In a recent IEA Insider piece, our Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz examined and critiqued the Marxist concept of ‘false consciousness’. In short ‘false consciousness’ is a term given to an explanation of why workers do not begin socialist revolutions despite obtaining the necessary material conditions.
Marx’s initial example was the English working class, whose lack of revolutionary fervour he blamed on a successful scheme cooked up by the British ruling class to stoke division between them and Irish immigrant workers. Long since Marx died in 1883, his devotees across the world have adapted this false consciousness thesis to a wide array of cases in which the working class weren’t too keen on their ideas.
Kristian’s piece critiques a modern argument, based on false consciousness, made by modern Marxist thinkers who contend that many of the cultural concerns (including opposition to immigration, gender politics, and general ‘wokeism’) are actually rooted in deeper economic anxieties. He argues:
“The idea that ‘the ruling class’ has the ability to manufacture culture wars in order to distract and divide the proletariat is risible. Culture warriors, whether they are in the right or in the wrong, are not engaged in culture wars because they think winning them will make them rich (...) What really happens is simply that people have cultural as well as economic preferences, and they sometimes form alliances on the basis of the former rather than the latter.”
For the most part, I agree with him. False consciousness advocates are usually engaging in motivated reasoning. They believe that workers of all backgrounds are the victims of systematic oppression by the capitalist ruling class and their political allies. They believe that workers have more in common than that which divides them and if they were able to successfully seize the means of production and bring about Marxist utopia, those differences would wither away. I have some sympathy with this, given that I believe people of all backgrounds suffer systematic oppression by governments and their cronies and wish they’d turn their ire on the state rather than businessmen, landlords, and immigrants.
But unlike the Marxists, I’m under no illusions that most people genuinely don’t see it that way. Where I disagree with Kristian is that I think economic and social concerns are more difficult to separate and that therefore, they are more closely linked than his analysis suggests.
The Great Realignment
As the IEA’s Steve Davies has been explaining for almost a decade, most of the liberal democratic West is in the process of a political realignment. Traditional post-war coalitions based on aligning economic interests are giving way to coalitions based on cultural values. This is why the Conservative Party went from winning a Parliamentary majority in 2015 based on winning traditional middle class and rural swing seats to a landslide in 2019 marked by victories in Brexit-voting Labour Party homelands. It’s why the Republican Party in the US went from being dominated by country club tax cutters like Mitt Romney to being a right-wing populist party driven by working-class grievance politics led by Donald Trump.
You might ask, then, doesn’t this support Kristian’s argument? Don’t people just care about culture wars now instead of taxes and spending? To some extent, yes. But this realignment is underlined by some distinctly economic themes.
Firstly, the loss of relative economic status in an era of globalisation seems to have propelled traditional working class communities towards the right. A 2017 paper by Noam Gidron and Peter A. Hall in the British Journal of Sociology analysed data across 20 developed democracies and found that lower subjective social status among working class voters without a university degree correlated with support for right-wing populist parties. Part of that decline, they argue, is the fall in secure low-wage manufacturing jobs and the rise in knowledge-economy jobs concentrated in urban centres.
A 2019 Institute for Labor [sic] Economics paper which found that exposure to robots and automation across 14 Western European countries led to lower perception of economic conditions, lower satisfaction with democratic institutions, and, ultimately, greater support for right-wing populism. A 2020 American Economic Review article found a clear shift towards the Republican Party between 2000 and 2016 in areas with the highest exposure to trade with China. Another 2019 American Economic Review article concluded that areas which experienced the deepest cuts during the coalition government registered stronger support for leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum. The reliance of those areas on government funding is in large part a product of general economic decline.
None of these case studies overwhelmingly affirms an interpretation of realignment that is purely economic; plenty of literature concludes the opposite. But they do show the influence of economics in the growth of populism and culture-focused political cleavages.
Another less-studied economic force that may also play a role here is the increasingly zero-sum backdrop against which politics has taken place across the West since the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008. Since the GFC, most of western and central Europe has experienced weak economic growth and greater state intervention in the economy through both redistribution and regulation. The theory goes that if there is less economic growth – and therefore, fewer resources to go around than otherwise expected – and the government does more to manage and distribute those resources, there is likely to be more political resentment between groups competing over them.
As noted above, so many of the findings linking economic factors to cultural backlash relate to a loss of relative status, an inherently zero-sum concept. A 2016 paper published by the Harvard Kennedy School found a link between economic stagnation and the intensity of feelings of comparative status loss, fueling the rise of right-wing populism in the United Kingdom and the United States.
A 2021 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that negative opinions towards immigrants was linked to lower support for redistributionary policies. In his 2019 paper examining the effect of austerity on support for Brexit, Thiemo Fetzer found a clear correlation between the level of local governments’ budgets and hostile attitudes towards immigration in those areas.
There are, of course, some cultural issues which have almost nothing to do with economics. It’s hard to see much of an economic angle to the rising anti-trans movement or ‘wokeness’ in prominent cultural institutions like universities and the creative arts, for example.
Likewise, the question about hot-button culture war issues is not ‘would better economic conditions put them to bed?’ but ‘would better economic conditions reduce their salience and intensity to some degree?’. I think the answer based on evidence about their root causes is yes.
False Consciousness Meets Public Choice
Any liberal worth their salt will agree with Kristian’s rebuke of the Marxist false consciousness doctrine but that should not tempt us into having too rosy an outlook on the rationality of public opinion. As George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan has argued in his The Myth of the Rational Voter, voters are irrational in political affairs. The reasons, Caplan believes, are:
When people are voting, the costs of their prejudices and lack of knowledge are virtually zero. In the real world, these have costs.
Each person’s vote is worth almost nothing to the outcome of an election, giving people little incentive to improve their understanding of the issues and ways of evaluating them.
To simplify, think of the difference between buying a carton of milk and voting. If I am the person buying milk, I have a very strong incentive to develop knowledge and heuristics about the purchase and consumption of milk. I know that I have a preference for whole milk, so I’ll buy the blue labelled stuff instead of the green or red (in the UK). Before each purchase, I’ll have a pretty good idea of how much milk I plan to consume in the near future, so I’ll base the amount I chose to buy on that knowledge. If I get it right, I benefit. If I get it wrong, I will lose out.
But when it comes to voting, I have none of the same incentives. Whether I base my vote on logically sound, evidence-based thought or not, it still counts the same and it’s unlikely anything will happen to me that wouldn’t have if I’d voted differently or not at all. Even if that wasn’t true, the nature of politics is coercive, redistributive, and zero-sum, meaning that I can vote in a way that delivers benefits to myself at other people’s expense.
Given the incentive structure of voting and the endless complexity of politics, should we really expect people to have political preferences that are based on solid foundations? Of course not.
The Myth of the Rational Voter persuasively argues that four central biases are widespread among the voting public: anti-market bias, anti-foreigner bias, make-work bias (equating prosperity with employment rather than production), and pessimism bias. Kristian certainly would not dispute Caplan’s central thesis. But what it shows is that in rejecting the Marxist false consciousness doctrine, we should not risk overlooking the systematic factors influencing political opinion and decision making.
Neither of these points should be interpreted as to defend a materialistic theory of the culture wars, nor to defend the Marxist conception of false consciousness. My hope is that they will encourage liberals not to ignore economics or democratic irrationality when they think about culture; they are not as distinct as they may first appear.
Fascinating. I think you are missing influences such as 24hr news and the Brexit vote. And the long four year wait to elect a competent leader but all we get are incompetent governments! People are not educated in political or cultural thinking so much as collective opinion as a means to an end.
I personally believe that, Marx had he been alive today would have different view points to consider. Like a more democratic vote driven society. Or Keynes may have been much different in his philosophy with the advent of digital banking giving rise for the first time in our history a way to track and trace money.
I sometimes think that, in s race to reanalyse old doctrines and old set in time masterclasses are a failure of forward thinking, in using our brains to think problems through afresh. It seems too easy to try and fit old theory’s of a square peg into today’s round hole! Keep regurgitating old views as still relevant can be like a brake on thinking, using them as a rule to think by when we have a clearer view now of how things must or should be.
I get worried by not taking all the obvious and making a clear decision. Rather than trying to self check out homework against old masters rules. Rules times and society has changed, culture and economics have changed.
For example again digital banking and Brexit. The former economic and the later cultural. But both are interlinked in both. Reasons for Brexit were economic as well as cultural and internet banking is great for the banks to earn off lending the money if the people snd the wealthy, but not used for their richer than most buddies in the city to keep a track on their individual economies for our benefit. No it’s used for their benefit not the other way around.
Brexit thought us at last that our votes count! When given a chance the 49% has to adhere to the will of the 51%. The same happened in the Scottish independence vote. Which are different votes to our 4-5 yearly voted for people we don’t know based on party lines on a vote of borders of constituencies in small battlegrounds in a hope we get a good leader from an offering of very little difference. This is not democracy. A free vote that counts is democracy! And now we’ve had a taste of it. Our general elections are rigged. We all see it. Once elected they are gagged by party whips. It’s a mess. We don’t need them. We don’t need the two houses. We need properly elected free votes that count for us with a vote that counts like in Brexit. We vote for what we want rather than what’s put up. The cream should rise not the puppets.
Look. We are desperate for a real leader to get behind. One that knows what we want. And in the face of failure we can only pick what else is on offer. It’s the system that failing us. In a modern world we vote here in our phones! If it’s good enough for strictly or I’m a celebrity get me out of here it’s good enough to make decisions.
We are all underfunded and underpaid. Because our ancient system lets those with money hold onto it if they want! This fact was a result of a not knowing of who had the money where and when. But now we can track and trace every penny!
But we are still using the old system yet we have had this ability of digital banking for decades.
Our government refuse to see its potential because of tradition. And because they are inept.
Money is supposed to be an exchange of work. In the now. It’s meant to be a fair exchange. To balance out each month so we can all be rewarded for our efforts and enjoy those fruits.
But, money is neither a fair exchange nor is it actually fully exchanged!
I’m all for earning more if you are brilliant, clever or skilled. Or needed or work in danger. Do pay them more! I’m not a communist!
But unless they spend that money back each month how, do you think money can be returned to those who don’t have it or need ti have it to live? How do we get the ones either too much to return it to the pot ? Taxation?? Well that doesn’t work. No taxes are triggered from NOT SPENDING MONEY! None!!
I’m not talking about wealth. That’s what you get when you spend money, assets goods etc.
No wealth can be fold later. Thats the right you’ve earned. But holding money to random, to loan back is not freely spent money! That’s what’s wrong.
If all the pounds sterling out there in the aether was spent just once in one while year. It should bring in £3.8 trillion pounds in vat alone. So make money move. Make it a hot potato. Not allow it to be held longer than a month. As that’s what’s making us devoid of it. That’s what’s holding us back. That’s what’s keeping us underfunded and underpaid. That’s what’s making us poor and in debt. It’s a cash flow problem if biblical proportions.