What would Karl Marx think of his latter-day disciples in the Democratic Socialists of America? No doubt he would find their politics largely agreeable, but they would present him with a class conundrum. DSA is not a movement of workers but of people with intellectual credentials: some 80 percent of its members have college degrees and 35 percent have advanced degrees.
Those credentials are all granted by the institutions that capitalists sustain – it’s not bricklayers who endow Harvard University. State colleges and universities depend on government funding, but government itself, under capitalism, is simply an instrument of business interests. As the Communist Manifesto says, “the bourgeoisie… since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway.”
Conservatives as well as Marxists have reason to wonder about this: why does capitalism so lavishly subsidize these self-described socialists?
Marx, after all, thought capitalism was fundamentally oppressive and unjust, expropriating from workers the value of their labor. Yet if that’s what’s happening, the ownership class is funneling hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stolen profits into allowing students to live for years – even a decade or more, for some with advanced degrees – without selling their own labor on the market.
What’s more, Marx was quite a severe utilitarian. The “labor theory of value” does not mean that the more “work” that goes into a commodity, the more valuable it is. Goods must have some utility, for consumption or exchange, to count as products of socially useful labor. There is such a thing as socially useless activity – Marx scruples to dignify it with the label “labor” – that leads to products nobody wants to buy.
America’s private institutions of higher education are centers of capital (and capitalist) accumulation: given its tremendous endowment, Harvard has sometimes been called “a hedge fund with a university attached.” Some university departments – chiefly the hard sciences – do contribute to economic utility through basic research that ultimately leads to new products. Other departments and divisions, such as economics and business schools, also have a clear role in serving market interests. But the social science and humanities departments that are havens for DSA-style leftists are, in Marxist economic terms as well as capitalist ones, well and truly useless. Marxism absolutely depends on utility: a Marxist wants to redistribute profits, or return the fruits of labor to the laborer. Fruitless “labor” that makes nothing other people want to consume or exchange is tantamount to theft from society as a whole. “From each according to his ability” is a demanding rule.
Of course, there’s a precedent for communists living parasitically off capitalists – that’s exactly what Marx did, depending on his factory-owning friend Friedrich Engels to keep himself afloat. This is not as much in conflict with Marx’s class theories, however, as it might seem. Belonging to a class doesn’t strictly determine how you behave. A class possesses certain intrinsic interests, but individuals are subject to a variety of influences and can act against simple class logic. Thus, an Engels can subsidize a Marx, and a Marx, despite being “a head worker and not a hand worker,” can claim to speak for the proletariat.
But the fact that capitalists as a class do support the universities that produce DSA activists – and the fact that such activists as a class are credentialed intellectuals, not utility-producing laborers – cries out for a systematic explanation. Marxism itself provides a few.
Marx expected capitalism to generate its own opposition. If capitalists know there’s a demand for socialism – if they can’t get rid of it, and a capitalist economy must have a socialist movement of some kind – what kind of socialist movement would capitalists prefer to accept? Probably one with as little connection to the working class as possible. Ideally a socialist movement that is maximally hedonistic, hypocritical, stupid, and feckless. In other words, Hasan Piker.
Education also makes a useful substitute for religion
Old-school Marxists have often seen gender-studies departments and other leftist academic extravagances as fundamentally liberal and capitalist. They foster an economically unthreatening species of radicalism: indeed, America’s pharmaceutical companies love the prospect of selling hormones to transitioners for life. It would be optimal for the corporate bottom line if everyone were trans.
Education also makes a useful substitute for religion. Marx thought that capitalism needed religion to relieve the toiling masses of pain and monotony: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Yet market-oriented materialism and its attendant morality, and the new utilitarian sciences and liberal rationalism, all eroded traditional religion. What could take its place?
The answer, in two ways, was education. It provided a new source of ideals and moral aspirations, while also promising material rewards in this life, in the future, not in a world to come. College has long been a promise of social mobility. DSA’s overeducated members feel the promise has been betrayed, but this hasn’t turned them against the universities – on the contrary, they’re eager to send even more people into the institutions that failed them. That’s the power of faith.
A conservative doesn’t think Marx was right about much, but he does provide some insight into the class contradictions of the left. Marx was never more wrong than when he held the workers to be fundamentally internationalist – in his day and ours, they’re natural nationalists. It’s business interests and left-wing intellectuals that want open borders. In that, too, DSA is on the corporate world’s side. Socialists and globalist neoliberals are partners, not rivals.
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