The Architecture of Marxist Beliefs

by James Lindsay

Recently, a friend reminded me that when I hoaxed American Reformer with the Communist Manifesto, I said that the Woke Right has the same “architecture of belief” as Marxism, and he challenged me to give an analogy that clarifies what that architecture is so people can better understand why the Woke Right is “Woke.”

Imagine we’re in a plane, say like a B-777 or something. We know flying is supposed to be safe and comfortable, and we expect our pilots are competent to provide that kind of air transport. But today there’s pretty severe turbulence, and it keeps coming up. The air isn’t smooth, and the flight is bumpy, even a little concerning.

Most of us don't think anything about this. We know turbulence happens, and, even though it can be scary or inconvenient (hold on to that red wine they just poured into your little plastic cup!), we don't blame the pilot for the turbulence. Sometimes, though, when there’s a lot of turbulence, more of us might start getting frustrated not with the situation but with the pilots. Maybe they should be doing more. Maybe they’re responsible.

This analogy will give us insight into the Marxian architecture of belief.

Imagine someone in the plane (our “Marxist”) decides that the pilot really is the problem, so he asks the stewardess to go up to the flight deck and tell him how to fly the plane. He’s never flown a plane before, but he’s flown in them, maybe, or even seen some things about planes or played some video games.

The stewardess, of course, tells him this is not possible. He objects, demanding to talk to the pilot, but he’s rebuffed again. He argues. The stewardess tells him not only is that not allowed and illegal, it’s also impossible. The flight deck door is locked from the inside so that no one can enter, and the pilots are trained not to open it except under certain circumstances.

Our good Marxist is not an understanding person. He does not believe that keeping the pilots protected from passengers, whether dangerous or distracting, is for the good reason of letting them exercise their expertise in flying the plane safely. He thinks the whole setup is a rigged game to keep people who could help the pilot fly better and end the turbulence for everyone out of the cockpit so the pilot can retain his status as “captain” and the power that grants him.

As he argues with the stewardess, the Marxist becomes convinced that she’s in on the game that’s keeping the flight turbulent. She could let him into the flight deck, she just won’t, and she cites all kinds of illegitimate (to him) reasons like laws and locked doors that are all designed to keep him out and therefore keep the flight turbulent and awful for everyone. She doesn’t even care that the passengers are suffering in all this turbulence, and it’s not like the plane is comfortable to begin with! She must be in on it to retain her status as “stewardess” and the power that grants her as part of the “flight crew.”

In his mind, in the Marxian architecture of belief, there are two kinds of people on the plane: the “flight crew” and the “passengers,” and they are intrinsically in conflict that is highlighted by the less-than-ideal circumstances of turbulence. To him, there is a system of rules, regulations, norms, expectations, and “reasons” why the flight crew gets to be in charge and, ultimately, fly the plane, and the passengers do not have any input into the way the flight is conducted, no matter how turbulent or uncomfortable. But the whole point of the flight is to take the passengers where they are going, so it’s really their flight, not the flight crew’s. The flight crew is alienating them from their status as the raison d’etre for the flight and the primary sufferers of the flight’s unpleasant conditions.

So he starts thinking to himself that he could actually get into the flight deck and seize control of the means of flying if he really wanted to. It isn’t impossible, and legalities are just social fictions, and no one can say why it matters that he “doesn't know how to fly a plane.” He knows there’s turbulence, and he knows what being on a flight is like, and it sucks. He also knows the flight is only flying for people like him. He’s entitled to a say, if not control.

He realizes he could actually storm the flight deck door if he tried hard enough, or take a stewardess hostage or win her over to his side and get her to call into the cockpit for them to open it from the inside. So he could get in. It would just take a kind of violent revolution (storm the door and break it down), “revolutionary terrorism” (take a stewardess hostage), or a certain Gramscian “boring from within” with a defecting stewardess or two (create a counter-hegemony within the stewardess class).

He realizes there’s a problem here, though. The other passengers.

The problem is that they’ve been brainwashed by the pilot, the stewardesses, who are there “for your safety,” by the law, society, “common sense,” and a belief in the “realities” of the complexity and difficulty of jetliner aviation, etc.. They would thwart him in storming the door or even from taking a stewardess hostage. If he wanted to convert some stewardesses, these other brainwashed passengers would also likely object and certainly wouldn’t help. They have a false consciousness about the true nature of the flight situation. (Some of them might even be praying for smoother air or God’s Hand on the flight, thus distracting them from the full appreciation of their circumstances.)

The problem in the Marxist architecture of belief is that the other passengers, who are actually sane, have been brainwashed into the “flight crew’s” ideology, whereas he has “woke up” to the “critical awareness” of his flying situation and the dismal turbulence it’s causing. He realizes he needs to wake up the other passengers so they have a critical flight consciousness like he does: the pilots and stewardesses, laws and policies, norms and common sense are all conspiring against them in a mutually reinforcing way to keep the passengers out of the cockpit and their hands off the means of flight production.

There’s a lot more of us passengers than there are of them controlling the plane and its cabin, he reasons, and if I can get enough of the other passengers on board to help, a few more than that more to at least support the hijacking, and the rest to be too afraid to do anything heroic to stop us, there’s no reason we, the passengers, can’t take this plane over and get the turbulence to end for the good of all passengers. Even the pilots and stewardesses will benefit because they suffer from the turbulence too.

Everyone just needs to understand that the captain just wants to be “captain” so he can be special and important and remain in control of the flight situation (which he also benefits from with a handsome salary and a ton of status and good reputation he doesn't deserve). The rest of the flight crew is the same. They’re responsible for alienating the passengers from a smooth and enjoyable flight experience in the name of “safety” and “law.”

This is the Marxian architecture of belief. The plane is society; the flight controls are the “means of flight production”; the flight deck is the government and elite strata of society; the captain and co-pilots are the capitalist class; the flight attendants and maybe first-class passengers are the bourgeoisie benefiting illegitimately; the regular passengers are the proletariat; the turbulence is society not functioning perfectly and sometimes uncomfortably or dangerously; laws, norms, etc., and “flight safety” are the ideology maintaining the two-tiered, illegitimate system.

Other analogies are made clear above, like to the Marxist methods of violent revolution, revolutionary terrorism, and Gramscian counter-hegemonic activism (long march through the institutions).

The Marxist in the seat is likely to believe that the flight crew is corrupt and certainly not doing their best with the situation. He believes the pilot could be flying a smooth flight if he wanted to and just thought more about the passengers, but he doesn’t, thus revealing a “contradiction” in the system and ideology of “flight safety” that impugns the pilots and flight crew. The stewardesses, he believes, are enforcing this status quo not for safety but because of the status it confers to tell passengers they cannot fly the plane or bother the pilots in flight.

Thus, we can understand how Marxists think.

So, what about the Woke Right? How would their mindset fit into this analogy?

Our Woke Right passenger would also experience the turbulence and conclude that it isn’t just part of the circumstances of flying that day (weather) but a deliberate failure by the pilot and crew. The problem, he would surmise, is not that the flight crew is hoarding status away from passengers like him but was actually made a pilot for illegitimate reasons. Maybe he’s a DEI hire, representing the degradation of standards necessary for safe, comfortable flight, and that’s the reason for the turbulent flight.

He would also conclude that there is likely someone on the plane who could advise or replace the pilot and relieve the passengers of their suffering in the turbulence, someone who would have been a pilot, perhaps, if not for the degenerate system that gave them the pilot they have. Of course, that pilot would also recognize the purpose of the flight is to move the passengers, and he would also identify with them.

Like his Marxist counterpart, he would likely conclude that the stewardesses and cited laws, regulations, and “common sense” were arranged to secure and maintain the illegitimate regime that places inadequate pilots in positions they obviously don’t deserve, and the other passengers just “don’t know what time it is.” The whole system is against him too, just for different reasons. Maybe this plane won’t crash, but it might, and sooner or later one will.

If he conferred with our hypothetical Marxist, he would agree on many points of the problem, but he would disagree that it it is some passenger, in the generic, who should be flying the plane. That’s part of the problem. He’d agree that much of the Marxist’s analysis is right and that his general tactics for taking over the plane are generally correct, but that his solutions and appeals are wrong. There are natural elite representatives among the passengers who have taken more flights or played more video games than other people, perhaps, and they have a greater claim than the other passengers to fly the plane and run the cabin—even than the degenerate and corrupt pilots and flight crew.

Our good Woke Right reactionary, then, would agree with everything that makes the hypothetical Marxist “Woke” about the flight circumstance though not about some details of the specific nature of the problem or its solution. The analysis and solution would be, as we might say, “same in kind but different in degree,” where the kind in question is still “Woke.”

Thus we can understand the Woke Right mentality as being essentially Woke though with different particulars.