‘Imaginary Marxism’ and The Appropriate Domain of Political Ideologies

by Guido Ugo Sitzia, 02.10.2025

I am not writing to vindicate Eli Celeste-Cohen, even though I do believe his satirical piece was met by misplaced acrimony. Schopenhauer famously defined humor as a form of incongruity, and I believe that is exactly where we need to look in order to grasp where the satire lies in Cohen’s piece. Perhaps, mine is just hermeneutic benevolence, but I sincerely did not read his words as aimed at belittling the hardships faced by doctoral students at our university or elsewhere. However, to question whether my interpretation is accurate or not is in some sense to miss the point, since I mean to use this episode as an excuse to elaborate on the incongruity which I perceive to be manifested in the very existence of a student party operating under the banner of “communism” – the incongruity which I thought originally moved Cohen’s pen.

I will do so through what I believe could be a dignified sociological category, even though it was humbly introduced (and there it died) by an Italian writer, Vittoria Ronchey, who was writing at the time of the 1968 agitations… the category of the ‘imaginary marxist’.

Karl Marx was a great social scientist and, in my humble opinion, the most brilliant and profound economist to read up to the onset of the Marginal Revolution in the 1870s. I do not say that lightly. I used to consider myself a marxist and I spent a considerable amount of time trying to make sense of Marx’s system: and given the mental energies I invested in him, it is not surprising that I also really wanted to make him make sense. Unfortunately, I had to conclude that he was fundamentally wrong in his basic assumptions – perfectly justifiable given the state-of-art of economic theory at the time he was writing – on which his theory of exploitation was predicated. If we want to discuss these controversies, we can do it in polite company, leafing through the pages of Marx, Böhm-Bawerk, Hilferding, and others.

‘Imaginary marxism’ bears no resemblance to any of these, it is a sociological concept: it describes varied instances in which militants perform an inappropriate extension of the repertoire of categories developed by Karl Marx beyond their meaningful range of application; it results in an emptily choreographic and symbolic use of categories that are scientific in the analytic system developed by Marx, but, in fact, purely rhetorical when applied in disregard of the meaning they otherwise possess there. Note that one can be an entirely respectable student of Marx and behave, at times, as an imaginary marxist: one just cannot satisfy both conditions simultaneously.

Communism and socialism are modes of production and typically people who call themselves socialists or communists are people who believe that a society organized in either of the two ways would be more desirable (according to a given conception of the good) than the kind of world we live in. The world we live in would be the capitalist (neoliberal?) world where, for instance, an average of roughly 50% of the GDP among the EU countries is directly controlled by the state. This is not a paper on comparative institutional analysis and I will not discuss their respective merits, even though I think economic theory and empirical record leave little doubt about them. Now the irony could lie in the fact that, as student representatives, you are just not in the position to seize the means of production, pursue an ambitious agricultural revolution, to establish ‘the power of the Soviets plus the electrification of the whole country’, and so forth.

Think of it this way. Suppose I am an enemy of the people (I do not mind the role, by the way): if communists win the election in the country where I live (or gain power otherwise, which would be a more realistic scenario), I have reasonable grounds to worry; but if imaginary marxists lead the student union of my university, I am not worried at all. Why so? Because the responsibilities implicated in running a country’s national economy are incommensurable with those faced by a student government. Communism is relevant to the former and irrelevant, redundant to the latter. You are just not in a position that allows you– thanks God! – to employ coercive political power to bring about any measure that can meaningfully fall under the definition of communism. Demanding higher stipends for PhDs is not communism, neither is demanding more generous financial aid, nor to receive other services. I am not questioning the propriety of these demands as they might be more or less legitimate, the point is that I do not see communism in them.

Basic Public Choice Theory explains it. To my knowledge, CEU’s funding comes from its endowment, tuition paid by at least some of the students, and private donors. It does not generate revenues in and of itself: realistically, how could it do so? Its research focuses on social sciences and humanities and you will hardly get something like patents out of that (sure you can get research grants, but those are not fungible funds you can allocate freely and unconditionally). Now, luckily enough the neoliberal hell we live in is one where very rich individuals like George Soros invest large amounts of money in very cool things like a university that does research on social sciences and humanities and that could otherwise not sustain itself by generating revenues. Asking higher stipends for PhDs is a form of rent seeking: you are investing resources not to produce new wealth (as we said you can hardly produce any directly by investigating social sciences and humanities) but to re-allocate existing wealth.

All this is perfectly legitimate and I will tell you more: if you succeed in achieving these objectives, for instance by proposing a more efficient use of the university resources or cutting on wastes, that will not fail to meet my sincere admiration. But communism, again, has nothing to do with it: you are not uttering any scheme of social relations of production, let alone establishing new ones.

If then, against the background of such legitimate redistributive demands, you make the deliberate choice to borrow from the historic-symbolic repertoire of a historical experience as traumatic as that of communism, you cannot just shy away from the irony which some might employ in objecting at your choice.

I hope we can agree that my piece articulates its themes in a respectful way. I hope its thesis can be discussed, assuming anyone wants to, in a peaceful manner. I cannot control beyond what I pen down, but I would be genuinely saddened if what I wrote was to spark the kind of resentment and animosity that followed – whether justifiably or not, it is not for me to judge – from Cohen’s piece.