Brian Leiter’s Marx, Woke Capitalists and Daniel Bells Cultural Contradictions
With ideology theorist Jamie Edwards philosopher Brian Leiter has written a new introductory book about the philosophy of Karl Marx. Their account is incisive and bracing. So I’ll summarise some of the main points and then at the end briefly put this version of Marx into a conversation with the late sociologist Daniel Bell. It's a rambling thought piece rather than a book review but the book is really good and anyone interested in Marx should read it because to be honest a lot of stuff out there about Marx is rubbish.
We might begin looking at what Leiter thinks Marx is about by presenting a deceptively simple counterfactual: would you do the work you do if you did not need the wage to survive? If the answer is no, Marx would say the labour is unfree. Many jobs, especially in the professions, are mixtures of spontaneous and compelled tasks, writing and teaching that one would do regardless of pay alongside meetings and administrative chores one would do only for a paycheck. This shows that even highly compensated workers can find that the bulk of what occupies their time fails the counterfactual test. In this respect Marx would say we were all ‘wage slaves” whenever we do unfree work.
Marx’s paradigm case, influenced by Engels’s observations of Manchester, was factory labour in the mid-nineteenth century, work that was paradigmatically non-spontaneous. The present features wider occupational variety and, for some, much better wages. Yet higher pay does not transmute unfree labour into free labour. Leiter’s parade case for this is his experience teaching student big-law: the six-figure starting salary purchases long hours of tasks that associates would not do except for the wage, which is why burnout and attrition precede partnership for most. That these choices are made willingly does not by itself show that the labour is free; it shows the strength of incentives in a system where survival, status, and aspiration press in the same direction.
This is where ideology enters the picture, not as a crude conspiracy but as the ambient culture of aspiration and evaluation that shapes what options feel live and what sacrifices seem normal. Leiter borrows here from the Frankfurt School’s sensitivity to preference formation: the choice of lucrative drudgery over modestly paid spontaneous activity may be explicable less by sovereign agency and more by a background that values certain careers, consumption patterns, and forms of success. The presence of choice, then, does not neutralise Marx’s unfreedom claim rather it redistributes coercion from overt compulsion to market necessity and the soft power of social meaning.
Leiter’s key move is to present capitalism’s distinctive “logic” without moralising. He stresses Marx’s convergence with monetarist Chicago economist MiltonFriedman on the structural constraint: firms must pursue profit under competitive pressure or be displaced by those that do. That imperative makes capitalism unrivalled at technological development and productivity growth. It also makes certain forms of benevolence commercially untenable. The kindhearted owner who refuses labour-saving technology for the sake of workers creates a margin that more ruthless competitors will erase. This is the mechanism by which progress is generated and, simultaneously, by which labour is displaced and the sphere of unfreedom reproduced. In Leiter’s retelling, Marx is not primarily asking what is morally wrong with capitalism but just identifying how capitalism, by its own internal necessities, produces both prosperity and the conditions that keep most people’s work unfree.
Artificial intelligence sharpens the point. Prior rounds of automation targeted manual or routine clerical tasks; the current wave credibly substitutes for portions of professional judgment such as junior legal work, consulting analysis and parts of financial modelling. If the competitive logic remains in place, adoption is not optional. Firms that hesitate will lose to those that move. That in turn reduces demand for precisely the strata who once purchased freedom with high wages. Leiter grants that Marx was wrong about timing because obviously the nineteenth century did not culminate in capitalism’s collapse, and worldwide capitalism only later became genuinely global. But the structural claim may be vindicated under new technological conditions: if fewer human tasks are indispensable, more of us confront the pure form of wage dependence under shrinking demand for our labour. The forecast is a sober extrapolation from the same competitive dynamic that made capitalism so productive.
Running beneath this is an anthropological thesis that guides Leiter’s reading of alienation. Marx’s early writings portray human beings as makers by nature, beings who engage in productive activity beyond mere subsistence, often for aesthetic or intellectual satisfaction. Children’s exuberant making, prehistoric cave paintings, the amateur bookbinder’s craft, or a podcast produced for love rather than money all manifest this species-being. Alienation is estrangement from that essential activity; unfreedom consists in the compulsion to devote most of one’s waking energy to tasks one would abandon absent the wage. Importantly, Leiter takes Marx to be an objectivist about the good, taking him to think that the value of a life does not reduce to what its subject happens to want, or even to what they would want under sanitised conditions. Obvious counterexamples like being skilled at and enjoying vicious activities do not threaten this view; such proclivities can be read as pathologies rather than expressions of essence.
The claim is that humans as productive, creative beings, but this is not homogenising. A shared nature does not require uniform outputs. Freed makers will make different things. This "species essence" seems a rather strange claim to me to be honest, as it seems likely that what Marx - and Leiter - are describing is very much the bourgeois individual. I doubt if all humans throughout all time have been driven by some in built proclivity to engage in productive activity beyond subsistence - certainly not to the same degree as modern humans are - but of course, this is one of those claims that can’t really be proved one way or the other.
Anyhow, for Marx this yields a two-stage judgment of capitalism . On the one hand, capitalism is historically necessary because only its competitive engine can deliver the surplus required for the utopian society where needs are met without unfree labour. On the other hand, precisely because capitalism’s engine is competition, it cannot on its own convert productivity into freedom because the very same mechanism that produces surplus keeps labour structured by dependence and displacement. This is an internal account of why capitalism cannot be the final form of social production if the standard for that is widespread free, self-directed activity.
Leiter is correspondingly austere about Utopian “the day after” talk. Marx offers very little blueprint for the institutional design of a post-capitalist order - communism and all that - and Leiter resists filling the gap. Administration surely does not vanish because even with enormous productive power, societies must coordinate distribution, infrastructure, and mundane routines. The language of the state “withering away” can only mean the withering of state functions dedicated to sustaining capitalist relations because law-like and administrative functions for coordination remain. The hardest historical critique, voiced by Marx’s contemporaries and dramatised by the Soviet experience, is that administrators may congeal into a new ruling stratum. Leiter acknowledges that Marx under-weighted this governance problem. If capitalism is necessary to build the material preconditions of freedom, the design problem is how to prevent administrators from re-creating domination when markets no longer hold the whip. This is actually a crucial omission by Marx who has no theory of forces of coercion beyond the economic logics of capitalism itself and I’d argue that coercion is actually far more important a force than either cultural or economic forces.
Two pressure points remain if one wants to push the view. First, the counterfactual test risks over-identifying unfreedom in socially necessary but unpleasant work. Any decent society must decide who bears such tasks without simply reinstalling coercion under a new name. Second, the appeal to ideology can blur into a comprehensive suspicion of preferences; the challenge is to mark when aspiration reflects domination and when it is genuinely one’s own. Neither problem sinks the analysis; each names the institutional and cultural work that any transition beyond capitalism would need to accomplish. One historical caution is worth registering in passing. The sentiment that liberal rights are genuine progress over feudal orders fits Marx’s texts; yet references to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights must be understood anachronistically, Marx died long before 1948, so the right way to put it is that Marx recognized civil liberties as advances while treating them as insufficient for full emancipation.
What Leiter’s analysis of Marx achieves is a reframing. He does not ask you to hate markets or to romanticise poverty. He asks you to interrogate the structure of your own day with a precise counterfactual and to see how a system that brilliantly multiplies means also entrenches a form of unfreedom about ends. Capitalism may well be the indispensable path to the material threshold at which most people could be makers in Marx’s sense but its logic also ensures that reaching that threshold will not, on its own, convert work into freedom. Whether AI accelerates us toward a generalisation of wage dependence or forces a redesign that finally aligns productive power with free activity is, on this view, the live question our century inherits.
Leiter turns from Marx’s utopian anthropology to a colder register, one he, Leiter, shares with Freud and Nietzsche. Marx, he says, underestimates our appetite for cruelty and aggression. If humans find real satisfaction in domination and spite, as Freud thought, and as Nietzsche anatomised, then any serious institutional design must reckon with those unattractive features. This is not an incidental caveat; it bears directly on how one would organise a post-capitalist order once massive productive power is available. Optimism about species-being must be tempered by the political psychology of sabotage, hierarchy, and the thrill of injuring. It’s here that forces of coercion are surely convincingly found and Marxist structural designs that assumes away these drives will be devoured by them.
That scepticism spills into Leiter's assessment of market utopias. Anarcho-capitalism imagines oligarchs will take over state-like functions benignly but nothing in experience warrants that hope. Second, market utopianism ignores capitalism’s inner tendency to make most human labour redundant for those who command the newest technology. The more plausible endpoint, in Marx’s terms, is not a frictionless market Eden but a bifurcated world akin to that presented in the rather poor sci-fi movie Elysium: a thin stratum for the tiny elite protected by capital and force, with the many left to immiseration outside this gated bubble. (We can see this already as the settled structure of several nations as tiny mega rich elites gate themselves away from the rest of us). If accumulation plus technological control removes the economic need for the many, it is naive to presume benevolent diffusion from the few. (Think Elon Musk if you need convincing).
Leiter separates two theses that often get conflated: desires do change, and capitalism has historically supplied new roles as older ones are automated. Both can be true without licensing a perpetual guarantee. The labour economists’ picture in the twenty-first century is one that shows us that displacement is accelerating while replacement lags in wealthy economies, and AI threatens the professional classes, the very strata that once weathered automation by moving up the value chain. Induction from 175 years of capitalism, he argues, is too thin a reed for the next 100-200 years, especially as capital’s incentive is to adopt labour-substituting technology rapidly or die. (And I don't think it'll take a century tbh). Even if higher-order desires proliferate, they do not conjure basic goods; without income and inclusion, the newly redundant will still lack food, shelter and sociability. Marx’s distinction between relative and absolute immiseration matters here: relative immiseration is inequality amid rising means; absolute immiseration is deprivation of the basics. The Elysium trajectory makes the latter thinkable, not merely the former.
Leiter's scepticism pairs with a clarifying demolition of Marx’s labour theory of value, at least as a theory of price. As Leiter reconstructs it, Marx, following and revising Smith and Ricardo, wanted socially necessary labour time (direct and embodied in tools, machinery, logistics) to explain “production prices.” The project, especially in Capital’s third volume, fails. Neoclassical marginalism predicts prices better because it tracks demand and supply at the margin. Many Marxist economists concede as much whilst some try to reinterpret the value theory as something other than price theory, but Leiter thinks that misreads the aim of the Ricardian problem Marx set himself.
What falls with it? The strictly technical grounding of “exploitation” and the technical sense of “commodity fetishism”, which depends on value being labour in disguise. Yet the core critique does not fall. One can retain a plain-language concept of surplus - society produces beyond need leaving us with the question of who appropriates it - and a plain-language sense of fetishism as overinvestment of social power and aura in commodities, without pretending labour time explains price. More importantly, none of Marx’s central claims about capitalism’s dynamic require the value theory; the compulsion to cut costs, adopt labour-saving technology, and expand profit remains intact.
From here Leiter presses his burden-of-proof challenge back onto the Utopian optimists. If the engine of capitalism is competition for profit, what concrete desire change on the part of capitalists will systematically create new roles for the vast majority when technology can perform a widening scope of tasks? The maximisation imperative is a structural feature of capitalism and gives no reasons for Utopian capitalist’s psychological altruism (Again: Elon Musk alert! Elon Musk alert!). The rejoinders about “treating labour well” through perks and compensation in elite sectors simply re-describe short episodes in a cycle: as soon as collusion is possible (he cites the Silicon Valley anti-poaching pacts), firms suppress wage competition; as soon as substitution is possible, even the elite engineer may be displaced by the tools she helped build.
The optimist might then pivot to diffusion and claim that “technological bleed” will mitigate domination. Perhaps at the outset, Leiter allows, as with Uber cheap ride-hailing before market power is secure or freemium AI models that entice users. But bleed is strategic and reversible and the best tools are paywalled, and price trajectories converge upward once incumbents consolidate. The real counterforce, if there is one in a Marxian register, is not capitalist benevolence but the state acting, as Marx put it, as the committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie, now enlightened enough to preserve consumers and social peace via redistribution, Universal Basic Income (UBI), or intentional diffusion. All that is conceptually compatible with Marx’s analysis, and Leiter grants the possibility but points out that it is not guaranteed by it.
For example, UBI looks like a response to a problem Marx saw first. But UBI can be a stopgap and in its current iterations it is pitched too low to emancipate most lives from necessity and leaves the underlying logic of accumulation untouched. If a capitalist state is prudent – ‘prudent’ is one of Leiter’s key terms for explaining how capitalists may choose to buffer hard capitalist effects for short term personal interests and he sees the Democratic Party as the prudent wing of the capitalist party - it may adopt redistribution to preserve consumers and social peace and that’s possible within Marx’s framework but as noted above, it is not guaranteed by it. And because capital’s incentive is to treat generosity as a cost, any sustained UBI at emancipatory levels will run up against the same calculus that pressures wages and constrains diffusion of the best technologies. A prudential, state-led settlement may stave off barbarism but it won’t be conjured by market benevolence.
Leiter’s deepest disagreement with utopianism concerns teleology. The optimist infers from two centuries of enrichment that capitalism trends toward universal prosperity. Leiter thinks that that is to mistake history’s arc for a law. Marx was right about the engine and wrong about the ending. Leiter argues that Marx can’t claim a providential Hegelian backdrop and the capitalist mechanism itself offers no promise of a happy terminus. It might issue in reformist stabilisation through state action or it might harden into barbarism under elite control. A sober reading of human nature as self-interest first, altruism rare and aggression not exotic, pushes toward caution, not consolation. Leiter’s point of diagnosing capitalism’s logic and puncturing the value theory is not to smuggle morality in by another name, but to preserve the criterion of freedom as self-directed, creative activity while recognising that markets do not magically translate productivity into that freedom.
If there is a route to a society where most people’s daily work passes the counterfactual test, it will run through institutions that harness productive power without reproducing dependence and through governance designed with Freud and Nietzsche as well as Aristotle, in mind. The very capacities that make us inventive also make us hierarchical and punitive. A left wing politics that ignores this courts catastrophe according to Leiter although he also thinks the current right wing politics that ignores capitalism’s tendency to shed labour courts a different but equally disastrous one too. In both cases Leiter’s pushbacks are a refusal to countenance any easy utopianism, whether Marx’s nineteenth-century revolutionism or contemporary market providentialism. The capitalist engine hums, the surplus grows, the means multiply and none of that answers the question of ends, and nothing in the mechanism compels the answer to be freedom.
In this respect, Leiter’s Marx isn’t just not the Marxism that gets Marxists all horny for revolution, it’s not even Marx. Or rather, it’s Marx without his mistakes, as Leiter sees them. Genius makes mistakes and what Leiter argues is that what serious scholars of Marx should try and do is give the sustainable parts of Marx’s theory and discard the parts that don’t actually follow from that main thesis. Marx himself was utopian because of his Hegelianism and not just because it promised a happy ending but also because it led to the mistaken view that there would always be the repair of any technological displacement. But Hegelianism is wrong and Leiter doesn't think we need it. Coupled to the omission of a theory of coercion which Leiter acknowledges, noting that Marx was blind to the psychological mechanisms of love of cruelty, power and hating that Nietzsche and Freud identified as competing forces of coercion to the economic forces of production in Marx, Leiter shows the limitation of Marx’s theory.
This last point was the criticism levelled at Marxists during the Cold War by Ernest Gellner who pointed out that the Soviet Union, having presumed to have reached the Marxist happy ending did indeed still require a bureaucracy backed by a police force to run the newly instituted utopia, and there was absolutely nothing in Marxism to prevent raw coercive power turning the whole thing into an authoritarian nightmare. This to me is the most serious omission and is why I have never liked Utopian revolutionary projects of any kind, Marxist or otherwise. It’s not that an analysis of capitalism as Leiter describes it is not powerful but it always struck me that any utopian happy endings are ridiculous fairy stories if they can't say how power will be handled once nirvana is reached. In the real world they all tend to end up looking like contemporary North Korea or Lybia.
Leiter wants Marx taken seriously as offering a powerful though incomplete and sometimes mistaken explanatory framework. That’s why he begins by underlining his own route into Marx, through Richard Rorty’s “Kant to 1900” course, long habits of teaching, and now a collaborative book with Jamie Edwards, whose specialty is the micro-foundations of ideology. The pairing matters. Marx breaks with philosophy in the scholastic sense and inches toward a proto-naturalism where for him explanation leans on history and economics. That’s the conceptual architecture and the empirical engine that drives it. For Leiter, the most serviceable entrance to Marx is an historical materialism stripped of mystique. Social change pivots, in the first instance, on growth in productive power, technology broadly construed, and the conflicts it induces between classes differently situated with respect to that power.
He recommends two cuts through the theory. The first is the Manifesto’s blunt axiom: history is propelled by class struggle. The second is the functionalist tiering made famous by G. A. Cohen: a “base” of productive forces; relations of production keyed to property and control; and an ideological superstructure that helps stabilise those relations as a set of feedback loops. Productive power expands with power looms, steam, coal, computation and, under capitalism, those who own or control the relevant tools profit by substituting capital for labour. Institutions and norms then tilt to accommodate and legitimise the new balance of power. Marx’s wager, which Leiter endorses in its descriptive core, is that capitalism is uniquely good at accelerating this cycle because competition punishes any firm that fails to cut costs or exploit an innovation. As we've already noted, Marx is closer to Milton Friedman than most of Friedman’s admirers - and Marx's admirers also - notice. For both "the only responsibility is profit” line functions descriptively inside capitalism’s structure and is not a moral ideal. The point, then, is not to scold capitalists for failing to be charities; it is to see why the compulsion to adopt labour-saving technology generalises the unfreedom of wage dependence and may, on certain trajectories, produce absolute rather than relative immiseration. Rosa Luxemburg’s fork, socialism or barbarism, is a realistic choice.
The value of Marx, on Leiter's telling, is that he offers an unusually powerful model of how technology, property, and conflict mesh to produce social forms and how ideology greases the joints. That last term, in Jamie Edwards’s hands, gains a psychological grain. Edwards argues that systematic mistakes about interests can be traced to common cognitive mechanisms operating in specific institutional environments. If you want to know why workers back policies that entrench their dependence and growing immiseration, look for patterns of inference that make such backing feel reasonable under local constraints.
Leiter has been a relentless critic of “woke capitalalism” for years on his blog and has approached the resultant culture wars with the same demystifying impulse. Corporate affirmations of diversity, equity, and inclusion are not moral awakenings but rather are profit-sensitive strategies within changing consumer and labour markets. He sketches the American genealogy. An original justice-oriented rationale for affirmative action (compensation for centuries of racial domination) gives way in the 1970s to a “diversity is good for business” rationale, constitutionalised by courts and embraced by firms. Why? Because the end of de jure apartheid and the rise of black middle- and upper-middle-class consumers, alongside broader demographic shifts, made diversity a plausible way to align brand, workforce, and market share. That is Marx’s lens applied to the present whereby in capitalism, even moral vocabulary is repurposed through the profit filter. Where that filter points in the short run to higher pay for scarce AI talent you will see selectively generous employers. Where it threatens margins inter-firm collusion to suppress wage bidding, tacit ceilings on “bleeding” the best technology to the masses, you will see the instinct to contain diffusion. Ideological cover varies but the logic is consistent.
Leiter’s analysis sharpens when he pivots from “woke capitalalism” to the way public tragedies are narrated. In his telling, the response to George Floyd’s murder illustrates how a race-forward frame can eclipse class. Police kill the poor and economically marginal in disproportionate numbers. Black Americans are overrepresented among the poor, so racial disparity tracks economic precarity. Corporations readily embrace a race-only storyline because it harmonises with decades of diversity branding whereas a poverty frame would imply redistribution, wage floors, and fiscal commitments that rub against their bottom line. The choice of frame is not merely moral rhetoric but an instance of ideology at work where beliefs are beliefs that mislead people about their interests.
Here his co-author Edwards’s contribution enters decisively. Ideology, for Marx, isn’t just a bundle of ideas; it’s a patterned error whereby people adopt views whose falsity is adverse to their own material interests. Why is this error so common? Contemporary cognitive science supplies mechanisms Marx lacked the vocabulary to name such as just-world and status-quo biases, motivated reasoning, the preference for order and fairness narratives that rationalise what already obtains. Add the institutional fact Marx did emphasise, that ruling classes tend to own the “means of mental production,” the platforms and outlets through which most people learn what to think about, and the puzzle dissolves into a reproducible dynamic. Media ecosystems owned by capital will be socially liberal in some respects and thoroughly capitalist in others and will elevate frames congenial to consumption and labour supply, whilst marginalising frames that threaten margins. On this view, a newspaper can champion civil liberties and still police the Overton window against redistributionist politics and a network can condemn racism and still grind down unions. That is not hypocrisy in the individualist sense but the predictable alignment of content with ownership and audience monetisation.
As noted already, Leiter’s historical materialism remains resolutely non-teleological. No Hegelianism allowed! And he judges it the best single framework we have for explaining large arcs of change, one that claims that technology-driven expansions of productive power reconfigure property relations and ignite class conflict that remakes institutions, but nevertheless it doesn’t offer a scientific law. There are counterinstances and detours. Stalin’s industrialisation of a largely agrarian society without capitalist markets achieved through terror confounds a simple “forces determine relations” sequence, even if it confirms how decisive coercive organisation can be when a ruling stratum resolves to drag the base forward. That concession isn’t a retreat to relativism; it is a hedge against the intellectual vice Marx himself inherited from Hegel which is the itch to read history’s end into its mechanisms.
The open question is whether states can be made prudent early enough through redistribution, guarantees of income, de-commodification of essentials, and forced diffusion of transformative technologies to bend capitalism’s engine toward positive ends. If they can, Leiter suggests the endpoint may merit the name socialism although I wonder why he thinks that’s justified by anything Marx or he have said. It seems to me that the mechanisms for doing that aren’t socialism in any Marxist sense but rather the already existing prudent welfare state institutions of democratic civil society currently and predictably under attack all over the world and most prominently in the USA.
I have mentioned Hegel a couple of times and haven't explained what bit of Hegel are relevant in all this. I should probably sketch that out quickly. So, Hegel’s world-history is the procession of “forms of consciousness” where each era has a governing geist or spirit - religious, political and metaphysical - that contains internal contradictions; those tensions are resolved and preserved in a successor form in a forward movement aiming to a resolution. Marx took the dialectical, teleological bit and dropped the idealism bit of there being a "spirit" of the age. The engine isn’t ideas but the “material conditions” of life, how people secure food, shelter, clothing and so forth. The category that matters is “productive power”: labour power plus tools and, above all, technology broadly construed. As technology surges, relations of production, property rights, control, class positions, shift to exploit the new possibilities. The superstructure of law, politics, and moral culture bends to stabilise whatever arrangement emerges. That is Marxist historical materialism without the Hegelian mystique attached, a layered, functional story that explains change by tracking the fit (or misfit) between productive forces and property relations, with class conflict as the mechanism of adjustment.
His snapshot of the transition from feudalism makes the point vivid. When steam and factory systems appear, the feudal order’s property regime of lords owning land and tools and serfs with only labour to trade is misaligned with the most efficient exploitation of the new forces. Nascent capital needs peasants off the land and in cities, selling labour for wages but the aristocracy needs them bound to the estate. The “contradiction” is not intellectual but material, so the conflict is between interests, and the resolution is a new regime of industrial capitalism. Globalisation continues that logic. Capital moves to cheap labour and favourable conditions because it must. That’s why jobs go abroad to places where labour costs are low. Child and slave labour and low wages are best of all for capitalism so places that prohibit such things are the worst places. A machine that can remove workers altogether is the prefect solution as all surplus is profit once the kit is paid for.
AI automation now emerging in professional rungs means the very class once buffered from displacement is exposed and explains the phenomenon of anxiety amongst this class who no longer think that the forces that have hollowed out the working class are not going to eviscerate them too. This helps explain why support for populist movements increasingly includes members of this professional class. Populists like Farage and Trump correctly point out that many jobs have gone abroad, wrongly blame foreigners rather than the capitalist forces that make this happen and their resultant racist nationalist ideology misleads people about their interests and about the causes of their panic.
For Leiter material life scripts our sense of the reasonable. If your survival is mediated by wages in volatile markets, “instrumental rationality” isn’t an ideology so much as a coping rule whereby you calculate means to given ends because your ends are nonnegotiable. We all have to pay for basic rent, food and heating. Markets propagate that stance outward, colonising everything from personnel policy to personal ethics. But Marx’s materialism, as Leiter frames it, doesn’t say “ideas don’t matter.” It says that ideas travel along channels carved by production. We’re not blank slates and as Edwards noted earlier, cognitive science supplies its own nudges toward status-quo justification and just-world bias, whilst the environment fixes which stories are salient, credible, and rewarding to hold. When productive power changes, the moral weather changes with it. That is why Leiter lingers over the anthropologists who make the same point in different idioms. Ian Morris’s “energy capture” thesis and Marvin Harris’s taboo functionalism are both versions of historical materialism. They argue: change how a society gets calories or kilowatts and you will, in time, change its moral code. Prohibitions survive not because a preacher argued better but because they stabilised a way of life. Don’t eat the drought animal during the drought if you want a harvest later. In the long run, the taboo outperforms any moralising about prudence, because it binds behaviour to production.
With that frame in place Leiter sees the Frankfurt School’s detour back into culture as a sort of midcourse correction. Lukács’s Hegelian relapse whereby he talks about contradictions in bourgeois thought rather than contradictions in the factory helped rehabilitate the critique of ideas, but Horkheimer and Adorno supplied the more durable insight that culture in mass-market capitalism is an industry, and its wares are serialised, familiar, and pacifying by design, kind of “bread and circuses” with better soundtracks, as Leiter puts it. Gramsci added the grammar for domination, introducing the notion of “hegemony” which is the quiet labour of embedding ruling-class common sense into schools, news and entertainment.
All this was a reminder that production had created new idea-machines such as Hollywood, radio, TV, Netflix, TikTok , social media and so forth, and that those machines mattered politically. Habermas peeled off in a different, Kantian direction, trying to rescue a robust normativity of reasons we could share under fair conditions, while giving up most of Marx’s hard structural talk. Marcuse stayed closer to the culture line and, for a moment, read student bohemia as a crack in the edifice arguing that if capitalism needs disciplined, punctual subjects, perhaps eros, psychedelia, and noise could jam the gears. In retrospect that hope underestimated the system’s capacity to commodify such dissent. Yesterday’s pop anthem sells today’s SUV. We'll come back to this when we look at Bell.
On this, Leiter thinks Horkheimer and Adorno are more prescient. Leiter is dismissive of “cultural Marxism” but points out that the Frankfurt School did not swap class for gender, race, and sexuality but rather asked why class antagonism hadn’t yet produced rupture. Their answer, “because culture props up consent” remains an important insight and is a warning to those who think culture, even antinomian resistance culture, can automatically escape being used by capitalism. For this reason Leiter laments the current habit of bundling Marx, the Frankfurt School, and postmodernism into one amorphous villain because by so doing we collapse distinctions that matter. Marx is an Enlightenment naturalist with a theory of history and a bet on science whereas Horkheimer is trying to salvage a thick rationality and Foucault isn’t in their family at all. And whatever else identity politics is, it is not the late flowering of Marx. If anything, a great deal of it is orthogonal or hostile to the class analysis that animates his critique.
Leiter’s complaint about “diversity blather” which is so very prominent in Universities at the moment targets the corporate reframing of justice as brand alignment. The compensatory case for affirmative action, rectifying centuries of legal subjugation, was historically intelligible and morally serious but when HR translated it into “diversity improves performance,” it was made compatible with profit maximisation and thus safe for boardrooms. Universities followed, hanging their policies on thin empirical claims about classroom outcomes rather than on reparative justice. The result is easy to market and easy to game. It also displaces the question his Marx cares most about: what happens to all of us when the system’s own logic cheapens and then eliminates human labour?
This is where his critique of identity politics bites. There is nothing in Marx that denies the reality of racial or gender subordination but there is a lot in Marx that predicts capital will weaponise those fractures. How? By dividing the people who need wages against each other so they won’t organise as a class. The sociologist Adolph Reed Jr is another prominent contemporary thinker who argues this case. In the American case, the effect is visible. Urban Black poverty and rural white precarity look different and vote different, but the drug epidemics, family stressors, job deserts, and downward mobility ought to bring them together. Yet a politics that routes every grievance through symbolic representation -more CEOs of type X, more winners of award Y - produces new elites and leaves the wage relation, and the shrinking space for wages, untouched. It also hands right-wing populists a plainer story to tell. Call those voters racists and you miss the contingent fact that many voted for Obama and then for Trump and what they reliably voted against was continuity and solidarity with different groups with identical class interests.
If the engine is grinding towards a world with fewer buyers of labour, then any politics that does not put decommodification of housing, healthcare, education and time at its centre will keep losing the war while winning its moral battles. Leiter is a realist about institutions so he thinks, rightly, that labour unions mattered when they were strong and their evisceration tracks the flattening of wages and the growth of insecurity. He thinks the next great shock will be long-haul automation unless the same energy that once built the welfare state builds new protections, new ownership forms, or both. The prize is not a perfect census of identities at the commanding heights but a distribution of productive power that makes most people’s time their own.
Culture can narcotise or wake up; redistribution can cushion or transform; states can be prudent or predatory and in each case capital will always prefer the former to the latter. What decides the path is not an opinion piece or a drama about moral values, in the end, but whether those who must sell their hours can still bargain and whether they recognise themselves on the same side of a line that production, not propaganda, has drawn.
One of the things many people feel at the moment is how there is a crisis of authority. Established sources of authority seem to be being eroded and this is why I think looking at Leiter’s Marx alongside a suggestive theory by sociologist Daniel Bell from the end of the last century is illuminating. Leiter's Marx dovetails with Daniel Bell’s thesis of the cultural contradictions of capitalism in an unexpectedly tight way though they are looking at the same machine from different angles. Marx, in Leiter’s telling, starts from production, asking who owns the tools, what the tools can now do, and how profit-chasing compels owners to substitute capital for labour. Bell starts from culture and asks what people are licensed to want, how quickly styles of feeling spread, and how those permissions feed back into institutions that still require discipline. But the hinge that connects them is precisely what both insist upon: capitalism manufactures not only goods but the sensibilities that make its order liveable, and in doing so it also manufactures stresses that its own institutions cannot easily absorb.
Take Bell’s core picture of an economy that needs delayed gratification tethered to a culture that loves immediacy. This hunger for immediacy is now baked into everyday culture. News arrives as push alerts and live “breaking” banners that outrun verification, rewarding the fastest hot take over the slowest check (It's why the BBC, for example, and much so-called 'legacy media' looks so conservative and compromised to many people immersed in the faster feeds). Social media compresses attention into loops of instant feedback such as TikTok’s swipe-and-serve clips, Snapchat streaks and “seen” receipts, Instagram stories that vanish by tomorrow, BeReal’s timer, all turning presence into a timed reflex. Entertainment matches the tempo with autoplay, binge drops and 1.5x playback, while shopping promises same-day delivery and one-tap checkout. Even conversation is paced by dopamine metrics with likes, views, shares so that hesitation feels like loss. Among Gen Z, who grew up inside these interfaces, the result is a literacy of speed with micro-trends that flare and die in a week, news consumed as headlines or reels, and a preference for tools that answer now. Bell labels all this a 'psychedelic bazaar.'
By contrast, work demands disciplined, ordered and methodical regimentation. Hours are blocked by rosters and calendars, tasks are ruled by standard operating procedures, and output moves through briefs, checkpoints, QA reviews and audit trails. Even creative jobs run on roadmaps, sprints, tickets and version control, where changes are justified in commit messages and signed off in review. Compliance sits over the shoulder in regulated sectors, documentation is a deliverable in its own right, and deviation from process is a risk. Meetings follow agendas, decisions are minuted, performance is judged against preset criteria and the workday is chunked into fixed timetables.
So culture and work seem to be driven by opposing ideas. Marx would call all this a functional contradiction born of accumulation. Rising productive power, propelled by competitive profit-seeking, throws off affluence and leisure so that marketing systems, entertainment industries, and credit technologies then convert affluence into standing demand. The same firm that needs punctuality and obedience at work must in the marketplace stoke desire and novelty.
Leiter’s point about ideology as ideas riding channels carved by production fits Bell’s map exactly. Culture is a downstream effect of how we produce and sell, then an upstream force that changes what workers expect and how they experience command. Bell’s “psychedelic bazaar” is simply Marx’s commodity world under conditions of mass media and surplus. The bazaar is profitable because the base made it so, and destabilising because the base still needs habits the bazaar corrodes.
We can see how the Frankfurt School sits right between them. Horkheimer and Adorno noticed what Bell later theorised which is that once culture becomes an industry, the “tradition of the new” can be serialised and sold. As we’ve noted, Marcuse briefly hoped that liberated sensibility could mess this up but Bell’s realism matches Leiter’s, arguing that the system is too good at commodifying transgression.
Novelty ceases to threaten discipline because it is scheduled, and yet - and this is a crucial insight I think - the scheduling still undermines the old justificatory stories that told people why deferral and hierarchy were meaningful. In Marx, this is ideology doing its dual work, by both legitimating the status quo while hollowing out the older moral vocabularies that once glued production and polity together. In Bell it is a legitimacy gap where business “falls mute” about authority because it needs hedonism to sell and asceticism to work, and cannot coherently praise both. This, if right, goes some way to explain why we are experiencing an authority crisis.
Leiter’s emphasis on the profit imperative sharpens Bell’s institutional stakes. You can’t paper over the contradiction with corporate ‘blather’ about purpose or diversity. Under competitive pressure, the firm will default to whatever keeps demand high and labour cheap and the political system, shaped by that same pressure, will promise comfort it cannot deliver or scapegoats it can (think Farage, Trump etc). Bell’s distinction between expressive politics and distributive politics aligns with Leiter’s worry about how the culture wars displace class.
If the economic engine is eliminating wage labour at the margin, the core institutional task is decommodifying basic goods and bargaining power and symbolic fights over manners become, in effect, the soundtrack to stagnation. That is not Bell’s language, but it is Bell’s idea: when culture teaches limitless demand and the economy imposes hard limits, politics becomes a theatre of resentment. This seems prescient and captures much about contemporary politics and why the populists are doing so well on both left and right but particularly now on the right.
Where Leiter and Bell part is methodological emphasis. Bell pushes hard on culture’s partial autonomy where styles incubate within traditions and can outpace institutional adaptation. Leiter, following Marx, resists this and thinks culture’s autonomy is real enough to jam some gears for a little while sometimes but not strong enough to rewrite the logic of accumulation. That difference matters for remedies. Bell wants settlements so we have craft institutions that admit the cross-pressures rather than pretending one realm’s principle can govern all. Leiter wants power shifts so that ownership and control of the productive forces are brought under social purposes, or else the “Elysium” trajectory dominates.
Read together, the counsel is that any settlements will fail if they ignore the wage relation and its erosion, and power shifts will stall if they ignore the motivational ecologies within which people consent to work and rule. The modern workplace makes the synthesis vivid. Firms advertise agility and authenticity to recruit, sell exuberant lifestyles to consumers, and then require patient, often boring, hierarchical craft from employees. Universities celebrate expressive exploration while quietly depending on routines of apprenticeship, scholarship and assessment. Bell wants to make explicit the trade-offs and write new justificatory languages that honour discipline without denying pleasure. Leiter says we mustn’t mistake new slogans for structural fixes because as long as profit rules and labour is a cost to be minimised, the long arc bends toward fewer buyers of human time. The bridges between culture and economy - schools, families, professions - can buffer the whiplash only if they are funded, respected, and allowed to confer prestige on mastery. They cannot, by themselves, repeal the incentive to automate away the very subjects they are training.
Even Bell’s most quoted inversion asserting that culture is “becoming supreme” looks, from Leiter’s angle, like a phase within the same dynamics. Culture is “supreme” not because it floats free, but because markets now propel it faster than political and economic institutions can metabolise it. That speed intensifies Marx’s old diagnosis of fetishism whereby commodities arrive already soaked in meanings that colonise aspiration, and the appetite for novelty becomes a moving target that keeps demand high while rendering the old bourgeois ethic unintelligible. The result is Bell’s “muteness” of authority and Leiter’s cynicism about capitalist altruism. When the story that dignifies sacrifice collapses, redistribution and restraint need a different ground than ethics or rebranding.
So the dovetail as I see it is this: Bell gives Marx’s structural critique a kind of phenomenology. He shows how the base’s successes feel from the inside and how abundance translates into sensibility, how sensibility strains institutions, and how legitimacy thins when the culture of self eats the language of duty. Leiter gives Bell’s cultural map its engine and endpoint. He shows why the contradiction persists (profit makes it pay), why rhetorical reconciliations ring hollow (competition selects against them), and what the real fork looks like once productivity has outrun wage labour (social ownership and decommodification on one path, gated abundance and managed barbarism on the other).
What all this suggests is that we need to stop pretending bourgeois discipline and bourgeois desire answer to the same principle and in so doing we need to start telling the truth about the trade-offs, resuscitate honour in the rather unglam craft and public purpose of bourgeois life and move the levers that actually change how production is owned and how its gains are shared. Without the last, the first three become mere fluff. Without the first three, the last cannot win consent.