In reading various Conservative pundits, one might be pardoned for believing that there has been a surge of support for Socialism in the US. over the last decade. Similarly, in listening to the rantings our mad king, one might be led to the belief that the US has been suddenly overwhelmed by a surge of left wing radicalism. Socialism and Marxism in turn are often linked with “woke Progressivism” which in turn is associated with every other idea Conservatives dislike such as Intersectional Theory, Critical Race Theory or DEI. Whether the goal in all of this is to discredit ” woke Progressivism” by tying it to Marx and Socialism, or to attempt to discredit Marxism and Socialism by tying it to to “woke Progressivism” is unclear. That it is a deliberate tactic to simply discredit the left through caricature rather than engaging with actual positions, is clear.
As the right wing polemicist Christopher Rufo has put it:
“We have successfully frozen their brand—”critical race theory”—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”
More to the point, in Rufo’s view, Critical Race Theory, and everything associated with it, is the product of an alleged long march by the left through the institutions of American life that began with Herbert Marcuse. The argument, as often advanced by multiple figures on the right, turns near conspiratorial at times with the problems alleged to have begun with Hegel, with little, if any discussion of the actual contributions of, or problems with, Hegel. Hegel in turn begat Marx. When Marxists were unable to rally the working class, they begat the Frankfurt school which turned to analysis of culture which in turn led to all the above and an attack on American Institutions and indeed, all of Western Civilization.
The problem with this view is that while some advocates of the above perspectives may have intellectual roots in Marx, the reality is that their current position has little, if anything, to do with Marx or Socialism. Though a few may at times draw connections between what they see as structural discrimination and Capitalism, for the most part, what is labeled as Critical Race Theory or DEI has set economic equality between different groups, under Capitalism, as their goal. Taken at face value in other words, when one strips away the radical sounding rhetoric, most of its advocates are in essence simply Social Liberals, and not Marxists or Socialists.
None of this is of course beyond critique and in addition to the salvos from the right, there have notably been substantive criticisms of all the above from what I would argue is the actual left-that is those who believe that actual worker control of Industry and an end to corporate hegemony is a desirable goal. And indeed, the closer one gets to actual Marxists, the more likely one is to encounter such critiques. To that end, my own view is that real leftists should cautiously embrace the general goal of pursuing equality between historically advantaged and disadvantaged groups, while reserving the right to critique what is poorly thought out and advanced dogmatically. But the goal of polemicists such as Rufo is not to engage in meaningful critique or dialogue, but rather to smear, evoke outrage, and in so doing, put Gramsci in reverse marshal his own troops for his own war of position with the goal of imposing his own ideological straight jacket on discourse/.
A somewhat more sober and constructive, albeit ultimately flawed approach is taken in Carl Trueman’s recent book To Change all Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse. It should be noted in advance, that the book is not written for an academic audience, but rather to Conservative, and presumably Protestant Christians. On an academic level it has serious shortcomings. That noted, one could be pardoned for supposing it is the sort of thing that might be assigned in a college course in a Christian College as a means of warning students off all things distantly related to Marxism. Yet even at the level of an audience of laypeople, the book betrays some substantive misunderstandings of important issues, and echoes the paucity of much of Conservative Protestant Theology. It is dubious that those who incline to the left will find the book worth reading, except in those cases as with myself, as an exercise in understanding how the other side thinks with the perhaps illusory goal of urging them to take their analysis of the left more seriously. As a Professor who engages in substantive discussions of Marx in the classroom and in research (though not of the Frankfurt School per se) I would hesitate to recommend this book to anyone-not because I disagree with its conclusions, which I do-but due to the kinds of fundamental misunderstandings it perpetuates.
Before delving into the book itself, a few preliminary thoughts about how to address Marx may be helpful. In his classic, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, the Political Economist Joseph Schumpeter argued for the existence of four different Marx’s: The Prophet, The Sociologist, The Economist and The Teacher. To this, Schumpeter might have added Marx the Philosopher and Marx the Historian, or as I would prefer, quite simply Marx the Evolutionary Social Theorist. By rejecting Marx the Prophet and viewing Marx as just an Evolutionary Social Theorist sometimes flawed, sometimes mistaken and sometimes capable of brilliant insights, we can read Marx with the same critical spirit we would apply to Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Johnathan Stuart Mill, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, or any other contributor to Social Theory. Indeed, while not stated explicitly by Trueman, it is hard to avoid the sense that the real target is not simply Marx, contemporary Critical Theory, or even Social Liberalism, but the whole structure of the Enlightenment which would include much of Classical Liberalism, a point which actually is made explicitly by some, such as my colleague, Nicholas Meriwether.
Trueman’s book is well and clearly written. It explains a number of complex concepts reasonably well, though it stumbles on several key issues. It’s most significant shortcoming is that it promises to explain the path from Hegel to Marx, from Marx to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, of the Frankfurt School to Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Critical Race Theory, and presumably, the entire panoply of currently fashionable leftish social theories but never quite delivers on this point. It’s second most significant fault is that each chapter concludes with a comparison between Critical Theory, which Trueman concedes sometimes correctly diagnoses the problem, and the solutions offered by traditional, Conservative Christianity, or in other words, personal salvation. Because the book is clearly written for a Conservative Christian audience there is some justification for this. However, Trueman’s argument on this score could just as easily be directed at any secular social theory, including, defenses of free market capitalism while ignoring left and Socialist traditions within Christian thought, or even for that matter, much of Catholic social teaching. Unless Trueman’s point is that Christians should reject all efforts to engage in social reform via political action and seek only personal salvation, which I do not believe it is, the argument in my view entirely fails. On this point especially, the book would have benefited from engagement with the Christian Realist tradition of Reinhold Niebuhr.
Trueman’s objective in this book is not to appraise Marx per se, but rather to explain the line of thinking that in his view goes from Hegel to Marx, through Marcuse to what he terms Critical Theory. To this end, Trueman sees the origins of contemporary Intersectionality and Critical Race Theory in Marx and the Frankfurt School, while claiming to take both Marx and Critical Theory seriously. Trueman begins with Marx’s relationship to Hegel and so doing, ignores the connection between Hegel and Christianity while at the same time arguing that Marx’s critique of Feurbach’s theism was the most important component of Marx’s break with Hegel. In this vein, there would seem to be an implicit critique of Hegel’s Hegelianism, but this is never developed. Trueman argues that Marx’s view of human nature is one that sees humans as entirely determined by their social position-a view that is common, but also arguable and to which I will return to briefly below.
In his discussion of the Frankfurt School he begins by placing the concerns of the Frankfurt School in the context of their effort to grapple with the rise of Nazism in Germany. Here, he starts with the Hungarian Marxist Gyorgy Lukacs whom he sees as the founder of the Frankfurt school. In summarizing Lukacs he correctly in my opinion emphasizes Lukacs’ focus on subjectivity and the very strong Hegelian vein that runs through Lukacs. However, he misses two very important points about Lukacs. Lukacs is not necessarily the founder of the Frankfurt School per se, but rather of Western (e.g. non Soviet) Marxism and especially humanistic interpretations of Marx. Similarly, Trueman entirely misses Luckac’s association with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which sought to displace Stalinism with a more humanistic form of Socialism.
That noted, his discussion of the Frankfurt School’s concerns is mostly fair. He correctly identifies the goal of critical theory as critique of existing social structures with the goal of bringing about restructuring of social institutions-even if he falls short on some points. Similarly, his discussion of how different writers in the Frankfurt School shifted the focus of Marxism towards critique of culture is reasonably accurate. He notes how their critique of instrumental reasoning showed how the idea of reason could be misapplied in a way that merely reinforces existing power structures and how commodification in Capitalism creates a consumer culture that reinforces the underlying logic of Capitalism. Here again, on a critical point he entirely misses the boat when he asserts the Frankfurt School was attempting to explain working class support for Fascism which simply did not occur in Spain, Italy or Germany where working class support for the Socialist and Communist Parties was quite strong. Rather, the Frankfurt school did try to explain working class support for Capitalism in general in the Post WWII era.
Quite frustratingly, while Trueman claims that he is going to demonstrate the line of descent from the Frankfurt School to theorists such as Foucault and Judith Butler, he never quite does this. He notes in passing that there is indeed some daylight between the theorists of the Frankfurt School and the above writers. Yet while he alludes to the connection and engages in some extrapolations and analogies, he never systematically develops the point. Hence what he succeeds in pointing out is that there are some similar concerns and a vague family resemblance between the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and the much broader definition of Critical Theory that incorporates diverse and often divergent approaches under one umbrella today. What he definitely does not show, as is often alleged, that something called “Cultural Marxism” emerged when Marxists became disappointed in the proletariat and hence went searching for culturally marginalized groups to form the basis of their new historical subject. Instead, the rejection of the working class as the historical subject was due to the influence of a number of non Marxist writers, including Max Weber as well as the upsurge in protests by historically marginalized groups, including, perhaps especially, the rise of anti-imperialism in what was then called the “third world”. Similarly, Trueman misses the point that the Frankfurt School, like the later Lukacs was especially critical of Stalinist Marxism. The impetus behind was thus definitely not to embrace totalitarianism, but rather to search for an alternative to the stodgy old left of both the Social Democrats and the Stalinist Parties. As it happens, I believe there are fair criticisms of the uncritical way in which the Frankfurt School and the New Left in general uncritically embraced all liberation movements, including some very unsavory people and movements.
On the issue of the history of Social Democrats and the Second International, Trueman simply misses the boat. According to Trueman, Karl Kautsky, a critically important figure in the formation of the Second International believed in the inevitability of Socialism and rejected conscious political action as unnecessary. If this were true of course, Kautsky and many others in the Socialist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century would not have wasted time building political parties, promoting political programs and engaging in polemics with each other. Along the same lines, Trueman’s characterization of the German Revolution of 1918 is simply erroneous. In so far as the German revolution failed to take a Socialist direction, it was due to conscious, deliberate choices by the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party to attempt to compromise with non Socialist Political Parties and emphasize building Democracy. This led of course to the split with Luxembourg and the failed Spartacist uprising, which the Social Democrats helped to repress. The events surrounding this era amongst Marxists and Socialists are extensive. Regardless of how on views the participants and players in this era, to argue that they rejected the need for political action to bring about Socialism is an absurdity. Similarly, why Socialism, or as I prefer to term it, Bureaucratic Collectivism triumphed in Russia, rather than Germany was a consequence of the conjuncture of unique historical circumstances and the political organization of the Bolshevik Party than with failures of Marx’s predictions.
By far however, the most frustrating aspect of Trueman’s book is his discussion of Marx. There is no substantive discussion about Marx’s historical materialism. While Trueman treats the influence of Hegel at length, there is little to no discussion of the influence of Aristotle, Adam Smith, John Millar, David Ricardo and others on Marx. Nor does Trueman address Marx’s extensive analysis of Political Economy. Whatever one thinks of Marx, in order to engage with him it is necessary to address Marx’s views on such matters as the distinction between merchant and industrial capitalism, primitive accumulation, the long run tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the importance of class analysis to Marx, and the class nature of the Capitalist State. Along these lines, there needed to be at a minimum, a more systematic effort to address the tension between Hegel’s idealism and Marx’s materialism, which Trueman addresses in what is at best a superficial fashion. The result is that a reader who did not know better and did not read carefully, would be led to think that Marx embraced idealism. In the end, Trueman’s work is at best only a marginal improvement over Rufo’s polemics.
Citizen Rat 