25 Debate quotes that show Jordan Peterson doesn’t know what Marxism is

I’ll confess: I’m one of those terrible people who slows down when passing a car accident. It’s not that I enjoy witnessing a disaster, I just can’t help but pay attention when things go horribly wrong. Maybe that’s why last night I finally caved and watched Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson take on Slovenian quasi-Marxist psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek. The philosophical fight night of the new century, the debate was supposed to be on the topic of “Happiness, Capitalism v Marxism.” Not that anybody cared.

As you probably know by now, the debate was more meme-worthy than intellectually provocative. Peterson delivered a schoolboy-style book report on The Communist Manifesto, before Zizek took the stage to verbosely defecate in front of the crowd. Obviously, the latter was far more entertaining than the former, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t possible to milk Peterson’s half-assed teenage homework assignment for a bit of comedy. So here we are, with 25 quotes that nicely illustrate that Peterson has almost certainly never read any Marxist literature beyond the manifesto, and probably has no interest in doing so. But maybe you don’t want to look so Lumpenproletarian next time you try to discuss Marxist theory. So to help the reader, I’ve tried to accompany each example of Peterson’s intellectual failure with suggestions for appropriate reading material. Have fun.

1. “What I did instead was return to what I regarded [as] the original cause of all the trouble, let’s say, which was The Communist Manifesto.” (Crowd laughs.)

– An excellent place to start your discussion of Marxism — assuming you’re a high school student.

2. “I also understand The Communist Manifesto was a call for revolution, and not a standard logical argument …”

— …and now I’m going to spend the next half hour complaining that it isn’t a standard logical argument, while failing to approach any of Marx’s more intellectually challenging works.

3. “I have some things to say about the authors psychologically.”

– Marx was a drunkard and heavy opium user, while Engels was Mark Corrigan from Peep Show. They both clearly had problems, so can we move on and talk about Marxism, not Marx?

4. “What struck me about The Communist Manifesto was … ‘typical thinking’.”

– Peterson goes on to complain that The Communist Manifesto doesn’t contain much self reflection or self criticism; instead being just full of bombastic statements about proletarian revolution. In other words, Peterson is unsatisfied because the manifesto is a call for revolution, not a standard logical argument. Maybe he should try reading something more critical or reflective from Marx, such as Grundrisse, the Critique of the Gotha Program or even The Class Struggles in France. If he’d rather see how Marx clearly critiqued and altered his views over his lifetime, Peterson could also try contrasting the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 with Capital. That could be fun. Are we allowed to have fun?

5. “First of all, … the proposition there is history is primarily to be viewed through an economic lens, and I think that’s a debatable proposition, because there are many other motivations that drive human beings.”

– Of course it’s a debatable position. If we were interested in art, then we’d look at history through the lens of art. If we want to learn about culinary traditions, then we’ll look at history through the lens of food. Right now, the discussion is about capitalism, which is a social order characterised by a specific form of economic organisation. So we have a debate about two contrasting approaches to economics, but Peterson doesn’t think we should focus on talking about economics. What should we focus on then? Peterson characteristically offers nothing of substance here.

6. “Marx believed that in a capitalist society, capital would accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people.”

– Once again, Peterson signals his disinterest in engaging with Marxist theory in a serious manner. Marx concluded that the conditions he described in Capital I would indeed lead to growing inequality and immiseration. In Capital II and III, Marx went on to introduce more layers of complexity to his model of capitalism. In the end, Marx’s model is one where the system has an underlying tendency towards creating inequality, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for capitalist societies to experience periods where this tendency doesn’t prevail. Modern Marxists are somewhat divided on this whole issue. Moreover, there are plenty of voices in the Marxist camp that even think Marx was completely wrong about this tendency. After all, Marxism is, first and foremost, all about methodology — something Peterson can’t seem to grasp. A good place to start learning about this discussion is Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation, by Eduard Bernstein. For something more contemporary I’d recommend Peterson read David Harvey’s The Limits to Capital and A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume II. I found Harvey extremely easy to read, and useful for understanding the basics of Marxist thought.

Peterson then argued the problem with Marxism is that it blames social organisation for the failings of hierarchy, rather than discussing the psychological origins of hierarchy itself. There is, of course, a trove of Marxist literature that looks specifically at the exact issue of how hierarchical and authoritarian thinking develop in the individual. Two of the more well known examples of this are from quasi-Marxist Erich Fromm’s The Fear of Freedom and A.R. Luria’s Cognitive Development Its Cultural and Social Foundations.

7. “The idea that there’s hierarchical competition among human beings — there’s evidence for that, that goes back at least to the Paleolithic times.”

– No Marxist would disagree that hierarchies predate capitalism. After all, this was basically the point of Engel’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

8. “This ancient problem of hierarchical structure is clearly not attributable to capitalism, because it existed long in human history before capitalism.”

– It’s almost as though almost all forms of human society have been hierarchical, whether it be a slave society, feudalism or capitalism. No Marxist thinks capitalism is the first hierarchical society, but plenty have dedicated their lives to exploring the relationship between hierarchy and capitalism. Arguably the most famous example of this would be Marxist-feminist Silvia Federici’s classic Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.

9. “Why would you necessarily — at least implicitly — link the class struggle with capitalism?”

– Marxists don’t necessarily link class struggle with capitalism. The afore-mentioned Federici actually did briefly explore class struggle under feudalism. Speaking of Marxist-feminists, August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism looks at both the status of women and class relations in pre-capitalist societies. Other examples of Marxist literature dealing with class struggle and hierarchy in pre-capitalist societies include Novack’s The Long View of History, Labriola’s Essays on the Materialist Conception of History, Vygotsky’s Primitive Man and his Behavior, Plekhanov’s The Materialist Conception of History and Morgan’s Ancient Society. Along with Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels is also worth revisiting in The Peasant War in Germany and On the Early History of Christianity. All of these texts provide examples of how different groups of people have engaged in social struggle within societies where individuals serve specialised roles in the political economy.

10. “The other thing that Marx didn’t seem to take into account is that there … are far more reasons that human beings struggle than their economic class struggle.”

– That’s why modern Marxists have intersectionality. Remember Peterson: this isn’t a debate on Marx, but on Marxism. But even if we focus exclusively on Marx — whose most significant works do indeed focus on class struggle — it’s clear he understood perfectly well that struggle, social change and conflict aren’t exclusively propelled by economic class conflict. Peterson would know this if he had read The Civil War in France, where Marx meticulously detailed how the Franco-Prussian War — with all its political intrigue and nationalist fervour — created conditions for social change. Here, Peterson is simply presenting a strawman that hardly applies to Marx, and certainly doesn’t apply to modern Marxism.

11. “Human beings struggle with themselves; with the malevolence that’s inside themselves, with the evil they are capable of doing. With the spiritual and psychological warfare that goes on within them. And we’re also, actually, always at odds with nature — and this never seems to show up in Marx, and it doesn’t show up in … Marxism in general.”

– Congratulations Peterson, you literally just summarised Marx’ theory of alienation, as first expressed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In short, Marx believed we flawed, limited human beings are constantly being held back from a more natural, idealised state he called “species-being.” For Marx, our separation from both nature and our own natural species-being is the source of alienation, while our struggle with nature underpins all social relations. As he wrote in the manuscripts, “Every self-estrangement of man, from himself and from nature, appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other than and differentiated from himself.”

To learn more about the Marxist approach to alienation and nature, Peterson should consider reading Istvan Meszaros’ classic Marx’s Theory of Alienation. It’s dense, but that’s only because the issue of alienation and nature shows up a lot in both Marx, and Marxism in general.

12. “It’s as if nature doesn’t exist [for Marxists].”

– As Marx wrote in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, “The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labour is realised, in which it is active, from which, and by means of which it produces.”

13. “The primary conflict, as far as I’m concerned — or a primary conflict — that human beings engage in, is the struggle for life in a cruel and harsh natural world. And it’s as if that doesn’t exist in the Marxist domain.”

– As George Novack noted in Understanding History, “Alienation is therefore first of all a social expression of the fact that men lack adequate control over the forces of nature.”

For Marxists such as Novack, the struggle with nature isn’t just the primary conflict that humans engage in, but the very lens through which we understand our existence. Marx himself had a rather intriguing, albeit cynical, take on this very personal conflict. As he wrote in the manuscripts, “Having seen that in relation to the worker who appropriates nature by means of his labour, this appropriation appears as estrangement.”

Marx believed we need to exploit nature to survive. However, by exploiting nature we become alienated from it, and thus suffer confusion, loneliness and a sense of meaninglessness. This suffering both holds us back as individuals, while also being the engine that drives civilisation and all forms of social organisation — including hierarchies.

In other words, for Marxists, humanity’s primary conflict is the struggle for life in a cruel and harsh natural world. Despite what Peterson claims, this theme not only exists in the Marxist domain, but was also central to Marx’s understanding of societal development.

14. “There’s also very little understanding in The Communist Manifesto that any of the, like say, hierarchical organisations that human beings have put together might have a positive element.”

– Remember how the Manifesto was supposed to be a call to revolution, not a standard logical argument?

15. “And that’s an absolute catastrophe because hierarchical structures are actually necessarily to resolve complicated social problems — we have to organise ourselves in some manner … [and] hierarchies happen to be a very efficient way of distributing resources.”

– Peterson seems to be suggesting that Marxists have never considered hierarchical solutions to problems of social organisation and resource distribution. While it’s true that modern Marxists tend to be egalitarian and often suspicious hierarchy, Marxism as a field is far more diverse than Peterson seems to presume. Terms like “democratic centralism” and “vanguard party” may have fallen out of favour in the 21st Century, but that doesn’t mean Marxists have never noted the potential efficiencies of hierarchical organisation.

Some examples of Marxist literature grappling with this issue include Lenin in both The Democratic Tasks of the Revolutionary Proletariat and his classic The State and Revolution, Trotsky’s On Democratic-Centralism & The Regime, and Ernest Mandel’s Trotsky’s Conception of Self-organisation and the Vanguard Party. Chapter 15 of the 1966 compilation Quotations from Mao Tse Tung (Democracy and the Three Main Fields) might also be helpful. Finally, we have Georg Lukacs. Lukacs himself is a controversial figure among Marxists: some view him as playing an important role in expanding on topics like Lenin’s concept of the vanguard party as a force for liberation, while his critics label him an outright Stalinist. Either way, the issue of hierarchical organisation was central to much of Lukacs’ work.

16. “Human hierarchies are not fundamentally predicated on power.”

– So why do we need cops?

17. “You don’t rise to a position of authority that’s reliable in a human society primarily by exploiting other people. It’s a very unstable means of obtaining power.”

– David Harvey made this exact point in Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Chapter 14: Freedom and Domination). For Marxists, capitalism’s reliance on exploitation of the masses creates a series of contradictions that can provoke social and economic instability. It is indeed an unstable means of obtaining power, and that’s why the revolution is coming.

18. “Another problem that comes up right away is that Marx also assumes that you can think about history as a binary class struggle, with clear divisions between, say, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. And that’s actually a problem because its not so easy to make a firm division between who’s exploiter and who’s exploitee, let’s say. Because it’s not obvious — like in the case of small shareholders, let’s say, whether or not they happen to be part of the oppressed, or part of the oppressor.”

– A small shareholder would likely be considered part of the petite bourgeoisie, as they likely rely on a mix of capital/limited productive property and their own labour power to sustain themselves, without necessarily depending purely on either labour power (like the proletariat) or entirely on control over the means of production (like capitalists). This example illustrates that in Marxist theory, class is defined by the economic role an individual plays in society — not their wealth, social/cultural status or anything else. So just as we can put a label on your job, we can also put a label on where your job fits into the economy. I don’t see why Peterson thinks this is so difficult. Having said that, Peterson is right to say there isn’t a binary divide between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Like the petite bourgeoisie, Marxism also identifies many other intermediary classes, such as landlord/rentier capitalists, the peasantry/campesinos and the lumpenproletariat. As capitalism evolves, new classes can emerge, such as the bureaucratic class of the USSR, or the precariat of 21st Century neoliberalism.

Even with all these technical terms, most modern Marxists will still agree the distinction between exploiter and exploited isn’t clear cut if we atomise individuals. Exploitation depends on your social role, and as individuals we can serve many social roles. For example, a husband might be exploited all day at work, only to return home to exploit his wife for free domestic labour. That same housewife might be exploited by her husband at home, while still being the passive beneficiary the racist exploitation of African Americans. An African American might be racially exploited by a discriminatory social structure, yet still reap some of the benefits from the imperialist exploitation of the Third World. Remember: this isn’t a question of ethics, but of how resources are distributed in an economy. Most of this should be covered in any Sociology 101 course.

19. “[In the USSR] The listing of how it was possible for you to be bourgeois instead of proletariat grew immensely, and that was one of the reasons the Red Terror claimed all the victims that it claimed.”

– The Red Terror was a wave of violence and repression carried out by Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. The causes are numerous, ranging from the chaos of the collapse of the old regime to the pressures of war and, of course, fanaticism. Around 100,000 people were killed. It’s worth noting the Red Terror took place at the same time as the lesser-known White Terror, where anti-Bolshevik forces likewise butchered around 100,000 people. It’s impossible to put the massacres down to a single cause; because as Peterson would likely say, there are “far more reasons that human beings struggle” than just identity politics.

20. “The binary class struggle was a bad idea. That was a very bad idea. It’s also bad in this way: in that — and this is a real sleight of hand that Marx pulls off — you have a binary class division (proletariat and bourgeoisie), and you have an implicit idea that all of the good is on the side of the proletariat and all of the evil is on the side of the bourgeoisie.”

– Citation needed. Marxism is primarily a family of theories on political economy that also branches into disciplines ranging from sociology to psychology, urban planning to administration and management. It has fairly little to say on the topic of morality. Marx himself barely wrote anything on “good” versus “evil”; instead, he sought to understand how capitalism works as a system. Nonetheless, Marxist ethics does exist as a field of study, though it has little to do with definitive “good” versus “evil” proclamations. Instead, most Marxists tend to understand morality as a social construct, meaning right and wrong depend on the society and context you live under. However, there is much diversity on this topic, and I’m sure plenty of people will disagree with the above overly-broad generalisation. Many Marxist-anarchists align with anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin’s understanding of morality as a kind of social instinct — a view somewhat shared by Noam Chomsky (not a Marxist but nonetheless influential). The closest real-world example comparable to Peterson’s strawman is Trotksy in his 1938 pamphlet, Their Morals and Ours. In it, Trotsky equated the self-interests of the working class with the interests of humanity in general, while arguing capitalism’s own morals exist primarily to serve those in positions of power or privilege. Perhaps Peterson had this text in mind, but I somehow doubt it.

Overall though, serious Marxists tend to be wary of moralistic appeals. This is because, as Chris Harman put it,

“Marx saw that what is of cardinal importance is not the personal behaviour of the individual but the struggle between social forces, not personal morality but the fight to establish the good society. And in that struggle, the language of moralism was all too often the language used by the ruling class in order to constrain those who opposed it.”

21. “It’s absolutely foolish to make the presumption you can identify someone’s moral worth with their economic standing.”

– This is a point I routinely have to make to anti-Marxists who claim rich people get rich because they’re good, hard-working people. As with all things though, Marxists aren’t interested in morally condemning somebody for their economic standing. If anything, the most we can say is that Marxists are mostly interested in the role somebody plays in society, and whether that role produces outcomes conducive to human (and for some, animal) welfare. One example of this is the current debate over the role of police. Marxist David Whitehouse has noted the earliest formal Western-style police forces were developed in the mid 19th Century as a response not to crime, but to “strikes in England, riots in the Northern US and the threat of slave insurrections in the South.”

“The overall point here is that the invention of the police was part of a broader expansion of state activity to gain control over the day-to-day behaviour of the working class,” he argued.

This is a fairly typical view among Marxists: police as we know them today exist as a branch of the state that seeks to both maintain a domestic monopoly on violence and protect orderly capital accumulation from the unruly masses. This is why many Marxists view the police as counter-revolutionary, even while acknowledging that most individual officers are drawn from the proletariat itself. It’s even possible to acknowledge an individual officer might be a great person who generally acts in what could be considered a morally righteous manner in their private life, but nonetheless serves a potentially repressive social function. Is that person bad? What if he’s a rich cop? Who knows, and who cares? The real question for Marxists is how that individual’s social role can be changed for the better, such as by reforming law enforcement into something along the lines of community policing. Anything beyond this has nothing to do with Marxism, and more to do with an individual’s personal understanding of morality. Speaking from my own personal sense of morality, I judge people based on how the act given their context, not how much money they have.

Next, around the 22 minute mark, Peterson indulges in an extended, mostly incoherent critique of the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. He never defines the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the concept of a form of government where the electorate exerts democratic control over the economy. Rather than discuss the potential issues that could emerge from a democratised economy, Peterson’s main gripe appeared to be that if you entrust a relatively small group of people to manage the affairs of state, you may end up with corruption and incompetence. He presents no explanation for why this problem is supposedly unique to socialist states, and not to governments in general.

22. “If you’re running a business, and it’s a successful business: first of all, you’re a bloody fool to exploit your workers.”

This is a textbook example of an equivocation fallacy. Here, Peterson appeared to use the colloquial definition of “exploit”, which usually refers to unfair or abusive treatment. If Peterson had read Capital, he would understand that Marxists don’t use the term “exploitation” in that way. Instead, the Marxist definition of “exploitation” refers to an economic phenomenon present in almost all societies (including pre-capitalist ones). This phenomenon occurs when a society starts producing a surplus (eg; harvesting more grain than the local farmers can consume). Part of this surplus might be distributed among the masses, but it’s inarguable that people who enjoy a position of privilege in society are obviously somehow getting hold of more of that surplus than everybody else. In Marxist theory, under capitalism this is usually achieved by paying workers less than the value of whatever they produce. If I work in a sweatshop and produce 100 shirts a day and each shirt sells for $10, then I’ve made $1000 worth of value for the company. But if the company pays me $1000 a day, then that company probably won’t be around for every long. If a company wants to make a profit, it needs to withhold at least some (if not most) of that value. This phenomenon is called “exploitation”. Maybe you think this is abusive, or maybe you think that’s just how capitalism works. Either way, Peterson didn’t seem to understand that this is what Marxists are talking about when the toss around the word “exploitation”. Nonetheless, Peterson was right when he suggested it can be foolish to abuse your employees, but it would be impossible to have employees in the first place without exploitation as defined in Marxist theory.

23. “The notion that you’re adding no productive value as a manager (rather than a capitalist) is absolutely absurd.”

– Marx would have agreed. Ignoring Peterson’s obvious failure to understand the difference between a corporation’s profits and managerial salaries, for Marxists, most mid-level managers fit into either the proletarian or petite bourgeoisie. Hence, they too are typically subject to exploitation, albeit perhaps less than their subordinates. Even a capitalist might add productive value, though they’re not being exploited unless surplus value produced by their personal labour power is being accumulated elsewhere in the economy. Does that mean it’s possible for a capitalist to be exploited? Potentially, but only under extremely uncommon circumstances. For example, if the sweatshop boss works overtime to save their failing company, only to end up selling those shirts at a loss, then maybe you could argue part of the capitalist’s own labour power was exploited by whoever bought up all the shirts on the cheap. In that situation though, the capitalist by definition may end up being considered a member of an intermediary class, such as the petite bourgeoisie. Of course, this is all pretty abstract and mostly irrelevant to the normal function of capitalism; the point is simply to illustrate how little Peterson understands basic Marxist concepts such as surplus, profit and exploitation.

24. “What’s wrong with profit, exactly? Well, the idea from the Marxist perspective is that profit was theft.”

Marxists aren’t concerned about profit on moral grounds, but due to economic realities. I would have liked to hear Peterson discuss his issues with notions such as market saturation, the transformation problem, underconsumption/overproduction and the myriad of economic distortions that can be caused by excessively high (or low) rates of profit. In fact, Marxists don’t really have a problem with profit at all; rather, the concern is the widely accepted reality (even among many liberal economists) that capitalism requires constant compound growth forever in order to avoid falling into crisis. As David Harvey once explained,

“The system has to expand because it’s always about profit, about creating what Marx called a ‘surplus value’ … and what that does is this: if you grow at 3 percent a year, forever, then you get to the point where the amount of expansion required is absolutely huge. In Marx’s time, there’s plenty of space in the world to expand into, whereas right now we’re talking about 3 percent compounding rate of growth on everything that’s happening in China and South Asia and Latin America. The problem arises: where are you going to expand into? That’s the bad infinity coming into being.”

Whether or not you share with Harvey’s concerns is irrelevant, because Peterson didn’t even acknowledge the Marxist perspective. Instead, he created a strawman who hates profit because it offends their morals.

25. “How can you grow if you don’t have profit?”

This issue was discussed in Capital III. Without resorting to algebra, the short story is that profit is indeed essential for the circulation of capital. The problem is when capital stops circulating — such as if the capitalist class has hoarded so much surplus that an excessive percentage of a society’s created value can’t be recycled back into productive cycles. This has the potential to inhibit growth and drag the system into crisis. Peterson would have been better off asking the question, “How can you grow with profit?”

Bonus Round:

“It’s not easy to have a good idea.”

– The last 27 minutes of anti-intellectual posturing has made that abundantly clear.

“There were forms of stupidity I couldn’t engage in.”

– I find that extremely hard to believe. I just listened to a grown man spend half an hour riling against something that he clearly hasn’t even tried to understand. To finish, Peterson threw in a few stats that appeared to suggest capitalism has done a lot of good in the world. Even if we assume he is right on this final point, Peterson failed to even attempt to make a case that a critical study of capitalism such as Marxism is somehow bad.