It is quite a puzzling thing: Everyone seems to say that there are large numbers of “academic Marxists”. But it is very, very difficult to ever find any academic actually making a Marxist argument—that is, one that springs from one or more of the six intellectual threads woven together in the 1859 Preface to Marx’s abysmal
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy…Share
Columbia’s Adam Tooz said that he is thinking a lot about the 1859 Preface to Karl Marx’s abysmal A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
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He does not say why. So let me tell you why. The passage (reproduced at the very bottom of this post) can be usefully divided into six threads:
Here we have, working backward:
Theology: the millenarian claim (made in 1859!) that the end was at hand of the long era in which human societies were societies of domination,
Stage Theory of History: The six modes of production—tribal, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, bourgeois, and socialist—as the successive stages of human history, social revolutions driving the transitions between them.
Theology: Refracted through Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis: the claim that history has an arrow of progress driven by econo-political change.
Sociology & Ideology: The conflicts generated by the rupture between old relations of production and the requirements of the new, growing forces of production play themselves out in ideological forms.
Political Economy: Relations of production constrain technological development and investment, and then constraint fails as society’s property order is broken by social revolution.
Historical Materialism: The relations of production have to be fitted to the technology of society and thus to the way people experience their worklife. And then everything else has to be fitted to that
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And I argued <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/six-analytical-threads-in-search> that to pick up one (or more) of these six claims and then to try to develop it and demonstrate its truth and draw forth its implications for human knowledge, human society, human political action, and the human future is what it is to be a “Marxist” in any sense meaningful, other than grabbing that term as a positive or negative marker of tribal allegiance. If someone shows up calling themself a “Marxist”, and cannot demonstrate which of the threads from at least one of these six claims they are pursuing in their thinking—well, they should find something else to call themself.
Conversely, looking at the development of social science since 1870 or so, it is a fact that nearly everybody else doing historical social science worth reading who is not picking up and developing one of these six claims is spending a lot of their time trying to disprove and dispel one or more of them.
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But I had yet more to say. So here it is:
With respect to (6) Historical Materialism, everyone agrees: yes, social being determines social consciousness, but social consciousness determines social being, and such economics and such are relatively right-wing disciplines these days people on the left are much more likely to be “idealist” than materialist. As for (5) Political Economy, yes, changing technology does cause immense trouble for societal order as the rest of society finds itself no longer properly fitted to it, and a reworking does follow—but that does not entail any necessary social revolution, and especially not a socialist revolution that was supposed to have happened more than a century ago.
Nobody today likes the reductionism of (4) Sociology and Ideology. It simply doesn’t work. In fact, it never worked: Marx could claim that in the France of his day the Orleanists were really motivated by the concerns of industrialists and the Legitimists by the concerns of large landlords, but that did not make it true. (3) as well is nonsense on stilts: the arc of history does not bend toward justice, or even prosperity. (2) Stage Theory is simply not popular. in anything other than some “modernization theory” sense, although Gary Gerstle and company are trying to revive it through the conceptual device of political-economic orders. And nobody has any confidence in (1): there are no signs that history will work so that utopia will be here soon.
What counts as “Marxism” worth the name? Pursuing one of six testable threads from the 1859 Preface. On inspection, only two remain serviceable: relations of production must fit technology, and technological change unsettles property orders. The rest—teleology, ideology-as-master-key, stage theory, utopia—collapses under a messy record of overlapping, sector-specific transformations. Since 1750, change arrives in concentrated waves; since 1870, faster and broader, with a fifth of the economy reengineered each generation. Institutions lag; culture mismatches; politics convulses. The apparatus of Marx, even detoxed, explains less than a braided account of creative destruction, complementary investments, and late-arriving social scaffolding.
Hence: few real Marxists remain.
So why, then, do I find while walking the dogs a podcast from Henry Oliver (with Jeffrey Lawrence and Julianne Werlin) on “Literature, politics, & the future of the humanities” <https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/literature-politics-and-the-future> talking about “academic Marxism”. What could such a thing possibly be?
Henry Oliver: ‘Let’s go to the question of “what is academic Marxism?”… Give us a quick overview of how Marxist things really are.
Julianne Werlin: It’s very complicated… because Marxism is… a living tradition… and there’s a huge amount of disagreement about… what is a legitimate form of Marxism, what is not, where [are] the boundaries…. Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism… argues that in the West Marxism becomes alienated from actual political, economic, and social movements… [and] moves into academia… [becoming] much less concerned with… the politics and economics of labor. And that this continues and is accelerated… in the Cold War…. At the same time you have… the cultural turn in history and in sociology… so Marxism remains a current within that, but it’s far less of an influential current…. And so at that point, I do think you have to ask, well, “What does ‘Marxism’ actually mean?”…. As somebody who does work… [on]: Are markets becoming more efficient in Renaissance England? Those kinds of questions. How much does bread cost? How much do books cost? Those kinds of questions… fee… incredibly peripheral within academia in comparison to, say, the politics of gender…. What would you say, Jeff?
Jeffrey Lawrence: [After] Marxism moves into the academy after the 1960s… it becomes a different thing…. What we’re really talking about is a progressive politics… amalgam of different ideas that may have some roots in Marxism of previous periods, but really don’t… align with… Marxian thought as such. And also as someone who does take that tradition very seriously, I think… it becomes a[n]… intellectual tool and sometimes even an intellectual weapon… where the question of how it relates to practical… working class politics… becomes… secondary….
Henry Oliver: Is there some inherent aspect of literature that means it has been more amenable to Marxist study… than… to… systems of thought that come more from a kind of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek tradition. Because it’s very striking to me how few liberals and libertarians there are currently publicly…. Is there some good literary reason for this? Or is it just an institutional problem?
Jeffrey Lawrence: I share the sense that… there is a… Marxist literary tradition that goes back to… Lukacs… Adorno, Horkheimer…people like Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams… [who] were… [an] insurgent force… within the academy that has now become… almost entirely dominant. I personally… was very interested in a certain liberal tradition that comes from… John Dewey…. People like Lionel Trilling… were very important… in a particular moment…. John Dewey… Lionel Trilling… Philip Rav, these kind of mid-century intellectuals… were foundational for the field, even if now I think there may be some desire to take distance from them.
Henry Oliver: The bigger problem that we should just get back to… literature as literature…. Once we allow a kind of methodological approach from one tradition or another, we’re just no longer really studying literature. We’re using literature…. Some people want to take a… Northrop Frye, Christopher Ricks, literature as literature approach, and some people want to have an extra-literary methodology. Be it Freudian… feminist… identity politics.. whatever….
Julianne Werlin: I don’t think that we can just say… these are great works, this is part of a canon…. [That] came with its own set of ideological commitments that are now vanishing…. So we need some kind of framework for making sense of why we read literary history at all…. A lot of those frameworks were implicit. didn’t, you know, they were… [not] articulated…. I think we do find ourselves in a position where we need to explain why we care about this object literature in the first place… situating it within some kind of wider account of culture…. I don’t think you can say to people, look, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, we have to read him because he’s great. I think you need to have an argument about the place that Shakespeare has in culture…
Jeffrey Lawrence: If you’re just going to read literature for… a particular political thing, for Marxism… to understand… a Marxist conception of society, why not just read… Marxist theory…. If you are always just interested in the methodology… as opposed to literature, then this is going to be a long-term problem…
Julianne Werlin: I think it’s a huge problem…. No, I don’t think you should study the methodologies instead of studying literature. Of course not. But the questions that the methodologies ask are really basic to the questions that we need to ask about the study of literature…[:] What is this thing? What is its role in culture? What does it mean? Why do we study it?… It has become very hard to make that, that case. And it’s not that I think making that case explicitly is going to win converts, as opposed to talking about the literature itself. In the end, it’s going to be the literature itself…. But to have an account of the meaning of what we’re doing, even for our own sakes, we do need to be thinking about questions like: “What is this thing?”…
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It is a very good podcast, well worth listening to.
Yet its foundations seem to me to be built on sand.
It is hard to find a self-described “academic Marxist” these days: there are zero in the natural sciences, and zero in the business schools and in economics. When you get to the more humanities-oriented social sciences and the humanities proper, it is a little bit easier—but it is very hard. (Although it is trivially easy to find people whom Christopher Rufo and company call “academic Marxists”. I probably qualify under that active-disinformation standard.)
(I do have considerable differences with Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism, that I should write down sometime. Suffice to say here that Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci; Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin; Sartre, Della Volpe, Colletti, Lefebvre, and Goldmann were trying hard to understand society and history, and deserve a judgment much kinder to them than Anderson administers.)
And to the extent that left-wing people with aspirations to pushing transformative changes in social consciousness moved into the university starting in the 1960s, they were not Marxists in any proper sense of the word. They were, rather, the kinds of people whom Marx and Engels cruelly mocked in their The German Ideology, the central thesis of which was that while the English had made a revolution by transforming their economy and the French by transforming their polity, Germans simply thought about revolution and yet convinced themselves they were the leaders of the parade.
Plus, as Nils Gilman rightly says: even in the humanities:
Liberals have been the predominant force, certainly within the administrations, but also within the faculty as a whole. At the university I know best—Berkeley, where I spent the whole 1990s in college and graduate school, and then later in the mid-2010s served as a senior administrator—the radical faculty probably never have amounted to more than… ten or twenty percent…. [But] very noisy, thinking of themselves in many cases as “activist-scholars,” for whom criticizing the fecklessness of their liberal colleagues and resisting the neoliberal administration of their universities is a core part of the public identities…. These people, it should be noted, are generally loathed (or sometimes pitied) by the mainline liberals…
And so note how Oliver, Lawrence and Werlin quickly shift away from “Marxists” to something else: How to justify the study of literature, and how to think about what the conclusions from the study of literature teach us about how a society in constant flux should organize itself.
From my perspective, this is indeed an urgent problem.
For one thing, I think nothing is more essential to the university than having flourishing and educationally excellent history, English, and drama departments (not rhetoric: rhetoric as a discipline looks to me increasingly like a lost cause). We need to teach students the broad sweep of the human culture and civilization they as intellectual workers will draw on, how to present their conclusions and ideas in English prose, and how to argue for their conclusions ideas in personal presentations. Nothing is more important. (Pre-professional education—primarily engineering/data science, biochemistry and finance/management—comes second).
And you cannot have flourishing and educationally excellent history, English, and drama departments that lack a strong and confident sense of what they are for.
Still, I think Oliver, Lawrence and Werlin have the wrong end of the stick here: they talk about the need for justification over and above simply saying “literature is great”, without ever taking a real stab at providing it.
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Note: The full quoted Marx passage as Tooze gives it:
Karl Marx (1859): Preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”: ‘In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.…
References:
Anderson, Perry. 1976. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: New Left Books. <https://archive.org/details/considerationson0000ande>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “Six Analytical Threads in Search of Useful Empirical Traction: On Karl Marx’s 1859 ‘Preface’”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. January 8. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/six-analytical-threads-in-search>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “The Curious Case of Karl Marx’s 1859 ‘Preface’”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. January 10.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “Contra Marx, the Record Since 1870 Is Rotating Upheavals in Leading Sectors, Not Synchronized Economy-Wide Revolutions”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. January 13.
Engels, Friedrich. 1880. Socialism: Utopian & Scientific. Bonn, Germany: Marxists Internet Archive. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm>.
Gilman, Nils. 2025. “How Did Academia Not See It Coming.” Small Precautions. March 7. <https://nilsgilman.substack.com/p/how-did-academia-not-see-it-coming>.
Marx, Karl. 1859. “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Bonn, Germany: Marxists Internet Archive. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm>.
Oliver, Henry. 2026. “Literature, Politics, & the Future of the Humanities”. The Common Reader. January 7. <https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/literature-politics-and-the-future>.
Tooze, Adam. “Top Links 976”. Chartbook. January 8. <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/top-links-976-ai-investment-surges>.
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