In 2019, the Slovenian communist philosopher Slavoj Zizek and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson—who first came to fame after publicly misrepresenting the contents of a Canadian piece of legislation—met in the so-called “debate of the century” on the topic of “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism.”
In his opening statement, Peterson begins by admitting that the totality of his argument is based on two readings of The Communist Manifesto (the first time when he was 18 and the second time in preparation for the debate). Peterson claims to have taken “apart the sentences” to carefully evaluate the Manifesto “at the level of the phrase, at the level of the sentence, and at the level of the paragraph.” “Is this solid thinking?” he asked himself. He came to the conclusion that he had “rarely read a tract that made as many conceptual errors per sentence as The Communist Manifesto” and that it was of the same intellectual “ilk” as an undergraduate paper. Peterson proceeds to lay out a detailed—and highly sloppy— critique of Marxism.
Peterson moves on to the bizarre observation that Marx and Engels “failed to grapple with the fundamental truth that almost all ideas are wrong.” They were “typical thinkers,” that is, their thinking was that of “people who weren’t trained to think.” This is because, Peterson argues, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels appear to “just accept [their thought] as true.” They don’t critically evaluate it but, instead, seem to posit them as self-evidently true.
This is less of an argument against Marxism and more of a dull observation that could fit any political text. That’s right, The Communist Manifesto, as opposed to being a methodical, analytical work of economic theory, is explicitly a political pamphlet that was intended to serve as the official text of The Communist League, a political organization. In fact, in the preceding two sentences, Peterson does all of us a favor by providing the counter-argument to his own claim:
I also understand that the communist manifesto was a call for revolution and not a standard logical argument
With Peterson already having admitted that his reading of Marxist literature begins and ends with The Communist Manifesto, he clearly skipped out on what he is looking for in more theoretical works like Capital and The German Ideology.
Class Struggle and Historical Materialism
Peterson begins his critique by claiming that Marx and Engels believed economic class struggle to be the only historical determinant. This can’t be true, Peterson argues, because “there are many other motivations that drive people other than economics.” This is a caricature of Marx and Engels’ actual views. In an 1890 letter, Engels specifically answers this objection:
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary.
In the rest of the letter, Engels goes on to further elaborate the point that class struggle is by no means the only factor that drives history and non-material factors do play an important role.
Now, to be fair, since Peterson’s only source of information for Marx and Engels’ thought is The Communist Manifesto—which does seem to have a class-reductionist bent, he could be forgiven for this mischaracterization. That the entire basis of one’s critique of Marxism is a little political pamphlet, however, is hardly a point that works in Peterson’s favor.
Peterson then claims that Marx & Engels linked the existence of hierarchies solely to capitalism. This objection, even for Peterson, is just embarrassing. At the (literally) beginning of The Communist Manifesto, Marx & Engels talk about how class struggle is not just attributable to capitalism and, instead, has existed within other economic systems throughout history, of which capitalism is just the newest form. Class struggle has existed among pre-capitalist societies that consisted of “freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, guild-master and journeyman.” Marx & Engels make it even more obvious:
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
For Marx, capitalism “has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.” The notion that Marx & Engels attribute hierarchies solely to capitalism is laughably absurd.
Peterson also argues that Marx views history “as a binary class struggle with clear divisions between the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie.” He objects to this supposed Marxian belief since “it’s not so easy to make a firm division between who is the exploiter and who is the exploitee” because “it’s not obvious in the case of, let’s say, small shareholders whether or not they happen to be part of the oppressed or part of the oppressor.”
This is a fair criticism. The problem, though, is that Marx doesn’t hold the belief that Peterson attributes to him. For Marx, history is absolutely not characterized by two firmly divided classes. In fact, he came up with a term for economic actors like the “small shareholders” that don't fit in either class: Petit-Bourgeoisie.
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx specifically acknowledges the existence of classes distinct from both the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat:
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
Peterson further asserts that, for Marx, “all of the good is on the side of the Proletariat and all of the evil is on the side of the Bourgeoisie” which is “naive beyond comprehension.” He argues that “it is absolutely foolish to make the presumption that you can identify someone’s moral worth with their economic standing.”
In reality, however, not only does Marx not make a moral argument against individual capitalists, he explicitly denies it. In the preface to the first volume of Capital, Marx writes:
But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular classrelations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them
Marx’s analysis of capitalism does not depend on the “moral worth” of the individuals of any class. Rather, Marx is concerned with evaluating capitalism as a socio-economic system.
The State, Revolution, and the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”
Peterson also ascribes to Marx the belief that capitalism must only be dismantled after a “bloody, violent revolution” overturns “all existing social structures” to establish a “dictatorship of the Proletariat” in which autocratic power is centralized into the hands of a “minority of Proletariat.”
That a “bloody” and “violent” revolution that levels all existing social structures must come about is an idea that Marx does not hold. While he acknowledges that violent revolution may be necessary in some (or even most) countries, this is not invariably the case. In his La Liberté speech from 1872, Marx clearly argues that in some countries workers may achieve their goals through parliamentary institutions:
… and we do not deny that there are countries -- such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland -- where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means.
Furthermore, Peterson's understanding of Marx’s conception of a workers’ state, a “dictatorship of the Proletariat” that “centralizes” power among a “minority,” and thereby establishes an authoritarian and anti-democratic state is deeply flawed. This is partly because, and it may come as a surprise, Marx’s central focus was not on the state. He never put forward a systematic consideration of the state because he was concerned with a descriptive analysis of the capitalist mode of production. But, insofar as Marx did talk about the state, his ideas are drastically different from what Peterson claims.
The only contemporary state that Marx ever believed to be an actual “dictatorship of the Proletariat” was the Paris Commune of 1871. This, therefore, is reasonably the best source of Marx’s view of what a workers’ state should look like. In an 1871 text, Marx praises the Commune as “a working men’s government” that was "of the people” and “by the people.” The Commune “transformed” the Proletariat’s “present blood-suckers, the notary, advocate, executor, and other judicial vampires, into salaried communal agents, elected by, and responsible to, himself.” Marx believed the Commune to be “essentially a working-class government” in which “instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes.” It gave way to the “self-government of the producers.” All government officials were “representatives of the working class” who were elected by “universal suffrage” and were “revocable at short terms.” Marx writes:
“The rural communities of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents.”
In total contradiction to Peterson’s attempted caricature of the “dictatorship of the Proletariat” as an authoritarian power center, Marx provides a radically anti-totalitarian and democratic portrait of what a workers’ state would look like.
In fact, Peterson’s argument against the centralization of power (that power corrupts) is very strong. But ironically, as Marx himself argues, it is one that most perfectly fits capitalism: a mode of production that centralizes the means of production—and, therefore, economic and political power—into the hands of a few capitalists. By his own argument, Peterson should become a socialist.
Profit, Exploitation, and Labour
Peterson argues that Marx assumed that “nothing the capitalists did constitutes valid labor” and that capitalists are not “productive” laborers. Unfortunately, Peterson gets entangled between “productive labor” and “valid labor”—a term that Marx does not use. “Productive labor” is labor that produces a surplus value. Capitalists are not “productive laborers” because they, instead of producing surplus-value, extract it. Peterson’s confusion leads him to believe that Marx denies the possibility of any “useful” work coming out of capitalists, which is patently false.
Peterson also criticizes Marx’s theory of profit as “theft.” Though profit can be theft “because crooked people can run companies,” Peterson argues, this is not always the case. Notwithstanding the incorrect claim that Marx understands profit to be “theft”—because “theft” assumes that private property exists in the first place, a notion rejected by Marx—Peterson seems to fundamentally misunderstand what the Marxist conception of profit and exploitation is. Earlier in his statement, Peterson claimed that “exploiting other people is a very unstable means of obtaining power.” He is under the impression that with his theory of exploitation, Marx is making a normative or moral argument about capitalists who “treat their workers poorly” or something of the sort. In reality, exploitation in Marxian thought is purely descriptive in itself. It describes the process of the expropriation by the capitalist of the surplus value generated by the worker, which, after reinvestment in capital and wages, is accrued in the form of profit. It is embedded in the logic of the capitalist mode of production. It is thus impossible for a capitalist mode of production to exist without exploitation.
For all the conviction with which Jordan Peterson pronounces the “evils” of “Marxist ideology” and its disastrous effects, he appears to be utterly clueless on what he is talking about. The comical irony of denouncing Marx for being too confident in the veracity of his thought and then proceeding to present a series of incoherent assertions with utmost certainty after reading a 40-page leaflet seems to entirely elude Peterson. That he dodged a debate with Marxist economist Richard Wolff is scarcely surprising. His “critique” is not even incorrect. It’s a dogmatic amalgamation of half-arguments, mischaracterizations, and antiquated cold-war era imperial propaganda which, for some reason, Peterson still thinks is in vogue.