Marx’s basic move: from ideas to social relations
For Marx, political ideas, languages, and narratives are part of the “superstructure,” shaped by and helping stabilize a specific mode of production (here, capitalism). Political discursivity—party programs, campaign rhetoric, constitutionalism, rights-talk, “national conversations”—is thus never free-floating; it condenses and represents interests that arise from the structure of production and class antagonism. Instead of taking discourses at face value (“national interest,” “competitiveness,” “security”), a Marxian reading asks: which class interests become universalized in those terms, and which are disavowed?
Ideology critique: how discursivity misrepresents
In Marx’s sense, ideology is not just “false beliefs,” but structured misrepresentation: social relations between people appear as relations between things, and historically specific class domination appears as natural, neutral, or just. Political discursivity participates in this by:
Presenting class antagonisms as technical or moral problems (e.g., “budget discipline,” “labour flexibility”) rather than struggles over exploitation.
Framing capitalist imperatives as universal necessities (“markets demand,” “investor confidence,” “there is no alternative”) rather than contingent choices linked to ownership and power.
Individualizing structural issues (unemployment, precarity) as matters of personal responsibility, skills, or culture, thereby depoliticizing class structure.
On this view, “debunking” political discursivity does not mean denying that discourse matters, but exposing how its key terms and problem-definitions are indexed to the material interests of dominant classes.
Reframing political discursivity through Marx
Using Marx, you can systematically re-read contemporary political talk along at least four axes:
Class location of speakers and audiences
Whose material position does a given discourse presuppose? Professional-managerial, finance, industrial capital, petty-bourgeois, organized labour, surplus populations? This helps show how what appears as a universal “we” is usually a class-particular “we.”Naturalization of capitalism
Discourses that treat wage labour, private property in the means of production, and generalized commodity exchange as timeless or unquestionable smuggle in a specific historical order as if it were an ontological horizon. Marx’s lens insists these are historically produced relations, not anthropological constants.Obfuscation of exploitation
Policies and narratives are judged by whether they clarify or obscure the extraction of surplus value. For example, talk of “job creation” or “growth” that never names profit, ownership, or the rate of exploitation is ideologically structured, not merely incomplete.Substitution of representation for emancipation
Political discursivity often equates changes in language, recognition, or “voice” with emancipation, while leaving intact property relations and labour processes. From a Marxian standpoint, this is a displacement: the terrain of struggle is moved from the organization of production to the management of meaning, with class antagonism re-coded as a competition of narratives.
Using Marx against discursive absolutism
This also lets Marx undercut some strong versions of discourse theory or “politics as discursivity” that treat reality as fundamentally constituted by language. A Marxian position:
Grants that discourse is a terrain of struggle and a modality of power, but
Insists that discourses are anchored in, constrained by, and functional for specific material reproductive needs of a mode of production.
Thus “political discursivity” is de-centered: it is not the ultimate ground of politics, but one register in which material antagonisms are represented, mystified, and sometimes clarified. Debunking it via Marx means:
Rejecting discourse as the primary explanatory level.
Re-reading discourses as ideological forms tied to class relations.
Evaluating them by their role in reproducing or challenging exploitation and the capitalist organization of social labour.
Culture war rhetoric, read through Marx, functions as an ideological way of organizing attention around symbolic fights so that underlying class relations and crises of accumulation stay off-stage. The point is not that culture is fake, but that these conflicts are selectively framed and intensified to displace and re-code class antagonism.
What culture war rhetoric does (Marxian view)
From a Marxian standpoint, culture war talk (on both left and right) tends to:
Recast class and material issues as moral or civilizational ones: instead of arguing about wages, welfare, or ownership, politics is narrated as a battle over “the family,” “the nation,” “Western civilization,” “woke ideology,” etc.
Fragment the working class into opposed moral-identity camps (e.g., “real” workers vs “woke elites,” or “progressive cosmopolitans” vs “backward deplorables”), obscuring their shared interest vis-à-vis capital.
In Marx’s terms, this is ideology: a form of misrecognition in which the real conflict between capital and labour appears as a clash of values, lifestyles, or cultures.
Class function of culture war
A Marxian analysis asks: who gains, in material terms, from a politics dominated by culture war rhetoric?
While culture-war skirmishes saturate media space, governments of different formal “sides” often converge on policies of austerity, privatization, and labour flexibilization that benefit capital.
The “ordinary people” invoked by right-populist culture warriors are frequently invited to side with segments of the ruling class (national capital, fossil capital, conservative media) against scapegoated minorities, migrants, or “subversive” intellectuals, rather than against capital as such.
So culture war rhetoric helps reproduce hegemony: it channels anger generated by capitalist crisis into symbolic enemies rather than into class organization.
How rhetoric mystifies material contradictions
In Marx’s vocabulary, culture war talk is part of the superstructure that stabilizes a crisis-ridden base by:
Personalizing structural contradictions
Deindustrialization, wage stagnation, and precarity are narrated as results of “globalist elites,” “lazy welfare cheats,” “immigrants,” “feminists,” or “cultural Marxists,” not of capitalist restructuring and profit-maximization.Projecting antagonisms outward
What Žižek notes about “cultural Marxism” discourse captures a general mechanism: internal contradictions of capitalism (profit squeeze, social dislocation, authority crises) are projected onto an external cabal supposedly imposing feminism, anti-racism, queer rights, etc.Turning recognition into a substitute for transformation
Liberal culture-war counter-rhetoric often centers on recognition, representation, and inclusive language within existing institutions (corporations, universities, the state), which can be partly absorbed without altering property relations or labour exploitation.
In all three moves, class exploitation is displaced by cultural pathologies and moral dramas.
Sample rhetorical patterns, Marxian reading
Here are some recurrent culture war tropes and what a Marxian lens does with them:
“They’re destroying our way of life.”
Ask: which class’s way of life is at stake? Often, this defends specific hierarchies (racialized labour markets, gendered unpaid care, fossil-intensive industries) that underpin profitability.“Working people vs the woke elite.”
This fuses parts of the working class with certain fractions of capital (e.g., extractive industries, nationalist media) against professional-managerial or academic strata, leaving capital–labour as such unthematized.“Identity politics is the real enemy.”
Genuine critiques of liberal identity politics can be recuperated to argue that any struggle around race, gender, or sexuality divides “the people,” while quietly preserving racialized and gendered divisions of labour that are structurally profitable.“Free speech vs cancel culture.”
A real concern about repression gets re-aimed: instead of focusing on employer power, union-busting, or surveillance of social movements, the main villain becomes students, activists, or HR codes, often in ways that protect right-wing and corporate speech but not labour organizing.
In each case, the signifiers (“elite,” “people,” “freedom,” “tradition”) abstract from ownership and control of production.
Debunking culture war rhetoric in practice (using Marx)
To apply Marx’s lens, you can treat any culture-war flashpoint as a three-step exercise:
Locate the material stakes
Map class positions behind the discourse
Identify the ideological displacement
Doing this consistently does not deny that culture, race, gender, and sexuality matter; it insists that in the current conjuncture they matter within a capitalist totality, and that culture war rhetoric is one of the main ways that totality shields itself from direct class confrontation.
A Marxist analysis of Jordan Peterson treats him not mainly as an individual psychologist, but as an ideological figure whose work helps reproduce capitalist social relations, reframe class antagonism as moral-psychological struggle, and neutralize socialist or emancipatory projects.
Class position and audience
Peterson addresses primarily middle-class and aspiring professional audiences anxious about status, work, and identity in neoliberal capitalism. His message of personal responsibility, entrepreneurial self-fashioning, and acceptance of hierarchy resonates with subjects who experience instability but hope to secure or climb within existing structures rather than transform them. From a Marxist angle, this locates him as an organic intellectual of a particular fraction of the petty bourgeoisie and professional-managerial strata, translating their interests into a universalizing moral narrative.
Defense of hierarchy and capitalism
Peterson consistently defends market capitalism and social hierarchy as both natural and normatively necessary, casting them as expressions of competence and order rather than historically specific class domination. The lobster metaphor and his broader appeals to evolved dominance structures naturalize inequality and present current capitalist hierarchies as extensions of biological or metaphysical truths, rather than outcomes of exploitative relations of production that could be altered. In Marxist terms, this is classic ideological work: transforming historically contingent class structures into “second nature” so that resistance appears either futile or pathological.
Misreading and demonizing Marxism
Peterson’s frequent attacks on “Marxism,” “neo-Marxism,” and “postmodern neo-Marxism” rely on caricatures that detach actual Marxist critique from its analytic content and reattach it to images of chaos and totalitarianism. He reduces Marxism to envy-driven egalitarianism and the pursuit of “equality of outcome,” erasing Marx’s focus on exploitation, value, and the social relations of production, and then uses state atrocities in the 20th century as retrospective proofs that any critique of capitalism leads to gulags. A Marxist reading sees this as a powerful ideological maneuver: pre-emptively criminalizing socialist critique so that the only “serious” politics left is some variant of regulated capitalism plus individual moral reform.
Culture war entrepreneurship
Peterson’s role in culture-war battles—over pronouns, “political correctness,” “cultural Marxism,” and identity politics—can be read as a channeling of diffuse discontent away from capital and toward academic, activist, and minority targets. He reinterprets institutional and activist pushes for gender, racial, or sexual equality as a coordinated ideological offensive by “postmodern neo-Marxists,” thereby recoding struggles over oppression and recognition as expressions of a totalitarian Left power-grab. For Marxism, this is a paradigmatic instance of ideological displacement: structural contradictions of capitalism (precarity, alienation, declining social status) are narrativized as the result of “radical leftists” and “cultural Marxists,” enabling segments of the working and middle classes to align politically with capital against their own potential allies.
Psychological individualism vs social relations
Much of Peterson’s practical message hinges on individual self-improvement, responsibility, and meaning-making, treating suffering primarily as a problem of personal orientation, chaos, and order. From a Marxist perspective, this psychologizes and privatizes what are often products of alienated labour, commodification of life, and the hollowing out of collective institutions: instead of organizing against exploitation and commodification, subjects are instructed to “clean their room” within the given order. The net effect is depoliticization: structural antagonisms are reframed as personal challenges to be met through therapeutic and moral discipline, which dovetails with neoliberal capitalism’s demand for self-managing, resilient subjects.
Contradictions in his critique of modernity
Peterson laments atomization, loss of meaning, and spiritual crisis under modernity, yet defends the very capitalist dynamics that generate those conditions: competitive individualization, commodification, and permanent disruption. Marxism would read this as a symptomatic contradiction: he intuits the pathologies of bourgeois society but resolves them through a return to tradition, hierarchy, and individual moral effort, rather than through collective transformation of the relations of production and the form of social cooperation. In doing so, his project helps stabilize the system that produces the malaise he diagnoses, making him—on a Marxist reading—a sophisticated, culture-war oriented ideologue of contemporary capitalism rather than a critic of its foundations.
Including Jordan Peterson's finances in a Marxist analysis highlights how his ideological function aligns with and is reinforced by his material position within capitalist society. Peterson's net worth is estimated around $8 million to upwards of $35 million, largely built from multiple income streams such as book sales (with millions of copies sold), high-fee speaking engagements, YouTube revenues, consulting, and digital products. This financial success places him firmly within the professional-managerial and cultural capitalist class fractions, whose interests he represents ideologically.
His wealth underpins his ability to produce and disseminate cultural narratives that naturalize hierarchy, individual responsibility, and market capitalism while discrediting socialist or collectivist critiques. In Marxist terms, Peterson is an organic intellectual whose economic independence from wage labor reproduction allows him to function as a cultural and ideological entrepreneur promoting capitalist hegemony.
Peterson's ideological role—defending capitalist relations as natural and moral—is thus materially enabled and socially reinforced by his financial success in the capitalist market for ideas. His brand and income streams depend on reproducing certain dominant narratives that appeal to segments of the middle and upper-middle classes anxious about social change and economic insecurity. This symbiosis between his finances and ideological production exemplifies how cultural production under capitalism is embedded in and serves class interests.
Therefore, Peterson’s financial status is not incidental but intrinsic to his role: his material power both reflects and secures his position as a key ideological figure defending the status quo and managing class conflict through moral and culture war narratives rather than direct engagement with capitalist exploitation. This analysis situates his influence within the capitalist superstructure as one that stabilizes the system by framing social contradictions in depoliticized, individualized terms.
Perplexity
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