When things break down, what has been ignored rushes in.
Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life
On 17 December 2018, Jordan Peterson issued a starkly worded invitation to the world’s most well-known Marxist philosopher. ‘Any time, any place, Mr Žižek,’ he wrote in a tweet, which contained attached images of himself, Žižek and—lest you doubt Peterson’s ability to hold his own against an esteemed thinker—previous interlocutor Steven Pinker. And in spite of seeming more like a challenge to a street brawl than a debate—a philosophy discussion would presumably take place in an auditorium, probably somewhere between 6 and 10pm—it was quickly discerned that Peterson’s intention was, indeed, to challenge Slavoj Žižek, the ‘Elvis of cultural theory’, to the latter.
The provocation in question concerned Žižek’s appearance, just over 5 weeks earlier, at Cambridge Union Society. There, Žižek—when asked by the moderator whether he agreed with Peterson’s opinion that it would be good for the US Democratic Party to, in the moderator’s paraphrase, ‘get badly beaten in the midterms’ to ‘give them a kick up the ass’—briefly offered a reiteration of his previously taken stance that Trump’s election affords the opportunity to create ‘a new consensus’. But then, something else happened. Žižek, digressing from the question, began to give his opinions on Peterson as an intellectual. ‘With all his pseudo-scientific references, you know, he cannot talk about women and marriage without discussing lobsters...’, he mocked, noting that any effort to model human behaviour upon that of animals is ‘madness’ due to the ‘unnatural’ character of notions like equality and freedom. His next comments were even more blistering: Peterson’s attempt to dispense Jungian-inspired ‘wisdom’, Žižek argued, represents the antithesis of the Christian and Greek philosophic traditions, which oppose ‘holism’ and circularity in favour of ‘social disruption’. ‘Here I react like Goebbels,’ Žižek joked of his attitude towards thinkers who advise on the best means of restoring ‘balance’ to one’s life. ‘I reach for my gun.’
In fact, this wasn’t the first time Peterson had tried to challenge Žižek to a debate. In early 2018, after the publication of an article by Žižek in The Independent that claimed Peterson’s popularity reflected the incapacity of the Left to adequately criticize the mistruths promulgated via ‘the PC universe of obsessive regulation’, Peterson tweeted that: ‘If you wish to debate the validity of my “apparently” scientific theories—or any of my other claims, then let me know, and we’ll arrange it...’ The only problem was who he’d tweeted it to: a faux-Žižek quotes account; one not manned by the social media adverse Slovenian himself but by a fan. But a video released on Peterson’s official YouTube channel on 28 February 2019 confirmed that this time the debate would, indeed, take place—specifically, in Toronto, on 19 April. What followed was a row of public excitement that—if not unseen in the history of philosophy—was the first of its type in the twenty-first century, when the existence of the Internet and heightened levels of university enrolment had allowed for the respective cults of thinkers like Žižek and Peterson to englobe much of the youth worldwide. ‘The debate of the century,’ it was dubbed by journalists. T-shirts were hocked by independent vendors online, with the mugs of Žižek and Peterson and the words ‘Team Žižek’ and ‘Team Peterson’ emblazoned on them. Scalped tickets for the 3000-seat Sony Centre were running at higher prices than tickets for the Toronto Maple Leafs-Boston Bruins NHL playoff game set to take place the same day (and this is Canada). Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Peterson and his people were scrambling to exert as much control over the event as they could before the 19 April deadline. The debate would take place on Peterson’s home turf22. But in addition, Stephen Blackwood—the founding president of Ralston College, an avowedly anti-PC ‘university’ that’s motto is SERMO LIBER VITA IPSA (‘Free Speech Is Life Itself’), and that includes Peterson among its board of visitors—was selected by them to moderate, on the grounds that he represented a ‘neutral’ choice. And rather than provide a free livestream, as per Žižek’s request, Peterson’s claque elected to charge for it, pocketing all the proceeds for themselves (though Žižek did succeed in getting its cost down to 15 dollars a pop). Somewhere in the midst of all this, Žižek, perhaps wanting to distance himself from the transparent profit-taking going on, announced that he’d be donating his speaking fee from the event to charity23.
Given the hoopla that preceded the event, it would’ve been difficult for Žižek and Peterson—after taking to the stage nearly half an hour late—to live up to expectations. They didn’t. The debate, which was titled ‘Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism’ ostensibly centred around the question of which system is better poised to engender global bliss. In practice, however, much of it involved Žižek reading off prefab talking points from a prepared script while an intellectually underpowered Peterson frantically attempted to keep pace with the complexity of his monologue. Part of this was inevitable: for all of the disdain he directs at ‘affirmative action’, Peterson is, in his own way, a product of it—no one but a right-wing philosopher with his level of media support, after all, could’ve parlayed a threat to misgender his students and a self-help book peppered with Nietzsche references into an opportunity to debate with arguably the world’s most esteemed cultural theorist. But part of it was also by design. For rather than, in the infantile parlance of the alt-right, trying to ‘DESTROY’ Peterson, Žižek clearly took it upon himself to refocus the debate from its confrontational premise to an exploration of the things he and Peterson share in common—among them a disdain for political correctness and an appreciation of the role that belief plays in structuring political discourse.
This is a wholly defensible strategy: Žižek clearly understood that the hoped-for slugfest, were it to transpire, could only have the effect of reaffirming the audience’s existing presuppositions; of widening the existing ideological chasm between left and right. By refusing to try to deliver a knockout blow then, he succeeded in both wooing Peterson’s fan base—of disabusing them of the notion that one must necessarily be right-wing in order to oppose left-liberal political correctness—as well as rejecting the more agonistic model of verbal sparring they characteristically prefer. One consequence of this approach, however, is that many of Peterson’s factually dubious remarks went unanswered throughout the debate. This includes Peterson’s opening salvo, in which he unsuccessfully attempted, by laying out and critiquing ‘ten of the fundamental axioms’ of The Communist Manifesto, to lure Žižek into a more pedantic discussion regarding the pros and cons of said text. In honour of this gesture, then, this section of the book will conclude with a point-by-point response to Peterson’s ten critiques. As Peterson clearly intends these critiques to redouble as a dismissal of Marx’s philosophy tout court—and as he expressly cites terms throughout his argument that do not derive from The Communist Manifesto—it seems appropriate to draw from the entirety of Marx and Engels’ oeuvre in responding:
After a brief prelude in which Peterson claims that, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels failed to interrogate their own presuppositions, or to ‘think about thinking’—a remark that ignores both the degree to which the duo were steeped in dialectics, as well as the fact that The Communist Manifesto is, at bottom, a zippy political pamphlet—Peterson gets down to his first point. This is that, while The Communist Manifesto sees history as conceptualizable through an ‘economic lens’, in reality there are ‘many other motivations that drive humans’ such as, for instance, ‘economic cooperation’.
Neither the claim that history is defined by economic class struggle or, in Peterson’s highly scientific parlance, ‘other motivations’ are, obviously, falsifiable—though one could quite reasonably follow the path of Althusser here in denoting that historical materialism is scientifically, rather than philosophically, demonstrable. It’s for this reason, perhaps, that Engels—after Marx’s death—attempted to elucidate the relationship of ‘base’ (the means of production) and ‘superstructure’ (culture/ideology). We cite here two signal examples. In his 1884 text The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels argues that the ‘materialist conception’ of history involves the two-fold recognition of 1) the production of material objects, and 2) the reproduction of humans (e.g. the family)—a move that opens the door to understanding the ‘ties of kinship’ that dominate pre-agricultural societies as akin to a mode of production. And in his famed 1890 letter to Joseph Bloch, Engels states that—while he and Marx felt compelled to assert the importance of economic determinacy to combat ‘our adversaries, who denied it’—it is by no means ‘the only’ determining element of history, with the superstructure also playing an important role.
The question of the suitability of the materialist schema for understanding history is then, as can probably be gleaned from the above, a legitimate conundrum (and indeed, the ‘postmodern’ era has been defined partially by a rejection of it). Stranger is Peterson’s claim that Marx does not recognize the significance of ‘economic cooperation’ as a historical motivation. For Marx, ‘co-operation’ has always been integral to human life.Indeed, it is the particularly co-operative and uniform character of industrial production—in which ‘the subjective principle of the division of labour no longer exists’ due to advancements in automation—that, in part, furnishes the conditions for mass proletarian organization...
According to Peterson, Marx espouses the view, in The Communist Manifesto, that all hierarchies exist due to capitalism—something Peterson disagrees with, citing evidence that human hierarchies stretch into ‘Paleolithic times’, even predating ‘human history itself’. However, Marx never says that all hierarchy owes to capitalism, in The Communist Manifesto or elsewhere. In the Paris manuscripts, for instance, Marx writes that the entrenchment of money as the ‘universal commodity’ results in a situation where:
...what I am and what I can do is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful woman. Which means to say that I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its repelling power, is destroyed by money. As an individual, I am lame, but money procures me 24 legs. Consequently, I am not lame. I am a wicked, dishonest, unscrupulous and stupid individual, but money is respected, and so also is its owner. Money is the highest good, and consequently its owner is also good. Moreover, money spares me the trouble of being dishonest, and I am therefore presumed to be honest. I am mindless, but if money is the true mind of all things, how can its owner be mindless? What is more, he can buy clever people for himself, and is not he who has power over clever people cleverer than them? Through money, I can have anything the human heart desires. Do I not possess all human abilities? Does not money therefore transform all my incapacities into their opposite?
On this account, it is the development of commodity-producing society that is responsible for the perversion of ‘natural’ (if not necessarily strictly biological) hierarchies!
Marx, for Peterson, commits an egregious blunder in The Communist Manifesto by failing to recognize the ‘primary conflict’ that defines human societies—the way we are perennially at ‘odds with nature’.
The word ‘nature’ is used just twice in The Communist Manifesto to refer to the natural world. The first instance of this—when Marx characterizes capitalism as having achieved the ‘Subjection of nature’s forces by man’—gives a good indication of his stance towards man’s relationship to nature in this period: essentially, that while it once served as an obstacle, the technological gains made by capitalism have since endowed us with the ability to overcome the limitations it imposes (so call Peterson half-right).
For a long time, this naïve position—which Marx applies to critique Malthus’ theory of population growth, arguing that Juston von Leibig’s ‘soil science’ demonstrates that food supply growth can be exponential, and that soil degradation can be warded off indefinitely—was accepted as the only one derivable from his scientific works. More recently, however, Marxist scholars have challenged this. Kohei Saito, for instance, in his 2018 text Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, shows how—beginning in the 1860s, in response to the waning of Leibig’s optimism regarding the use of synthetic fertilizers to reverse soil degradation—Marx moderates his position on the ability of humans to outstrip nature.
This is not correct. While Marx does claim that class struggle is the basis of all ‘hitherto existing societies’ in The Communist Manifesto—a claim that he would later soften due to his study of the anthropological works of Lewis Henry Morgan—he does not suggest that the conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariat is transhistorical. This is quite clear from the Manifesto, where Marx claims that ‘the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed’ from ‘the chartered burghers of the earliest towns’ of the Middle Ages. Peterson, then, is confusing two things: the way that capitalism, according to Marx, ‘simplified class antagonisms’ where it sprung up, dividing society increasingly into bourgeoisie and proletariat, and the transhistorical nature of ‘class struggle’.
Peterson’s attempt to link this oversight—Marx’s supposed failure to identify classes other than the bourgeoisie and proletariat—to the liquidation of the kulaks in Soviet Russia is particularly puzzling. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx expressly acknowledges ‘peasants’ such as the kulaks, classifying them as members of the ‘middle class’ who are ‘not revolutionary, but conservative’ (though he also states that there is no point in abolishing their property where they possess it, as industrialization is already hastening its demise).
While Marx does romanticize the proletariat, this romanticism is intimately connected, particularly from the mid-1840s onward, with his understanding of the economic role that it plays within society. As he writes in the preface to the German edition of the first volume of Capital:
...here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.
It’s for this reason that Marx lauds the bourgeois as the revolutionary class crucial to the shift from feudalism to capitalism—a role the proletariat, in its struggle for communism, has since inherited. Subjective conceptions of morality may befit a bourgeois society, given the contradiction between its delegation of individual rights and the failure of them to manifest on the terrain of social reality. But Marx’s approach to morality represents a radicalization of what Hegel describes, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, as the synthesis of ethical life [Sittlichkeit] characteristic of the state, in which the individual will is understood as inextricable from consciousness of universality (and thus, with a little bit of dialectical nudging, inextricable from the spirit of world history, or Weltgeist).
The term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is not used in The Communist Manifesto. In fact, it wouldn’t appear in Marx’s writings until 4 years after the Manifesto’s publication, due to its usage in an article by communist journalist Joseph Weydemeyer (though Marx did use similar phrases prior to this—‘rule of the proletariat’, for instance). Moreover, while Marx, in his 1852 correspondence with Weydemeyer, states that ‘the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat’, he later, in an 1872 speech, declared that there are nations—such as America, England and Holland—‘where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means’. This seeming contradiction attests to the fact the term ‘dictatorship’ had not yet acquired, when Marx wrote, its present-day association with draconian top-down rule. The Paris Commune, for instance, which he described as ‘a proletarian dictature’, was, in Marx’s words: ‘Formed of the municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible, and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally workers, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive, and legislative at the same time.’
The stress Marx lays here on the importance of direct democracy to the revolutionary commune reflects his own awareness of one of the objections to his thought that Peterson cites—namely, that members of the proletariat elevated to significant positions wouldn’t be corrupted by their acquisition of ‘sudden access to power’ (in 1875, for instance, Marx wrote that a workers’ state would likely suffer certain ‘defects’ due to being ‘economically, morally and intellectually...still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges’). In this respect, Marx’s use of the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ differs from the subsequent Blanqui-influenced, putschist definition given to it by Plekhanov—a definition that would, later, come to influence Lenin24.
Peterson’s use of the term ‘valid’ here to characterize Marx’s position is highly misleading. For Marx, the distinction between ‘productive’ or ‘unproductive’ labour is not a normative judgement but one that reflects the logic of capital. A labourer is productive if they generate surplus value; they are unproductive if they do not. Thus, for Marx, ‘a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor’. By this criteria, a teacher employed by the state—regardless of the importance of their role in enhancing the value of labour power—is not a productive labourer. And ironically, while the unproductive/productive originates in Adam Smith, Marx later wields it against him, by noting the unproductivity of the labour of the capitalist when seen from this standpoint.
Clearly, the designation of all labour that does not directly bestow surplus value to the capitalist as ‘unproductive’ cannot provide a complete description of the economies of twentieth-century industrial states such as the Soviet Union and the United States, dependent as they were on massive programmes of state investment targeted at heightening economic productivity. It is for this reason that many dissident Trotskyists, in particular, have—in large part as a means of critiquing the USSR—adopted the term ‘state capitalism’ to refer to the process whereby a state acts as a corporation, extracting surplus value from the workforce and investing it in production (Trotsky himself maintained that the USSR was a degenerated workers’ state). To assume, however, that Marx’s theory has simply been outmoded by the economic changes inaugurated over the course of the past century is unfair to it. Moishe Postone, for instance, argues in his 1993 text Time, Labour, and Social Domination that ‘traditional Marxists’ have often failed to understand that Marx’s critique in Capital is ‘immanent’, in the sense that capital is analysed from its own standpoint (assuming that the ‘labour theory of value’ holds transhistorically, for instance, as opposed to being a consequence of the historical generalization of the law of value). Similarly, it is easy to observe that the distinction Marx makes between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ labour is intended to performatively illustrate the contradictions inherent within capitalism—not to furnish us with a ready-at-hand criteria to base communism upon.
Ironically, Peterson’s formulation of Marx’s position on profit—that he believed ‘profit is theft’—appears not to channel Marx, but the French politician and anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who coined the slogan ‘property is theft’ in 1840. Marx was, as a competitor for the attentions of the Left who found Proudhon intellectually vacuous, not a fan. ‘Theft’ as a forcible violation of property presupposes the existence of property, he wrote of this catchphrase in 1865, caustically adding that Proudhon entangles himself in ‘all sorts of fantasies, obscure even to himself, about true bourgeois property’.
This dispute aside, Marx clearly did think that the appropriation of the surplus value created by workers—the basis of profit—was exploitative. In this respect, he differs from Peterson, who argues that 1) the profits accrued by capitalists frequently represent ‘fair’ remuneration for their labour, 2) that profit is necessary to furnish capitalists with ‘security’, 3) that profits permit enterprises to expand, and 4) that the profit motive helps safeguard against the wastage of labour.
We’ll respond to these points summarily:
1. Peterson here reprises an old trope of classical political economy—the idea that the capitalist’s ‘profits of stock’ are tantamount to what Smith characterizes as wages for ‘the labour of inspection and direction’. Yet what Marx shows, through a careful dissection of Smith’s work in Theories of Surplus-Value, is that Smith ‘wrongly presents capital and land as independent sources of exchange-value’ and that to render his theories internally consistent one must acknowledge that ‘labour is...the only source of value, and the price of wages and the price of profits arise out of this source of value’. This does not mean, of course, that Steve Jobs didn’t add value to Apple—in so far as he also worked for the company, he was responsible for the creation of value (and a lot it, we can presume). But the bulk of his wealth, coming as it did from his ‘profits of stock’, was not a wage, nor remuneration for ‘his’ labour.
2. Profits may, indeed, furnish capitalists with ‘security’. But in so far as they exist on account of the extraction of surplus value, they also deprive workers of it. Moreover, given the inextricability of capitalism from the boom and bust cycle—which occurs (to offer a highly simplified formulation) due to the tendency of capitalism to proportionally skew towards investment in automation, before having to reboot itself—even capitalists may not be as secure as they’d like.
3. It’s true that, by profit-taking, capitalists are able to make further outlays in productive investment, thereby growing their capital. But productive investment itself is by no means dependent on the enrichment of the capitalist through the exploitation of surplus value. In his polemic against Lassalle in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, for instance, Marx states that even under socialism, workers will never receive the ‘undiminished’ proceeds of their labour due to the need for reinvestment in, among other things, ‘the general costs of administration not belonging to production’.
4. The term ‘waste’ is underspecified by Peterson. It is often assumed, for instance, that public-sector employees are ‘overpaid’ due to the fact they (typically) receive a higher proportion of the value they create than private-sector ones (and notwithstanding the difficulties that often arise in calculating this). But such a judgement already belies the axiomatic assumption that capitalists are entitled to surplus value. To say this, however, is to not go far enough in the critique of value as a regulative norm. Public-sector employees exist partly due to the fact that the capitalist category of ‘productive labour’ does not suffice to meet the need of capitalism, let alone society (nations where medicare is private, for instance, tend to pay more for it—a cost capitalists must also bear, in the form of the provision of private insurance). Such contradictions are observable everywhere. It is likely more socioeconomically contributive, for instance, for an unemployed PhD graduate to stay at home and write Wikipedia articles than for him/her to flip burgers at McDonald’s, pricing themselves below the cost of automation. Due to the diktats of capital, though, they cannot do this—and thus must ‘waste’ their labour power on a job that offers less to society!
The term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, as mentioned before, does not appear in The Communist Manifesto. Nor was it applied by Marx, as Peterson suggests, to refer to a state of ‘absurd centralization’. But to respond to Peterson’s main point here, there are good reasons to think that communism, if implemented on a global scale, could be more productive than capitalism. Faced—as they regularly are—with an onslaught of automative breakthroughs that in turn render large swaths of workers redundant, capitalists normally follow a two-pronged strategy, phasing out a significant proportion of their workforce while nevertheless retaining more workers than would be strictly necessary from the standpoint of production in order to buoy their derivation of profit from surplus value (a move that depresses productive efficiency in so far as it forestalls the implementation of automation). Eventually, this results in a situation where demand is spavined vis-à-vis supply, due to the fact workers who are unemployed (or underemployed) cannot buy up the supply of goods on the market. This leads to recession—or depression25. At this point, one of two things transpires: (1) the government steps in, redistributing wealth in order to subsidize demand, or (2) a massive ‘cleaning’ takes place through which excess supply—and with it, capital—is destroyed (war can also be efficient for this end). In practice, in the twentieth century, both of these remedies have been necessary, with the ballooning of the size of state apparatuses owing largely to the need to offset the diminution in demand caused by developments in automation.
This model is, of course, highly skeletal, and subject to variation depending on the context in which it manifests. From 1979-2007, for instance, the US economy managed to stave off extensive destruction of capital and/or wealth redistribution by extending consumer credit in its stead—consumer credit that was in turn used to buy goods manufactured in the Third World, where labour costs were below the costs of domestic automation. That this strategy eventually backfired demonstrates the inextricability of the boom and bust cycle to capitalism. And therein lies the chief economic advantage of communism. For by emancipating itself from the injunction to produce surplus value—by, in other words, making the workers the direct beneficiaries of the productive gains of industry—communism would be able to avert the diminution of demand, thereby putting an end to man-made recessionary cycles (as well as abolishing the current disincentive to deploy automation—namely, the fact that profit is dependent on surplus value extraction).
Of course, all of this raises the question of logistics—how would such a society be organized? While this is too complex a question to get into here, we should note that Peterson’s reference to the ‘impossible computation’ required to complete this task is provocative, given that many Marxists—Nick Srnicek, for instance—have suggested that computation has now obtained a level of sophistication that would permit it to do just that. This is not a wholly new idea: from 1971-73, to cite a prominent example, Chilean Marxist president Salvador Allende oversaw ‘Project Cybersyn’, which sought to create a computational decision support system to aid in the planning of a socialist economy (before being overthrown in a bloody US-backed military coup).
It’s true, certainly, that Marx and Engels acknowledged the huge productive strides that had been made under capitalism—and it’s for this reason that their vision of ‘scientific socialism’ amounts to a synthesis, not determinate negation, of its structure. Peterson, however, enmeshes himself here in contradiction. For if capitalism is already creating ‘material security’ for ‘everyone’ at a rate that is ‘unparalleled in human history’ this is not due to capitalism per se but rather due to the pressure exerted by the masses to redistribute its productive gains. Paradoxically, these efforts have allowed capitalism to—in altered form—survive, by tempering its tendency towards iniquitous distribution, thereby staving off the threat of revolution.
Today, however—in a world where corporate profits are easily stashed in Bahamian text shelters, and labour costs are undercut by hiring up Third-World workers to sew up soccer balls behind barbed wire—capitalism appears to be on the cusp of abolishing its own conditions of existence. Thus the consequences of its unfettered application become apparent: ceaseless recession, and an increasing disparity between rich and poor. Should this drift persist, the question of whether reform or revolution will be needed to remedy it will become purely academic. For the structural change required to make capitalism viable—as we enter an age of self-driving taxis and robotized caregivers—will, even if pursued under the watchword of reform, need to be revolutionary in its redistributive aspiration.
We leave you with one final thought. Peterson, after describing the enrichment that’s supposedly transpired due to capitalism, states that, in light of this, it makes sense to ‘let the system play itself out’. Though he adds a caveat: unless, that is, ‘you’re assuming that the evil capitalists are just gonna take all of the flat screen televisions and put them in one big room’. Today, the world’s 26 richest people control the same amount of wealth as the 3.8 billion poorest26. That’s half the world’s population. Spare me the maths: just how many flat screen televisions could that buy?