Did Jordan Peterson Forget What Marx Wrote in the Communist Manifesto?

Judging by the Marx passages in his new book, Peterson not only hasn't read a word of Marx since he read the Manifesto to prepare for his debate with Žižek in 2019 but he's forgotten much of that.

In 2019, Jordan Peterson debated Slovenian Marxist intellectual Slavoj Žižek in Toronto. In his opening statement, he said:

Alright, so how did I prepare for this? Um, I went, I familiarized myself to the degree that it was possible with Slavoj Zizek’s work, and that wasn't that possible because he has a lot of work and he's a very original thinker and this debate was put together in relatively short order and what I did instead was returned to what I regarded as the original cause of all the trouble, let's say, which was the Communist Manifesto. And what I attempted to do, because that's Marx and we're here to talk about Marxism, let's say, and what I tried to do was read it, and to read something you don't just all of the words and follow the meaning but you take apart the sentences and you ask yourself at this level of phrase and at the level of sentence and that the level of paragraph is this true? Are there counterarguments that can be put forward that are credible? Is this solid thinking? And I have to tell you ,and I'm not trying to be flippant here, that I have rarely read a tract, and I read it when I was 18. It was a long time ago, right? That's 40 years ago. But I've rarely read a tract that made as many errors per sentence, conceptual errors per sentence... [My emphasis]

If you want a nice crisp summary of the errors Peterson claims to have detected, and straightforward Marxist replies to them, you can read the article Benjamin Studebaker wrote about this at the time for Current Affairs.¹ What I want to focus on here is the part I’ve put in bold.

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Just based on its word count, this website helpfully estimates that it would take the average reader about forty-eight minutes to get through the Manifesto. And, just as a work of literature, those pages damn near turn themselves.

And, after years of Marxism being one of his primary rhetorical punching bags, right up there with postmodernism and pronouns, Peterson only made time to reread the Manifesto in 2019. It’s a safe bet that he wasn’t, like, perusing Capital Vol. 3 during the 40 years he spent between Manifesto readings.

That’s pretty bad.

But what’s worse is that, judging by the Marxism passages in his already-bestselling new book We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine, Peterson doesn’t even remember what Marx says about capitalism in the Manifesto.

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To be fair, two of Marx’s other writings show up in the endnotes of the book. He cites Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843) and his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). So, maybe Peterson actually read some more Marx?

He did not.

Having read through every mention of Marx in We Who Wrestle with God, I’m absolutely certain that Peterson didn’t so much as glance at the original texts. He only quotes one phrase from each, and both are extremely well-known phrases. In neither case does he show the slightest sign of knowing what goes on in the rest of the paragraph from which the phrase is pulled. Maybe the research assistant who looked up the citations for the endnotes read the full paragraphs.

From the Contribution to the Critique…, Peterson pulls the phrase “opiate of the masses.” He cites it, in passing, as one example among others of things atheists say to trash religion:

Everything has its shadow side. Just as religious belief, in its naive forms, can in fact serve those in power as the “opiate of the masses”; can provide as per the Freudian view, an immature and unsophisticated defense against death anxiety, can more generally serve and maintain and justify a childish dependency—so, too, can the skepticism of an “enlightened” moral relativism enable, camouflage, and even delight in the rejection of all responsibility, and far worse.

The way he casually assumes here that skepticism about religion marches together with skepticism or relativism about morality is painful in its own way.² But that’s a subject for another time.

Sticking with Marx, here’s the full passage in which that phrase appears:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. 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. [Or, sure, “the opiate of the masses,” depending on which translation you’re looking at!]

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

Marx is certainly a passionate atheist, and that comes through here. But the way Peterson treats the only four words he knows from this passage is meant to suggest that, unlike Peterson himself, who recognizes that the same phenomenon can have its good side and its “shadow side,” Marx thinks that religion is purely bad. Reading the two sentences before and that phrase and the two sentences after it is enough to destroy that impression.

And Peterson’s citation to Critique of the Gotha Program manages to be even worse.

He writes:

The same idea of a living spirit (albeit in its pathological or Pharisee-like form) makes itself present in the works of the greatest commentator on the catastrophes of the Soviet era, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He illustrated precisely how the evils perpetuated by the authorities in that dread communist system were not an aberration from the hypothetically pure and moral spirit of Marxism but a direct consequence of the poison implicit in that terrible doctrine of accusation and Cain-like envy. “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need,” indeed.

It’s several dozen more pages after that until any word like “Soviet” or “Communist” appears in the book, so Peterson apparently thinks that his point in the lines I’ve quoted is too obvious to require elaboration.

I’m going to go ahead and try to elaborate it anyway, though, because the scale of his misunderstanding really is staggering. He’s saying that all the repression and state violence in Stalin’s Russia, the purges and gulags and secret police terror documented by Solzhenitsyn, stem from the “Cain-like envy” embodied in Marx’s use of the phrase “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need” in the Critique of the Gotha Program. The only way I can even start to make sense of this claim is that Peterson thinks Marx is advocating that an all-powerful state bureaucracy take away from each citizen the excess they aren’t deemed to truly “need” and then force them, perhaps in labor camps, to render work according to their “ability.”

But what’s the original context?

It’s so easy to look up. It’s a famous passage because it’s one of vanishingly few places in which Marx speculates about how a post-capitalist economy might work, both initially and over time.

Once workers have collectively taken over the means of production, how should they divide the products of their labor among themselves? The obvious thing would be to distribute rewards according to the “duration or intensity” of labor, but Marx sees problems here. Some people can work harder or faster than others. We aren’t all born with the same talents. Should we really treat “unequal individual endowment” and hence unequal “productive capacity” as a “natural privilege”? And, after all, some workers need more income than others (for example because some have children and some don’t).

Marx ends up granting that in the initial phase of a communist society, when that society still bears the “birthmarks” of the capitalism from which it emerges, there probably won’t be any way around having to tie consumption to labor contributions. It’s a bit unfair, but there’s nothing to be done about that—we won’t be able to keep the economic machine humming along without it. (“Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”) But he holds out hope that “after the productive forces have also increased” along with a corresponding increase in “the all-around development of the individual,” and hence “the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly,” this will no longer be necessary. “[O]nly then,” he writes, can “society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

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The idea seems to be that, first, technology will continue to develop, meaning that less and less tedious work, of the kind that people need to be heavily incentivized to do, will still need to be done by humans, and that little can be spread around evenly under egalitarian socialist conditions. At the same time, as capitalism recedes into the historical rearview mirror, people will be less motivated by the habits of mind that come from a society where we’re all fighting each other for scraps. Eventually, what little work still needs to be done by humans can get done as a byproduct of everyone pursuing whatever projects they’re passionate about. To reframe the core insight in terms of technological developments that postdate his death, if most of the work can be done by machines, then with any luck enough people’s passion will be computer engineering that we won’t need to link work and consumption at all, and there will be so much material abundance that everyone can just take what they need.

There are all sorts of ways to object to this prediction as far too rosy and utopian. And fair enough. Maybe we’ll never get all the way there (although I’d argue that it’s at least useful as a regulative ideal, and that the closer we can come, the better). But Marx’s point in context could not possibly be farther from what Peterson suggests.

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And, as bad as those two examples both are, the only Marx passage in We Who Wrestle with God I haven’t discussed yet is much worse. This is, in fact, the one that inspired me to look up the rest of what Peterson says about Marx in the book when I saw Matt McManus post a picture of this passage on Twitter.

Peterson writes:

Karl Marx is Cain to the core, construing society as nothing but a battleground of power; assuming at any qualitative judgment regarding the value of comparative sacrifice is a game rigged by the victors. He failed completely (and purposefully) to separate wheat from chaff in the totalizing condemnation of the “bourgeoise,” regarding them in consequence of their success as only parasites, predators, and thieves, and give no credit whatsoever for the wealth and stable societal structure they produced as a result of their conscientious, diligent, honest, and productive labor.

….and….

…I mean…

…come on.

In the other two passages, Peterson is making some very bad assumptions about the meanings of famous phrases from Marx because he hasn’t read the original sentences and paragraphs. That’s bad. He should have taken a look at the original sources.

But this is so much worse. First, because it betrays such a fundamental misunderstanding of Marx’s historical materialism. One of the crucial differences between Marxism and a lot of earlier forms of socialist thought is that Marx doesn’t see capitalism as an avoidable historical mistake but as a necessary phase of historical development. Marx’s basic picture of history is that the legal and political “superstructure” of any given society is downstream of its “mode of production,” i.e. the way it organizes its economic life. These modes of production (like feudalism or capitalism) are themselves downstream of the level of development of the forces of production (the society’s capacity to produce). The “primitive communism” of early hunter-gatherer bands was a grim necessity. There simply wouldn’t be enough food to go around to support a ruling class that wasn’t hunting or gathering. You don’t get class divisions until the agricultural revolution. And capitalism replaces earlier forms of class society precisely because it’s so much better at developing the forces of production. In fact, Marx thought, it’s so good at this that, for the first time in human history, we have the possibility of marrying abundance to egalitarianism if the working class takes over the immensely productive economic machinery created by capitalism. Claiming that Marx gives the bourgeoise “no credit whatsoever” for the abundance their system has created could not be more wrong. Marx was writing at a time of rampant child labor, 16-hour workdays, vicious state repression of working-class organizing, and worse, but not only did he see the possibilities created by all the abundance that was being generated but that was his whole point.

And this brings us to the second reason that this is so much worse than the other two Marx passages in We Who Wrestle with God. It’s frustrating that Peterson hasn’t read any new Marx since 2019, but the Marx he read then should be more than enough to correct this particular misunderstanding. Because the classic place where Marx goes on and on the remarkable achievements of the bourgeoise is the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto, which are full of rhapsodic prose poetry about how that class

has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…

More than a few commentators have pointed out that Marx, the greatest spokesman in history for the expropriation of the property of the capitalist class, is nevertheless the most eloquent writer about that class’s historical achievements. And the real kicker is that, when he last read the Manifesto in 2019, Peterson himself picked up on this theme, even if he was confused about how it fit into Marx’s overall argument.

In his opening statement in the Žižek debate, Peterson said:

One of the strangest parts of the Communist Manifesto was [that] Marx and Engels admit repeatedly…that there has never been a system of production in the history of the world that was as effective at producing material commodities in excess than capitalism. Like, that's extensively documented in the Communist Manifesto, and so if your proposition is, look, we got to get as much material security for everyone as we as possible as fast as we can and capitalism already seems to be doing that at a rate that's unparalleled in human history, wouldn't the logical thing be just to let the damn system play itself out? I mean unless you're assuming that the evil capitalists are just gonna take all of the flat-screen televisions and put them in one big room and not let anyone else have one…

This seems strange to Peterson because (a) he doesn’t get that Marx thinks that once workers and communities have taken over the forces of production, and they can rationally and efficiently plan the economy, the forces will develop even more³, and (b) Peterson is so thoroughly committed to sufficientarianism that he sometimes has trouble remembering that anyone (even Karl Marx!) disagrees with him about that. The sufficientarian thinks that the only genuinely concerning thing about economic inequality is the location of the absolute floor. Only “Cain-like envy” could motivate anyone to care about the size of the gap between the floor and the ceiling. As it happens, a lot of the figures in the very great-books-of-the-western-tradition canon Peterson reveres were extremely concerned about that gap. (See here for some of the highlights from Plato onwards!) And of course Marx was one of them. In Ch. 17 of Capital, for instance, we have Marx warning that even in situations where the stars align just right for one of the best scenarios that can play out under capitalism, whereby the economy is so productive that (a) the percentage of companies’ revenues that have to be spent on workers’ wages would decline while (b) the actual purchasing power of those wages would go up, this isn’t quite the win-win it might appear to be, given that “the abyss between the life situation of the worker and that of the capitalist would keep widening.”

Peterson thinks such a widening abyss isn’t a big deal. All that matters is that some flat-screen TVs trickle down to the masses. That’s a massive philosophical divide. It’s worth exploring! As I wrote five years ago after the Peterson/Žižek showdown, I want to have the sharpest critics of Marxism do their thing, so we can have the best possible version of this debate.

But in order for Peterson to play the role he keeps volunteering for in that debate, he’d have to start doing a lot more reading.

1. I wrote about Slavoj’s own quite different approach in that debate here.

2. You’d think a great-books guy like Peterson would know his Plato.

3. Marx predated both the twentieth century’s theoretical debates about the limits of economic planning and the empirical cautionary tale of Soviet-style planning, of course, so whether socialism will work in the way he assumed it would if we’re lucky to get there at all is a giant question in itself.