.
The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses this relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence. (EPM, p. 73)
For animals, they are their “life activity.” That is, they are what constitutes their survival. This isn’t actually different for Man, but the “life activity” of Man has a different character because of Man’s consciousness. Man’s life activity is the construction of society, by which he constructs himself through himself. It is something he can sit apart from and contemplate and act upon willfully, envisioning how he wants it to be created. Man therefore owes his consciousness to his society, to others and his interdependent relationships with others. In fact, his “life activity” is primarily this: the conscious creation of himself and his society—thus the future of himself.
In creating a world of objects by his practical activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms objects only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty. (EPM, pp. 73–74)
The problem is that the division of labor has alienated man from this true nature of himself, which he could know if he didn’t believe labor as it occurs under the division of labor is what he’s supposed to be doing with himself.
The division of labour is the economic expression of the social character of labour within the estrangement. Or, since labour is only an expression of human activity within alienation, of the manifestation of life as the alienation of life, the division of labour, too, is therefore nothing else but the estranged, alienated positing of human activity as a real activity of the species or as activity of man as a species-being. (EPM, p. 122)
What’s the resolution? Communism. As we read from him before, “communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development.” How is it to be achieved? According to the Communist Manifesto, “communism can be summarized in a single sentence: abolition of private property” (ch. 2). In other words, man is to abolish private property and thereby undo his Fall and reinstate his true nature as a “species-being,” which is essentially, and not at all crudely, Communist: he is a being that has arrived at (or, more accurately, returned to) the positive transcendence of private property.
Of course, that doesn’t really answer how the abolition of private property and the division of labor that sustains it is to be accomplished, especially given that man confuses labor under division as the labor he’s meant and made to be doing. Before explaining the how, briefly note why man is so wrong about what he believes he’s supposed to be doing: the inversion of praxis. Being raised in a divided labor condition, his subjective range is limited to his own estrangement, which socialized him to believe that’s what he should be doing. Escaping this issue requires him to be conscious of himself as someone who could do something else. That’s where the how in Marxism appears. Returning to the point as Marx had it, leaving out the parts distinguishing Man from animal and continuing to the essential point further down the page,
In creating a world of objects by his practical activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being. … It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears, as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of Man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. (EPM, pp. 73–74)
The Fall of Man through the division of labor really is characterized as a Fall of Man. Man becomes estranged from himself in the same way he became estranged from God in the Fall from Eden—but now he is to be seen as his own creator, through the demiurgic powers that manifest in society itself. The result of his Fall is that Man comes to believe himself to be an individual, and thus he doesn’t and can’t know who he is.
In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form. (EPM, p. 73)
In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken away from him. … Estranged labour turns thus [m]an’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means for his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect. (EPM, p. 74)
For Marx, Man’s “human aspect,” the quality in him that makes him essentially human instead of animal, is that he is a Communist. Thus, Marx named his view “humanism” and claimed conscious Marxist praxis “humanizes” Man, society, and the world.
The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object—an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use. (EPM, p. 101)
The goal of this project is making each and all—Man, society, and world, including nature—fit for Man as he truly is, if only he could transcend his depraved (property-owning) false nature, which he wove into himself through generations of the inversion of praxis within the Fallen (property-owning) society he sinfully created for himself.
[T]he social character is the general character of the whole movement: just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him. Activity and enjoyment, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social: social activity and social enjoyment. The human aspect of nature exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist for him as a bond with man—as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him—and as the life-element of human reality. Only then does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence. Only here has what is to him his natural existence become his human existence, and nature become man for him. Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature—the true resurrection of nature—the consistent naturalism of man and the consistent humanism of nature. (EPM, p. 98)
As a religion, the point of Marxism is to teach Man to remember who he is. Notice I didn’t say “to teach people…” or “to teach men who they are.” All of Man, as a collective species, has to remember who he is. He is a species-being. His true nature is a fully social animal that hasn’t Fallen by seizing private property, declaring “this is mine.” Thus he declares “I am because I am someone who can possess.” This is a man who has forgotten that he is social because he’s been socialized to believe he is not. Because Man is always creating society (praxis, conscious or not) and society is always creating Man (inversion of praxis), Man is always a social being. The question, for Marx, is merely whether or not he is conscious of it.
The individual is the social being. His manifestations of life—even if they may not appear in the direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out in association with others—are therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual and species-life are not different, however much—and this is inevitable—the mode of existence of the individual is a more particular or more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life. (EPM, p. 99)
The individual for Marx is someone who can assert “I am someone who can have this thing that I withhold from you” while pretending that’s not a social relation, and the Communist is someone with the “human” consciousness that returns him to his social nature.
As a corollary, we see Marx’s theory of alienation by labor. Because you might value that thing and want it or something similar, or the advantage it confers, my assertion of having something enables me to require you to work for me to gain access to it. Thus, I estrange you from who you are, someone who can subjectively imagine and then create objects and see yourself as their creator, because you’re creating objects for me out of my vision. We become estranged, and the power that follows from possession, thus individuality, estranges us. It is sin, and the wages of sin are toil and death.
First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him—that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity—so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self. (EPM, p. 71)
This, in turn, inverts Man and animal, reducing Man to a mere animal that only feels human when engaging in animal activities like eating, drinking, and having sex. That which is divine within Man—his essential human nature and what every other Esoteric Religious sect before Marx recognized as his immortal spirit—is not merely lost but debased so that in its depravity it repeats for itself the Fall by seeking itself in the mundane, corporeal, Fallen world of bodily need and gratification. Man, for Marx, is thusly debased, depraved, and dehumanized by the existence of private property and the social relations it produces.
As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. W hat is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. (EPM, p. 71)
Marx offers a solution to this problem, as we have already seen: Communism. He believes it follows from consciousness, or gnosis, of this true nature of Man and his conditions. Under Marxism, as a religion, Man is (not merely “men are”) to be made conscious of their true nature and the structural conditions engendered by that which has caused their Fall, which is private property. In turn, they have a duty of conscience to do the work in praxis to transform the world so that the next dialectical turn of the inversion of praxis will expand people’s consciousness further. Writes Marx, attempting to justify the utility of his own theorizing amid so many appeals to hard labor, “my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being” (EPM, p. 99).
This process is to continue and continue and continue until Man remembers who he is, a species-being who lives collectively, and thus transcends private property. As his own creator who knows himself to have created himself thusly, he re-enters Eden on his own terms. There’s no need for a Savior because Man, as a singular collective, saves himself. Not faith, but arbeit, macht frei.
The essential reason for this is the dialectical faith at the center of Marxism. Man makes society. That’s praxis. Society, in turn, makes Man. That’s the inversion of praxis. Man, thus far, has Fallen and thereby made himself unconscious of the dialectical conditions that shape his reality and thus himself, but he can conscientize. He can become aware of the conditions that shape his reality and himself, and thus he can make himself as he should be, recollecting (in the Hermetic sense) his true nature as a species-being, which Marx later called “Socialist Man.” The creation of Man through society—through his State as Man’s self-made messianic Savior—can be consciously directed back to where it should have been all along. The prison of Being can be escaped. Man can return home and know himself to have come home. “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”
The only question, then, is what aspect or aspects of society make Man through the inversion of praxis. For Marx, who was a material determinist, economic conditions make Man, so in order to consciously seize the means of producing society and Man, one must seize the means of material production. The economic theory of Marxism misses what Marxism is entirely. It merely identifies one potential software routine in the underlying dialectical operating system (faith) of dialectical transformation of Man through the seizure of his means of self-production, and there are others. Thus, classical economic Marxism gave way to Cultural Marxism gave way to Critical Marxism gave way to Identity Marxism gave way to Woke Marxism is giving way to Sustainability Marxism today. Same religion, different plug-in for determining what drives the inversion of praxis.
Marxism in Full Generality
Marxism, in full generality, then, posits the existence of a special kind of “bourgeois” property (generally, “capital”) to which some people grant themselves access while excluding everyone else. This property empowers them to shape society for their own benefit while casting everyone else into enstrangement and alienation—a prison at the level of their very being.
To fully understand Marxism, the special property or capital under consideration must be conceived of very broadly. There is material capital, cultural capital, social capital, intellectual capital, human capital, and so on, and access to any or all of these has to be considered. The currently dominant versions of Marxism view these various forms of capital, or special “bourgeois” property, to be intertwined with one another and impossible to understand in isolation. Their power is “intersectional.”
The special access to a form of bourgeois property “stratifies” society into a class that has it and a class that does not have it. Access to the property confers advantages to the people who have it, leading them to want to keep it and rationalize keeping it through what Marx named “ideology.” It also confers power, which they use to structure society to their own advantage. The power they create is therefore systemic or structural in nature, and it results from the interplay between the privileged class and those they exploit to maintain their privilege.
The classes produced by this structural Fall of Man are therefore intrinsically in conflict with one another over access to the special property and the means of possessing it. Thus, the overclass erects a system that estranges the everyday individual (for Marx, the worker) in the underclass from the product of his efforts and thus his ability to fully and truly be. Those with the power to direct this system of power (currently referred to as “privileged”) generate elaborate mythologies, called “ideologies,” that justify their access to the special property and the power it confers while exploiting others to increase the amount of it they have. Marx claimed that ideology “mystifies” reality and that Marxism “demystifies” it.
Ideology functions in such a way as to ensure neither group is conscious of the “true” nature of society, which is “structural.” The goal, however, as Marx and Engels note in The Communist Manifesto can be summarized in the single idea of “abolition of private property” of this special kind. Marxism bills itself as the sole path to “the end of ideology”—not this ideology or that ideology, but ideology itself, in toto. It is therefore the only system of thought of its kind that somehow manages not to constitute an ideology, but this is just another way Marxists consider themselves better than everyone else and thereby trick themselves.
It will be instructive to see this abstract expression of Marxism in several more concrete forms. We therefore now turn to a number of descriptive examples.
Many Faces of Marxist Faith
The basic structure of Marxism repeats itself through every evolution of Marxist Theory and is always adhered to religiously and with the zealot’s fervor. In every case, a special form of property is at the center of the “Theory,” and the liberation of man depends on its abolition, by which is meant its “positive transcendence.”
For Marx, the special property was capital. Its ideology is capitalism, a caricature of market economies. Its winners are the bourgeoisie, and its losers the working class, who become a proletariat when awakened to class consciousness. The structure of this society is enforced by structural classism which is materially deterministic. The goal of Marx’s economic-material Marxism is the abolition (or transcendence) of private property.
In Cultural Marxism, the special property is cultural capital, the power to define and set culture. Its ideology is (cultural) capitalism, a form of cultural dominance. Its winners are the culturally elite, who are mostly the bourgeoisie, and its losers are those of low culture, who were readily identified with the working class. They can be awakened into a (cultural) proletariat by awakening their class consciousness, which includes an understanding of how cultural mores define the haves and have-nots in society. The structure of this society is enforced by cultural hegemony, which includes both classism and cultural classism, which are materially and structurally deterministic. The goal of Cultural Marxism is to abolish the existing means of production of cultural values and to establish a counter-hegemony that favors Marxism within culture-producing institutions (e.g., family, religion, education, media, and law) in order to abolish (or transcend) bourgeois culture and class society.
In Critical Marxism, the special property is acceptability. Its ideology is positivism, by which is meant strict rationality and legalistic thinking, at least in professional circles. Its winners are the culturally elite and the normal (“one-dimensional man”), and its losers are the culturally excluded. They can be awakened into critical theorists by adopting critical consciousness, which is the understanding that a better society cannot be articulated in the terms of the existing society but that the features of the existing society they find “dehumanizing” can be critiqued. The structure of this society is material, cultural, and social classism and is maintained by commodification, which is materially and structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition of the existing terms of society (a Great Refusal).
In Postmodern Marxism (not an oxymoron), the special property is discursive dominance, which is the ability to control how ideas and their networks of meanings are understood. Its ideology is a belief in the stability and universality of meaning. Its winners are the socioculturally elite, and its losers are the socioculturally excluded and marginalized. They can be awakened into postmodernism (or postmodern/radical skepticism), which is a general belief that all meaning-making is an expression of power, so, essentially a consciousness of how power operates within and through society within its meaning-making apparatuses. The structure of this society is discursive structuralism, which is structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition of privileging of meaning-making.
In Critical Race Theory, as I argue in Race Marxism, the special property is whiteness. Its ideology is white supremacy. Its winners are whites and white-adjacents. Its losers are people of color. Either of these can become antiracists when awakened to race consciousness (instead of colorblindness). The structure of this society is enforced by systemic racism, which is both materially and structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition (or transcendence) of whiteness.
In (Marxian) Feminism, the special property is maleness. Its ideology is patriarchy, that men should lead society. Its winners are men. Its losers are women and, to a certain extent, at least sometimes, homosexual men. These can become feminists when awakened with feminist consciousness. The structure of this society is enforced by misogyny, structural sexism, phallagocentrism, gender normativity, and sex essentialism, which can be both materially and (in multiple ways) structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition (or transcendence) of patriarchy.
In Queer Theory, the special property is normalcy. Its ideology is cisheteronormativity, that it is regarded as normal to be straight and not trans. Its winners are cisheterosexuals and people who pass as such. Its losers are the abnormal. These can become allies or queer when awakened with queer consciousness. The structure of this society is enforced by homophobia, transphobia, and other bigotries of normativity, which is both materially and structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition (or transcendence) of normalcy and, with it, normativity, i.e., all norms and socially enforced categorical expectations.
In Disability Studies, the special property is able-bodiedness. Its ideology is ableism, that it is in general better and more normal to be able-bodied instead of disabled in some way. Its winners are the able-bodied. Its losers are the disabled (who are disabled by the failure of society to accommodate disability as fully as it accommodates ability, which is realized when disability is in no way any disadvantage at all). These can become disability activists when awakened with a critical consciousness of ability status. The structure of this society is enforced by dis/ableism, which is both materially and structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition (or transcendence) of ableism.
In Fat Studies, the special property is thinness. Its ideology is thinnormativity, that it is normal for the human body not to be overweight (in fact, the term “overweight” is problematic because it implies thinnormativity by suggesting an ideal weight exists). Its winners are the thin. Its losers are the fat and bodies of size. These can become fat activists when awakened with a critical fat consciousness. The structure of this society is enforced by fatphobia along with healthism (that it is important and valuable to be healthy), which are both materially and structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition (or transcendence) of thinnormativity and expectations about weight and body size.
In Freirean education, the special property is formal education or literacy. Its ideology is one of “educated society,” which values being educated and literate in ways acceptable to the existing system. Its winners are the formally educated and literate, regarded as knowers, and its losers the illiterate, who are actually knowers in their own right, though the system excludes them, their ways of knowing, and their knowledges. They are awakened through political literacy, and conscientization is the process of their awakening. The critically conscious or conscientized are those who have been awakened. The structure of this society is enforced by expectations on literacy and formal education, which are materially and structurally deterministic, relegating the underclass to a “culture of silence,” as Freire has it. The goal is the abolition (or transcendence) of formal education and objective knowledge, and thus the immediate goal is the reappropriation of education into a process of conscientiation and “humanization.”
In Climate Justice, the special property is not being impacted by human-caused climate change. Its ideology is energy abundance (through non-Green energy sources), which are enabled by neoliberalism and imperialism. Its winners are the first world, the fossil-fuel industry, and all privileged classes, who are believed to suffer fewer impacts of climate change. Its losers are the developing and undeveloped world and everybody, especially members of oppressed classes, who benefit least from existing energy sources and suffer the consequences of climate change the most (allegedly). They are awakened through Green activism (and Blue), and they have a climate consciousness. The structure of the existing society is largely enforced by petro-capitalism, which runs a capitalist enterprise on the back of energy abundance produced by oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear power, all of which are backed by neoliberalism (with regard to energy policy), which have material and structurally deterministic effects. Its goal is the abolition of “Black Energy,” full reliance upon “Green Energy,” the end of the oil, coal, and gas industries, and environmental and Climate Justice (redistribution globally according to alleged climate change production and damages). Its primary objective in branding is “sustainability.”
We could go on (into postcolonial theory, health equity, and on and on), but we will not. In all cases, the mechanism is for the “conscious” to seize the means of production in the relevant domain and use that control to force redistribution and new norms that work toward abolishing the relevant form of special property by abolishing the special access or even its fundamental meaning. Doing so will abolish the special property and thus undo its contribution to the Fall of Man, thus ending the estrangement the existence of that form of special property and its attendant power dynamic produce.
What we see here is that Marxism, once understood properly as a Esoteric faith of societal division and transmutation (in alchemy, by: “divide and unify” or “dissolve and precipitate”), has reared its head in many different forms but has not lost its essential character. One additional example that grows significantly out of all of these preceding but especially the Critical Marxist line bears describing.
In Sustainable Marxism, which obviously has a double meaning, the special form of property is production capacity (in general). Its ideology is shareholder capitalism. Its winners are the one percent. Its losers are the ninety-nine percent, especially women, gender minorities, sexual minorities, racial minorities, residents of the Third World, and all other members of “marginalized groups.” These can become activists on behalf of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations and its 2030 Agenda and by behaving in ways that are ESG compliant (stakeholder-determined Environmental, Social, and Governance standards comprise ESG compliance). Its goal is to abolish shareholder capitalism and replace it with stakeholder capitalism, or “sustainable and inclusive” capitalism, which is not actually capitalism at all but a market-containing command economy not unlike the one in China under the CCP.
The Last Word
It’s time we understand Marxism for what it really is: a cult-religious ideology of transforming the world “back into Eden” by undoing the Fall of man into producing stratified power dynamics through allegedly self-granted access to special property. It arises from a singular error, which is the inability to perceive the legitimacy of a legitimate hierarchy, and thus proceeds by means of ignorant destructive envy. No matter which form of special property is under consideration, it is always the same, and so are its fruits. Restoring liberty and goodness to our lives depends on understanding this.
