The revival of the Marxist “False Consciousness” thesis, and its shortcomings

The idea was not especially plausible in Marx’s day, and it is even less plausible today

Socialists have revived the Marxist idea that the workers are suffering from a “False Consciousness”. The idea was not especially plausible in Marx’s day, and it is even less plausible today.

Introduction: the historic origin of the "False Consciousness" thesis

Karl Marx never spelled out how exactly we know when the time is ripe for the socialist revolution. It’s not like, say, the theory of the optimum currency area, where there is a set checklist of predefined criteria that are either met, or not. But he certainly thought that Britain was getting there in 1870:

“England, the metropolis of capital, […] is at present the most important country for the workers’ revolution, […] the only country in which the material conditions for this revolution have reached a certain degree of maturity. It is consequently the most important object […] to hasten the social revolution in England.”

So why did the revolution not happen? According to Marx, the British ruling class had discovered a neat trick to avert it, and thus give itself another lease of life. They had managed to manufacture an artificial divide within the proletariat, and an artificial conflict along that divide. That conflict now prevented the workers from realising their shared class interest, and join forces against the ruling class. Here’s how:

“[T]he English bourgeoisie has […] important interests in the present economy of Ireland. […] Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labour market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class. […]

Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.. […]

This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.” [Emphasis in the original]

In this theory, the English worker and the Irish worker are objectively part of the same team. But they do not realise it. They wrongly blame each other for their economic problems, which are really caused by the capitalist ruling class. And so they fight each other, while the capitalist ruling class – which created this divide in the first place, and which constantly fans its flames – watches and cackles.

This was not a major part of Marx’s writing. He did not even bother to name the pattern he thought he had discovered. (Future Marxists would call it “False Consciousness”, or more recently, “misdirected anger”.) Nor did he think it was difficult to solve, or that it would last long. (Irish independence would be enough to sort it out, and then socialist revolution ahoy.) The idea does, however, play a massive role for today’s re-energised socialist Left. 

The modern revival of the "False Consciousness" thesis

You can see why. 155 years have passed since Marx wrote the above words, and the revolution still hasn’t happened. Sure, there has been a major socialist revival since 2015. But this “Millennial Socialism” remains a movement of urban hipsters, not factory workers. It dominates sections of academia and social media, but it fails to have much of an impact beyond that. 

In earlier decades, Marxists were able to blame apathy, or claim that the proles had been tricked into being content with their lot. (Itself a version of False Consciousness.) Nobody could say that today. Today, Britain is a much more politicised, and a much angrier country than it was, say, ten years ago. People are not apathetic, and they are certainly not happy with the status quo. But all this anger does not seem to specifically help the socialist cause. 

In order to explain this, modern-day socialists have revived Marx’s above-quoted thesis, and given it much greater weight than Marx himself ever did. Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar, one of the media stars of Millennial Socialism, wrote a whole book on it. She starts, inevitably, with The Communist Manifesto, which, needless to say, she thinks was correct on the substance. But:

“Marx and Engels […] got one massive thing wrong. They thought that, eventually, the proletariat would […] overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize the means of production for themselves. […]

This […] did not happen. […] [R]evolution feels further away than ever. Why? […] [B]ecause wealth concentrations warp politics and stunt our ability to shape society for the better. Because if you can’t see the world clearly, you can’t change it. […] [T]he media machine functions to pump out trivial outrage bait; […] stoking of anti-immigration moral panics […] directs working-class anger horizontally and downwards rather than up at elites. Media and politics work on […] misdirection.”

In Marx’s days, the capitalist class redirected the anger of English workers against Irish workers. Today,

“we have been encouraged to focus our anger on a new set of villains. […] Our villains are asylum seekers […]. They’re […] ‘lefty lawyers’ […]. They’re Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain or Extinction Rebellion […]. Transgender people, […] ‘woke students’, ‘woke warriors’ and the ‘out of touch metropolitan elite’. […] You can throw in Black Lives Matter too.”

Sarkar is far from alone in this. Zarah Sultana, the likely future co-leader of Your Party (or whatever it will eventually be called), has coined a slogan which she seems to extreme proud of, because she repeats it at every opportunity she can get:

“The enemy of the working class travels by private jet, not migrant dinghy.”

Elsewhere, she said that

“migrants, Muslims, and trans people, have been blamed for people not being able to access council housing, not being able to get NHS appointments”.

Jeremy Corbyn, undoubtedly the future leader of Your Party, wrote in the socialist magazines Tribune and Jacobin:

“The great dividers want you to believe that the problems in our society are caused by minorities. They’re not. They’re caused by a rigged economic system that protects the interests of the super-rich.”

He also tweeted:

“I am sickened by the relentless demonisation of refugees. No refugee underfunded a school. No refugee closed a hospital. No refugee took away support from the sick and disabled.”

Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, recently said on Channel 4:

“The whole framing of the migrant crisis is racist and fascist. The answer is not to blame the migrants. The answer is not to point at the small boats. The answer is to point at the private jets, the private yachts, and to multi-millionaires and billionaires”.  

I could quite easily dig out hundreds of examples of similar quotes, but I think the marginal value has already dropped to zero. The idea is that people’s anger about their economic conditions, which should be directed at the capitalist ruling class, is being purposefully redirected at various minority groups, especially asylum seekers. If people understood the true cause of their economic woes, they would team up and revolt, and the revolution would finally arrive, if with a little delay of 155 years.

It is an extremely implausible idea for a number of reasons.

Photo by Hennie Stander on Unsplash

The problem with the modern “False Consciousness” thesis: cultural anger ≠ economic anger

Let's go back to Marx's original example for a moment. I don't know enough about the debates of the 1860s and 1870s, but I have no reason to doubt Marx’s claim that English workers would have seen Irish workers as economic competitors in the labour market, rather than proletarian brothers and comrades. One does, however, not need any conspiracy theories about an elite-manufactured false consciousness to explain that fact. That would simply be an example of the lump-of-labour fallacy, the false notion that there is a fixed number of jobs to go around, and that new entrants to the labour market “steal” jobs from workers who are already there. Marx could not have anticipated this, but there are plenty of 20th-century examples of policies that were inspired by the same lump-of-labour fallacy. Most of the time, they did not need an enemy group. Rather, the idea was that you can redistribute labour by incentivising early retirement, or reductions in the average workweek. 

But this article is not about the 1870s. It is about the 2020s. What about today? 

I have, on an on-and-off basis, been writing about immigration policy for about ten years now (see e.g. here, here, here, here, and here). The biggest change I have observed over this period is that, unlike in the 2010s, today’s immigration debate has next to nothing to do with economics. It is only a mild exaggeration to say that nobody cares about the economic effects of immigration anymore. I wrote a longer paper on immigration in 2019, in which I concentrated mostly on economic issues: the impact on employment, wages, skills, public finances, housing, healthcare etc. I would not bother writing such a paper today, because I know that nobody would read it. Today's immigration debates are almost exclusively about matters of public safety, crime, cultural attitudes, integration and social cohesion.

I won't go into who's right and who's wrong in these debates. I'm just summarising what they are about – and that's not economics. People who are incensed about small boats crossings, for example, believe that if these crossings were stopped, and if the people who are currently here illegally were deported, Britain would be a safer and a socio-culturally more cohesive place. They are not saying that Britain would be a richer place, let alone that they would personally be richer in such a scenario. You cannot "redirect" their anger at billionaires and capitalists, because it is a different kind of anger.  

Other culture war episodes have even less to do with economics. Take the controversies around transgenderism, England flags, EDI, unconscious bias training, "wokified" movies, Harry and Meghan, and all the rest of it. These are very clearly about matters of culture and identity, not economics. Nobody thinks that they would be richer if biological males who identify as female were barred from using women's changing rooms, or if public buildings substituted England flags for rainbow flags. There is not a single person in the country who thinks that this would shorten NHS waiting lists, improve school outcomes, ease traffic congestion, reduce the student loan burden, or cut rents or grocery or utility bills. Lots of people, on both sides of these divides, care passionately about those issues, but not for economic reasons. 

If you steal a beer from my fridge, and tell me that it was my neighbour who stole it, then yes, you can misdirect my anger over the missing beer towards the wrong target. If you are a convincing liar with a good story, you can trick me into blaming my neighbour when I should really be blaming you. What you cannot do is steal a beer from my fridge, and then tell me that rather than being angry at you, I should really be angry at trans people, or asylum seekers, or progressive filmmakers, or woke councillors removing England flags. Maybe I have strong views about those issues, maybe I don't, but even if I do, they are not my issue in that specific situation. Right now, I just want my beer! 

Anger is not a directionless force, which you can redirect at will, like the water jet from a hosepipe. You cannot convert economic anger into cultural anger, or vice versa.

Today’s socialists have it easy

As mentioned, I don’t think Marx had a strong argument for his “False Consciousness” thesis even in 1870. But I can understand the frustration he must have felt. Imagine you are Karl Marx in 1870. You are a relatively obscure scribbler. You are a big figure in your narrow circles, sure, but most workers have never heard of you, and are not going to within your lifetime. And then you read an article in a right-wing publication with a big reach, telling English workers that Irish workers are undercutting their wages. Of course you feel like you are hopelessly outgunned. Not only do your imagined class enemies have a much bigger reach than you. They also have a much easier job. People already think in national categories. They know perfectly well what “English” and “Irish” means. But they are much less familiar with thinking in economic categories.

This is very different today. Sure, the average Joe may not be fully au fait with the concepts of historical materialism or surplus value extraction. But telling people that the rich, or “the elites”, are to blame for their problems, is not a difficult message to get across at all. There is nothing remotely counterintuitive, or difficult to explain, about it. Bashing billionaires, landlords and/or corporations is an incredibly easy job, because all you have to do is bash groups that are already widely despised. Being a socialist today is a walk in the park. You have the enviable job of promoting a message that is simple, intuitively appealing, and popular. If you have such an easy job, and you still cannot make a success of it, then frankly, you only have yourself to blame.

As for platform size, the most prominent socialists today have infinite airtime, armies of social media followers, prestigious book deals, and big crowds to address wherever they go. If you are a socialist today, the only “adversity” you will ever face is that the Daily Mail will call you a “Champagne Socialist” every now and then.

Marx was an outsider. He could be forgiven for thinking that he had “the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, […] all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes” against him. He could be forgiven for thinking that there was a “superstructure” which existed to justify the material base of society (i.e. capitalism). Today’s superstructure, though, exists mainly to trash the base.

Conclusion

Marx’s False Consciousness thesis was not especially convincing when he formulated it (without calling it that) in 1870. But in his day, given the circumstances, we can at least see where he got the idea from.

The 2020s, though, are comically unsuitable for a revival of that thesis. 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. They are not blaming minority groups for their economic problems. 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.

The problem that today’s socialists have is that the people who are sympathetic to socialist economic policies are often on opposite sides of the culture war. This was already their big problem in the late 2010s, when Brexit divided their would-be coalition, and it may well be an even bigger problem for them today. Reviving zombie ideas from the 19^th century is not going to solve that problem for them.

But then again: if socialists stopped reviving zombie ideas from the 19^th century, there would be nothing left of them.