There’s (Still) No Such Thing As Cultural Marxism

James Lindsay’s latest hoax mocked the "Woke Right." But he got a lot wrong.

(Photo by Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert/picture alliance via Getty Images.)

In 2017 and 2018, James Lindsay co-authored with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose a number of articles and submitted them to academic journals. The articles were filled with trendy (often incoherent) social justice jargon; one bore the title “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” The hoax became known as the “Grievance Studies Affair”—the idea being to expose and mock the kind of left-wing scholarship too often found in the social sciences and humanities. By this metric it definitely worked: seven of the articles had been accepted for publication by peer reviewed journals by the time Lindsay publicly acknowledged the prank.

Since then, Lindsay has been on something of an ideological journey, lurching sharply to the right and engaging in a great deal of conspiratorial commentary. (He has, for instance, claimed that “Critical Theory approaches to education are meant to psychologically damage your children so they can be used in a revolution that will rob us all of our freedom.”) But despite this, Lindsay hasn’t been silent when it comes to criticizing the right. In fact, he now spends a large amount of time talking about the “Woke Right,” a phrase that increasingly crops up online to refer to the Christian nationalist movement—including the intellectual denizens of various strains of the religious postliberal right.

Last Tuesday, Lindsay revealed he had successfully perpetrated another “hoax,” this time by getting an article published under a false name in the evangelical magazine American Reformer. The article satirized the type of breathless writing that often appears on the Christian right, which blames liberalism and the left (which they equate) for all the world’s ills and seeks to marshal a counter-revolution led by conservatives to shore up traditional ways of life and “manly” virtue. Lindsay’s American Reformer article is pompous, sweeping, and, frankly, rather boring—and the editors simply didn’t clock that it was a parody designed to mock their own publication. Insofar as he attempted to lampoon a certain strain of right-wing cultural criticism, Lindsay clearly succeeded.

Except, the justification Lindsay gives for lampooning the religious right is extremely misguided: he claims that they are fundamentally “woke.” In support of this claim, he notes that postliberal writers sound an awful lot like Karl Marx. The entire American Reformer piece was, in fact, a deliberate pastiche of the opening chapters of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto (which he claims the editors didn’t notice). “It required shockingly minimal editing,” Lindsay later explained, “to make Karl Marx’s arguments transform into Woke Right arguments about American liberalism.”

His reasoning here is threefold:

1. The Communist Manifesto is a canonical “woke” text.

2. The postliberal religious right uses similar rhetoric to The Communist Manifesto.

3. Therefore, the postliberal religious right is woke.

Point 2 is, I think, accurate. Like Marx and Engels, postliberals and Christian nationalists—think Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, or even J.D. Vance—traffic in jeremiads against liberalism, prophesying the coming of a revolution that will wash away our current decadent individualist society. They inveigh to various degrees against “the regime”; many of them suggest that the current liberal-democratic order is beset by internal contradictions that will ultimately lead to its collapse. It’s easy to see why Lindsay was reminded of the postliberal right while reading The Communist Manifesto.

On points 1 and 3, however, I think Lindsay is dead wrong. He is perpetuating an idea that’s been in circulation for a while on the right, one that attributes all the excesses of the “woke left” to an ideology called “cultural Marxism.” In this he is not alone: the term “cultural Marxism” has been around since at least the 1970s, and is frequently invoked by a wide range of people to explain and condemn today’s progressives.¹

But the uncritical equation of “woke” with Marxism is spurious. It ignores the fact there is nothing meaningfully “woke” about Marxism. And insofar as postliberals sound like Marxists, there is nothing “woke” about postliberalism, either.

To show why this is the case, I want to defend one claim: that Marxism is inherently materialist, and any ideology that isn’t materialist cannot be Marxist. Because “wokeism” fundamentally isn’t materialist, it therefore cannot be a form of Marxism.

Marxism is Materialist

At the center of Marx and Engels’s thought was the doctrine of historical materialism. Simply put, this is the idea that the social, political, and cultural arrangements of any society are fundamentally a product of the economic arrangements of that society. As these economic arrangements—the “base” or “structure,” in Marx’s words—evolve and change over time, so do the political and cultural arrangements—the “superstructure.” This evolution tends to follow a logical and predictable path, rather than a random or irrational one.

Marx put it in the following terms:²

The totality of [the] relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

Marx and Engels’s work was deeply informed by their historical materialism. The central argument of The Communist Manifesto is that capitalism represents the latest stage of mankind’s economic development, having grown out of the failures and eventual collapse of feudalism in the Middle Ages. Just like feudalism, capitalism is beset by internal contradictions, which will ultimately result in a massive revolution and the downfall of the entire capitalist system. At every stage of their argument, Marx and Engels rely on the concepts of economic production and class antagonism to explain social phenomena.

Some years later, Marx would refer to historical materialism as “the guiding principle of my studies.” It would not be too much of a stretch to say that trying to imagine Marxism without materialism is a bit like trying to imagine an omelet without eggs.³

…“Woke” is Not

Now compare historical materialism with the set of ideas usually described as “woke.” To begin with, the term “woke” poses problems. Unlike Marxism, there is no canonical ideology called “wokeism,” certainly not one that is called as such by its proponents. As Yascha puts it, woke ideas are more aptly described as a “synthesis” of various conjectures than as an ideology or coherent body of theory. His list of “wokeism”’s core themes includes:

1. a rejection of the existence of objective truth;

2. the use of a form of discourse analysis for explicitly political ends;

3. an embrace of strategic essentialism;

4. a deep pessimism about the possibility of overcoming racism or other forms of bigotry;

5. a preference for public policies that explicitly distinguish between citizens on the basis of the group to which they belong;

6. an embrace of intersectionality as a strategy for political organizing;

7. a deep skepticism about the ability of members of different groups to communicate with each other.

There is clearly some overlap between some of these claims and Marxism. For example, Marx (and Marxist disciples like Antonio Gramsci) arguably did help found modern discourse analysis through his pioneering social criticism, coining at least some of the phraseology and conceptual apparatus of today’s critical social justice theory. On the other hand, Marx certainly did not reject the existence of objective truth, given that his life’s work was to place the analysis of political economy on a rational-scientific footing.

More damning for the “Marxism = woke” thesis, however, is that woke beliefs are simply not materialist. The central woke categories of analysis are race, gender, and sexuality—not class or economic status. Social justice advocates don’t claim that these categories are in some deep and meaningful sense offshoots of the economic base; rather, they treat them as “identity” characteristics, some of which you can choose (gender), some of which you can’t (race, sexuality), but none of which are fundamentally determined by modes of production.

Finally, a great deal of social justice activism revolves around demands that various individuals and institutions adopt specific symbolic imagery and use inclusive language: flying the flag during Pride Month or ensuring that corporations issue diversity statements, for example. This fixation on speech and symbolism is the exact opposite of the materialist concern with deep economic relations and structures.⁴

Superficial Similarities Are Not Enough

Lindsay must know that “woke” ideas have little grounding in materialism. Nevertheless, he still claims that the postliberal right is woke because, in his words, “They have taken up the Woke operating system.” This begs the question: What does he mean by a “woke operating system”?

The only answer that emerges from his parody of The Communist Manifesto is that Lindsay is equating wokeism with the use of grand historical narratives—especially ones which frame history through a lens of oppressor vs. oppressed. There’s a certain logic here. As I’ve noted, Marx and Engels prophesized the world-historical revolution of the downtrodden proletariat; the postliberal right, in its more apocalyptic mode, likewise predicts the imminent downfall of the liberal-democratic order at the hands of marginalized Christians.

But it is unclear, first of all, that “wokeism” shares this obsession with grand historical narratives and revolution. I would argue that (with notable exceptions) the social justice movement in 2024 operates within institutions as they are currently constructed, rather than seriously seeking to tear them down. (Even the recent wave of campus protests have been oriented more to specific goals such as divesting from actual or perceived complicity with Israeli crimes in Gaza than to trying to create a fundamentally reconstituted society in the United States.) What’s more, many “woke” ideas took inspiration from the work of 20th century cultural theorists such as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes: writers who explicitly denounced the notion that history is directional.

But let’s suppose Lindsay is correct that “woke” ideas come packaged in revolutionary language in a way that superficially resembles Marxism. This is hardly a basis on which to equate the two. By this logic, religious demagogues from Savonarola to Ayatollah Khomeini could be considered “Marxists.” Marx didn’t have a monopoly on the concept of oppressor/oppressed, nor on the claim that history is moving towards a logical endpoint or ultimate conclusion. These ideas have inspired a varied number of revolutionary—and nonrevolutionary—projects throughout history, including ones that are entirely opposed to pretty much every single belief that reasonable people would characterise as “woke.”

And here lies the problem with Lindsay’s latest hoax article. In attempting to simultaneously take down the progressive left, Orthodox Marxists, and postliberal Christians, he has erected a kind of golem molded from the clay of disparate ideological currents and slapped them with the unhelpful label “woke” as if they are all part of the same phenomenon. What we are left with is the strong sense that Lindsay has managed to obscure and conceal the distinctive ideological movements he is claiming to illuminate.

Luke Hallam is senior editor at Persuasion.

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1. At the extreme end, the “cultural Marxist” thesis takes the form of a virulent antisemitic conspiracy theory. To Lindsay’s credit, he has distanced himself from this version of the argument. Plenty of respectable commentators have meanwhile argued that something we might reasonably call “cultural Marxism” exists in the realm of academic literary theory, and has done so since the 20th century. What I am interested in here, however, are two specific claims Lindsay makes: 1) that Orthodox Marxism = woke; and 2) that woke = cultural Marxism. I think neither of these claims are sustainable (even formulating them in this way reveals them to be mutually incompatible).

2. Likewise, Engels wrote: “[Historical materialism] seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.”

3. Of course, the historical materialist view of history came under massive fire from the left during the 20^th century. Part of the justification advanced by Lindsay and others for the “cultural Marxism” thesis is that Marxists—starting with the Frankfurt School and the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci—pivoted to trying to win cultural victories rather than talking about the economic base and the materialist engine of history. But this shift was so comprehensive and successful, I would argue, that it resulted in a form of leftism that was no longer meaningfully Marxist. In 1937, Max Horkheimer could still rely on such notions as “the modern mode of production” to explain social processes. But by the late 1980s, the school known as “post-Marxism” had emerged and been given its definitive statement by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, in which they pronounced the death both of stable class identities and of “the concept of the mode of production” as “a legitimate object of Marxist discourse.” This, to me, was the moment the eggs were removed from the omelet. And as I argue below, the “woke” ideas that have sprung up since then are even further removed from anything resembling materialism.

4. Many people who hold left-wing cultural beliefs certainly hold left-wing economic beliefs. Many on the woke left subscribe to the brand of “democratic socialism” associated with figures like Bernie Sanders, embracing economic redistribution to the less well-off and increases in taxation for the ultra-wealthy and corporations. But there is very little specifically Marxist about this. Nothing about progressive tax policy commits one to the more radical historical materialist belief that “the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events” resides in “the economic development of society.” Moreover, Marx explicitly claimed it is misguided to focus on things like higher wages because, in his view, this simply results in “better payment for the slave.” (See Joseph Heath’s recent Substack article for an account of how the left abandoned Orthodox Marxism on economic questions.)