Marxism Without Reading Marx
By Tanzil Ahmed, MA and PhD Researcher at GCAS
Chomsky, Freud, and the class war that dares not speak its name
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the
spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that
spectrum—even encourage the more critical dissident views."
— Noam Chomsky, The Common Good (1998)
The Quiet Crisis of a Class War Unnamed
Marxism is dead. Except in the boardrooms where it’s practised most devoutly.
We’re told again and again that Marx belongs to another era—a dusty script from a failed
century. Capitalism, we hear, has evolved, democratised, and rebranded. Yet, behind the sleek
surfaces of platform economies and corporate mission statements, an old truth lingers:
The ruling class still behaves like it believes in Marx.
This isn’t ideological loyalty. It’s instinct.
And as Noam Chomsky remarked in a 2010 interview with Truthout:
“Elites are basically Marxist – they believe in class analysis, they believe in
class struggle... They’re instinctive Marxists; they don’t have to read it.”
Here lies the central contradiction of late capitalism. Those in power perform Marxism
unconsciously, operationalising class struggle with surgical precision, all while dismissing
Marx’s ideas as obsolete or dangerous.
They reject the theory. But they enact the logic. Daily.
What Capital Knows but Won’t Say
Marx’s insight was never about utopia. It was about structure. As he wrote in The Communist
Manifesto (1848):
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
This is not a slogan. It’s a description. And in the institutions that define modern life, tech giants,
investment firms, and media empires, this truth is both deeply understood and publicly denied.
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Take Amazon. In 2023 alone, it spent over $14 million to suppress unionisation efforts
(Economic Policy Institute, 2023). That is not indifference to labour power. It is fear of it—the
very dynamic Marx identified when he explained surplus value and capital’s dependence on
exploited labour.
Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent (1988) warned us: the media-
industrial complex exists not to inform, but to narrow the range of acceptable thought,
especially about class. Worker solidarity is either marginalised, pathologised, or branded into
apolitical wellness.
The message is consistent. Capital must not be named as capital. Class must
not be seen as a structure. The war must not be called a war.
When the Ruling Class Becomes Cryptomarxist
What happens when those who benefit most from a system begin to enforce it with a paranoia
that mirrors the logic of their critics?
Welcome to Elite Cryptomarxism, a condition where corporate and political elites suppress
Marxist theory in public, while embodying its most damning analysis behind closed doors.
Let’s consider BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s evangelism for “stakeholder capitalism”, a glossy
phrase promising shared prosperity. Behind the curtain, BlackRock lobbies against wealth taxes
(Financial Times, 2023) and maintains its investments in fossil fuels. As Chomsky often pointed
out, this is Orwellian newspeak in its purest form: the corporate elite co-opts moral language
to entrench economic power.
Marx called this ideology. Freud had a word for this: disavowal. Knowing
something while refusing to know it.
The Psychopolitics of the Denial Machine
To understand how deeply this denial runs, we must turn to Freud, especially his late work on
ideological defence. In The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924), Freud described how
people internalise suffering when they are convinced it’s necessary.
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Now apply that to Uber drivers working 16-hour shifts while calling it “freedom.” Or gig
workers who celebrate “flexibility” as they lose healthcare, labour protections, and bargaining
power.
This is Chomsky’s engineering of consent meeting Freud’s economic masochism.
The modern worker doesn’t just endure exploitation. They are trained to desire it. To see
structural dispossession as personal empowerment. To take pride in precarity.
We are not witnessing freedom. We are watching the superego
reprogrammed by venture capital.
Alienation, Rebranded and Sold Back
It gets darker.
In 2023, British steelworkers lost £2.8 billion in pension savings due to private equity
mismanagement. Many defended the very system that robbed them.
This is not simply confusion. It’s what Marx called alienation—and what Chomsky described in
Understanding Power (2002):
“People are trained to serve those who exploit them.”
The labourer not only loses control over their product, but they also lose the ability to name the
theft. Instead, they rationalise it. They protect it. They vote for it.
Crisis: The Return of the Repressed
Every system that represses reality will eventually be confronted by it.
When Shell pours billions into renewables while expanding its oil extraction (Shell Annual
Report, 2023), we are not seeing change. We are seeing a false correction—a desperate doubling-
down disguised as progress.
When Google’s algorithm lays off thousands of workers, we are not watching innovation. We are
watching the AI proletariat form, just as Marx foresaw. Labour isn’t liberated. It is automated out
of visibility.
As Chomsky warned in Requiem for the American Dream (2017):
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“Technical solutions are applied to political problems when capital no longer
wishes to negotiate.”
Automation becomes eviction. Innovation becomes erasure.
Breaking the Illusion with Language and Solidarity
So what now?
Chomsky’s brilliance lies not only in diagnosis but in decoding. When McKinsey says
“operational flexibility”, read it as: we will fire you at will.
When Amazon calls union organisers “outside agitators”, understand it as: they are reminding
workers they have power.
Solidarity remains the talking cure.
When the United Auto Workers won a major labour victory in 2023, it wasn’t through
algorithmic targeting or corporate partnerships. It was through organising. Through people
naming the system and refusing its silence.
“The only counter to organised capital is organised labour.”
— Noam Chomsky, Jacobin interview, 2021
When Starbucks workers in Memphis tore up the “partner” handbook to form a union, they
weren’t rejecting coffee. They were rejecting the newspeak that called exploitation “flexibility.”
Conclusion: Making Disavowal Impossible
The illusion persists only because it remains profitable. But illusions fracture under collective
memory.
Chomsky warned us long ago:
“The illusion of freedom will persist as long as it’s profitable to maintain it.”
— Chomsky, N. (1992). Letters from Lexington. Common Courage Press. p. 89
The elite need us to forget. Our power lies in remembering, and reminding them we remember.