The End of the Neo-Marxist
Whenever I hear the term “neo-Marxist” it’s a clear sign that the person talking, or writing doesn’t fully understand Marxism. Modern-day Marxists never use the combining form “neo” to describe themselves. That’s because to distinguish the Marxist thinking of today from that of the past misrepresents what Marxism is.
So, what is Marxism?
Marxism is a scientific method that uses a dialectical materialist approach to understand society and life in general. To truly appreciate the beauty of this method and what makes Marxism distinct from other ways of analyzing the world, we need to understand each of these terms — dialectical and materialism — separately and together.
Dialectical thinking is the belief that everything is always changing and in motion. In Trotsky’s ‘ABC of Materialist Dialectics’ he proves this point by showing that nothing is equal to itself. A pound of sugar in one moment is not equal to the same pound a moment later since the environment will inevitably lead to changes, even if it’s at a microscopic level. Therefore, since everything exists in time, existence itself is an uninterrupted process of transformation. This makes Marxism the opposite of dogma since it doesn’t rest on crude categorizations that are lifeless and unchanging. Instead, the entire approach is built around the understanding that contingent forces produce particular realities.
“For dialectical philosophy, nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything: nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher.” — Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1877
But to study the ever-changing social forces that constitute reality we need to be clear about how Marxists understand the constitution of reality. This is where “materialism” comes into play. Materialism is the principle that the material world is real, and we can observe it through our senses and then formulate ideas based on our observations. The opposite of this is idealism, which is the belief that reality begins with our thoughts and we create the external world from our ideas. With a materialist approach, thought and ideas are the products of the material world. Therefore, to understand consciousness, we need to understand the material conditions of society. This is why Marxists tend to reject religion and the supernatural as dogma — because many of their ideas and abstractions cannot be proven by observing the world around us.
Taken together, dialectical materialism is a method for understanding how our material conditions change over time. In particular, Marxists attribute the largest social changes to conflict, or the coming together of opposing forces, which is why they focus so much on the relationship between the oppressed and oppressor, and more specifically on class conflict. It’s important to remember that since Marxism is grounded in dialectical thinking, even the categories that are used to understand class struggle are not fixed. Marxists are not concerned about capitalism in general, but rather capitalism at a given stage of development. In this late stage of capitalism, it is more accurate to understand the system as one of Western imperialism, through which competition is largely transformed into monopoly.
Given this understanding of Marxism, it should be clear that there is nothing “neo” about it. While the analyses that come out of Marxist thinking have significantly changed since the era of Marx’s writing, the method has not. What makes Marxism such an insightful method for studying the world is its attention to interdependencies and the particular material conditions that lead to certain forms of social conflict and certain forms of cohesion. What makes Marxism so inspirational is its refusal to accept anything as natural or innate since everything is always in the process of transformation. This is why the method has been so important to groups who are struggling for freedom; while those in power would like for the oppressed to normalize systems of inequality, domination, hierarchy, and competition by believing in a Hobbesian state of nature where people are naturally greedy and where life is “nasty, brutish and short,” a Marxist lens rejects such ridiculous assumptions and insists that change is not only possible, it is inevitable.
So, let’s put an end to this unfortunate misnomer. Marxism is not new. Many modern-day Marxists have significantly deepened our understanding of reality by incorporating feminist, decolonial, queer, and anti-racist theories; however, the method of dialectical materialism remains the same. And as long as we continue to find ourselves in a world where injustice prevails, Marxism will continue to be an important method for exposing the material forces that are upholding such conditions and advancing our understanding of what needs to change to realize a freer world.
