Here is a challenge for those who like solving mysteries—the case of the disappearing Marxists. You will have heard that Eric Foner is not a Marxist, and no academic historians admit to being Marxists. Neo-Marxists are not real Marxists, and cultural Marxism does not exist. Indeed, we are to believe, there are no Marxists in America today.
The Marxists have come a long way from a time when, not having any power, they mounted the barricades and insisted that everyone must recognize that they exist. Now that they run most institutions, they all deny being Marxists.
American universities were historically regarded as hostile to Marxism, largely due to a widespread cultural preference for individual liberty and private property. Americans seemed to be singularly uninterested in transforming their country into a communist utopia, with relatively few Marxists in American colleges.
This absence struck a German socialist, Werner Sombart, a colleague of Max Weber. Sombart, who never traveled to the States, wrote in 1906 the classic book on the subject, Why is There No Socialism in the United States?
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He believed the American worker “emotionally” had a “share in capitalism.” In fact, “he loves it.” Moreover, the ethos of equality and democracy gave respect to the worker, unlike in Europe where he was stigmatized. In America, “he carries his head high, walks with a lissome stride and is open and cheerful in his expression as any member of the middle class.” Finally, the relative prosperity of the American worker doomed Marxism. In a sentence that would be endlessly quoted, Sombart declared: “All Socialist utopias come to nothing on roast beef and apple pie.”
By 1949, Albert Einstein was promoting socialism and the planned economy as the path to peace and economic progress. He criticized capitalism for being individualistic and for its “profit motive.” He wrote:
Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.
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I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child.
An article titled “No Welcome Mat for Marxist Scholars” published by the New York Times in 1976 lamented that American universities were not doing enough to promote Marxism:
In the modern world a university that does not welcome Marxism and Marxists—including those active outside academia—condemns itself in the eyes of all who comprehend learning. Apart from that large portion of the globe now socialist, one finds in universities in France, Italy, England and Canada well‐known Marxists and Communists as respected and leading members.
That this is not yet true in the United States reflects the fact that the United States is the bastion of monopoly capitalism and imperialism. To struggle against this within the university scene is part of the struggle against imperialism in general.
By 1989, the Marxists had arrived. Their apocryphal “Long March” through the institutions was over. They had established themselves as the mainstream. A New York Times article titled “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges” argued that Marxists “on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders.”
The article described Marxist scholars as “establishmentarians,” observing that, “It could be considered a success story for the students of class struggle, who were once regarded as subversives.”
It also noted the rise of “challenges” to Marxism from Neo-Marxist theories such as feminism and anti-colonialism. Radicals were no longer necessarily confined to the ranks of those who explicitly identified as Marxists. “Marx has become relativized. He’s no longer a battle-cry – just a great figure in economics and history, along with a number of other great figures.”
Being a Marxist was now the norm, or the default ideological position. All other radical ideologies were just variations on a Marxist theme. In a 2006 survey, about 18 percent of social scientists identified themselves as Marxists. By 2018, Karl Marx was one of the leading theorists in the academy.
In 2018, mainstream publications including the New York Times, the Economist, and the Financial Times ran gushy homages to the communist philosopher to commemorate the bicentennial of his birth. Marx’s Communist Manifesto consistently ranks as the most frequently assigned book on university course syllabi, with the exception of a few widely used textbooks. Bibliometric evidence of Marx’s prevalence abounds in academic works, where he consistently ranks among the most frequently cited authors in human history.
But today, according to the “scholarly consensus,” we are to believe that no academics are Marxists. They promote recognizably Marxist ideology while denying that they are Marxists.
One of the more curious features of contemporary American intellectual life is not the persistence of Marxist ideas, but the elaborate ritual of pretending they aren’t there.
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I’ve come to think of this reflex as a form of secondary gaslighting. Primary gaslighting is deliberate deception—knowing something is true while insisting it’s madness to believe it. Secondary gaslighting is more banal, and more common: people with little or no education in intellectual history assuring you, with total confidence, that what you’re describing simply doesn’t exist—because they’ve been trained to mock anyone who notices it.
The ability to dismiss one’s opponents with mocking derision is a clear sign of being in power. Those without power have to take their opponents seriously. They must at least try to come up with some arguments to justify their dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy. But if you object to the schemes and wiles of the “establishmentarian” Marxists, they have the luxury of merely laughing off your concerns and declaring that Marxists do not exist.
Samuel Moyn, a Yale law professor, recently asked, “What is ‘cultural Marxism?’” His answer: “Nothing of the kind actually exists.” Moyn attributes the term cultural Marxism to the “runaway alt-right imagination,” claiming that it implicates zany conspiracy theories and has been “percolating for years through global sewers of hatred.”
One of the arguments advanced by the gaslighters is that cultural Marxism and all forms of Neo-Marxism are not “real” Marxism. Karl Marx would certainly not recognize the blue-haired mobs that stampede across the South destroying war memorials as “Marxists.” Similarly, he would be puzzled to be asked what pronouns he “identifies with.”
It is true that the culture-cleansers are not committed to Marxist ideology for its own sake but only deploy Marxist terminology as an intellectual cloak for their destructionism. They are not too bothered about theoretical purity. One could say that in this purist sense, Marxists do not exist.
But this would overlook the gravity of the threat posed by Marxists. They are like the communists who insist that real communism has never been tried.
If one is searching for ideological purity, they might well conclude that Marxists have never existed. By that test even Karl Marx was probably not a Marxist. In “Marxism and the Manipulation of Man,” Ludwig von Mises observed that throughout the rise of Marxism there was not much attempt to reflect Marx’s ideas exactly as Marx had formulated them.
Marx’s philosophical doctrines became popular in that people became familiar with some of his terms, slogans, and so forth, although they used them differently from the way they were used in the system of Karl Marx. Such simplification happens to many doctrines…. Regarding Marx, people know his terms but they use them very loosely. But by and large, Marxian ideas have little or no opposition.
Therefore, whether the cultural Marxists are “real” Marxists or not is beside the point. The more important concern is the threat posed by those who draw upon theories derived from Marxism to justify their destructionism.
