A Question For Marx, That Unfortunately He'll Never Answer

Materialism without the "why" the question materialism answers, is empty. The oppressed ask it instinctively. The apathetic or Dark-Triad types don't. That's why the science only moves those who already feel the wrong, who are curious about why anything matters. Marxism, dialectical materialism wasn't written against the possibility of innate human drives. He left that gap open and never fully closed it. The science is a sorting mechanism, not a conversion mechanism. It finds and vindicates the people who already have the intuition, it doesn't create it in people who don't. For the person who never felt it, the framework just slides off.

This is also why communist organizing historically worked best among people already living under the boot, not among comfortable intellectuals who had to reason their way there. The genuinely conscience-absent person, the ruling class sociopath, the enthusiastic exploiter, the science will never move them. But the checked-out worker who stopped asking why anything matters is a different case. He's not missing the intuition. It's buried, and the system that buried it is the same one Marx said would produce the consciousness to overthrow it.

But that optimism has a ceiling. Marx never accounted for the person who isn't suppressed but absent. And that person isn't only at the top. He's also the man at the bottom who has never once considered that the man next to him is in the same position. The one who ranks everyone around him while he's got nothing. The guy who looks at the man washing cars and sees someone beneath him. Who looks at the man selling food and sees someone beneath him. Who looks at the drunk begging next to him and feels contempt instead of recognition. Who has been broke his whole life and still believes he's temporarily embarrassed wealth, that the lottery is coming, that he's one of the one percent who just hasn't arrived yet. The hierarchy lives inside him even though the hierarchy has done nothing for him and will do nothing for him. He's not numbed. He's not buried. He has fully internalized the value system of his own exploitation and wears it as identity, structurally indistinguishable from it at the psychological level. Even if external structures collapsed, the hierarchy would persist inside him.

Marx's framework is built on material interest and structural contradiction. It assumes that once you show someone how the machine works and whose back it runs on, interest and indignation will do the rest. But that assumes a baseline of moral intuition the theory never justifies. What psychology now maps as dark triad traits, the low empathy, the instrumentalization of others, the absence of guilt, the system doesn't just tolerate these, it selects for them at the top and rewards them throughout. But it also produces a mirror image at the bottom: the person who has nothing and still polices the hierarchy on the ruling class's behalf, not because he's been paid to, but because the ranking is all he has.

Marx described the structure that produces class consciousness. He never described the human variance that determines who receives that signal and who doesn't. That's not a refutation of the framework. It's the gap the framework left open and never closed. Marx's use of psychology was underused and incomplete. Marxism explains material contradiction but not psychological receptivity, and it fails to account for mental health, for psychological conditions, for neurodivergence, for the full range of what makes people either receptive or immune to the signal the structure sends. Instead Marx treats humanity as having a one size fits all cognitive function and mental capacity. Modern social and clinical psychology would greatly benefit Marx in answering what he either missed or chose to partially ignore, presumably due to poorly developed psychological advances of the time, but that doesn't fully excuse him but it doesn't make him any less suspect. His work is still credible, I just think it's not finished, and he perished before I could ask him. I mean others talked about 'authoritarian character,' or 'character armor,' but they didn't talk about those I speak of. I wish I could ask Marx, "why is such a figure categorically different and not just different in degree?"

It might of complicated his theory and asking it has a dangerous implication, even today but hard and uncomfortable questions are sometimes required, especially when pushing theory that would change the world. From historical purges, I think some former communist leaders may have partially recognized, some weren't safe to stay in the general population, and were to risky to leave in a cell. What was needed was not just Marx or Lenin calling for a Vanguard but theorists calling simultaneously for a MD-PhD Clinical Psychologist Committee, as the need was already there for dealing with false consciousness.

Marx isn't here and from experience of getting condemned for calling right-wingers "dark triad" or "mentally ill," and the reasons why people don't call for the committee and don't want people diagnosed, is either because they're worried about alienating others or worse, they're worried the number of diagnosed will be too high with bias. Honestly, it's an excuse to avoid doing some a respected head said to do, and that is, "do what must be done." And with the number of MDs, Ph.D. and Psy.D, to ask who's gonna run the committee would be an unserious question and serious disrespect for the medical community. If we trust the vanguard to come up with party structure and rules, we can trust the doctors to do the same. Hell, it's not hard to imagine how much better the vanguard parties would've been if their ranks had been vetted by such committees.

To those who say, "the history of psychiatry being weaponized as a political tool is real and documented." I say the same is true of we sub "psychiatry" for passivity, inaction, reactive, or fear mongering. And to those who say who guards the committee, i ask who guards the schools, the stores, the vanguard, the people and communities? Dark souls have the ability to exist and slip by anywhere; one could argue a dark soul in the general population is more dangerous than in the vanguard or committee because they could cause an uprising that could not only lead to the falling of the system but the loss of a significant portion of the population. So if you're gonna ask these questions, i'll turn one back on you, would you rather live in fear of your political leadership or neighbors? Many of you will try to defend a floor that doesn't exist.