Is Karl Marx woke? Surely, he is, right? After all, the right blames Marx for wokeism—cultural Marxism, they call it—and the left credits him with it. If two sides who can’t agree on anything agree on this, then surely it must be true, right? Well, the answer is yes and no.

What does this term “woke” mean? It is bandied about, celebrated, and vilified, but when those who use it are asked to define it, few have anything coherent to say. The idea is that it describes a person who has been awakened to the fact that their personal experiences and individual perspective are not just a function of oneself, that there are systemic influences that shape us, that erect barriers for us, that grant us privileges we may or may not deserve, that create the normal that we never question because it is so normal.

If we want to discuss ourselves, we need to not only deal in the specifics of our own choices and opportunities but must see ourselves as part of a larger integrated whole which has had profound effects on our choices and opportunities. Yes, we made the choices, but we did so in a cultural-social-political-economic context we did not create, but which had a hand in creating us. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it, you are now woke.

Hegel, God, and History

This idea did not originate with Marx, but rather with the systemic historical and political program of G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel argues that the only thing that exists is Spirit, that is, God, and God is working out the nature of His existence through ideas that are the phases of history. The universe changes as the ideas of God unfold in His mind. Our reality, our being, is just an aspect of God’s thoughts about Himself as they progress through a specific sort of logic, the dialectic, which ends with God’s full understanding of His essence.

Marx keeps Hegel’s notion of history as a dialectic that works itself out to a perfect endpoint but gets rid of Spirit. Marx, who identified himself as a Young Hegelian, materializes Hegel’s spirit-driven philosophy. Make no mistake, Marx’s systemic path to understanding human beings comes from Hegel, a very Christian theorist. Indeed, Hegel considered himself the greatest Christian philosopher. But unlike Hegel, who worried little about human beings, the well-being of people was Marx’s sole concern.

We have to remember that Marx is living in the middle of the 19th century in a tsunami of capitalist exploitation. This was when children around ten years old were working their little bodies to death in coal mines, textile factories, and many other places adolescents have no place in being. “The new factories and mines were hungry for workers and required the execution of simple tasks that could be done by children,” according to British historian Professor Emma Griffin, “The result was a surge in child labor, presenting a new kind of problem.” Marx was correct to point to this problem, the dehumanization of workers, as a result of unbridled capitalism.

Understand that the prophet of capitalism, Adam Smith, never lived to see a capitalist society or the Industrial Revolution. He died before they came to be. Smith would not have liked the state of the workers that Marx observed. That’s because Smith’s idealized capitalism was more humane than that exercised in the mid-nineteenth century. Locke and Smith saw their philosophies as liberating laborers from mercantilist slavery, getting to own their labor and products of their activity. In Marx’s day, the laborers were no better off than a laborer laboring in a mercantilist economy. The obvious question was “What happened?”

Marx viewed all laborers as wage slaves whose humanity had been stolen from them by the economic system and handed over to their masters, the factory owners. He gets this master-slave dialectic from Hegel (although he strips it of Hegel’s Spirit-talk). All laborers, Marx held, are like brothers, oppressed in the same way by the same forces. They should all look out for one another. Marx understood human identity as about class, nothing more. If one group asks for better living conditions, Marx concludes that group is hoping to join the masters of the world instead of fighting for all those enslaved by the masters. We see this most notably in the young Marx’s 1844 essay “On The Jewish Question.”

The Jewish Question

In 1844, German Jews were tired of not counting. They were dispirited after two thousand years of marginalization. “Jewish Lives Matter” was a struggle 19^th-century German Jews were making. They wanted an end to overtly antisemitic restrictions on what they could do for a living. They wanted to be citizens with the full range of rights.

Marx wanted nothing of it. He explained the Jewish struggle for Jewish lives mattering was self-centered. It wasn’t about ending all human suffering, just that of the Jews. Jews, he held, were not interested in changing the status quo, but joining it and he found that ugly.

This is the reason for the “no” to the question of Karl Marx being woke. If wokeness is about identity politics, and it very much is, then Karl Marx isn’t woke. Contemporary wokeness centers on the different lived experiences of various social outgroups including, but not limited to, race, gender, and sexual orientation. In woke discourse, these elements of identity are central. But their importance is exactly what Marx denies. No tribalism on his watch.

But that does not mean that the insight behind woke discourse is not to be found in Marx’s ideas. Marx is so woke that he doesn’t think anybody should own the labor of another human. He hates all discrimination, so much so—as mentioned above—that if one group singles itself out in need of equal rights, Marx accuses said group, e.g., Jews, for thinking themselves better than everyone else, speaking only for their own equal rights; as if asking for a special privilege.

Systemic oppression

He was among the first to show that the oppression that is present in the world is interwoven into the fabric of the society, into the structures of its institutions, and into invisible crevices of normal life. It is enforced by laws. It is reinforced by the economy. It is re-reinforced by social codes and expectations and infiltrates what we think we want and want to be. He pointed out to those who came before us that we are not free atoms, able to determine ourselves on our own terms, independent of external influences.

We are, and what we want to be, are largely a function of external influences. We cannot understand ourselves by just looking at ourselves, we have to look at our relationships, at our place in society. If we want a better world, it is never just a matter of personal responsibility, because the personal is inextricably connected to the political, the social, and the economic.

The question Marx asks—how do we shake off the alienation we feel as a result of the modern industrial world, the dehumanization that comes with being “human resources” instead of actual humans?—is exactly the right question. The answer he gives, however, the one he takes from Hegel, is wrong. Marx contends that the system has a life of its own. That it will necessarily go through phases that will lead to an endpoint of human flourishing, but that it is the system, not us, that drives this historical process. In his quest for full human self-possession, Marx follows Hegel in investing in a system that dehumanizes us.

This is where the open question resides, a question that wokeness discourse at its best, is helping us answer and where wokeness discourse at its worst is also keeping us from answering. We are all interconnected and the social, political, and economic structures in which we were raised and in which we continue to exist do have undue influences that unfairly privilege some and unfairly oppress others—and with the insight of civil rights activist Kimberle Crenshaw, reflecting John Donne’s “No man is an island,” explains almost all of us are combinations, intersections in which we are privileged in some ways and hampered in others.

It is complicated. We are complicated. We cannot see ourselves and each other as atoms, as pure individuals. Yet, in some sense we also are. We and we alone live the lives we lead. We make our decisions. We suffer and benefit in ways that are both fair and unfair. We are both individuals and interconnected.

Maximizing human freedom

So, then how do we maximize human freedom and human flourishing for the interconnected individuals? Surely, we want to eliminate oppression. We want to be happy and we want others to be so as well. So…how? If we reject Marx’s answer that the system will simply self-correct and make it so, if we accept responsibility for ourselves and for the human society that shapes us and that we can shape, what does the best structure look like and how do we make it happen?

The worst part of woke discourse devolves into identity politics so extreme that it eliminates our ability to do it together. But together is the only way out. We need open conversation in which we listen and understand the lived experiences of all of the intersecting vectors of life. And that requires understanding how history, politics, religion and so much more plays out in human life.

Marx is the first systemic thinker discussing these existential concerns of living. Our educational system would look quite unfamiliar without him. Marx is the trigger for the emergence of sociology, the nuance, and social approaches found in political science, showing economists they needed a more holistic approach in analyzing human economic behavior. Novelists, playwrights, poets, painters, musicians, and, more illustrate the crimes Marx recorded.

Is Marx woke? No, and yes. It’s not wrong to see him as triggering a systemic understanding of injustice, but to attribute to Marx wokeness writ large is mistaken. He asked the right question, and insightfully showed us how complicated a question it is, but then gave a wrong answer. What is the right answer? That is our project, that is, a project that will require open-minded conversation involving all of us, no matter our identity, but a conversation that does not eliminate the complicating, but fascinating intersectional elements of who we are as we try to make ourselves who we should be.

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Co-written with Dr. Steven Gimbel, Bittenger Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Jewish Studies at Gettysburg College. He is the author of  13 books including Einstein’s Jewish Science, former finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and In on the joke: the ethics of humor and comedy. This post was first published this August 23, 2023 at Feed Your Head on Substack.