The Great Peterson-Zizek Marxism-Capitalism Debate

Before actually watching it, I read two reviews of the recent Toronto debate between Jordan Peterson and Salzov Zizek on Marxism vs. Capitalism, in Quillette and in Maclean’s. From both, I got the clear idea that Peterson had embarrassed himself, revealing that his understanding of Marxism was superficial.

This sounded plausible. What business did Peterson really have debating economic systems? He’s a psychologist. No doubt he has overextended himself.

But then I watched the debate. Granted that it failed as a debate. But this was in no way Peterson’s fault. It was entirely due to Zizek.

Peterson started proceedings by giving an account of ten fallacies he found in The Communist Manifesto.

The commentators had criticized him for sticking to The Communist Manifesto, as if this showed a lack of knowledge. They say that this suggests only a superficial study of Marxism. But I think this is quite wrong. The way to understand anything is to go to the original text, and this is Marx and Engels’ statement of their core message. (Das Kapital is way too abstract and theoretical here.) It seems to me a matter of focus, vital in a debate. Straying further afield in opening a one-hour debate is likely to introduce confusion and red herrings. Just as the most legitimate way to introduce Christianity is to go back to the actual Gospels. If you start instead with Augustine or Aquinas or the Church Fathers, you can quickly sneak in some pretty debatable assertions. They are better reserved if needed to illuminate the core text.

In any case, whatever Marx or other “Marxists” have written elsewhere, if there are indeed ten basic fallacies embedded in The Communist Manifesto, Marxists need to address them.

Zizek did not address this argument. In his response, he simply ignored what Peterson had said—he was, in fact, reading a prepared text. He was failing to engage. Hardly Peterson’s fault.

And what Zizek said had little or anything to do with the topic for the debate. He did not directly address either Marxism, Capitalism, or happiness. Instead, he brought up personal observations seemingly at random, not even building them into a coherent argument.

The term “word salad” fits.

This is a familiar tactic among academics. He read sentence after sentence roughly on the model: “Ocelots are undoubtedly orange. But here we unnecessarily confuse ourselves. The orange of ocelots can be of any colour.”

It is all perfect nonsense, designed only to make you sound as though you have some superior insight in comparison to the common view. Yet at the same time you are careful not to really have made any assertion at all. Not having said anything, you can never be shown to have said anything wrong.

It is all a tiresome academic careerist game that subtracts from rather than adds to the sum of human knowledge. Such academics are purely parasites on society.

Listening to Zizek drone on like this for ten minutes, never saying anything, I puzzled over how Peterson could possibly respond. Trying to “debate” anything from Zizek would be like boxing with a balloon. Take him up on anything, and he could simply respond, “No I did not mean that. I was really saying the opposite.” But if you say he said the opposite, he can give the same response. Failing all else, he could say he meant anything “ironically.”

It is an old and tired game, similar to Calvinball.

I think Peterson did as well as anyone could under the circumstances to try to make the debate meaningful or worthwhile for the audience. He with painful politeness prefaced his next remarks with the suggestion that Zizek’s thoughts were too “complex” to respond to in detail. Many commentators seem to have inanely taken it as an admission that Zizek was outclassing him, and he had no good response.

Yet Peterson also then pointed out, in excruciatingly polite fashion, that what Zizek said seemed to have nothing to do with the topic of the debate. He had listed various things he considered wrong with the world or with most people’s thinking today, in no particular order; but in what way was this a criticism of capitalism? Moreover, since he seemed to have no interest in Marx or any tendency to refer to his ideas, why did he call himself a Marxist?

Which seems to me just about all Peterson could do, short of publicly calling Zizek an academic fraud. Which perhaps he should have done, for everyone’s sake. I’m not sure I could have bitten my tongue so well. That’s probably why Peterson has managed an academic career, and I haven’t.

Since he could not determine, let alone examine, any opinions of Zizek’s, all Peterson could finally do, if he was not to declare Zizek a fraud, was to declare that they did not really seem to disagree on anything. Which is what he then did, making the debate a bust as debate. They lamely agreed on the trite and irrelevant proposition that money did not buy happiness.

To make anything useful out of the debate, it is easier to examine claims made by commentators in the reviews, than to try to distill anything coherent from what Zizek said.

OK. Ben Burgis writes, in Quillette:

“Unlike Žižek, Peterson apparently believes that attempts to carry out a political program inspired by Marx’s writings can only go wrong.”

Burgis does not explain why this should be a criticism of Peterson. That, of course, is why he zeroed in on The Communist Manifesto, the core text, and showed it to be founded on fallacies. Are we obliged to believe that Marxism must be right a priori?

Burgis also objects to Peterson’s equation of postmodernism with “cultural Marxism,” on the grounds that “Marxism is, after all, precisely the sort of ‘grand narrative’ decried by poststructuralist thinkers.” But here he is not raising any insightful objection to Peterson, but ignoring his argument. He is quoting here almost verbatim from Peterson during the debate: Peterson pointed this out, before explaining why he thought the connection nevertheless held. Peterson’s reason for linking the two, he explained, is that postmodernism seems based on the Marxist concept of society being necessarily based on power and exploitation, and on oppression of one class by another. With the “oppressing” class intrinsically morally evil, and the “oppressed” being incapable of doing any wrong.

If this does not come from Marx, where does it come from?

Moreover, why doesn’t the point that postmodernism itself claims to reject all “grand narratives” simply demonstrate that postmodernism is being self-contradictory? In fact, postmodernism seems to me to be just another example, on a grand scale, of the kind of word salad and intellectual scam Zizek was using in the debate. Postmodernism is intrinsically self-contradictory; and this disproves it. It is itself a meta-narrative, and it declares all meta-narratives to be wrong. QED.

Burgis’s objection holds once again only if we start by assuming the desired conclusion, that postmodernism, like Marxism, is necessarily correct, and it is up to external reality, and any dissenting debaters, to fall into line with this truth as and when it seems required.

Which, indeed, expresses the very core of postmodernism in a nutshell: truth is whatever I want to be true. And you must conform to my wishes in this as in all things.

Burgis also makes an argument against Peterson’s equation of Marxism with “equality of outcome.” And, to be fair to Zizek, Zizek also brought this up in the debate. I have heard the same in the past from another Marxist of my acquaintance. No, they insist, Marx was against welfare and a social safety net. Everyone must work hard.

“But what has been less widely appreciated is that Marx was far from an advocate of strict ‘equality of outcome.’ In his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx argued that in the earliest stages of a post-capitalist society, individual workers would have to be compensated unequally for a variety of reasons.”

I’m not sure how this ends up being flattering to Marx or to Marxism. Do we not want a social safety net?

But notice how carefully Burgis has to phrase this: “In the earliest stages.” As Peterson responded to the same point during the debate, this claim simply cannot be reconciled with Marx’s view of the ideal communist society, which does indeed promise equality of outcome: no more social classes, and “from each according to his abilities to each according to their needs.” If not strict equality of income, that means income is equal so long as all human individuals have, in principle, the same needs. Presumably it only means that a family gets more than an individual, and someone who needs a special medicine or medical treatment, say, gets it. In other words, just as Peterson alleges, and just like modern Marxists, Marx is promising equality of outcome. And, just as Peterson alleges, and just like modern Marxists, he intends to do this by treating people unequally in the here and now, “in the earliest stages.”

And, as someone once wryly said, Marxism is here the opiate of the intellectuals: inequality now for some pie-in-the-sky future.

Burgis writes:

“In his opening statement in the debate with Žižek, Peterson said that Marx’s solution to the ills of capitalism was ‘bloody violent revolution.’ That’s not quite right. Marx advocated revolution against the hereditary monarchs who ruled most of Europe when The Communist Manifesto was published. But I know of no passage in his and his collaborator Engels’s voluminous writings in which either man said that socialists would need to resort to a violent seizure of power in an advanced parliamentary democracy where the franchise had been extended to the working class.”

That’s not quite right. Whether Marxism requires violent revolution indeed reflects an ancient debate within Marxism. And perhaps Bernstein and his social democrats are right that it does not. But Peterson was explicitly criticizing The Communist Manifesto, and in The Communist Manifesto, Marx himself, Burgis later reminds us, points to the Paris Commune as his model of communism. And, as a matter of historical fact, the Paris Commune involved a violent revolution against a just-elected parliamentary democracy where the franchise had been extended to the working class. Accordingly, Marx was here indeed literally calling for violent revolution against democratic governments, in the absence of king or emperor.

A barrricade set up by the Paris Commune

Peterson’s description might possibly be wrong if applied to Marx’s thought as a whole. But Peterson made it clear that he was referring to The Communist Manifesto.

And, if Marx contradicted himself or was later ambiguous on this point, what is canonical for “Marxism,” if not the Manifesto? It seems a little cultish, after all, to instead hold every word uttered by some founder figure as received dogma. And unsurprising if this practice results in endless contradictions.

In his opening criticism of The Communist Manifesto, Peterson objected to the call for a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” not merely on the grounds that it is undemocratic, but that it is self-contradictory in practice. If, Peterson pointed out, you simply take the means of production out of the hands of the current proprietors, on the grounds that they are “bourgeois,” and give control to any given other group, on the grounds that they are “proletarians,” how have you changed anything systemic? Have you not just replaced one group of oppressors with another? Without assuming there is something innately evil in the current group, whatever caused them to abuse this power is simply going to equally tempt the new group.

Burgis ignores this argument, and focuses only on insisting that Peterson is wrong to consider a “dictatorship of the proletarian” undemocratic. Not Peterson’s point.

Burgis cites the Paris Commune, again, as an example of how it is all supposed to work. “All elected officials in the Commune could be recalled by their constituents at any time and for any reason.” Hey, what could be more democratic than that?

But, to begin with, the Paris commune itself was not democratically elected, any more than Lenin’s “Soviets” in the October Russian Revolution. The majority of Parisians ignored or boycotted the elections that formed the Commune—they being, of course, illegal. There was already a government in place, newly elected. Only the radical elements voted, inevitably returning a radical result, not one that reflected the popular will.

And, of course, the Commune then energetically suppressed free speech and the free press, shutting down the major newspapers, and held all their deliberations in strict secrecy—making it impossible for any electorate to hold individual members to account.

The supposed right to recall was therefore moot. And there was no process in place to do this anyway. None were recalled during the brief life of the commune. It was only theoretical.

It was indeed a dictatorship, by a small in-group who pretty much simply called themselves “the proletariat.” Had the commune survived, would the draconian measures have persisted? Who knows? But at the same time, whatever residual freedom Parisians felt and exercised under the Commune might equally have had to do with the general chaos of war, and the inability of any government to impose its will.

Regardless, having been formed undemocratically and in defiance of a democratic government, the Commune’s dictatorship of the proletariat is hardly a model of democracy.

 Burgis claims that Peterson mischaracterises Marx, saying the success of capitalism in raising people out of poverty disproves him.

"Why should it, though? One of the reasons Marx thought that the transition from feudalism to capitalism was progress is that it allowed the 'forces of production' to develop in a way they couldn’t when they were fettered by feudal social structures. "

This either misunderstands or misrepresents Peterson's point. It was not that the success of capitalism disproves Marxism. How could it be? It was that, given that capitalism has demonstrably, as Marx himself admits, so rapidly given the world dramatically better material conditions than anything else that has ever been tried over the millennia, how is this an argument now for tossing it over for any new and untried system?

Burgis goes on, 

"Some of this is disputed territory. Is $2 a day or $5 a day a better indication of 'extreme' poverty? Should we care about raw numbers or about the percentage of the population that is desperately poor?"

This ignores again Peterson's argument. Peterson pointed out that it does not matter what figure you choose: $1.90 a day, or $3.00 a day, or $5.00 a day. Whichever figure you pick, the rise out of poverty at the bottom end is equally dramatic. And Peterson was explicitly talking about the percentage of the population as well as the raw numbers.

Andray Domise in Maclean’s:

“When confronted by Žižek as to which particular academics could be considered cultural Marxists—‘Give me some names,’ he demanded, and even threw a couple of bones—Peterson simply could not come up with an answer.”

This is nothing more than a lie. When Zizek asked him, Peterson replied quite promptly that, according to survey, 25% of social science profs self-identify as Marxists. He then also mentioned two names: Foucault and Derrida. He could have given many more: Chomsky, Hobsbawn, Zinn, Butler, Sartre, Lyotard, Marcuse, Adorno, and so on. But that would have been pedantic. Two should suffice.

Zizek, it is true, objected to calling Foucault a Marxist. But this is bogus. Peterson did not call Foucault a Marxist. He called him a “cultural Marxist.” This no more implies a strict adherence to Marxism as a political or economic philosophy than calling someone a “cultural Catholic” implies their strict adherence to all Church doctrines. Foucault was, in fact, for some time a member of the French Communist Party. “Madness and Civilization” is obviously based on some Marxist assumptions: it declares the insane an oppressed class, oppressed because they are poor—proletarian, more or less.

I am left scratching my noggin here. How can these commentators get it so wrong? Are folks so dumb that they sincerely get it all so wrong, are they cynical and lying, or are they stark mad?

I think it’s door number two.