Prophecy and political action
Authenticity games on the path to social disaster.
So, the second essay in my Worshipping the Future series has been posted on Helen Dale’s Substack. While the essays will focus on social dynamics and social strategies, ideas also matter. Both as sources of motivation and framings for action.
As sources of motivation and framings for action, how accurate they are in their claims about reality and about us humans has consequences. Potentially dire ones. As is certainly true of Marxism.
Which is why the first few essays are centred on Marxism. For Marxism is so much the original template for the secular politics of the transformational future.
Marxism is also the template for a great deal of bad social science and for the expanding propensity for academe to embrace and propagate pseudo-knowledge. To make and propagate false claims about reality that are congenial or convenient for other reasons.
One of the themes being explored in the essay series is how social science has been going wrong, to a truly remarkable degree. To explore that, one needs to do social science better. To provide more robustly accurate analyses of human social dynamics.
Hence, the first few essays not only discuss how Marx gets so much about humans, and human social dynamics wrong, it does so through exploring how the relevant social dynamics actually work. Much of what passes as “wokery” is based on false claims about social dynamics. Moreover, to understand how it has so readily propagated through various institutions and organisations, we have to explore social dynamics.
Part of the value of serialising the essays online in this way is a chance to get feedback, to sharpen the analysis. This thread raised a very good point about “authentically Marxist”.
Rooster Luggage makes the excellent point that a Marxist can seek to defend that the various ghastly Marxist regimes are “not authentically Marxist” claim by stating that Marx’s preconditions for the “true” proletarian revolution have not been met.
In other words, claim that the prophecy has to play out fully. Rooster Luggage then rescues my critique by recasting it as: Marx’s analytical system is false, so the prophecy will never come true, so political Marxism is the only form of Marxism that does or can exist.
Quite so. Marx’s analytical system IS false, as the essays will explore in some detail. More specifically, it is that falsity that leads all attempts to actively implement his ideas to be such serial disasters for human flourishing.
For it is very much worth exploring how inherently disastrous Marx’s ideas are. Both because they influenced (and continue to influence) much academic thought and because they have been such a powerful and influential template for the politics of the transformational future, even as those politics have embraced new ideas and claims. (Many of which would have appalled Marx: hence various Marxists have been noted critics of that evolution.)
There is, moreover, a deep ambivalence in Marx’s own thought. For yes, he was a secular prophet, presenting an analytical vision of how history would play out. But he was also an activist (albeit not a very successful one). He agitated, he founded and joined political organisations, he was embedded in a political movement.
No human action was outside history. So none was outside his system. His analysis of history was an analysis of the dynamics of human action. So, he acted and urged others to do so. Which of course, so many did. With the consequences we can see.
I hope you enjoy my second essay in the series.
Another way of describing what you say is that Marxism is unnatural. It's wrong because it's unnatural -- i.e. humans don't behave the way Marxism supposes they do, nor can they be moulded to behave in such a way either.
Our current system in the West, whatever you might want to call it, feels very much like an outgrowth of the kind of systems of exchange that people do naturally with ad hoc policies to prevent the worst of our tendencies.
Marxism, though, blocks this natural tendency to exchange. As such, however Marxism ends up being implemented, it won't be the ideal envisaged in believers' heads. People naturally will kick against the prescribed ideal behaviour.
And, of course, Marxism repeatedly denies the existence of human nature. Its purpose it to mould the ideal humans, never to work with the humans we are.