Neo-Marxism

Neo-Marxism is the body of theory that kept Marx’s critique of capitalism after abandoning his economics and his revolutionary agent. Where classical Marxism predicted that the industrial working class would seize the means of production once contradictions in the profit rate matured, the neo-Marxist schools that developed from the 1920s onward asked why the prediction failed and answered that capitalism survives through culture: through schools, churches, newspapers, entertainment, and the assumptions people absorb before they are old enough to examine them.

Conservatives take the tradition seriously for a specific reason. Its practitioners understood, more clearly than many liberals, that political order rests on inherited belief rather than on argument. They drew the opposite conclusion from that observation, treating the inheritance as a system of domination to be dismantled. The conservative reply is that the inheritance is what makes a free society possible in the first place, and that societies which dismantle it do not become free.

Key Takeaways

• Neo-Marxism relocated the site of struggle from the factory to culture, education, and consciousness.
• Antonio Gramsci’s prison writings of 1929 to 1935 supplied the concept of cultural hegemony.
• The Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923, produced the critical theory that carried these arguments into American universities after 1934.
• Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man of 1964 supplied the New Left with an account of why affluent workers had stopped being revolutionary.
• Conservatives judge the school by its results in Eastern Europe and by the intellectual habits it left behind in Western institutions.

History And Context

The trouble began with a failed forecast. Marx expected revolution in the industrialised West. It arrived instead in agrarian Russia in 1917, and the German risings of 1919 and 1923 collapsed. Two responses followed.

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist leader, was arrested by Mussolini’s government in November 1926 and filled thirty-three notebooks in prison between 1929 and 1935, when illness stopped the work; he died in April 1937. His notebooks argued that the Western bourgeoisie ruled by consent as much as by force, through a hegemony exercised in schools, publishing, and the Church, and that a counter-hegemony would have to be built through the same institutions before any seizure of the state could hold.¹

The Institute for Social Research opened at the University of Frankfurt in 1923 under Carl Grünberg and was directed from 1930 by Max Horkheimer. Its members, most of them Jewish, left Germany in 1933 and reconstituted the Institute at Columbia University in New York in 1934. Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment in California during the war, arguing that instrumental reason itself had produced both the culture industry and the death camps. Herbert Marcuse stayed in the United States after the war, worked for the Office of Strategic Services and then the State Department until 1951, and published One-Dimensional Man in 1964, which held that consumer abundance had absorbed the working class into the system it was supposed to overthrow.² His 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance” argued that even-handed liberal tolerance functions to preserve the existing order, and that liberation requires withdrawing tolerance from movements of the right.³

Leszek Kołakowski, himself a former Communist expelled from Warsaw in 1968, produced the standard critical history of these developments.⁴

The Conservative Position

Conservatives make three responses.

The first is that the diagnosis contains a real insight put to bad use. Burke and Oakeshott both held that a society runs on inherited practice rather than on explicit reasoning, and that most of what a person knows about how to live he absorbed without being taught. Gramsci saw the same structure and called it a prison. The disagreement is not descriptive but evaluative: what the conservative calls custom, the neo-Marxist calls hegemony, and the difference is whether an unchosen inheritance is understood as a gift or as a fraud.

The second is that critical theory produces criticism without a positive doctrine. Roger Scruton’s study of New Left thinkers argues that the writing supplies elaborate accounts of what is wrong with existing society and almost nothing about what should replace it, and that the vagueness is structural rather than accidental, because any specified alternative could be examined.⁵ A method that dissolves institutions while declining to describe their successors leaves whatever power fills the vacuum unexamined.

The third is empirical. Thomas Sowell’s treatment of Marxist economics argues that the labour theory of value and the immiseration thesis were falsified by the twentieth century, and that neo-Marxism’s retreat into culture was a response to that failure rather than an independent discovery.⁶ Conservatives add the record of the states built on the doctrine, and the fact that the intellectuals who knew those states best, Kołakowski among them, wrote the sharpest refutations.

Differing Positions

Defenders answer that the conservative account attacks a caricature. The Frankfurt School was a body of academic philosophy, not a political programme; Adorno called the police on student occupiers at Frankfurt in January 1969; Habermas, the school’s most prominent living heir, has spent his career defending constitutional democracy and public reason. Treating this lineage as a plan to subvert Western institutions inverts its actual politics.

There is also a substantive defence of the core claim. That schooling, media ownership, and inherited advantage shape belief before anyone can consent to it is not a Marxist eccentricity; conservatives assert it whenever they complain about the political composition of university faculties or the assumptions of the national broadcaster. Both sides accept that culture forms citizens. They disagree about which formation is legitimate.

A third position, held by orthodox Marxists, dismisses the school from the left. Replacing the working class with students, minorities, and the marginal, on this view, abandoned the only agent capable of changing anything and produced a politics of academic gesture with no purchase on ownership or wages.

References

1. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Lawrence and Wishart, 1971).
2. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Beacon Press, 1964).
3. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance”, in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Beacon Press, 1965).
4. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford University Press, 1978).
5. Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Bloomsbury, 2015).
6. Thomas Sowell, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics (William Morrow, 1985).