Marx’s Counter-Enlightenment

that would seem to follow from a subjectivity of values. Postmodernist literary critic Fredric Jameson’s remark that “everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political” is illuminating: if an epistemology of objectivity and truth lends itself to a politics of domination and submission, certainly an epistemology of subjectivity and irrationality will also lend itself to another kind of human social organization.

Other inconsistencies abound. Left-wing politics, such as socialism and communism, have tended to be defended on traditional modernist grounds of reason and science. Karl Marx, the famous German economist, founded much of the territory of left-wing economics and called his politics “scientific socialism.”

Another seemingly contradictory stance of postmodernists is the rhetoric and tactics of postmodern politics. In the classrooms and boardrooms engaged by postmodern political activists, we have seen a great deal of hostility to debate, ad hominem arguments, and advocacy of the inherently authoritarian “political correctness.” We can cite several examples: (in)famously, Fish calling the opponents of affirmative action bigots and associating them with the Ku Klux Klan; Dworkin’s male-bashing to the extent of associating all penetrative sex with violence and having a “Dead Men Don’t Rape” slogan above her desk; or Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals advocating violence and deception as political tactics by. How did the far-Left strategy, which often traditionally upheld civility, tolerance, and justice, become so illiberal?

Classical Marxism argued along modernist lines, via reason and evidence, that socialism was the next logical

political organization after capitalism. It followed two main storylines: 1. The system of capitalism is inherently exploitive. The “capitalists” or managers of labor create a hierarchy and place themselves at the top, extracting a portion of the productivity of the laborers working under them. They also control who advances to the managerial class and who remains as labor. Thus, the rich enslave the poor. This wealth gap can only increase, leading to the less productive use of resources and the ultimate collapse of capitalism, either due to the depletion of resources or the resolution of class conflict with the revolt of the working class. 2. Socialism, the supposed remedy of the exploitive capitalistic system, is purportedly humane due to the removal of hierarchy and the sharing of wealth. Production is equal and cooperative. This economic system will bring with it a new era of prosperity, as it lacks the over- and under-consumption of resources of capitalism.

The theory of socialism as an economic system generated and argued for in the 19th century and early 20th century would be tested in various European countries. However, over the 20th century disaster struck as the claims made of capitalism and socialism were refuted in both theory and practice. Note the importance of how these claims were made: since Marxism uses reason and evidence, as is expected in the field of economics, reason and evidence can also be used to test its claims.

One particularly strong opponent of socialism from an economic science standpoint were the free-market economists, two notable groups of the 20th century being the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek from the former group and Milton Friedman from the latter, these economists wrote extensively on the impossibility of socialism as an economic system, two of them winning Nobel Prizes. Their work led those still in support of socialism to retreat from economic arguments, the domain of science and mathematics, to the less empirical grounds of moral and political arguments.

Not only was socialism disputed if not debunked in theory, it was also found to cause disaster in practice. Looking around the world, countries that exhibit more free market or capitalistic tendencies have more productive and wealthier citizens. The rich get richer, for sure, but the poor get richer as well, making the “poor” in any Western country something of a relative concept when one examines the truly poor in the Third World (and it is no coincidence that the economic and political systems of the Third World are not liberal capitalism). While Marx predicted a collapse of capitalism, we benefit from our standpoint in history where Karl Marx could not—we have witnessed the collapse of several socialist countries over the last century. To name a few, the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Mozambique.

We can also point to countries that have slowly moved towards freer markets, such as China and Scandinavia, which has resulted in rising middle classes. Socialistic countries continue to exist, such as some in South America, but one can always examine the immigration versus the emigration rate to see how people vote with their feet;

people will tend to move to where they can find safety and earning opportunities. Looking across the social and economic systems of the world, it is clear that capitalism tends to correlate with human liberty and wealth, and socialism tends to correlate with a collapse to dictatorship, poverty, and often, human rights abuses. We also have many writers who have documented their plights under socialism, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Nien Cheng.

By the 1950s, Leftist intellectuals had serious doubts about the project of socialism; the slogan from Marx and Engels, “Workers of the world, unite” failed to materialize. After the Great Depression of the 1930s, capitalist countries recovered much faster after World War II. Thankfully for these intellectuals, the Soviet Union also emerged and was seemingly going strong with its commitment to humanity. However, in 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to suppress student and worker demonstrations, and around the same time, Nikita Khrushchev announced publicly that Joseph Stalin had exterminated tens of millions of people.

If socialism wasnot already a dirty word, it became one after these series of events, especially in the United States. At this point, a devotee to socialism had two options: they either agreed with the facts and altered course, or they found a new way to sell socialism. The latter is where postmodernism came in, which is the second thesis of Hicks’s main book Explaining Postmodernism: Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice.