Vulgar Marxism refers to a "belief that one can directly access the real conditions of history" and is sometimes referred to as reflection theory. [1] In 1998, Robert M. Young defined "economism or vulgar Marxism" as "the most orthodox [position in Marxism which] provides one-to-one correlations between the socio-economic base and the intellectual superstructure". [a] [2] [3]
The expression "Vulgar Marxist" is used usually as a derogatory label, rather than a self-identification. [4]
Walter Benjamin in Theses on the Philosophy of History described the Gotha Programme's "defin[ition] [of] labor as 'the source of all wealth and all culture'" as a "vulgar-Marxist concept of what labor is, [which] does not bother to ask the question of how its products affect workers". The Gotha programme to Benjamin "wishes to perceive only the progression of the exploitation of nature, not the regression of society". Benjamin contrasted "technocratic" vulgar Marxism with Marx's response to the Gotha programme. Benjamin wrote: "Suspecting the worst, Marx responded that human being, who owned no other property aside from his labor-power, 'must be the slave of other human beings'". [5]
Paul Mattick saw "incorporation of bourgeois economic ideas into the framework of Marxism" by "the proponents of 'Marxist economics'". To Mattick, this occurred when "classical economy degenerated into vulgar economy" and "marginal utility theory", which "could be regarded as a universal and therefore neutral principle" was "deemed the more desirable" than "Marx's derivation of prices from labor-time values". He saw the resultant Marxism which followed "'economic laws' that could be appreciated by friend and foe alike" as "vulgar Marxism". [6]
John Phillips states that Julia Kristeva understands "vulgar Marxism" as synonymous with "vulgar sociologism", a view that "characterises ideology in terms of a superstructure determined by an economic/historical base (base and superstructure)". [7] Richard Lewontin explains vulgar Marxism as a form of economic reductionism, in which human expression and knowledge is determined by the form of economic production put upon the group. [8] In other words, that rather than having innate properties, humans are almost exclusively shaped by societal circumstance: "Disease, illness, depression, and the pain of day-to-day living are no more than the inevitable consequence of a capitalist and patriarchal social order." [9]
In contrast, McKenzie Wark in Four Cheers For Vulgar Marxism!!!! suggested that "as Marxism became a creature of the academy" the accusation of vulgar Marxism arose to "cordon off respectable approaches to knowledge", which were outside academia. Wark detected the deployment of "the insult", vulgar Marxist, as an allegation by George Lukacs and Karl Korsch (against Russian Machism), by Theodor Adorno and by Louis Althusser, and by E. P. Thompson against Althusser. Wark wrote that the allegation entailed a dismissal of "too much attention to specialized knowledge such as the sciences" and a disdain for the "lack a sense of the central role of philosophy". Wark praised Donna Haraway who "knows her biological science first-hand" as a vulgar Marxist, and noted Alexander Bogdanov who saw "the nexus of labor-techne-nature to be primary", to be "vulgar in a ... different sense to the cartoon of economistic, deterministic, reductionist vulgar Marxism". [4]
If you want to show that your version of Marxism is better than somebody else's, the quickest way to do so is to call the other version vulgar. One's own version is nuanced, sophisticated, subtle, erudite, philosophically rich – all the things the vulgar is not. [...] What is wrong about the vulgar other is a bit of a moving target, as we shall see.[...] The sins of the vulgarians are whichever you claim your refinement of Marxism has corrected. [...] / I want to look a bit more closely now at how the insult "vulgar Marxist!" is deployed, and in otherwise not wholly compatible ways, before moving on to four lesser-known kinds I think worth particular attention in the current conjuncture. I suspect progress in the twenty-first century might only now be made from the starting point of the various vulgarians who were insulted along the way.