I’m not a Marxist, but this summer I chose the pleasurable and frustrating experience of re-examining the Communist Manifesto, a text so widely referenced that it demands sporadic re-examination by any semi-serious philosopher. I set out to understand the roots of the Manifesto and explore how the ideas Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote 177 years ago continue to evolve and interact with modern leftism, especially identity-focused progressivism.
Why the Communist Manifesto and not Das Kapital? Well, Marx and Engels interact with the people whom they’re writing for in quite a unique way in the Manifesto, in which they conflate these people into a sort of universal subject. As far as I and anyone I consulted with is aware (quite the formalistic research procedure, thank you very much), this is less analyzed in the more mechanistic piece of social science that is Das Kapital. This topic of the universal subject will form the basis of much of my criticism going forward.
I encountered several surprises in my study. Take a popular concept in contemporary leftism: intersectionality—a framework for understanding how different ascribed social identities intersect to form an individual’s experience. Intersectionality is an important development in how we think about our place in society because it clarifies how, say, certain combinations of attributes like race and sex can lead to increased discrimination, or how attributes like ability status can unfairly eclipse other attributes like sexuality.
The attribute of social class is an element of intersectionality, even if popular understanding often neglects it in favor of race. Because the concept of intersectionality relies on a structural analysis of power, it has some surprising similarities with Marxist politics, which focuses on how economic structures produce inequality. With this in mind, intersectionality could be a pathway to a natural alliance with Marxism, especially under the broader leftist umbrella.
There’s just one thing. The Communist Manifesto, if interpreted and applied to the letter, isn’t an intersectional text at all. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: Marx and Engels write about the proletariat in a manner that amalgamates this group as a sort of universal subject; that is to say, they treat the working class as a homogeneous entity. Their model proletarian finds definition in his relationship to the means of production, and his interests concentrate in Western Europe and America. He’s also male. This universal subject is implicitly a member of this one identity specification, insofar as Marx and Engels depersonalize him by neglecting to mention potential subjects with attributes that fall outside the assumed norm.
No matter what you think about Marxist principles, this seems confounding. The original theorists’ choice to utilize a universal subject effectively overlooks the deeply complex diversity of individuals within the proletariat. This choice appears to be at odds with what we can term cultural Marxism. What contemporary elements, especially those on the right, perceive as cultural Marxism isn’t in line with original Marxist doctrine, because of contemporary leftists’ cultural emphasis on intersectionality. Our cultural Marxist dialectics holds space for racial and sexual identity (etc.) debate rather than just class debate.
Perhaps Marx and Engels are intellectually further from the American and European left than some claim. Perhaps so, but maybe that also means we need to set aside the originalism that many apply to the Manifesto and think critically about how today’s Marxists can rework fundamental concepts in conjunction with other, more contemporarily appropriate, theories.
Originalism is a legal theory that holds that texts should be interpreted based on analysis of the historical, social, and intellectual context in which they were written. (Originalism is most famous for its jurisprudential application to the U.S. Constitution.) However, I think it’s appropriate to apply originalism to The Communist Manifesto. The debate over how this foundational text of Marxism should be interpreted and applied in praxis is similar in historical stakes to a significant dispute over constitutional interpretation. We can use the term originalism to encompass the idea of interpreting any foundational philosophical text to the letter.
If we trace the genealogy of identity in leftist intellectual thought, we get a better understanding of the “universal subject” contradiction in 19th-century Marxism. We can start in the not-so-distant past with another landmark piece of leftist philosophy, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), in which Butler, although preoccupied with gender rather than class, critiques the very concept of a universal subject. Butler seriously doubts that any collective political subject (whether representing just one gender or just one class) could be conceptually stable or coherent. In this way, Butler’s theory is remarkably anti-collectivist, strictly opposing the idea of conflating a movement of individuals into a single shared attribute, which is a vast departure from Marx and Engels’ universal subject.
And yet, Butler is not anti-Marxist; in fact, they* directly allude to Marxist viewpoints throughout Gender Trouble, albeit not in direct reference to the concept of the universal subject I am discussing here. Instead, Butler speaks in support of the Marxist concept of reification. While reification is a subject for a much longer article, I think Butler’s work, which weaves in both expressly Marxist and non-Marxist ideas, is a good example of how we can successfully adapt and expand parts of a foundational philosophy while leaving out the parts that don’t serve us (and remaining intellectually honest and consistent). We need not be originalists.
Now, you might say that Marx and Engels’ universal subject, as intended by its authors, is meant to be an abstraction to understand the realities of capitalism, rather than a fixed identity. There’s no concrete white, Western, male worker that anyone can point to that served as a model for Marx and Engels’ work. (Unless, of course, they used themselves—though not proletarians—as models for the figure on whose behalf they’re speaking.)
True—one cannot say that Marx and Engels are claiming there’s some universal subject that’s fixed or unchanging by nature. But they also don’t acknowledge mutability within a class itself. No distinction exists between the classes they speak of and their individual components. You are your class; that’s it. There is no layer of analysis beneath that in Marxism upon initial conception. The reason Marx and Engels did not go further is probably because they prioritized the dissolution of what they call bourgeois “individualism” in pursuit of class unity. Yet, in my view, Marx and Engels might have actually benefited from focusing more on a sense of individualism that embraces fluidity and ongoing collaboration, in a rather proto-Butlerian sense. Acknowledging the multiplicity of attributes that comprise the proletariat would have introduced intersectionality and expanded Marx and Engels’ original framework to encompass the multidimensional realities of lived identity, which could have changed the whole course of Marxism as carried on by later thinkers. At the very least, later thinkers would have had less work to do in filling in The Communist Manifesto’s gaps, and Marxism may have evolved in different, fantastic ways with all this intellectual bandwidth. However, since Marx and Engels aren’t around to take my suggestions, I don’t think we should be shy about filling in the blanks.
If we adhere to originalism in analyzing our foundational texts, we may end up with real-world results very different from what well-intentioned advocates of these texts actually desire. Marx’s and Engels’ rhetoric may implicitly or explicitly influence followers of their theory to center the white, Western male subject in their praxis, inspiring Marxist extrapolations that do not accurately reflect the intersectionality of identity, which we know has profound effects on individuals’ lives. To copy them exactly would be to prioritize the emblematic “white male,” which hardly seems the aim of most leftists.
I don’t think amending problematic works means we need to discount the faults of these works automatically. We can address the lack of intersectionality in the Communist Manifesto without abandoning the document as a whole. However, I still believe that the universal subject imposed blinders on Marx and Engels, limiting their philosophical perspective. Not even the most established philosopher, regardless of their ideology, should be exempt from criticism, even if some may regard their ideas as having concrete, positive effects. Thinkers build philosophy through dialectics; the Manifesto itself includes a section wherein the writers explicitly critique many then-prominent socialist writers.
That best-practices disclaimer taken care of, I will now offer the rest of my critique of the lack of intersectionality in the Communist Manifesto.
First, I am aware that one could argue that the culture in which Marx and Engels penned the Manifesto did not deal with intersectionality like the modern intelligentsia does, and to mention gender and sex, sexuality, race, or ethnicity analogously would not only have been somewhat unthinkable but would weaken the appeal of their pamphlet, which they intended for mass consumption.
However, Marx and Engels didn’t need to discuss these ideas in precisely the same sense as modern theories may approach them. Even a cursory mention of the ways sexual, racial, and ethnic differences impact the proletariat from individual to individual would have been conceivable and era-appropriate. The lack thereof speaks to an inexcusable oversight on the part of the authors.
The Manifesto was already quite radical in its ideas surrounding class, and those who supported such ideas were predisposed to radicalism; therefore, the concept of intersectionality would be less startling here than in more conventional, mainstream pieces of political theory at the time. Marx and Engels were already on the fringe.
Intersectionality, as a concept, would not have existed until the latter part of the twentieth century. However, the lived complexity of social identities—the delicate balance of race, sex, class, and other factors—had shaped individual and collective experiences long before formal identification systems emerged. Early thinkers and activists recognized this, even if they lacked the specific vocabulary for it.
Indeed, contemporaries of Marx and Engels addressed such concepts. English philosopher John Stuart Mill published his The Subjection of Women in 1869, and it was met with “favorable reception… by readers and critics.” Other contemporaries specifically addressed overlapping effects of race, gender, and class; what we would identify today as intersectional concepts—American abolitionist Sojourner Truth confronted the limited, binary popular conceptions of gender and sex and Blackness in her 1851 speech “Ain’t I a Woman?,” and American author Anna Julia Cooper argued that oppression was not solely race- gender- or sex-based, but a complex, interconnected synthesis of these constructs in her 1892 book A Voice From the South. Even ancient political theorists like Plato addressed the role of complex identities in a way that Marx and Engels did not—for all the questionable aspects of Plato’s Republic, he at least took pains to mention that although “the natures of men and women are different,” women should be able to be educated alongside and share in the same roles as men, a baseline acknowledgment of individual differences (even if socially constructed and problematic in Butlerian terms), and no doubt radical for its era.
The absence in Marx and Engels’ analysis reflects not simply historical limitation but also a conscious rhetorical choice to privilege their version of unity over any form of diversity. We now have the benefit of having such clarifying vocabulary to use in re-examination, and use it we shall.
I wonder how Marx and Engels figured attributes other than class into their personal macro-scale vision of society. They primarily concern themselves with the bourgeois oppression that currently dominates society, yet they saw the coming proletarian revolution as inevitable. After the proletarian movement succeeds, what will happen to individual proletarians based on their other, intersectional identities? To accept the fact that Marx and Engels would have likely argued that once the state withers away, differences such as race, gender, and other social identities would cease to matter would be to sidestep acknowledging how society really works, both in their time and in ours. Deeply rooted identity-based oppression does not simply vanish through the eradication of class structures, and material transformation alone is not a sufficient cure-all for social strife.
Marx and Engels’ critique of capitalist society remains powerful and has resonated with generations of radical thinkers worldwide. Yet, from my perspective (admittedly, again, a non-Marxist-aligned perspective), it is far from perfect. Their choice to center the white, Western male subject is a rhetorical one that ultimately limits the inclusivity and effectiveness of their vision. They create more questions than they provide answers when we consider their theory in the broader context of society.
I walked away from my summer of Marxist reading, appreciating (if not entirely accepting) Marx and Engels’ acknowledgment that “differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class” due to the demands of industrial capitalism. Still, as a woman, I wondered how, and if, non-males fit into their proposed revolution beyond nominal membership in their exploited class.
A feminist who wishes to use Marx and Engels’ theories on class must contend with the consistent use of gendered language throughout their text. She has the right to criticize this aspect of the text (as I have), even if gender is not at the forefront of the writer’s concern and she does not intend any sort of Marxist praxis. And if she does intend praxis and is firm in her feminist principles, she has an obligation to amend the original work. Suppose she wishes to utilize the Manifesto and agrees with me that Marx and Engels’ cursory mention of sex differences within the proletariat class is insufficient. In that case, she cannot be complacent and overlook this factor.
Judith Butler is just one great example of a theorist who knew how to both adapt and correct a foundational text like the Manifesto. Butler draws on a long tradition of feminist and critical theorists, such as Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, and Monique Wittig, who found value in classic leftist texts but noted that their tendency to synonymize the masculine with the universal was a specific product of the “conventional representational systems of Western culture,” as Butler states in Gender Trouble.
“The requirement that feminism establish a subject, ‘women,’ as the coherent and stable subject of feminism, is itself a discursive formation and effect of a particular Western epistemology whose presuppositions, exclusions, and constitutive acts are masked by the ‘universality’ of the subject,” Butler continues, though here she is critiquing feminism’s use of ‘women,’ as the universal subject, which is a controversial stance that is more radical than the criticism I’m raising here.
The point is that Western culture and epistemology are a powerful and often blinding force for theorists. Western universalism continues to shape the writing of leftist scholars, to the detriment of the many other rich viewpoints and elements that comprise our world. The fact that Butler (an American) can recognize this, as well as their predecessors Irigaray, Foucault, and Wittig (all French), is a powerful lesson in humility, as well as expansive and critical thinking.
I will conclude by reemphasizing that these thinkers still owe a great deal to each other and share something powerful and undeniable in common simply by virtue of falling under the leftist umbrella. I am not trying to say that all of Marxist ideology is entirely alien to leftism or unusable for leftist theorists. The influence remains palpable in many areas. In her essay, “One is Not Born a Woman,” Monique Wittig argues that for sex, “what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an ‘imaginary formation,’” socially constructed through repeated acts and norms—a reflection of Marx and Engels’ idea that commodities are the assumed form of abstract social relations. Wittig’s domain of gender theory and Marx and Engels’ domain of political economy address many of the same themes and concepts, even if they appear, at first glance, unrelated beyond being leftist in nature and, at times, even contradictory.
In all, I hope my toe-dip into Marxism, my preliminary critique of it, and ideas on how we can expand on such foundational texts, will affect the way you read these texts and question some of the abstractions—such as Marx and Engels’ portrayal of the white male Western worker—present in them. Abstractions are important. Abstractions shape political theory as they form the basis for concrete practice. We must deal with abstractions carefully, for they can blind and limit their adopters.
I still don’t really align myself with Marxism, but as you can glean, I found a lot of value in re-examining The Communist Manifesto this summer. No doubt it is a text as full of enduring insights as it is of persistent limitations. My surprise at its constant treatment of class as a universal, homogeneous identity that sidesteps the complex realities of gender, sex, race, and other intersecting identities was profound. I hope that my reference to the works of theorists like Judith Butler clarifies how today’s well-formulated leftist works (Butler is certainly well-formulated once you figure out what in the world they’re saying) benefit from challenging originalism. If intersectional values are political values that are important to you, by all means, insist on their inclusion in your entire praxis.
Critiquing foundational texts is intellectually necessary and enriches our understanding of the entire world of political philosophy. Grappling with the coexistence of strengths and oversights in these works is vital for critically engaged discourse, regardless of one’s ideology. Marx and Engels’ attempts to construct a universal subject within the working class overlook the multidimensional realities of lived identity, realities that later theorists (like Butler and Wittig) push us to consider. Reality encompasses a vast and diverse variety of individuals and attributes. There is no “universal” subject.
by Cara Eaton
*Judith Butler uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, but since they prefer the latter, I utilize they/them for consistency.
Further reading:
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Georgieva-Stankova, Nadezhda. “The Book – a Meaning Construct or a Vehicle for Social Change? Deconstructing Liberal Feminist Discourses – John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women.” The Book and Beyond, no. 1 (2011). doi:10.15291/sic/1.2.lc.9.
Lukács, György. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The Communist Manifesto. Translated by Martin Milligan, 209–243. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988.
Mays, Vickie M., and Negin Ghavami. “History, Aspirations, and Transformations of Intersectionality: Focusing on Gender.” In APA Handbook of the Psychology of Women. Vol. 1, History, Theory, and Battlegrounds, edited by C. B. Travis and J. W. White, 541–566. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2018.
Plato. Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson, 971–1223. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997.
Wittig, Monique. “One Is Not Born a Woman.” In The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 9–20. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
