A couple of days after the World Trade Center attacks, posters appeared around San Francisco in astounding density. You couldn’t walk fifty feet on Market Street without seeing one. Their message, as I read it, showed some sophisticated Marxist reasoning: 1. American foreign policy produced conditions leading to anti-American terrorism. 2. Our prosperity was dependent upon an unequal global economic system. 3. Americans had moral responsibility for the violence directed against them. 4. Abandon capitalism.

There is certainly truth in number 1. Number 2 is arguable and has been argued and assumed true in university education, but remains highly contested. It seems to me less plausible today than it might have 25 years ago. Number 3 is the gut punch. It does not follow from 1 or 2. Number 4 is standard Marxist/Marxian bs.

And by that I mean this is typical Marxist reasoning. You prepare a bunch of academic-sounding whereas and then pull a therefore out of your butt.

Let’s take a detailed look. The language is pure Marx. Alienation, social conflict theory, exploitation.

Seven different posters, as follows:

1. Unprovoked?

2. Fighting alienation with alienated means

3. “Today is a great day for the people of Indochina” – Simone Weil

4. The issue raised by social-conflict theory is ine<…> Members of rich societies consume most of the world’s resources and generate most of the p<…>. That is, we maintain our affluent way of life by exploiting the poor of the less-developed countries <…>ning our planet in the process.

5. “The chickens are coming home to roost” – Malcolm X

6. “Brought to you by YOUR STANDARD OF LIVING”

7. “got milk?”

The reasoning, plausible in the premises, asinine in conclusion, entails that understanding why someone like Bin Laden hates you is exactly equivalent to accepting their moral judgment of you.

We can dig into their epistemic machinery.

Their conclusion was completely formed before 9/11 happened. Obviously. These things went up in the hundreds or thousands almost overnight. At what cost? Professionally printed – while feigning low-budget – fully adhesive-backed posters appearing immediately says this wasn’t a few Berkeley students on a Kinko’s binge. Somebody had resources, organization, and a preexisting political network capable of turning an event only a day old into a finished ideological product.

They started with a conclusion, then looked at 9/11 through the available vocabulary of their political worldview. Every road led back to capitalism, imperialism, consumption, alienation, exploitation. The remarkable thing is how little room there is in the seven captions for the actual agency of the attackers.

“Unprovoked?” is standard Marxist catechism. It invites you to supply the answer the poster-maker already knows. The question can mean “Did the United States have a history that helps explain al-Qaeda’s hostility?” That would be a charitable reading, and a legitimate historical question. Or it can mean “Was the United States morally responsible for this attack?” At best, the poster exploits the slippage and the grief.

In San Francisco, 9/11 wasn’t an abstract geopolitical event occurring to people somewhere else. The social distance was extraordinarily small. Many people I worked with knew someone on one of those airplanes or in the towers. I did. The Marxist posters immediately converted an intensely human catastrophe into an illustration of a preexisting theory of global political economy.

“Brought to you by YOUR STANDARD OF LIVING” is a straight-out accusation. The photo supplies the emotional force, the caption tells you who is to bear responsibility.

I have, or probably had, a couple of devout and honest Marxist friends, innocent, somehow able to partition belief from evidence in their minds, the way they assure themselves the Christians do. Beyond them, I see only academic capitalists who lie about following Marx. They lie for their own economic gain, just like Karl Marx did.

Hey, Tithi Bhattacharya, Richard Wolff, Vivek Chibber, David Harvey, and Nancy Fraser. Got Ben and Jerry’s?

Epistemic/epistemological horseshit. Marxists cannot be wrong.

Marxism, as is obvious to anyone who has opened Das Kapital, is immune to disconfirmation. If workers become revolutionary, that’s evidence for the theory. If they don’t, that’s also evidence, because false consciousness, ideology, and bourgeois institutions explain their failure to revolt. The theory has an answer either way.

Americans have a high standard of living and are attacked. That is evidence that capitalism and imperialism generate resentment. The quarter century following is equally accommodated: the system is exploiting people enough to prevent resistance, and American cultural dominance is suppressing awareness.

Poor countries resist: class conflict.
Poor countries don’t resist: alienation and false consciousness.

We see a conceptual system absorbing unexpected observations without allowing the observation to alter the system.

The posters ask: What if the attackers had reasons? They don’t allow: What if those reasons don’t explain the attack so well?

Beyond the epistemological issue of a theory being immune to disconfirmation (Karl Popper’s criterion), we can use another idea from History of Science: explanatory adequacy.

The posters did not ask, even implicitly: “What does 9/11 tell us that we didn’t know yesterday?”

They announced: “9/11 tells us what we already knew.” Of course you did.