Understanding Marxism through Metaphysics

I’ve been enjoying some theological research lately, and I came across the work of Jordan Cooper, a Lutheran theologian. He’s got some great video series on different thinkers. I watched his Marx video last night, and it sparked a bunch of thoughts.

Cooper makes the claim that Marx can best be understood through the lens of a hardcore materialism—that reality is only composed of atoms and their movement. Everybody knows Marx is a materialist, but I’ve never considered his metaphysics to be fundamental to his thought.

The more I think about it, the more powerful this analysis becomes.

Economics without Abstractions

If Cooper is right, it would explain why Marxists are fundamentally confused about economics.

For example, think about the factory owner employing a worker. To the materialist, the only person doing real work is the physical laborer—the man moving atoms around. The capitalist is not moving atoms around and is therefore literally doing nothing productive. In that perspective, capitalists are indeed parasites, mooching off workers. Things like risk, capital investment, coordination of labor, etc., these are all abstractions and not fundamentally real; they are word-games to keep the capitalist in power.

The labor theory of value also flows from a hardcore materialism. Physical labor actually moves atoms around; this labor is an objective phenomenon in the domain of physics. By contrast, subjectivist theories of value are all abstract (and even metaphysically dualistic, to say that value is “in the mind”).

Think about private property. As Marx says, the essence of communism is the abolition of private property. That also makes sense from a materialist perspective. Private property is an abstraction placed on top of atoms; it’s not real; it’s an arbitrary carving up of the physical world. In the strongest metaphysical sense, private property does not exist. So it’s natural to think the social orders built on top of private property are fundamentally flawed.

Why are communists against the existence of the family? Well, if the family does not actually exist, that’s a pretty good reason.

The inevitability of communism also makes sense to me. Workers are the ones with real power, so what’s stopping them from throwing off the yoke of their capitalist oppressors? Simple class consciousness; they are not aware of their situation, and after gaining awareness, nobody can stop them.

Later Marxist Thinkers

The development of Marxism into its modern form of being a nihilistic, anti-truth, power-obsessed worldview also makes sense. If abstractions are not real—if they do not correspond to anything essential—then I can suddenly understand why these people think “Everything is a social construction.” They don’t believe the world can be carved up in an objectively meaningful way.

In the most extreme version of materialism, even the relations between atoms are not real, which would mean at the most fundamental level, there is no such thing as a composite object. Basic distinctions between “men” and “women” are arbitrary. Everything is individual atoms without relation to one another. Therefore, there’s no abstraction that could possibly be “true.”

Understood through this lens, language really does look like it’s just about power. What is language fundamentally? Well, if our metaphysics only allows us to track how atoms move, then the only thing real about language is how it pushes atoms around. That’s all it can do. It’s all just power—physical power, ultimately.

I’ve never really thought about Marxism through this lens, but it sure explains a lot.