As the language of Marxism becomes increasingly disguised in moralistic slogans such as “social justice” and “inclusiveness,” many people fail to recognize Marxist theories when they encounter them. They expect theories derived from Marxism to be littered with red flag phrases like “dialectical materialism” or “class conflict,” which would be the dead giveaway that they are dealing with Marxist interpretations. In the absence of such phrases, they deny that social justice theories are Marxist at all. 

For example, although the historian Eric Foner is reputed to be a “noted Marxist historian,” he describes himself, not as a Marxist, but merely as “one who grew up in an Old Left family.” Thus, his history of the Reconstruction Era is taught as “objective” scholarship; after all, his work is not Marxist but merely Marxist-adjacent. While WEB Du Bois writes an explicitly Marxist history of the Reconstruction Era—describing it as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”—Foner believes nobody should be described as a Marxist:

JG: Would you be happy to be described as a “Marxist historian” or is there a more accurate term for historians like you, Howard Zinn and others?

EF: I tend to eschew labels. Marx is believed to have said: “I am not a Marxist.” In other words: “I don’t want to be assigned to a single school of interpretation.”

But no-one can understand history who does not have at least some familiarity with the writings of Marx.

I have been powerfully influenced by Marxist insights, especially those of the last generation of British Marxist scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson and others.

But I have also been influenced by black radical scholars like WEB Du Bois, who himself was influenced by Marxism and also by other radical traditions and by feminist scholars.

Understanding history through “Marxist insights” is not merely about being familiar with Marxist theories of historical materialism and the Hegelian dialectic. The greatest infiltration of Marxist doctrine into the social justice discourse does not come directly from notions of class conflict or historical materialism, but from the far more pernicious influence of Marxist doctrine in erasing human will and agency. Marxists insist that human action is inevitably determined, not by individual will or choice, but by one’s economic and social circumstances. As David Gordon explains in “Mises Contra Marx,” the Marxist premise is that human will is governed by the prevailing “forces of production.” Marxists argue that each person’s choices are determined by his historical epoch, his class consciousness, his race, or other socioeconomic structures of his society. By contrast, Ludwig von Mises accords to human beings the will and power to make choices and take purposeful action. In Human Action, he states that “[A]cting man chooses, determines, and tries to reach an end. Of two things which he cannot have together he selects one and gives up the other.” Mises further explains:

Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is human will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life.

Mises highlights the importance of the human will and human agency in making choices:

For the term will means nothing else than man’s faculty to choose between different states of affairs, to prefer one, to set aside the other, and to behave according to the decision made in aiming at the chosen state and forsaking the other.

Constant adjustment in pursuit of individual ends and goals is key to understanding human action. According to Mises, “In the course of social events there prevails a regularity of phenomena to which man must adjust his action if he wishes to succeed.”

But how can man “wish to succeed” in the first place, much less “adjust his action” accordingly, if he is merely some kind of automaton responding to the stimulus of his material circumstances? According to Marxists, there are certain predetermined actions that will inevitably be adopted by people who are classified as “exploited” and other actions will always be adopted by their “exploiters.” To Marxists, man does not adjust his actions based on his personal preferences or his own agency but merely follows the collective dictates of his group. By viewing everyone’s actions as determined by their group, it immediately becomes self-evident what their choices must be in every situation—you know what a white person would choose, what a slave would do in any situation, etc.

At the very least, this is regarded by Marxists as the default position and anyone asserting the contrary is regarded with deep skepticism and subjected to the highest standard of proof. They certainly would not get past the academic gatekeepers. For example, there is a widespread belief that there are no happy black people in America, and if any black person claims to be happy, he must be suffering from false consciousness or perhaps he was paid by white people to claim to be happy. In “Why America Has Never Been Great for Black People” Ariana Doss writes that:

Our president’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” has always confused me.

As a progressive person, who only views the past to find ways to improve the future, I cannot fathom why President Trump wants to go backwards. When I examine this country’s history, I do not find a time in which I, or any other Black person for this matter, would have wanted to go.

HK Egerton—a black man from North Carolina who defends the Confederate heritage of the South—is depicted by the Southern Poverty Law Center as simply incomprehensible: “I’ve often wondered what could cause him to do such things,” they say. The notion that a black man might not share the SPLC worldview is a deep mystery to them. This expectation that people’s opinions are determined by their class consciousness or race consciousness is held even by progressives who claim to reject Marxist ideology. They regard their worldview as merely a statement of the “obvious” and nothing to do with Marxist theories. Isn’t it obvious that exploited people will be in constant struggle against their exploiters and would never willingly cooperate with them?

There are many problems with this reasoning, but the key point being highlighted here is that it denies the very notion of free will and individual choice. As Mises explains:

Marxism asserts that a man’s thinking is determined by his class affiliation. Every social class has a logic of its own. The product of thought cannot be anything else than an “ideological disguise” of the selfish class interests of the thinker.

Marxist theories developed further by the Frankfurt School and modern critical race theories extend this notion of class affiliation to racial affiliation. Just as one’s thought cannot be anything else other than a reflection of his class interests, so one’s thought inevitably reflects his race. Thus, for example, Ariana Doss speaks not only of her personal opinion, but that of “any other black person.” Mises rejects this worldview. He further distinguishes the purposeful action of man from mere “animal reaction” meaning the innate biological nature of animals such as the “instincts of nourishment, of reproduction, and of aggression,” and rejects “the method of instinct-psychology” which says that the goal of human action is “the satisfaction of an instinctive urge.”

Many champions of the instinct school are convinced that they have proved that action is not determined by reason, but stems from the profound depths of innate forces, impulses, instincts, and dispositions which are not open to any rational elucidation.

Rejecting these irrational theories, Mises argues that “what distinguishes man from beasts is precisely that he adjusts his behavior deliberately. Man is the being that has inhibitions, that can master his impulses and desires.” Human action is deliberate and masterful, not simply determined by one’s history, race, or class. Human action and human choices are not prescribed by the dominant ideology or by prevailing power structures, but by individual will and agency.