The original intellectual sin of modern academe

Treating Marx as what he is not—a social scientist.

Despite—in some ways because of—all his Theorising about “capitalism”, Marx made no serious attempt to understand the actual dynamics of commerce, creating a (false) theory of economic parasitism (“surplus value”) that—both predictably, and in practice—motivated mass murder. If you convince a group of Homo sapiens that that group over there are economic parasites—and you and your society is better off without them—then you have primed them for mass murder. Hence, Marx’s theory was used to justify actual Marxist mass-murders, starting with Lenin’s infamous hanging order.

Marx’s economistic systematising created a pretence of being social scientist—to himself and even more to Engels—that many people have maintained ever since. Hence a pre-Darwinian metaphysician is even now regularly treated as if he was a social scientist. This despite being wrong about more or less everything—class, commerce, surplus, immiseration, the state, patterns of history, commodification, division of labour, foraging societies …

As I have noted elsewhere:

To have a state, farming niches have to be sustainable after taxes are extracted. That means resources are extracted before they turn into extra babies. This means that states create surplus (income above subsistence): indeed, they dominate the creation and extraction of surplus.

The perennial dominance of the state in extraction of surplus—and hence the creation of class structures—is nowhere more obvious than in Marxist states.

Philosopher Charles Taylor pointed out the tension between the claim to being science—and the causal determinism that goes with that—and the messianic vision that motivates Marx’s and Marxist activism. In any tension between the two, the latter wins because it is so powerfully motivating. This includes with Marx himself, which is why his “science” is so profoundly wrong in fact. It exists to justify the messianic vision.

No political (or religious) movement has killed and tyrannised more people than revolutionary Marxism. A Marxist is someone for whom no amount tyranny and mass murder will stop them worshipping the splendour in their head. This testifies to the power of the messianic vision.

Marx was the original launderer of ideas. Over decades of wrestling with the economics of Smith and Ricardo, he laundered—via economic reasoning—the metaphysical conclusions he reached in the 1840s to create a system that would “scientifically” generate and justify those conclusions. That those conclusions went mostly unpublished in his lifetime—with the most dramatic exception being The Communist Manifesto (1848)—does not belie this. Marx himself insisted on the centrality of this period of “self-clarification”.

Nothing he published later significantly contradicted those conclusions. Marx is the archetypal activist scholar, whose activism drives, and so degrades, his scholarship and analysis. He is the key formulator of the Dialectical Faith, that has generated various disastrous spin-offs, from his own economism to Lenin’s Jacobinising of Marxism to the Cultural Marxism of Lukacs and Gramsci, Critical Theory, and all forms of Critical Social Justice.

No form or derivative of the Dialectical Faith have ever generated a net positive contribution to human flourishing, or understanding, compared to available alternatives.

Ibn Khaldun was a far more acute analyst of the role of the state in the economy, and patterns within history, than Marx. Ibn Khaldun sought systematically to understand what he observed, participated in and read about. He was not laundering ideas, not justifying pre-set conclusions, nor judging evidence by his Theory.

Ibn Khaldun was a social scientist (arguably the first). Marx was not, he was pretending to be one (including to himself).

The Dialectical Faith holds that history is driven by dialectical process that transforms society from an oppressive past to a future liberated from constraints, if the oppressive elements of society are suppressed or abolished. As Marx tells us, our productive capacity will be so great, that we will so humanise the world, that division of labour will end for:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Marx was not engaged in scientific enquiry but pseudo-scientific, or scientistic—the form of science without the substance—justification of already reached conclusions. He regularly judges and chooses evidence based on Theory, a pattern that has become endemic within all forms of Marxism and its spinoffs (such as Critical Theory). Marx exemplifies the activist principle that “what I can imagine—however self-contradictory—is so much better than what others have struggled to achieve”.

Marx’s picture of the evils of division of labour is metaphysical twaddle flatly contradicted by any serious study of the role of division of labour—and, for that matter, commodification—in production at scale. How can division of labour be such an alienating evil when it is built into sexual reproduction, into every eusocial species, even into the cells of every single complex organism?

The answer is via a ludicrous quasi-theological metaphysical inflation of human consciousness and creativity. Marx collectivises—through his notion of species-being—the Romantic notion of human fulfilment through self-expression.

Academic alienation

The conformist judging of Theory leads to academics who feel entitled to exclude from consideration ideas with wide resonance in the rest of society. This both disconnects academe from the wider society and narrows what is considered within scholarship. For instance, driving out or silencing conservatives greatly undermines consideration of the problems of order.

Just about the last conservative at Harvard has nominated grade inflation as a major corrosive force in the universities and the wider society. A pattern that itself rests on not taking the problems of order—specifically, generating useful information about student’s knowledge and capacity—sufficiently seriously. The expanding pollution of the signals of competence that grade inflation and affirmative action generate is likely to lead to the collapse of complex systems.

In contemporary Western societies, no amount of social dysfunction undermines the Dialectical Faith, as evidenced in the mounting social dysfunctions in “progressive” cities in the US.¹ The most dramatic recent disaster of this evolving tradition of ideas was the—utterly predictable—surges in homicides in various US cities as a consequence of BLM’s anti-police activism. Though the surgical and hormonal mutilation and sterilisation of minors is, if anything, even more shocking. A horror that is built on the vicious blatherings of Queer Theory, with its rejection of all limiting principles and celebration of subjective (self)marginalisation.

Academe is both bloated and full of people with no responsibility for making things in the wider society work. Such folk gain social leverage through seeking to control legitimacy, operating via the coordinated motivation of mutual worship of the splendours in their head. Hence they are demonstrably great developers and promoters of toxic ideas. Popular confidence in higher education is declining, while it is collapsing among conservative voters.

Source.

Hence also, universities—as incubators and disseminators of this toxic nonsense—need either mass purging, or closing. A view that is garnering more and more adherents based on burgeoning contempt for the toxic nonsense Universities increasingly peddle. Toxic nonsense that is grounded in the Dialectical Faith, and its invidious intellectual patterns and habits, that emerges from Marx’s reworking of Hegel.

The principle of families … and cancer

From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs has a dual aspect. Among folk with deep interpersonal connections, it is the principle of a family or an intimately connected group (such as a foraging band). Without those connections, it is the principle of action of the cancer cell.

The only species that can operate on the from-each-to-each principle at scale are eusocial species, such as ants, termites and so on. For they can use pheromones as externally coordinating hormones among individuals serving their shared (queen’s) lineage. It is not mere kin-cooperation, it is queen-daughters-siblings cooperation, where the sterility of the servitor-daughters is required for the thing to work. Hence any daughter that becomes fertile will normally be killed or expelled, with her offspring similarly being starved, killed or expelled. Even eusocial insects need enforcement mechanisms.

With human foraging bands, a mixture of intimate connections and norms operate to act according to the from-each-to-each principle. But that requires both norms of common action and willingness to punish those who fail to conform to the norms. Punishment that can range from shaming and shunning to death.

For us to become such a normative species required not only the ability to act according to norms, but also to enforce the norms. It is only by that combination of deep connections and mechanisms of enforcement that we—as an ultra-social species—can reproduce the from-each-to-each principle of action of eusocial species. Without those deep connections, it becomes a cancerous principle, not a prosocial one.

Marx’s concept of primitive communism presumes we are eusocial in small (tribal) groups, but with the added human capacity for self-conscious creation. Full communism will achieve global eusociality through the elimination of human self-estrangement and completion of our species being.

This is biological and anthropological nonsense. We have been, are, and will remain, an ultra-social species precisely because we are a self-conscious normative species capable of non-kin cooperation at scale. What Marx produces is not science. It is what a pre-Darwinian metaphysician produces.

When biologist E.O.Wilson’s said of the from-each-to-each principle “good ideology, wrong species,” he was presuming that social science had to be consilient with biology and that biology was constraining as well as enabling. This is precisely what is denied by the Dialectical Faith. Its superior understanding trumps biology.

The constraints of biology

Marx says that the economic system creates man who creates the economic system, with that capacity expanding and changing society, and so man, in a dialectical process. Hence the imperative to seize the means of production of people, so we can transform their production, and thus them, eliminating or by-passing the constraints of biology.

The human capacity for self-creation is so vast everything becomes socially constructed. This has become sex is “assigned at birth”. Such anti-biological social constructivism is a direct development from the thought of a pre-Darwinian metaphysician posing as a social scientist.

Marx’s (Hermetic) notion of humans as collectively self-creating is a ludicrous quasi-theological metaphysical inflation that leads all those who take their cues from him to—again and again—be disastrously wrong about what is required for human flourishing, through not taking the problems and constraints of order seriously. Yes, we are enabled by our biology but we are also constrained by it and we did not create that biology.

Yes, we are a product of culture-gene co-evolution, but that is, in the words of behavioural scientist Herbert Gintis, a special case of niche construction, not some profoundly metaphysically distinctive thing.

The metaphysics of tyranny and mass murder

Marx’s quasi-theological metaphysical inflation leads directly to (secular) gnosticism that profoundly delegitimises all that is not part of the Dialectical Faith. For what has been created by human action becomes a structure of malign powers blocking full human flourishing. Conversely, correctly enabled awareness of our self-creation would, via unity of Theory and practice, achieve proper human flourishing. Such salvific expectation is generated from the quasi-theological inflation of humans into collectively self-creating beings.

Of course tyrannising mass murder comes from such ideas. They are, quite directly, a to-be-expected consequence of them: of the demand for the power to so transform society and delegitimisation as servants of oppression of those who disagree or otherwise resist, coupled with a ready contempt for the efforts—particularly the past efforts—of others. The Dialectical Faith is a jealous Faith and will have no other Gods except it.

Max Horkheimer, the founder of Critical Theory, was very clear that the pursuit of liberatory justice requires the crushing of freedom:

Marx did not see that freedom and justice are dialectical concepts. The more freedom, the less justice and the more justice, the less freedom.

But Marx cannot be excused from this. Despite all Marx’s comments on the way the “bourgeois” have expanded human productive capacity, his writings show a profound contempt for the value and lessons of heritage inherent in seeing the past (and present) in terms of Conflict Theory and making an imagined future as the moral benchmark for judgement. Every regime that attempts to put Marx’s ideas into practice has come to Horkheimer’s conclusion and operated on its basis.

Moreover, in The State and Marxism, written in 1867, Mikhail Bakunin correctly predicted the tyrannical implications of Marx’s ideas:

It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe betide the mass of ignorant ones!

As businessman and social commentator David Sacks puts well, hubris destroys tolerance and there are no greater manifestation of intellectual hubris and profound intellectual intolerance than Marx and all who, directly or indirectly, take their cues from him. The entire tradition is based on a lack of intellectual accountability for its falsities and failures.

There is a persistent pattern of academics privileging Theory—which is their possession—over the inconvenient experience of others. As Arnold Kling notes, once an area of (purported) social science falls into “a tar pit of Marxism” it finds it almost impossible to escape. The appeal of the epistemic and moral authority of Theory is too great.

James Lindsay’s usefully restates Jonathan Rauch’s presentation—in his profoundly prescient book Kindly Inquisitors—of liberal principles as:

No one has special authority.

No one gets the final say.

But that is exactly what Marx claims from his alleged unlocking of “the riddle of history”:

Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

Hence the possessors of the Dialectical (i.e. critical) consciousness have an epistemic and moral authority denied all others. Their knowledge of Theory means their judgement is trumps. We see this attitude becoming entrenched in contemporary urban elites, particularly if they are graduates of elite universities.

Source.

The increasing impatience with the constraints of democracy seen in contemporary Western elites—due to the authority that democracy gives to their moral and intellectual inferiors—gets so much of its Theoretical justifications from the evolving intellectual traditions that Marx is the key progenitor of.

The attack on freedom of thought and speech—based on the inquisitorial principle that error has no rights and they, via mastery of Theory, can determine error—seeks to strip authority from ordinary citizens, the ones who lack the mastery of Theory. This is creating what Avner Greif and Jared Rubin call a legitimacy conflict. Such conflicts, if sufficiently intense, can lead to serious civil strife.² The rise of national populism in its various manifestations—including Trump, Brexit and surging populist Parties in Europe—represent political pushback against such stripping citizens of authority through what writer Wesley Yang accurately characterises as a non-electoral politics of institutional capture.

The Hegelian notion that history has a direction is profoundly antithetical to democracy because the former denies contingency of choice that that latter is based on. Once you embrace the idea that history has a proper direction, then dissent is delegitimised.

The divide between Anywheres—who get their identity from achieved status—and Somewheres —who are rooted in place, in locality—between the Laptop class and the Physical class, is made worse by a refusal to be constrained by the wishes of a general citizenry whose choices and concerns Theory leads the former to despise.

Thus, we see the dean of admissions at UCLA Davis Medical School pursuing affirmative action admission policies despite affirmative action having been twice banned by the votes of Californians and by the recent US Supreme Court decision. But the sense of moral entitlement, based on Theory, is so profound that both democratic decisions and legal judgements can be, and are, ignored in order to pursue what are clearly deeply stupid and destructive policies.   

The fundamental concern over order is that things not collapse, that what has been achieved is not lost: a concern that has haunted human civilisations across history. But if the future is where all the good things happen, then such concern for collapse becomes profoundly misconceived. On the contrary, any present collapse of the benighted heritage of the past will release the golden future. A delusion that only an extraordinarily pampered, arrogant—and cleverly stupid—scholar class could propagate at any scale.

Universities have, for decades now, generated an excess of graduates with little to contribute because they are miseducated in toxic nonsense that evolved from Marxian thought. Graduates who then go on to destructively parasite on the wider social system.

As a friend has observed:

The humanities/liberal arts tendency to cut wrong ideas slack has now infected the sciences, and that is the breach through which Wokery entered.

Treating Marx as a social scientist is the modern ur-example of such. The notion of a “superior” understanding that enables one to judge all others we see in Marx has gone from infecting the Humanities and Social Sciences to infecting Science and Medicine, with a spreading abandonment of the norms of science.

For not only is evidence judged by Theory, so are people. Such arrogance of Theory is now undermining the Scientific enterprise itself, particularly via the genderwoo of “Trans rights”.

We are seeing a new Lysenkoism in Medicine and Biology, just as there has been a new Zhdanovism in the cultural sphere. Genderwoo aka “Trans rights” is being used to undermine and replace parental authority.

Jews and Asian immigrants are targeted for being successful. As market-successful minorities they are the new Kulaks—those whose success Theory reads as presumptively exploitive/oppressive. As the previously quoted friend has noted:

Any model that says differences in outcomes between groups is due solely to discrimination or oppression is going to finish up persecuting market-dominant/model minorities. This happens because Jewish/Kulak/Hakka/Armenian success/good outcomes breaks the oppressor/oppressed model.

DEI produces diversity officer commissars and inquisitors who operate on the principle that error has no rights, and they can judge error, for they can judge all. The Theory that enables all-encompassing, and absolutely authoritative, judging of others naturally generates the inquisitor-commissar. These extend to bias response teams in universities; sensitivity readers and intimacy consultants in publishing and film and TV production; and disinformation units in newsrooms.³

These ideas have consequences. They have recurring and predictable consequences.

None of this is science in any sense, social or otherwise. Yet it is corroding science.

Just as Physics has to be consilient with Mathematics (the science of structure), Chemistry with Physics and Biology with Chemistry, any so-called social science that is not consilient with evolutionary biology is false, and is false at least to the extent that it is not consilient. This particularly applies to any analysis that treats people as interchangeable widgets and/or as blank slates.

Treating Marx as what he is not—a social scientist—is a falsity that is having increasingly grim consequences. This original sin against taking evidentiary standards and humilities of scholarship seriously has polluted and corroded the Social Sciences and Humanities, is moving onto to Science and Medicine and out into institutions.

References

Roelof van den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times, State University of New York Press, 1997.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.

Herbert Gintis, ‘Gene-culture coevolution and the nature of human sociality,’ Philosophical Transactions Royal Society B, (2011) 366, 878–888.

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353.

David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, Penguin, 2017.

Avner Greif, & Jared Rubin, ‘Endogenous political legitimacy: The Tudor roots of England’s constitutional governance,’ (2023) ESI Working Paper 23-01.

Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Cornell University Press, 2001.

Stephanie Muravchik, Jon A. Shields, Trump’s Democrats, Brookings Institution Press, 2020.

Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, University of Chicago Press, [1993] 1994.

Harold Robertson, ‘Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis,’ Palladium: Governance Futurism, June 1, 2023. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

1. In part because causing increasing social dysfunction is precisely the strategy, on the grounds that undermining the current “oppressive” society will enable the utopian future to emerge.

2. Greif and Rubin characterise the English Civil Wars and Glorious Revolution as legitimacy conflicts.

3. In the words of former NYT journalist Sally Bowles, in the eyes of the “intensely political” disinformation people in newsrooms, almost 100% of time, what disinformation is basically is anything a Republican says. … So many of the censors within American newsrooms are not the best reporters, they're not the best writers. It's almost universally that they aren't the best writers, and aren't the best reporters. The best reporters at the Times don't like this movement, and they're still there working hard and doing great stuff there. They don't like these sort of little Slack censors running around telling them that talking to Trump anytime is a lie, and that you should only write 'Trump bad.' is basically what they would prefer.