Turning Marxism Into A Joke

 My contact with Karl Marx has been tenuous and contentious. When I was 18, I bought a bunch of books, including Marx's Capital. I had already done an independent study on the USSR in high school,, and my step-father had given me John Bircher books about how every politician was a Communist. The Bircher books I thought were a joke; Capital bored me before I finished the first chapter. It was hard to take the inevitable march of history towards a proletarian revolution seriously when one had the example of the USSR staring them in the face.

I tried reading the much shorter Communist Manifesto, but never got through it until I was in prison. As a utopian call to arms, I could see why it was inspiring, but I was too cynical to heed the call.

Today, I received a link to John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism by Joseph Heath. It is a bit long about the history of Marxism in the late 20th Century, but I recommend it to anyone who thinks Kamala Harris is a Marxist, or who thinks Marx has some political value. I recall reading sometime during the past couple of decades his theory of surplus value still has importance, but that is economic, not politics.

But beyond this, the collapse of academic Marxism – as a body of normatively motivated social criticism – has been complete. Hence the fundamental unseriousness of contemporary Marxism in public discourse. Popular Marxism (along with the sort of Gramscian or “cultural” Marxism one finds in critical studies departments) has become a religion without a theology. I can understand why some people might be reluctant to read serious Marxist theory, if the primary upshot is that it turns you into a liberal, but if the alternative is the style of aggressive, in-your-face stupidity found in Jacobin magazine (i.e. “I’m going to talk like a Marxist, even though none of it makes any sense, because you can’t stop me!”), then it seems to me a price worth paying.

Some people have failed to notice these trends, unfortunately, because there was no point at which any one person “refuted” Marxism. Serious thinkers, for the most part, just slowly drifted away from it, the way that guests at a party filter out of the living room into the kitchen, where the conversation is livelier. In this case, the conversation that they drifted toward was Rawlsianism. That is how Rawls wound up triumphing over Marxism – by rendering it superfluous, making it so that no one needed to be a Marxist any more.

I have never met a real Marxist. I had a great aunt who probably about 90 years ago. Of my professors, none seemed ready to storm the barricades to raise up the proles. Now, I think I see why.

sch 8/31