Trump hopes you don’t know Marx

Celebrating year-one on Substack; it’s a great time to support Marx & friends!

[Painting by

April Burke

]

Happy one-year anniversary of Marx & friends! Within 52 weeks, I published 50 philosophical essays about history, economics, and psychoanalysis—inspired not only by Marx but also Spinoza, Kant, and Deleuze & Guattari. These are pieces I'm passionate about and which look to understand real world social problems. They take a lot of work, which I’ve been doing in addition to working fulltime.

I’m especially grateful for

April Burke

creating and sharing the amazing artwork featured with these essays.

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Despite pretending like Marxism is an insidious mind virus infecting vast swaths of society, the Trump administration is actually banking on the fact that there’s a low chance you even know anything about Marx or Marx’s theory, or for that matter, anyone who could explain such ideas to you. And despite knowing there’s so little knowledge of Marx’s theory in society, these fascists pre-emptively attack it, trying to poison the well, because they know it would be bad news for billionaire wealth piles if everyone had such understanding. Thus, they want you to either be too afraid to learn about what Marxism is, or rather to be too afraid to share any Marxist ideas. They want to wage class warfare, but they don’t want a conscious opponent.

Don’t peek behind the curtains

Wait. Should you be reading this stuff?

Aren’t you worried about catching the… wuh… wuh… W⁰k3 _miN^d v_IrU^s _?!^¿

Trump doesn’t want you reading Marx, or any critical thinkers for that matter. Neither does Musk or Theil, or any of the other billionaires who pretend to have only made their money through their natural born genius. Theil even creeped out to enlighten us of his worries about where democracy leads, especially because of the influence of women.

Apparently, women in democracy makes for a tough time for libertarians. Poor libertarians. Gettin’ a tough go at it because of women’s suffrage. Because women wanted to participate in politics, because of democracy in general, Theil might merely peak at billionaire. What a shame.

He and his court blogger Curtis Yarvin envision for society, not a democratically elected leader, but a sort of CEO-king. So much more efficient than pesky democracy! They want you to believe they’re exactly where they ought to be in society and that so are you—a natural order. They’ve made superior decisions, have superior talent, bigger brains, and work so much harder than you.

Have you considered how hard it is for Musk to pay engineers (with the aid of massive government subsidies) to build rockets or electric cars, or a useless traffic tunnel in order to prevent plans for a high-speed rail in California? How challenging it is—amidst dozens of Tweets per day, attacking random trans people online, re-Tweeting rando fascists—to also be busy firing striking workers, busting unions, and paying someone to play video games in order to maintain a facade of genius? Musk works 80-100 hours a week, he’ll have you know. And please don’t call him a “mogul.” Musk wants you to think of him as an “engineer,” not just some trust fund baby.

If you want to see through the enormous delusion these billionaires have not only of themselves but also of the world, just look at them now, forcing themselves behind the wheel of the ship, revving the tired engines of capital, to steer full speed ahead on a collision course with public health and the environment. Was there ever a more naked image of the incessant and psychopathic drive for profit than in this moment, with these “titans of industry” denying climate disaster, pillaging government resources, and tanking the economy in order to gain a tighter hold, a taller pile?

There’s a monster under your bed!

Trump doesn’t want you reading Marx. On day one of his second term, Trump signed executive orders to withhold funding from DEI programs, so that his administration could investigate such programs for evidence of “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.”

Of course, none of these phrasings are legit. No one, for example, other than far-right talking heads use the term “transgenderism,” and the “green new deal” was language used for a policy proposal that was largely never implemented. Also, are they okay with non-Marxist equity? How do they decipher between Marxist and non-Marxist equity? They just tacked “Marxist” in front of “equity” to help give it some extra xenophobic flare. “Equity” on its own wouldn’t sound spooky enough. To the contrary, it might even sound appealing.

Even in the absence of a well-developed, well-organized Left today, these linguistic boogeymen are being used to justify a radically fascistic political economic agenda.

Why Marx & friends?

I’ve been joining others to march, picket, and organize since around the same time I became interested in theory, philosophy, and politics. But one thing I’ve learned along the way is that maintaining stamina and focusing on the long-game requires a substantive understanding of the problems underlying the issues we face.

In addition to the context of ‘08 economic crisis and the subsequent Occupy Movement, one of the primary issues in society which I’ve been working to understand for over a decade and which helped turn me toward socialism, has been the rise of domestic terrorism in the U.S., the stochastic acts of violence against the population. When I first attempted to understand these acts, I was far from having a materialist take on the world and the state of affairs in which we live.

Marx’s method of historical materialism, especially as most fully developed in Capital, provides the critical lens for understanding what elements of society we need to change in order to overcome the various social problems that bring us all into the fold of a broader movement, a movement addressing concerns beyond the particular ones that initially bring us as individuals together.