Because this experiment has obviously failed and this attempt to create a less toxic work environment through activism has resulted in a thinly veiled attempt to create a more toxic work environment for those who do not want to conform to neo-marxist orthodoxy.
This is one my main gripes with conservatives right now. You go to any of the places you congregate and alongside the more reasonable scepticism towards woke culture, there’s this constant talk of the rise of “neo-marxism”
I have seen zero evidence for this. None
Besides very basic issues like minimum wage, on the whole, the new left does not care about economics. There’s the occasional “bad capitalism bad” meme or tweet, but that’s the extent of it
This whole neomarxism shit just seems like a confluence of:
1. it’s bait to conservatives, so it gets attention
2. If you don’t like BLM etc, it’s much easier to just label them as marxists, rather than actually dismantle their flimsy ideology
3. it’s probably partially a reaction to the media calling Trump a fascist
In conclusion, it’s convenient for a lot of the right to confuse identity politics with marxism, and it puts me off because it’s lazy and ignorant
Not quite. BLM in particular is called Marxist because the people who actually organize that movement have called themselves "trained Marxists" and the British BLM website for a while claimed their goals involved overthrowing capitalism and the nuclear family. If you don't think BLM is Marxist that's understandable because those facts didn't get much attention, but, they definitely are. Adopting a clenched fist as a logo should be another hint.
At any rate, it's mostly because Marxism is not really an economic ideology, even though communism is often presented as an alternative to capitalism. Communism is arguably not an economic system at all given the absolutely minimal detail Marx provided about how a communist economy was actually meant to work. Marxism is best understood as a packaged set of views about the current state of the world and human nature, the correct/perfect state of the world and human nature, and a plan for how to get from here to there.
A key component of Marxist thought is that the current state of the world is one of "alienation" (today we would say oppression), in which a small minority subtly oppress the majority in such a way that the majority don't realize they're oppressed. But if they were to realize, they could rise up and via a revolution overthrow their oppressors. This would establish a transient state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) that would eventually, once society was finished being transformed, sort of melt away leaving communism as a kind of superior form of existence in which there's no oppression, human nature has fundamentally changed and as a consequence everyone is equal.
It's that last bit that gets the bulk of the attention because, firstly, the rest is kind of vague, and secondly, the socialist revolutionaries were expected to deliver obvious, real-world benefits for their revolution and focused on the "everyone is economically equal" bit as something that could be achieved via large scale government action. But to Marx that was only one part of it. The rest was about human nature.
The modern left, especially in Silicon Valley, is easily identifiable as a new variant of this basic ideology:
- Society is split into oppressors (white men) and everyone else (women, other races). People are always one of these groups and cannot move between them. Many oppressed people don't believe they're oppressed, but that's because they've been deceived and it's very important to make them realize that white men are oppressing them.
- People are either really good, or really bad, and people who are really bad (anyone who doesn't subscribe to this ideology) need to be suppressed, expelled, or silenced in various ways.
- The world is suffering under vaguely defined oppressive forces (Marx: imperialism, the Woke: patriarchy/systemic racism). If these forces are defeated, humanity will be elevated to a superior form of existence.
- Exceptionally aggressive "with us or against us" tactics are legitimate and even required to reach this state.
There are a bunch of other similarities, but that's the gist.
Wow, both the parent comment and grandparent comment here are the best of HN - extremely well reasoned thoughts with different perspectives. Thank you for sharing!
To start, I appreciate the long and thought out answer. You’ve put some effort in, and it was a pleasant and interesting read
However, I think you’ve misunderstood BLM at its core. BLM is not a specific group like the GOP or the NRA. Maybe it was originally, and maybe it nominally still is, but BLM is a slogan. It’s a label. It’s more like calling yourself left-wing, or right-wing.
If I say I’m left-wing, do you assume I have the same views as the people who sat in the left wing of the French parliament all those years ago?
So if I say “Black Lives Matter”, should you assume that I believe the same as some nameless, faceless founder that I don’t know?
Just to add a bit of real life evidence to that, I don’t know if you’ve met the kind of people that associate themselves with black lives matter, but being a student, I have, a lot. They have no interest in Marxism, let me tell you
And in regards to your comment that Marxism isn’t economic: I don’t like to directly call people wrong, because it’s abrasive and rarely changes anything, but no, you’re completely wrong.
Marxism is primarily about the distribution of wealth in society. The name of the book is ‘Das Kapital’. It’s not ‘Das Identity’, or ‘Das Oppressors’. It’s ‘The Capital’. It’s a book analysing who holds the money and means of production in society and how that capital is distributed amongst the classes. Marx was an economist.
and I take your point that if you extrapolate some of Marx’s views outwards, they could be applied to what blm people stand for. However, that is not marxism. That is one aspect of Marxism, extrapolated outwards and applied to something different.
Look at it this way:
Plenty of right-wing anti-semites believe that the world is secretly oppressed by a small minority of jews. Would you call them Marxists, or neo-marxists?
Now finally, onto your parallels between the silicon valley ideology that’s risen up and Marxism. First of all, there’s an inherent extremely obvious contradiction. Silicon valley is full of massive capital holding corporations, who aggressively crush any attempts to unionise, who are the antithesis of marx’s primary goals. Even if the ideology shares some vague themes with communism, in my opinion, that is easily enough to scratch off a Marxist label. Easily.
Onto your actual parallels:
1. this is just a repeat of above. Sure it’s true, and sure it’s a parallel, but it’s nowhere near enough to start throwing round the word marxist
2. that may have been an aspect of communist societies, but it’s also an aspect of fascist societies, and basically any society who had something to hide. Besides, we’re talking about Marxism, not in-practice communism
3. First, Marx’s feud wasn’t with imperialism, it was with the class system. I’m sure he didn’t like imperialism either, but that wasn’t his primary enemy. Anyway, that’s beside the point. I’ve never heard anything like that from a BLM or new left/silicon valley type. They’re very interested in short term aesthetic wins (pulling down statues, apologies from politicians etc etc) and I really don’t think many of them have considered their long-term goals. This is a conversation I’ve had a few times. I posit that surely the end-goal should be to, outside of practicalities, forget race/gender/sexuality even exists in the first place, and they aren’t really sure and don’t seem to have thought about it
Additionally, achieving your goals and converting the world to your mindset is not an invention of Marx, and not even remotely exclusive to marxists
4. this also is hardly unique to the ideology, or to Marxism, or any group. the Nazis were the same. So are the Westboro baptist church. Are they Marxists?
To take the WBC point further, look at those parallels again. How many of them apply to the Westboro Baptist Church, or the Nazis, or most cults?
You may think that’s against my argument, but it’s not. I’m not here to defend the new left or BLM. They do share some themes with cults and bad groups from history, and I think their ideology is borderline madness. (read up on critical race theory). That doesn’t make them Marxists though. It just doesn’t
I agree it's reasonable to view BLM as a leaderless social movement, and that the existence of people who claim to speak for it is a bit suspicious. But the original point I was responding to was that neo-Marxism is some sort of wacky label that isn't justified by anything, and that labelling BLM as neo-Marxist is a sort of unjustified smear that's designed to bait conservatives. To address this point, it's not necessary to actually win the argument that BLM is a Marxist movement, only to point out why people might genuinely believe it without having been baited into it. And I think the fact that the people who own the websites and claim to speak for the movement say they're Marxists is sufficient to make that a justifiable claim, even if it may be debatable and certainly not the full story.
You're right that Marx didn't explicitly identify his work as being about identity politics. However, Marx wasn't really a student of economics in the way modern economists would recognize. He showed very little interest in the mechanics of how business worked, to the extent that when his friend Engels invited him to visit one of his factories Marx declined. In fact, I believe there's no evidence Marx ever actually spent time in places where the working classes utilized the means of production, even though his entire philosophy revolved around them. Marx viewed capital almost exclusively through the lens of class struggle. Capital was something that some people had lots of because they oppressed other people, and it really wasn't much more complicated than that. In particular his world view had nothing in it that justified the existence of capitalists - he assigned zero value to their role as coordinators and planners.
A part of your argument is that some of these attributes could apply to "right wing anti-semites" and you mention Nazis in a few places. I actually believe the Nazis were not right wing at all, for example if you read their propaganda magazine (Signal) it is basically a standard socialist critique of western culture, which they called imperialism, naturally, and obviously the party called itself the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. However last time I made that argument on HN I got slapped by dang so let's put that to one side here, as it's apparently taboo.
W.R.T. short term vs long term goals. Yes, it's true, Marx was a much longer term thinker than the current crop of neo-Marxists. He had a sweeping view of human history and was happy to make long-range predictions about the inevitability of revolution. There's nothing like that anywhere in the (supposedly) neo-Marxist philosophy. However, I think a critic of Marx would observe that his long term plans were extremely vague. Marx was big on criticism of capitalism and short on detail about communism which is one reason for the enduring popularity of "regime X wasn't really communism" as an argument. The Communist Manifesto was about as close as it got, and that boiled down to a bunch of bullet points that could be enumerated in 60 seconds flat. It was a long way from a real plan. It's more than the new Left have (right now), but not much more.
At any rate, to say it again, the point here is not really to thrash out what Marxism is or isn't. The point is, there are sufficient parallels that even if you disagree with the argument it's obvious why plenty of people make it. It's not like this idea was just invented out of nothing for nefarious reasons. People who conspicuously subscribe to BLM/feminist/new left thinking describe the world in very similar ways to how Marx did, are invariably voting for policies closer to his policies, and some of them literally say "we are Marxists". That's sufficient for the arguments to be made in good faith even if they're wrong.
BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors (on the news recently for her luxury-home purchasing spree) openly describes herself as a trained Marxist. The other BLM co-founder, Opal Tometi, is chummy with the Maduro regime in my home country.
Compare BLM's comments on family structure to Engels' The Origin of the Family and the connection cannot be more obvious.
