What Makes Somebody a Marxist?

Interview byMelissa NaschekKarl Marx famously declared that he was not a Marxist. But his theoretical work spawned many branches of research, political movements, and heated debate. Can we identify a set of unifying ideas that make up Marxism?On this latest episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber and Melissa Naschek look at the foundations of Marx’s writing and explain how Marxism has both developed and degenerated over the past century.Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and published by Jacobin. You can listen to the full episode here.Melissa NaschekIn our podcast and in your academic work, you consistently put forward a Marxist perspective on politics, theory, and the economy, but sometimes you also criticize aspects of Marxism. In what sense do you consider yourself a Marxist?Vivek ChibberMarxism is a social theory about how the world works, and it’s the theory that’s been used and mobilized by the socialist movement. So, analytically, socialism and Marxism are different things.That means that technically, as the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding once said, it’s possible to acknowledge Marxism’s theoretical power no matter what your political alignment is — you could say that the theory you think is best and most illuminating is Marxism without being a socialist, because they’re different things. But in my view, it’s not the best way to understand the relationship. The way I would put it is that Marxists are particular sorts of socialists.It is technically true that you could be a right-winger and say that you think Marxism best explains the world, so you’re going to use it to try to try to stabilize capitalism.Melissa NaschekThere’s all that talk of how figures like Steve Bannon are influenced by Marxism.Vivek ChibberThat’s technically true, but I think it is going against the spirit of what Marxism is supposed to be, which is the theory that helps illuminate and guide the socialist movement.It’s socialists who abide by a certain understanding of how capitalism works, how history has evolved, and what the conditions are that might allow for a more humane, more just society that we call socialism.Marxism can be either right or wrong. You can be a socialist and say, “Well, I think Marxism actually is mostly mistaken.” And you can also be a socialist who abides by it. The reason I still abide by Marxism is that I do regard myself a socialist. And I also think that, whatever its flaws are, Marxism is the theory that is still the most illuminating and the most helpful to advance a broadly social democratic and socialist project.Melissa NaschekSo what ideas are at the core of Marxism?Vivek ChibberThis is an interesting question, because there’s never been an agreement on this. I understand that, across social media, there’s an incredible confidence that there is this thing out there called Marxism, and it has these four laws or those five components, and you either are or aren’t one. But every time you try to narrow it down that way, you easily find that people who are universally viewed as part of the Marxist pantheon but who don’t abide by this, that, or the other of the strictures that are supposed to be essential to what Marxist theory is. So it’s not an easy question to answer, what’s at the core of Marxism.Some might say labor theory of value, the really ambitious and pretentious ones might say dialectics or something like that. But at any moment in the history of Marxism, if you looked at the people who are the forefront of socialist politics and who call themselves Marxist, you would find profound disagreements on things that you might regard as being essential to Marxism — whether it’s value theory, whether it’s philosophy, even materialism or something like that. So it is not an easy question to answer. But I don’t want to dodge it either.Melissa NaschekI am going to make you answer this question.Vivek ChibberFair enough. First of all, Marxism isn’t a doctrine. Unlike the Bible or a religion, it doesn’t have central tenets, all of which have to be abided by and all of which were decided by a central authority.In fact, the central authority of Marxism was Karl Marx, and when he saw the way his theory was being mobilized and packaged by other people, he famously said, toward the end of his life, “All I know is I’m not a Marxist.” And what he meant by that was it was never meant to be a doctrine.Marxism is what’s called a research program, which is a set of propositions and hypotheses about how the world works that are to be judged on their merits epistemologically, i.e., whether the evidence supports them or doesn’t support them. And so trying to freeze it into a doctrine is foolhardy.At the same time, you don’t want it to be so capacious or so wide that anything goes — that anything counts as Marxism. So to my mind, you want a definition of Marxism that makes it identifiable, that gives it a core, an essence, but that also allows for sufficient disagreement and debate within it that you’re not spending all your time excommunicating people for stepping outside the fold.So let’s see what Marx was trying to do when he developed his theory.What he was trying to show was that the foundation for injustice in this world, which motivates us to try to build a better world, was located in the very structure of modern society. And that structure, Marx said, was its class structure. The idea was that the class structure generates a set of constraints and imposes a set of compulsions on people, which compel them to behave in certain ways, behave in ways that make a humane and just social order impossible. And because that order is impossible, you need to change the social structure and put a new one in its place that at the very least creates the possibility of the kinds of social relations, the kinds of institutions, and the kinds of behaviors that would be consistent with human flourishing.Melissa NaschekOne of the ideas that really struck me the first time I read Capital, Volume I was when Marx talks about how the capitalist is just the personification of capitalism. And his point is that this isn’t a system that’s just propelled by these individual actors with their own intentions, it’s propelled by actors who fulfill a role in a social order. And so it’s the social order itself that needs to be examined, understood, and attacked, and not just these individuals. That is a really profound idea.Vivek ChibberVery true. Socialists and Marxists are very comfortable with the proposition that workers are trapped in their situation, that they’re forced to go out and sell their labor power every day because they have no choice. That’s absolutely true. But Marx was also making a deeper point, which is that capitalists are also trapped in their situation, which is that they have to compete on the market, and they have to try to compel excess labor out of their employees in order to make a profit.So to Marx, capitalists are no less prisoner to the market than workers are. And that’s profound because it means you cannot make capitalism better by asking capitalists to be better. If they’re going to remain capitalists, they’re going to have to do what they do. In order to change the way in which work is carried out, the way in which people make their living, you have to actually change the compulsions and the constraints on people who are capitalists, which are class constraints and class compulsions.Melissa NaschekRight. And when we would talk about this idea of social forces being primarily responsible above and beyond individuals, people would push back and say, “Well, Jeff Bezos, for example, is evil.” And I would try to explain that maybe he is, but maybe he isn’t. It’s actually irrelevant.Vivek ChibberSusan Neiman just recently made the argument that socialists should use the word evil. I don’t actually agree with that. But if you want to, fine. Evil, I don’t think it’s a moral term. I think it’s a religious term. Socialists should be moral, and they have to be morally motivated. And you can say Bezos is evil, but he’s not doing what he does simply because he’s evil. If you knocked Jeff Bezos off the pedestal and you put somebody else in his place, they would do more or less the same things, because that’s what it takes to succeed in the sector of business that he’s occupying.So the first component of Marxism, its main foundation is that the class structure of capitalism is what gives it what Marx called its “laws of motion,” its macro-dynamics. What makes the class structure go is that one group of people isn’t just richer than another group of people, but that it gets its income and wealth from exploiting those other people.A lot of other theories use the word “class,” but in those theories class is typically associated with income. There are rich people who are in one class, poor people who are underneath them in the other class, and then there’s these people in the middle, and you can identify them by income breaks.Melissa NaschekRight. Some of these theories equate class to a sort of cultural status, as a set of — you know, living in a certain place . . . Vivek ChibberTastes.Melissa NaschekYes, exactly.Vivek ChibberBut for Marx, what differentiated classes was not the level of income earned but what people had to do to acquire their income. So the second component is that class happens when one group of people exploits the other group of people, and by that he meant they derive their income by getting labor out of the other group of people.Now the fact that the rich extract labor from the poor ties them together in a particular way, which is that the poor are poor because of what the rich are doing to them. And the rich are rich because of what they’re doing to the poor. So think of what that means is if you want the working people to improve their situation — get higher wages, better working conditions, better housing. To get all those things they have to figure out how to get more out of their employers, because that’s where the money’s coming from.Meanwhile, the employers, in order to make a profit, have to try to give out as little as possible to their employees. And the reason Marx came to this view of class was that, through hard experience, the labor movement found that if they wanted to try to improve the lot of their constituency, which is working people, they again and again and again came up against the resistance of the employers, of the capitalists. And through those hard lessons came a concept of class in which class isn’t simply inequality but a kind of social relation that ties people together, so that the betterment of one comes at the expense of the other. That’s called exploitation.Out of that comes the third component, which is that if you want the majority of people in capitalism — who are workers — if you want them to have better lives, it means figuring out ways to overcome the resistance and the denial of these things from their employers, from the Jeff Bezoses of the world. How are you going to do that? For this, Marx developed a political theory of how ordinary people can make their work situation better, and that’s through organizing themselves as a class. How do they do that? They find what they have in common, which is their economic situation, they find what separates them from the other side, which is that the other side is exploiting them, and they try to create organizations and institutions that will better enable them to fight against their employers. That process of creating the organizations, of using them to fight, of changing the power balance between the rich and the poor is called class struggle.Now, these three ideas are what Marx was fundamentally committed to and what the entirety of the Marxist tradition has tried to explain and develop: that class is the foundation of modern society; class is kept in place through the process of exploitation; and that in order to overcome it and build a better society, or even build a better capitalism, you’ve got to organize people as a class — not as a race, not as genders, but as a class, because race and gender are not the same thing as class.Melissa NaschekSo what you’re saying is that you can’t really be a Marxist unless you’re centering social class.Vivek ChibberThat’s right. And here’s the irony and profound tragedy of today’s left. The identifying feature of Marxism, the centrality of class, is what the current left views as a crime or a sign of stupidity. Unless you abide by the centrality of class, you can’t be a Marxist. Indeed, in my view, you can’t even be a socialist. It is something of a disgrace that this has to be debated.Now, Marx built upon this a certain political economy or an economic theory, which is called his labor theory of value, in which he tried to show how it is that capitalists pump labor out of workers; how it is that wages are determined; how it is that prices in capitalism are determined; and how capitalists as a class share in the surplus that they extract from labor, and thus have a collective interest, a common interest, in getting that labor out of workers. That’s what his economic theory tried to do.There have been many debates in Marxism about the defensibility of the labor theory of value. People with impeccable Marxist credentials have thought that the narrow version of that theory is not sustainable. Now, you might ask, “Okay, so can you be a Marxist if you think the labor theory of value is mistaken?”My view is that what you need to have a distinctively Marxist view of the world is the view that class is fundamental, that exploitation is what class centers around, and the way out of it is through class struggle. You can maintain that view even if you don’t abide by the labor theory of value. This is just an example.In my view, value theory should not be one of the defining, deciding features or criteria for whether or not somebody is a Marxist. You can reasonably accept it or reject it while abiding by the underlying sociology that Marx tried to develop and Marxists have all tried to develop. If you look at the history of Marxism, you’ll find lots of disagreement — on value theory, on dialectics, on the theory of history. But all of the people who are having these debates agree that class is central, that class struggle is central, and that exploitation is what defines class.This inductively shows you that people who regard themselves — and who were regarded by the world — as Marxists had class theory as their common core and could legitimately disagree on other things.To my mind, this is what enables me to call myself a Marxist, even though I think, for example, the value theory might very well be mistaken; even though I have publicly criticized orthodox historical materialism as probably unsustainable (I do think a weaker version of it is sustainable, but the orthodox one is not). I also have a pretty dim view of what’s called dialectics. It’s not that it’s wrong, but it’s pretty trivial. That being the case, I think it’s perfectly consistent to have those views and still be a Marxist. People are free to disagree with that, but you’ll have a hard time if you settle on any one of these other phenomena as being central to Marxism. What you’ll find is people who you love as Marxists fail to make the grade.Rosa Luxemburg, who was an impeccable revolutionary, abided by a theory called underconsumptionism, which held the view that capitalism suffers from chronic lack of effective demand. She was roundly criticized by Nikolai Bukharin and other Marxists on this issue, because they insisted that Marx roundly rejected underconsumptionism. Okay, which of those is then the acceptable Marxist? Would you want to excommunicate one of them?Paul Sweezy is the greatest American Marxist of the twentieth century. He held the view that capitalism entered a stage of what’s called monopoly capital. Now, if you hold to the view that competition is over and firms can monopolize sectors and effectively deter entrants, you also hold to the view that capital cannot move in and out of sectors pursuing the highest rate of profit. This means, technically speaking, that the law of value has ceased to hold. If you think the law of value is central to the labor theory of value, then you’re saying someone like Sweezy or Hilferding or Vladimir Lenin is no longer a Marxist. Would you want to say that? It just makes no sense.So I think having very narrow understandings of this goes against both the history of what Marxism has been and the spirit of it. I prefer to take a more capacious view of it, but I think holding to the centrality of class still gives Marxism a recognizable foundation that makes it distinctive from other theories and which gives it, I think, the possibility of being also falsifiable. And that’s what you want a theory to be.Melissa NaschekHow did those important twentieth century Marxists start to build upon and in ways change the original ideas that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed in the 1800s?Vivek ChibberI think all of them took to heart this idea that we have to understand that the fundamental problem for social justice is capitalism, and therefore we have to understand how that economic system works. And because Marx’s works did not leave answers to everything, they had to try to take his framework and develop it, move it into vistas which were new to the theory, and they used their ability the best they could. And they did it at a time when there was a lot of debate and discussion around these things.They also had the confidence to say that aspects of Marx’s theory might actually be mistaken. Rosa Luxemburg said quite clearly that Marx was mistaken in how he developed the schemes of reproduction in volume II of Capital, and that she was going to try to correct him. There are lots of Marxists today who would faint at the idea. It’s a strange tradition in Marxism. The word “revisionist” is used as a swear word. It’s a fundamentally religious view that if you revise a theory, you’re to be excommunicated. It means that you are dead set against the idea that it’s a social science. The idea that you can’t revise a science means you turn it into a religion.When you look at the real advancements or revisions within Marxism in the twentieth century, most of the really productive ones came at a time when the labor movement was very, very active, when there was a deep and lively culture within the Left, and that gave people a certain confidence that we know that the foundations of the theory are correct, but we’re also free, therefore, to think about how to make it stronger because there are also weak areas of the theory, and we should not be afraid to criticize those weak areas.Melissa NaschekCan you give an example of one of the debates you’re talking about?Vivek ChibberYeah. The debate around Rosa Luxemburg’s understanding of imperialism or Hilferding’s understanding of imperialism — that debate was over whether or not capitalism can sustain itself on its own internal dynamics or whether it needs external sources of demand and external sources of stimulus. Someone like Luxemburg says it cannot, and she’s criticized by people who say she’s dead wrong. But they don’t criticize her by saying, “You’re going against the word of Marx, and therefore, you must be excommunicated.” There was a very healthy debate in the early 1900s on what the schemes of reproduction in volume II of Capital actually prove or do not prove.Similarly, the debate on monopoly capital: when the New Left and that generation of economists came up in the late 1960s and early ’70s, they very effectively criticized the theory that was at the time the reigning theory in Marxist economics, handed down from Lenin. Monopoly capital theory said that competitive capitalism came to an end in the early twentieth century. And competitive capitalism had morphed into monopoly capital, which is a system in which — and here it gets fuzzy — either they said that the era of competition is over and large conglomerates now control the markets, in which case competition is largely over, or they had this — in my opinion — nonsensical argument that you have something called “monopolistic competition.” I think this is essentially an oxymoron, a bit of special pleading.This theory of monopoly capitalism, which used to be the reigning and hegemonic theory, was very roundly criticized by an emerging generation of Marxist economists, so that, by the 1980s, it really was a very minority theory.Is one of these sides not Marxist? Is one side Marxist and the other not? Nobody said Paul Sweezy was not a Marxist. They didn’t call him a revisionist. They said the analysis was mistaken, and Sweezy said the same thing about them. I think that’s perfectly valid. I think you have a good debate here. Both sides agreed capitalism is the problem, that the class structure generates whatever it is that we’re analyzing, and that in order to get to a better society, you need to change the class structure. But they disagreed about the macro-dynamics of that structure, what drives it, what kind of constraints capital and labor are facing today. That’s just a healthy scientific debate.Melissa NaschekSo we’re laughing at the idea that some treat Marxism like a religion, but why do you think it’s important that Marxism is a living, breathing, evolving thing?Vivek ChibberWell, the second it ceases to actually criticize itself, it dies, because reality is changing enough that simply repeating a theory from 150 years ago through rote memorization is not going to enable you to understand the forms or the particularities of capitalism today. Because even though it’s still capitalism, it is different from the nineteenth century’s capitalism. And so you need to be able to derive the consequences of the theory from a reality that is at least on the surface different from the reality of the nineteenth century. The essence of it is still the same.But then one has to actually show empirically that even though the phenomenal forms may look different from the nineteenth century, the underlying causal structures of the world are still the same, which are the profit motive, the competitive threat, the drive to produce for capital to go from sector to sector looking for the highest rate of return; how that then constrains the firms; how the constraints on the firms then constrain workers; and how the constraints on the workers then create the conditions in which they have to try to organize themselves. That’s what the theory tries to do.If you cannot develop the theory into these new empirical domains and phenomena, you’re left with essentially a religion, a doctrine, which will be cool in certain subcultures of American students and academia and all that, but will have absolutely zero relevance to actually trying to engage the world as people find it.Melissa NaschekHow would you define modern Marxism?Vivek ChibberThat’s a good question. It’s not easy to answer, because the fact is that with the decline of the labor movement and the degeneration of academic and intellectual culture, Marxism is, if not dead, on life support today.In the last fifteen to twenty years, there just has not been a lot of work within Marxism. But if I were to lay out what has remained of that Marxist tradition, I think it’s actually, ironically — even though it’s harder to find Marxists right now in academia, in the intellectual world — the theory is a lot stronger than it was a hundred years ago.Melissa NaschekHow so?Vivek ChibberThe underlying economic logic of the theory has been explicated far, far more clearly than was the case in Lenin, Luxemburg, and Hilferding’s time. And I think the same can be said for the normative foundations of the theory, that is, its moral commitments, its view of justice and injustice. What kind of vision it has of a more humane society is infinitely clearer today than it was even in the 1950s.A lot of earlier Marxists took to heart Marx’s own reluctance to develop a moral theory. Marx had this contradiction that while he denied that he was developing moral foundations, his arguments were profoundly moral. And for the first two generations after him, people in Lenin’s and Karl Kautsky’s generation parroted the same view. And it took the New Left to identify this as a contradiction.After the horrible experiences of Stalinism and Pol Pot, it was perceived by people that we need to have a very clear understanding of what the moral lines are that we refuse to cross and what the moral foundation is on which we criticize capitalism.So if we say that capitalists exploit labor, notice the word exploit. It’s a profoundly morally charged word. Marx didn’t simply say capitalists employ labor. He said they exploit labor. There’s no way to have a morally neutral rendering of the word exploit.Melissa NaschekEven outside of Marxist circles, exploit is not a positive word.Vivek ChibberRight. To exploit someone means to take advantage of them or to in some way treat them unfairly. If we’re using that word, we have to be clear about what makes the employment relation exploitative. So until the 1960s and ’70s, this was just not developed by Marxist philosophers, but it was by the New Left. And I think that’s been a very fruitful line of inquiry. I also think we’re much, much clearer on the theory of the state. The book that people used for a long time was Lenin’s State and Revolution, which is frankly a terrible book. It’s very badly argued. It gives no real theory of what the state is and what makes it a bourgeois state.Melissa NaschekCertainly not a coherent one.Vivek ChibberNo. So there are many, many, many aspects of Marxism that I think over the last forty years have been much more soundly developed, explicated, and put on a more secure foundation than they were before. That was the last time that a generation of really talented intellectuals came to Marxism. That ceased to be the case in your lifetime and in most of my lifetime as well.So we’re in this strange situation where I think the theory is actually on much more secure footing than it was, say, in 1960. But the way in which universities, political parties, and trade unions have developed in the past forty years has thinned out the intelligentsia on the Left. There is a left intelligentsia, but very little of it is Marxist. And most of the left intelligentsia actually calumniates the Marxist tradition and actively undermines the foundations of what the socialist movement has been about for 120 years, which is class politics.Melissa NaschekI think it’s pretty self-explanatory why liberals and conservatives are highly critical of Marxism. If you’re not sure why, you can see any of our previous forty-nine episodes, and that will start to give you a sense. But why is it that leftists are participating in denigrating Marxism?Vivek ChibberIt’s because they perceive correctly that at the core of Marxism is class politics and the centrality of class. And today’s left is single-mindedly dedicated to undermining class politics and to substituting for it various kinds of identity politics. And to my mind, for that reason, it doesn’t deserve to be called a left. It is the left wing of neoliberalism. It is not a left. You cannot be a leftist or a radical if you don’t put capitalism at the center of your politics. And that means putting class at the center of your politics. That has been true from the birth of the modern left. They put class at the center of their politics. It is the historical contribution of this left that it is the first one to not only question it but to violently reject it. And it’ll go down in history as a laughingstock for that reason.Melissa NaschekWell I hope one day I can laugh about it. There are a lot of different criticisms that leftists in particular levy at Marxism. One of them that I wanted to bring up is this criticism that Marxism is deterministic. So I want to ask you, is Marxism deterministic? And if it is, is that a bad thing?Vivek ChibberOf course it’s deterministic. And not only is that okay, it’s actually essential to any viable social theory, because social theories are essentially about causation. That’s what social theories do. You try to understand what brings about something else. And then you try to make a generalization about it, that in certain circumstances, when you have A, you will also have B. That’s what theories do.Marxism says that as long as you have capitalist class structures, you’re going to have certain kinds of social outcomes. Those social outcomes are exploitation, all kinds of injustices, all kinds of unfair outcomes. That is a deterministic statement. Now, that’s what I call a macro-level determinism. But a society that is capitalist is going to have certain kinds of institutions and certain kinds of social outcomes. That also means that it’s true at a micro level.If you’re working in a factory, if you’re working in a restaurant, Marxists say the employment relation is going to generate certain kinds of behaviors even at that place, not just society as a whole. And that’s why if you’re trying to organize people in an Amazon warehouse, if you’re trying to organize people in transportation at UPS, that’s one firm or one warehouse. Those are places where the same kinds of class interests and class processes are going to be found, which you theorize at a macro level.Melissa NaschekThat gets back to the beginning of our conversation, where we talked about this idea of actors being compelled by social relations.Vivek ChibberNow, it is a fact that as you go from macro to micro, it becomes less deterministic. Because once you get down to the level of the individual, people can be willing to undertake all sorts of sacrifices, go against their class interests, go against the compulsions. But we also know that those people are unusual. And that’s why as you aggregate across individuals, the predictive success of the theory increases.But that is not to say that it has no predictive purchase at the micro level either. If that were the case, you’d be in this weird situation of saying, “The macro laws of capitalism are deterministic, but look, man, if you’re trying to organize your shop or union, that’s not going to work because that’s micro level.” That really doesn’t make any sense. It does make sense to say that it’s less deterministic at the micro level, but it’s still highly probabilistic.Coming out of identity politics, people love to talk about contingency. But if the world is ruled by contingency, then why do you object to racism? Why do you object to patriarchy? If you’re saying that patriarchal social relations generate injustice of their own kind, what you’ve rejected is a Marxist determinism, but you’ve accepted another one in its place. So it’s a kind of a rhetorical ploy that’s been developed out of this so-called radical intelligentsia.The truth is anybody who has an actual identifiable social program, anybody who has a social theory of justice and injustice that links injustices to social institutions and social structures, they are abiding by some degree of causal determinism, or at the very least a highly probabilistic theory that’s no more and no less deterministic than class theory. What they’re doing when they object to Marxism isn’t really objecting to determinism. They’re just objecting to class being the explanatory thing. And as I said, this is the calling card of the contemporary left.Melissa NaschekWhich is also a really disingenuous way to attack another idea. Why not just say, “Well, I object to the idea that class is what’s the fundamental determinant?” Why not say, “I actually believe this other thing?”Vivek ChibberYeah. It’s part of the general confusion that’s set in in the last thirty years in social theory.Look, if capitalism doesn’t have any deterministic properties, why are you anti-capitalist? Why do you oppose capitalism if you don’t think capitalism is causally responsible for the injustices that you’re trying to overturn?You cannot call yourself anti-capitalist unless you think it has very strong identifiable and highly probabilistic causal properties. That’s the same if you’re a feminist, if you’re anti-racist, the same thing goes. You cannot be a “social justice warrior” and be a promoter of contingency.Melissa NaschekYou said Marxism is on life support. And yet we were talking about how in the twentieth century it was flourishing and developing and growing. What happened in between?Vivek ChibberWell, it wasn’t flourishing throughout the twentieth century. There are really two periods in which you see Marxist theory actually developing in a serious way. One was a couple of decades after, say, the first Russian revolution of 1905, from 1905 to, say, the early 1930s, after which it goes into actual decline. And then it revives in the mid- to late 1960s into the middle of the ’80s or so, and then it goes into slow decline. And then by 2015, it’s in free fall. Why? If you just think about it for a second, it’s pretty obvious.Marxism is a social theory, and it requires serious study, serious thought, serious analysis. So it’s a body of ideas that tends to be housed among either professional academics, or we might say intellectuals at one remove from everyday organizing. So even people like Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Luxemburg, they’re very deep in politics at their time, but most of their actual time is spent reading, writing, and in meetings — not on the shop floor, not doing the organizing.There was a conveyor belt that links them to the organizers, and they’re imbued with that culture, but they’re not themselves shop-floor organizers. Then there’s people at that time, like György Lukács or Karl Korsch, who are mostly just intellectuals. All of these people have one thing in common: they spend a lot of their time reading, thinking, studying, debating. Some of them are in universities, others are not in universities, but they’re also institutionally separate from everyday activism.In the 1960s too, you had people who were either in communist parties, or in research institutions around trade unions, or for the first time ever in universities. The ’60s and ’70s is the first time Marxism was actually anchored in universities to any great extent. In both of these periods it is developed by people who you might call professional intellectuals of some kind. That means it’s a certain class environment. These are people of middle-class backgrounds in a middle-class environment, which means that they are actually stepping out of their class culture when they’re being Marxists.What’s making them step out of that class culture? It is an explosive growth of the labor movement. In both of these periods, in the early twentieth century, and in the 1960s and ’70s, the one thing that both have in common is major social upheavals: labor movements, anti-colonial movements, the anti-racist movement, which is mostly located in the working class, the black and brown working class. And then this was the last time you had any kind of explosion of labor activism inside the advanced capitalist world.What that did is that it pulled middle-class intellectuals and academics out of their normal class environment, and it kind of civilized them. It imbued them with a kind of humanity, which academics don’t normally have. Academics are basically just glorified clerks. They’re basically paper pushers who go about publishing meaningless articles, stuff that nobody’s ever going to read, for promotion and upward mobility, without any real thought as to how it connects to the world around them.Melissa NaschekThat strikes me in particular as something that’s always drawn me to Marxism. That quote, the point of theory is not to explain the world but to change it. That it’s a theory that’s not just meant to put forward ideas in the abstract but to actually provide organizers with information that they can use. This may sound self-explanatory, but actually the majority of theory does not concern itself with this.Vivek ChibberNo, and there’s no particular reward in academia for doing socially relevant work. So most academics and journalists are in this middle-class milieu, and their fundamental motivation is upward advancement, just like it is for somebody in an insurance company or real estate agency or something like that.What these two periods had in common, though, was that because they were periods of social upheaval, a lot of middle-class people were drawn outside their normal class culture toward the world, and were then — if they were lucky enough to be in political organizations or around political organizations like communist parties, trade unions, and socialist parties — also disciplined by the culture of those institutions to try to make their ideas relevant to the world. And that gave them the motivation to really interrogate those ideas, to really think hard about them. And there’s enough of them around each other that they could push each other, they could hold each other accountable. And finally, because there were so many Marxist thinkers, it became kind of mainstream.Most intellectuals and academics today stay away from Marxism for two reasons. One is that it doesn’t really help their careers, and the other is it’s embarrassing. You feel like you’re the freak, and unless you have real self-confidence, unless you have a community around you, or unless you are in an organization or something like that, it’s hard to be the freak in the room. So you slowly get assimilated, and it pays because there’s better academic career advancement if you’re not a Marxist.So those were the two periods in which you saw enormous flourishing of Marxist theory for all of these reasons. When the labor movements ebb, when the political institutions and trade unions and parties are dismantled, the academics are absorbed back into their world of upward advancement and general contempt toward working people, which is what most middle-class people have, right? So in the 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s, this is what you see. And then by the 1990s onward, the same thing again.By the 1990s, academic and intellectual institutions were different from what they were in the 1950s, in that they were no longer totally dominated by white men. Now you also have women, and now you also have people of color in these institutions, and they now start finding that they are not given all the goodies that the white men were getting, and they start developing a social theory and social analyses fundamentally geared toward their experience of discrimination, of glass ceilings, etc. And that then became the new radicalism.The new radicalism was one where the greatest sin is not exploitation. It’s not the way in which the poor are ground into dust. The greatest sin became discrimination, or cultural appropriation, or of not being treated with the same kind of respect that somebody else is in these middle-class settings. And anybody who tries to bring class into this environment, into this analysis, tries to redirect attention toward the people who can’t make basic ends meet and don’t have social insurance or basic employment. That is a threat to this version of radicalism, which is firmly pointed single-mindedly toward the travails of the professional classes whose upward mobility and ambitions are being frustrated. That becomes now the new radicalism.The irony of this turn away from class is not that it promoted race or gender above class. It’s that it identified race and gender with a certain class constituency within those communities. So it’s not that, for example, anti-racism should be denigrated in favor of class politics. It’s that identity politics turned race politics into the worldview of wealthy black and brown people, of the professional classes and the business classes within the black community, within Latino and Asian communities.Melissa NaschekAnd their specific class interests.Vivek ChibberMarxism was always anti-racist. Always. Marxism always fought against patriarchal gender relations. But it conceptualized and approached them in a way that foregrounded and promoted the interests of working-class people of color and working-class women. That means that it was a class perspective on social identities.What identity politics did was narrow down race and gender and sexuality to the way it was experienced by these upwardly mobile professionals in academia and the professional classes. And so it isn’t that it substituted race for class. It’s that it brought in a version of race that only elites are interested in. It brought in a version of gender politics that only professional women and wealthy women are interested in. And that means that in order to actually more effectively fight race and gender oppression, you have to take it up in a way that working class people experience them. And their discrimination is only one small component of what they experience.For oppressed populations, the fundamental struggle, whether you’re a woman or a person of color or some other group, is still going to be housing, health care, jobs, childcare, things like that, which, for the professional classes, have just never been issues because they have all of those things. And so they focus single-mindedly on impediments to more upward mobility rather than the ways in which your class situation actually makes your gender and race situation worse than it is for the upwardly mobile.That was not true in the 1950s and ’60s, because it couldn’t be, because they were so uniformly shut out of these social institutions. And this is why now radicalism is not only largely useless to working people, but working people despise the radicals, because the radicals spend most of their time heaping scorn on the unwashed masses and want to keep attention directly fixed on the travails of what we call the professional-mangerial class. This is the essence of identity politics.What makes it new today is that it has captured the space of radical analysis that socialists and Marxists used to inhabit. As long as this form of radicalism is what we see on the Left, the Left will continue to be marginal, useless, and largely despised.