Deconstructing Marxism Part 1: Introductory
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those
who falsely believe they are free.” – Goethe
Questioning stuff is quite a trend now-a-days, and this blog is itself a pretty good example of that. Look at the tagline, for instance. We often hear about questioning whether all women are destined to be housewife-mothers, whether caste hierarchies should be given any attention, whether cisgendered heterosexuality is the only kind of gender identity and sexual orientation, and so on and so forth. I love questioning stuff too, so I thought I’d take the questioning a step further by questioning the questions themselves. Should we end oppression? Why? Why shouldn’t we add to it? What is oppression, in the first place? This essay pokes into the very foundations of criticism and critical theory and related schools of thought, such as feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, etc.—what I refer to as ‘Marxism’. But first, a little background info.
The topic is pretty vast, of course, which is why this essay was originally the length of a thesis. Just kidding—I’ve never written a thesis. However, the entire essay I typed at first was approximately the length of a very enthusiastically-written TY Socio dissertation and therefore very frustratingly long. It’s sad enough that teachers have to go through that pain several times at the end of every year, but I want my essay to actually be read, so taking the advice of the Wise Manager of the Blog (who shall not be named, and who had to bear aforementioned pain), I split the essay into 3 parts. Part 1 is mainly introductory so if you’re already familiar with Marxism, you can skip it, BUT in case you were wondering why I’ve grouped feminism, queer theory, etc. under the heading of “Marxism”, or you’re thinking, ‘Oh this fellow believes in that myth of CuLtUraL mArXiSm’, I’d recommend going through at least the Definition section (it’s fairly short) to get a proper sense of what I’m dealing with in this essay. Part 2 examines the flaws inherent in Marxism while Part 3 is an attempt at a historico–philosophical overview of how such flaws have come to be embedded in Marxism. Endnote 1 has a really crisp and dense summary, in case you were looking for one.
And why have I written such a lengthy essay criticizing Marxism, you ask? Well, so many of my friends have been persistently pestering me, for a very long time, to get into the whole business of writing and sharing my thoughts and what not that, at last, I thought I should give it a shot with the culmination of my bachelor’s degree. I have attempted to poke around Marxism and examine its incompleteness and especially its (self-)contradictions, and being a little mischievous myself, I decided to examine Marxism somewhat with the help of its own various Marxist ideas and theories and theorists, many of which I’ve come across in my Third Year studying Sociology. The sections of this essay are: Definition, Description, Deconstruction, Destruction, Sociological Speculation and Conclusion. I think these amusingly alliterative headers describe the flow quite well. And now, on to Marxism!
Definition
Have you ever had the experience of someone giving you some (unsolicited) advice, or telling you to do something that you found unreasonable? And when you asked this person ‘Why?’ or ‘Why should I?’, the answer was something like ‘Just because,’ or ‘Because I said so,’ or ‘That’s the way it should be.’? It’s quite likely that you experienced this in the context of some religious issue or a socio-cultural norm, and that the person was someone older than you, and that you were annoyed by the person’s lack of real rationale (and maybe very annoyed so if you were forced to do the task anyway). It’s one thing if your 3-year-old niece is demanding another bar of chocolate right after eating a kilo of it, and it’s another thing if your entire family can never eat chocolate because your 87-year-old grandfather says so. When such irrational ideas/beliefs/norms gain widespread acceptance, they can become pretty problematic, because social life is filled with norms not only concerning what we can or can’t eat, but also how we should dress, or talk, or whom we should marry, or what we should do with our lives, or sometimes, even who should or shouldn’t live. Marxism is (usually) not content with simply letting things be as they are, but tries to peek into the actual causes of the various beliefs and practices that populate society. Marxists try to look under the surface and ‘behind the scenes’ as it were, to not only understand the historical development of society, but also to observe how various policies or events or traditions offer advantages to certain groups or persons, while adversely affecting and hurting others, so that they can try to undo these inequalities and help the marginalized.
In the past century and a half, Marxism has undergone many developments and changes, and has branched out into several fields and produced several theories, which means that Marxism is not a singular organized field of study/thought. When I use the word ‘Marxism’, I’m not referring simply to Marx’s original theories and critiques and criticisms concerning largely the economic side of society, but more broadly to all its developments after that, especially those related to the field of culture: in short, critical theory; in long, feminism, postcolonialism, critical race theory, queer theory, and the like. Though many of these may seem to be widely different fields/orientations, there are important common elements that can be found, and which can indeed be traced back to Marx himself: the identification of two broad categories of persons—generally labelled the ‘bourgeoisie’ (pronounced ‘boor-jwa-zee’) and the ‘proletariat,’ the dominant and oppressed classes respectively—the former of which is privileged in some manner (politically, financially, intellectually, physically) or has more resources of some sort, and which seeks to (and does) preserve its privilege by using its resources to dominate and oppress the latter. The theories or schools of thought that contain these elements at their core are the ones I’m grouping under ‘Marxism’ and critiquing in this essay. Some examples of modern bourgeoisie–proletariat pairs are men–women, Brahmins–non-Brahmins, whites–blacks, and heterosexuals–non-heterosexuals. Marxists, then, seek to uncover these inequalities existing in society and basically slay the oppression dragon.
A short summary of the aim of modern Marxism, as I understand and mean it.2
Description
Undoing oppression is what Marxism aims to do, and it does this (at least in the theoretical domain) usually through the lens of social constructionism and with the help of deconstruction. Social constructionism is the view that knowledge is not simply a direct observation of absolute facts, but constructed within a social environment. This makes quite a lot of sense intuitively. Think about the fact that the kind of clothes you wear, the way you wear them, the language(s) you speak, and all the various elements of culture, are passed down as traditions or spread through society continuously from many persons to many more. Even within the fields of the natural sciences, it’s usually not the case that one scientist can simply present some knockdown evidence for a new theory, which then gets instantaneously accepted throughout the world. Within the scientific community, a significant number of (“credible”) peers must endorse the new findings, which must then gain sufficient recognition for further research, etc. and all of this is barely the tip of the iceberg. In any case, not only descriptive ideas and beliefs, but also values, spread through society, and as mentioned in the Definition section, these can be advantageous for some people but pretty harmful for others.
It’s hard to pin down exactly what ‘deconstruction’ refers to, or what it was supposed to refer to, but at least one of the ways Marxists employ it is as a method of studying how particular ideas/beliefs/values emerged in the course of history (usually to benefit particular sections of society to the detriment of others), how these ideas/beliefs/values are still a part of modern society, and how they continue to sustain or increase systemic/societal oppression. Looking at the social/political/historical context of particular incidents or ideas helps us understand them more clearly than if they were examined in isolation, and this being done, the Marxists proceed to then highlight the oppression they cause, and then fight against the oppression as well as the cause. This emphasis on the socio-historical location of various aspects of human life was a particularly important feature of Marx and Engels’ (1848/1888/2010) historical materialism:
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? [emphasis added] The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. … The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs. But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms. The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. (pp. 25, 26)
Since Marx, of course, there has been massive development of these ideas and concepts, especially with Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, and according to me, the most popular parts of their works are quite complementary, and that is how I will describe them. Gramsci was prolific in his writings, and he is most famous for the concept of cultural hegemony. As I mentioned above, according to Marxist theory, the bourgeoisie dominate and oppress the proletariat more or less out of self-interest, but you’d think that the proletariat would do something about it! In fact, Marxist thinkers about a century ago were wondering the same thing, as capitalism and bourgeois domination were on the rise, without any real signs of Marx’s much-hoped-for proletariat revolution. Gramsci resolved this by saying that bourgeois domination does not occur merely in physical or economic terms, but also culturally and ideologically. That is to say, the various ideas and values of the culture into which we are socialized are accepted by us as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ or even ‘correct’, but in reality, they work to preserve the social order that favours the ruling minorities, and this process of the acceptance of domination by the dominated is called cultural hegemony.
An epiphany about biological hegemony.
The way I see it, Althusser augmented the concept of cultural hegemony by elaborating on its modes and content, especially with the concept of ideology (Lewis, 2018). He first distinguished between Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). RSAs function more by way of physical repression and violence, eg. courts, police and armed forces, but he focused particularly on the ISAs because, according to him, these institutions subtly disseminate the ideologies that favour the control of the dominant class. His ideas were at the very least controversial, and for good reason, because some of the social institutions that he classified as ISAs were the education system, the media, religious institutions, and yes, even the family. “Ideology, or the background ideas that we possess about the way in which the world must function and of how we function within it is, in this account, understood to be always present” (Lewis, 2018). Pierre Bourdieu, a famous French sociologist of recent decades, also described something very similar in the concept of ‘doxa’ which denotes the most basic, taken-for-granted beliefs that shape our understanding of the world, but which are themselves shaped by our social interactions (Calhoun, 2003, p. 291). These doxa are so fundamental that one cannot really detach from them or live without them.
Consider this simple example of ideology which is particularly relevant to the Indian context, and perhaps echoes the first paragraph of the Definition section: ‘One must respect one’s elders.’ To put it very concisely, the Marxist would deconstruct this social norm with the very obvious observation that this norm is given to us, and reinforced (in case of failure to conform), by our elders. The Marxist would further observe that obedience to this norm seems to benefit said ‘elders’ most, since ‘respect for elders’ carries with it related behaviours such as obeying one’s elders, caring for them and, often, not questioning their authority. The average member of society unconsciously and unquestioningly comes to accept these norms and thereby sustains the social superiority of ‘elders’. Now, apply the same to all the ideas, values and practices that one unknowingly adheres to, and the authority of political leaders, celebrities, and religious figures that continues to be sustained in this manner.
Cultural hegemony is most strongly manifested when those ruled by the dominant group come to believe that the economic and social conditions of their society are natural and inevitable, rather than created by people with a vested interest in particular social, economic, and political orders. (Cole, 2020)
Endnotes
Marxism—which includes many variants of feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, etc.—makes several value claims, implicitly or explicitly, but these seem to have no foundation whatsoever, since Marxists have not successfully attempted to solve the is–ought problem. Naturalism, especially via its logical implication of (moral) nihilism, undermines the core of Marxism, and thereby Marxism as a whole. I recommend that Marxists try to refute moral nihilism and provide a non-arbitrary account of their moral ontology to achieve more theoretical coherence and logical consistency, or else give up their decentralized demagogy–er, I mean, give up Marxism.
I chose this comic because (1) although it specifically mentions feminism, it’s meant to broaden the scope of feminism, and helps to similarly highlight my broad usage of the term “Marxism”; (2) feminism is probably the most popular form of critical theory or ‘Marxism’ today, in the sense that I mean it. Source: https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/03/slay-the-kyriarchy/
References
Calhoun, C. (2003). Pierre Bourdieu. In G. Ritzer (Ed.), The Blackwell companion to major contemporary social theorists (pp. 274–309). Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470999912.ch12
Cole, N. L. (2020, January 6). What is cultural hegemony? ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/cultural-hegemony-3026121
Lewis, W. (2018, February 13). Louis Althusser. In E. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2018 ed.). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/althusser/
Marx, K. H., & Engels, F. (2010). Manifesto of the communist party (S. Moore, Trans.). Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf (Original work published 1888/1848)
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