Chapter 2: Marxism | The Sophistructure [0th Edition]

by Steven Gussman

            ⁰When Karl Marx composed his ideas on economics, he claimed they were descriptive as opposed to just normative.¹ However, the man's legacy is not as a scientist, so much as an engineer; no science and plenty of failed social engineering have been the fruits of his labor.² Karl Marx's bloated hypothesis was at least two-fold, sociological and economic: 1. that any society of homo sapiens would follow a natural state machine from oppressive capitalism, to intermediate socialistic overthrow, and ultimately into a shared communist utopia with no individual property or labor ownership³ wherein everyone shared the means of production rather than competing for (and creating) wealth through free-market innovation;⁴ and 2. that the entire culture of a nation are but a means for keeping the “powerful” in “power”—this he called the superstructure.⁵ The ill-defined word, “power”, has always been a bugbear for me (it is quite well-defined in physics, but is generally used to mean some kind of influence, sociopolitically). For Marxists, “power” tends to mean economic wealth—all of Marx's ideas were the pitting of the poor proletariat against the rich bourgeoisie (as we will see, later, the academic use of “power” has shifted to axes other than wealth, nowadays).⁶ In fact, Marx spun off an entire allegedly scientific historical program called historical materialism which sees all of history through the myopic lens of class warfare.⁷ Marx did have one claim he would have admitted was normative: economically and morally, he believed that a communist system was better than a socialist system, which was in turn better than a capitalist system—from this descriptive claim about the quality of life under different economic systems, a normative claim effortlessly follows: one should change their nation into a communist nation (this is why he wrote a pamphlet for the everyman, or “proletarian”, in The Communist Manifesto).

            Science works by graduating hypotheses (ideas about how things might work) into theories (actual approximate descriptions of the real world), ultimately by the light of empirical evidence: you measure the natural world and observe whether or not your predictions prove consistent with it.⁸ Marxism has not fared well, descriptively: no nation has ever naturally moved through the state machine of capitalistic to socialistic to communistic without citing Karl Marx. Last I checked, the planets orbit today as they did before Sir Isaac Newton ever climbed those giant's shoulders, and with never a peep of credit to him. Either planets are time-traveling plagiarists, or Newton's physics was of a character very different from Marx's socioeconomics.⁹ Further, when unnaturally implemented, Marxist regimes (such as socialist and communist countries) tend to be terrible places to live where droves of people starve to death, the survivors subsisting on government rations;¹⁰ free-market capitalism has proven to be a better economic basis (on top of which decent countries implement regulations and social policies).¹¹ The second half of Marx's hypothesis, the “superstructure”, is more subtly pernicious and extremely paranoid. It is so sad a view of the world that there is absolutely nothing in it except the craven zero-sum competition for power, right down to our reasons for forming our beliefs.¹² Now, to be fair, it is the case that some hegemonic ideas have persisted not because they are true, but because of the biases of those believing them, because we are not omniscient and only hold the provisional scientific knowledge of our time, and yes, because elites believed it useful for lesser people to believe certain things. But science is different from popular belief: the scientific method is the very tool, the selection pressure for weeding out falsehoods and leaving behind provisional truth. And, at least in the modern capitalist democratic-republic of the United States, K-12 schooling largely focuses on teaching this actual knowledge of the world (or at least this was the case until very recently).¹³ Ironically, some of the worst offenders of erecting superstructures are those who believe in them (perhaps because they believe in them).¹⁴ Among the most egregious examples of taking control of a culture so as to weaken the already-weak are communist nations such as The Soviet Union, which edited history at will to fit their preferred narrative, and which had Gulag camps wherein they “re-educated” common people for the crime of wrong-think. Similarly, communist North Korea isolates its people from outside ideas, regularly imbibing them with falsehoods useful to the state.¹⁵ As it turns out, there are many emotions that we are fortunate enough to experience which drive directly against the superstructure hypothesis: rather than just blind ambition, we all feel love, compassion, empathy, sympathy, and above all else, passion.¹⁶ Some, the scientists, are most passionate about truth itself. Walking through the Science History Museum in Philadelphia, I felt the unfettered passion of a man reach out and grip me, slowed not by centuries of waiting:

            The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their

            pleasures amid smoke and vapor, soot and flame, poisons and poverty; yet among all these evils

            I seem to live so sweetly that may I die if I were to change places with the Persian king.

            – Johann Becher, 1667¹⁷

            A final annoyance about Karl Marx: in spite of the failure of his original ideas as noted above, he is given a kind of conciliatory victory, being cited and given credit for all manner of banal facts that were known before his time; that there exist different economic classes in societies, and that there is conflict between them is surely clear as day in artwork going back long before Marx's time; indeed, status differentials in competitive men is the ancient consequence of natural inherent differences in individual people, exacerbated by female sexual selection for high-status mates.¹⁸ I think cognitive scientist Steven Pinker deserves the last word on the falsity of the “superstructure” when he points out that despite the fact that Marx himself was a “proletarian” nobody, his ideas have gone on to inspire (and kill) millions around the world.¹⁹

Footnotes:

0. The Sophistructure Table Of Contents can be found, here. Many of the ideas here were mentioned in my Twitter thread on May 7^th, 2019: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1125753736419262464?s=20, and on March 25^th, 2019: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1110318282094063621?s=20.

1. Descriptive theories refer to scientific explanations about how nature behaves, normative theories refer to how things should be / how one should behave with regards to reaching a particular goal (behavioral economist Richard Thaler explains this well in Misbehaving: The Making Of Behavioral Economics by Richard Thaler, Norton, 2015, pp. 25-30); Political commentator Ben Shapiro has independently made this same observation about Marxism, contrasting the descriptive with the [sic] prescriptive.: “Ben Shapiro EDUCATES College Professors In An Epic Q And A” by LibertyVoice, 2019, at 00:43, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMBtvr_vyIk. Marx tended to write with his partner, Freiderich Engels—assume I am addressing both when I address Marx.

2. The introduction to my copy of The Communist Manifesto (author unknown) tries to explicitly claim the reverse: “It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and present) and the problems of capitalism, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms,” see The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (translator unknown) (Millennium Publications) (1848 / 2017) (pp. 3). Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes, “Authors in The Soviet Union were enjoined to become 'engineers of human souls.'” and describes Adam Smith as “the explainer of capitalism” whereas Marx is “the architect of communism and socialism”, see The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial Of Human Nature by Steven Pinker (Penguin Books) (2002 / 2016) (pp. 158, 161). For more on Smith and intentional vs. unintentional economic systems, see A Conflict Of Visions: Ideological Origins Of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell (Basic Books) (2007) (pp. 20-21).

3. Marx actually criticizes utopianism, but only after committing it himself, implicitly. He does so in a section entitled “III. Socialist And Communist Literature”, which to my surprise shows the No True Scottsman Fallacy is actually present in Marx's work from the very beginning—he essentially criticizes actual enactments of socialism as “not real socialism” (neo-Marxists are infamous for papering over 21^st century disasters such as The Soviet Union in just this way), see The Communist Manifesto, pp. 3, 26-38 (especially pp. 36). In practice, communism is even more centrally controlled than socialism (to the degree that there exists any distinction); there is no way to overcome the collective action, altruism, and leadership problems associated with making millions of people share “the means of production”—for evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein's claim that communism requires authoritarianism, see “Bret and Heather 38th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Adventures in Sneetch World” by Bret Weinstein (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t85DTC44JE) (47:01-50:13); see also Pinker in footnote xi, below. Marx writes “... the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property,” see The Communist Manifesto (pp. 18).

4. Ironically, Marx's complaints tend to take the same form as Libertarians' praise for free markets—take the following passages: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”; “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization.”; “Modern bourgeoisie society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”; “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”; “In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production.... too much means of subsistence...”; “... entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence.”; and “[members of the petty bourgeois] are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition...”, see The Communist Manifesto (pp. 7-10, 14, 28). The same set of facts looked at through a glass brightly constitute the common arguments in favor of market economics made by conservatives, libertarians, and even classical liberals: 'Free trade among individuals, of labor and property gives rise to an invisible hand which discovers the true prices / values of different products and services, leads to relative abundance (a solution to historic scarcity), and does not lead to completely stable economic classes because innovation can come from new people who will be rewarded as the old guard loses to this new competition, meaning that people can cycle in and out of the upper and lower classes based on merit.' Unregulated markets have issues worth worrying about such as negative externalities (costs that escape the vicinity of the transaction, like air pollution or contributions to climate change, which are borne not by the producers contributing but by everyone in the affected area) but these were certainly not Marx's focus in The Communist Manifesto any more than they're the main focus of today's Marxists. (I am not sure where I first heard political commentator Ben Shapiro make the point about economic mobility, but he does so in the YouTube video “Ben Shapiro on Income Inequality in America” uploaded by user InfoTV, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fdRrSitG5k, 1:05-1:18). See also The Blank Slate (pp. 290-291).

5. Interestingly, this is a rather obviously untrue conspiracy hypothesis, but one that in its modern form is believed by many educated people who would otherwise not touch a “conspiracy theory” with a ten-foot pool, and who would (rightfully, but ironically) scoff at the likes of an Alex Jones. I first explicitly read about these two general facets (and much else!) of Marxism on the “Marxism” Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism) (retrieved February / March 2018) but they are both present throughout The Communist Manifesto.

6. Marx actually does take a stab at defining power—and it is as one-dimensional (and circular) as one might expect (it also seriously calls into question many common instances of the use of the word): “Political power, properly so-called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another,” see The Communist Manifesto (pp. 25).

7. See the “Marxism” Wikipedia entry and The Communist Manifesto (pp. 5). See also The Blank Slate (pp. 341).

8. This is a common philosophy of science fact, but I most recently heard astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson speak about it in the “Cosmic Curiosities, with Paul Mercurio” episode of his StarTalk podcast (2019) (https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/cosmic-curiosities-with-paul-mecurio/id325404506?i=1000447645159) (32:54-34:10).

9. I expressed this view in a tweet on April 16^th, 2019: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1118177353300103168?s=20.

10. Pinker writes, “Historians are currently debating whether the Communists' mass executions, forced marches, slave labor, and man-made famines led to one hundred million deaths or 'only' twenty-five million.”; “Marxism is now almost universally recognized as an experiment that failed, at least in its worldly implementations. The nations that adopted it either collapsed, gave it up, or languish in backward dictatorships... the ambition to remake human nature turned its leaders into totalitarian despots and mass murderers. And the assumption that central planners were morally disinterested and cognitively competent enough to direct an entire economy led to comical inefficiencies with serious consequences.”, see The Blank Slate (pp. 155, 246, 295-296, 471, 473), which further cites “Bullock 1991; Chirot, 1994; Conquest, 2000; Courtois et al., 1999; Glover, 1999”, and “J. Muravchick, 'Socialism's last stand,' Commentary, March 2002, pp. 47-53, quotation from p. 51” (though I am not personally familiar with these works).

11. See The Blank Slate (pp. 302-304). See Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, And Progress by Steven Pinker (Viking) (2018) (pp. 78, 90-91, 247, 364-365, 459-460, 483), which further cites “Chile vs. Venezuela, Botswana vs. Zimbabwe: M. L. Tupy, 'The Power Of Bad Ideas: Why Voters Keep Choosing Failed Statism,' CapX, Jan. 7, 2016”, “Kenny 2011, p. 203; Radelet 2015, p. 38”, “Mao's genocides: Rummel 1994; White 2011”, “Deaths from communism: Courtois et al. 1999; Rummel 1997... see also Pinker 2011, chaps. 4-5”, “2016 Index of Economic Freedom compiled by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation...(OECD 2014)”, “Famines not just caused by food shortages: Devereux 200; Sen 1984, 1999”, and “Deaton 2013” (duplicate citations ommitted) (though I am not familiar with these works).

12. See The Blank Slate (pp. 341).

13. Marx implicates education in the “superstructure”, see The Communist Manifesto (pp. 21-22).

14. This projection from those who serve The Sophistructure will be a theme throughout this book, one which James Lindsay has also noted as The Iron Law Of Woke Projection, see the “advanced search” results of his tweeting examples: https://twitter.com/search?q=(projecting%20OR%20projection)%20(from%3Aconceptualjames)&src=typed_query. As it turns out, he also explicitly notices the tie to Marxism in this two-tweet thread: https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1345095553693134856?s=20; and appears to understand that this projection has something to do with their belief in “superstructures” as just being the way culture works: https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1348692976172752905?s=20.

15. Communist regimes are however by no means the only places this occurs, see fascist Nazi Germany. Communism (fascism being another) happens to be one kind of extremist ideology which demands the kind of totalitarian control which inevitably features revisionist history and other forms of pseudo-science—for B. Weinstein's claim that communism requires authoritarianism, see “Bret and Heather 38th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Adventures in Sneetch World” by Bret Weinstein (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t85DTC44JE) (47:01-50:13); see also Pinker in footnote xi, above.

16. Journalist Douglas Murray independently makes this point in The Madness Of Crowds: Gender, Race, And Identity by Douglas Murray (Bloomsbury Continuum) (2019) (pp. 53).

17. See the Science History Museum in Philadelphia, PA—I tweeted a screenshot of this exhibit on May 30^th, 2018: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1001969181275951104?s=20.

18. I wrote a bit about this giving of undue credit to Marx on Twitter on April 24^th, 2019: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1121153760770785281?s=20. For a homologous sexual selection argument (whether by inheritance or convergent evolution), see the chapter on lobster dominance hierarchies in 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson (Random House Canada) (2018) (pp. 1-28).

19. See Enlightenment Now (pp. 349). Marx ironically wrote, “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” see The Communist Manifesto (pp. 23).