How Marxists Erase Human Will and Agency
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 cla
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