In this video, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson offers a critique of The Communist Manifesto, the short 1848 pamphlet by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that became one of the most influential political texts in history. Peterson, who rose to public prominence as a professor and a writer on psychology, approaches the Manifesto not as a historical curiosity but as a living document, whose ideas about class, power, and revolution continue to shape political debate today. This chapter presents his argument fairly, in its strongest form, and places it in the context of his wider work and of the famous public debate he held with the philosopher Slavoj Zizek in 2019.
Peterson is a controversial figure, and readers of this book will have different views of him. That is part of the reason his critique matters. A book that spends nine parts judging socialism needs to understand the arguments made against its founding text, and Peterson's is one of the most widely discussed in recent years. This chapter therefore sets out what he says, what he concedes, and where his critics take issue with him, so the reader can judge both the Manifesto and Peterson's reading of it.
The Manifesto in Peterson's Reading
Peterson begins by taking the Manifesto seriously as a work of ideas. Its opening, which declares that a spectre is haunting Europe, sets out a grand account of history: all history, in Marx and Engels's phrase, is the history of class struggle, and capitalism will inevitably collapse, to be replaced by a classless society. Peterson argues that the power of the Manifesto lies in its simplicity and its moral appeal. It offers a clear story of the world, in which the suffering of ordinary people has a cause and a remedy, and that story has drawn in readers for more than a century and a half. To understand its appeal, he argues, is the first step in understanding why it needs to be answered.
He also stresses that the Manifesto is a short pamphlet, not a detailed economic treatise, and that its confidence is part of its danger. Marx and Engels wrote as if the future were known, and as if the collapse of capitalism were as certain as the laws of nature. Peterson, who has spent his career studying human psychology, argues that such certainty is a poor guide to human affairs. People are complicated, history is unpredictable, and a theory that claims to have settled the future too neatly should be treated with special care.
Oppressor and Oppressed: The Binary
The centre of Peterson's critique is the Manifesto's division of society into two camps, the oppressors and the oppressed, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In his reading, that division is too simple to describe a real society, and too dangerous to use as a guide to action. Human beings are not divided neatly into the good and the bad, and a person can be both privileged in one way and disadvantaged in another. Wealth and power are real, and they matter, but they are not the only things that shape a life. Talent, effort, luck, health, and character all play their part, and a theory that reduces everything to class misses that complexity.
Resentment as a Motive
Linked to that critique is Peterson's argument about resentment. He argues that the Manifesto, whatever its authors intended, appeals to a powerful and dangerous feeling: the resentment of those who have less toward those who have more. Resentment is not the same as a legitimate grievance about injustice, and Peterson is careful to distinguish the two. A person can rightly object to being treated unfairly, and can work to change the conditions that cause it. Resentment, in his account, is the desire to pull down those who have succeeded, to level the world by punishment rather than by building something better. That motive, he argues, corrupts the politics it touches, because it turns a desire for justice into a desire for revenge. His critics reply that anger at injustice is not resentment but a proper response to a real problem.
What Peterson Concedes About Inequality
Peterson does not argue that the world is fair, and his critique is not a defence of the status quo. He concedes that inequality exists, that poverty is real, and that the distribution of wealth in modern societies is deeply uneven. He also concedes that the industrial capitalism Marx described produced real suffering, and that the appeal of the Manifesto came from the fact that it spoke to that suffering. Where he differs is in his account of why inequality exists, and of what should be done about it. He argues that hierarchies are a natural part of human society, and that they arise not only from exploitation but from differences in ability, in effort, and in the value people place on different kinds of work.
The 2019 Debate With Zizek
The public debate between Peterson and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, held in Toronto in 2019, brought that contrast into the open. The two men were presented as public intellectuals of the moment, Peterson as a critic of Marxism and Zizek as a Marxist thinker, and the debate, about happiness and about capitalism versus Marxism, was watched by many thousands of people. In the debate, Peterson presented his case against the Manifesto, while Zizek defended a critical, and often unorthodox, reading of Marx, and argued that capitalism itself was in crisis. The debate did not settle the argument, but it was notable for its civility, and for the honesty of both men about the difficulties in their own positions.
What the Video Contributes
The video contributes by presenting Peterson's critique in his own terms, in a short and accessible form. It follows his argument step by step, from the Manifesto's central claims to his questions about human motivation, about the complexity of society, and about the record of the twentieth century, in which attempts to put Marx's ideas into practice led to oppression rather than liberation. Its value is that it is clear, and that it does not assume its conclusion. It invites the viewer to take the Manifesto seriously, to understand why it has moved so many people, and to ask whether its promises can survive contact with reality.
The Lesson
The lesson is that a critique is worth taking seriously even when it is controversial, and even when it comes from a writer with whom the reader disagrees. Peterson's argument, fairly stated, is that the Manifesto's simple story of oppressor and oppressed is too simple for a complex world, that it appeals to resentment as much as to justice, and that it promises a future that history has not delivered. Whether that argument is right, in whole or in part, is for the reader to decide. But a reader who has faced it is better prepared to judge the Manifesto than a reader who has not, and that is what this chapter aims to provide.