Against Bad Arguments for Terrible Things

Even for a polemic, John Rees’s “Marx’s ontology: a clarification” is logically brittle and historically thin.¹John Rees, “Marx’s ontology: a clarification,” Counterfire, April 24, 2025, https://www.counterfire.org/article/marxs-ontology-a-clarification/. It confuses biological capacities with social relations, ignores the complexity of scientific inquiry, and quietly excludes trans and intersex people while claiming universal liberation. The fifteen-point article does little more than restate populist orthodoxies into Marxist diction: labor and reproduction are timeless essences; women are treated poorly in society because childbirth makes them vulnerable; LGBTQI survival is a mere cultural tangent to women’s real material oppression; and anyone who disagrees with the author is a postmodern scourge. Rees’s comments come in response to the UK Supreme Court’s April 16 judgment that redefines woman as “someone born biologically female,” thereby stripping Gender Recognition Certificate holders of legal status and gutting trans rights overnight. Rees’s main point, which I would like to challenge, is that Marx supports the idea that Woman is an eternal biological category that must be preserved and defended. His second point, which I would also like to challenge, is that those who forcefully argue for trans inclusion in everyday life are disrupting more fundamental class solidarities that are necessary; therefore, if we are to…

No. Fuck this. I can’t do it. I can’t pretend that Rees’s regurgitated disconnected set of clichés is an authentic intellectual contribution that deserves a genteel, academic rebuttal. I can’t do it because I’m too tired from struggling to outlive the political violence Rees is apologizing for. I don’t have the energy or inclination to dress myself in the refined and detached tone he demands. I also can’t pretend that his article is an earnest philosophical endeavor that deserves debating, because the entire piece is little more than a rhetorical device—an attempt to posture as a measured intellectual who is merely “pointing out facts” and therefore doesn’t deserve to be taken to task for justifying state and populist violence against marginalized people. There’s an epidemic of this kind of tone-weaseling: “Just asking questions.” “Just making a few points.” Rees’s article is a polite-speak equivalent of the podcast bro’s “facts don’t care about your feelings.” In this case, the so-called facts are weird interpretations of Marx and the so-called feelings are trans, intersex, and queer people’s ability to exist in public.

To be clear: Rees’s essay isn’t an argument. It’s just scattered sentences shaped like an argument. The question then becomes: How do you respond to an intellectual facade? Since one can’t rebut a facade, the only option is to remove it to see what it obscures. Time to grab the sledgehammer.

The Surface Complaint

Rees names his problem: Marx has a social theory of being that some believe can be abandoned. But who believes this? No data yet. Do we get a summation of their counterargument? We do not. Do we get links to articles making these claims? Nah. All we have to go on is the Fox-News-style insistence that “some people” are saying these things. Rees does, however, attempt to name what he imagines is Marx’s besieged ontology. For brevity’s sake, I will outline the main ideas:

• Humans are formed naturally
• Humans are dependent on the natural world for survival
• Humans survive by laboring in their environments
• Humans are dependent on their biological capacities to reproduce other humans
• Marx says that we must start with the “actual physical nature of man” and “the natural conditions in which man finds himself”²Rees, “Marx’s ontology.”

Marx was writing in the nineteenth century to promote science as an alternative to religious philosophy. It’s 2025. Who is Rees schooling here? What could those who disagree with him possibly be arguing? That we live inside the mind of God? That babies are produced like dolls, capitalistically, on assembly lines?

As for humans reproducing biologically, well, I’ll certainly concede that point: humans are not digital objects replicated via copy and paste. Humans—along with other mammals, amphibians, birds, insects, and starfish—reproduce via sperms and eggs. Sometimes a penis ejaculates into a vagina and reproduction begins. Sometimes turkey basters are involved. Sometimes embryos are frozen. Most of the time they reach viability in a uterus. Other times, blastocysts and embryos are intentionally or unintentionally expelled from a uterus. Currently, artificial gestation bags are being developed for animals, but not for humans. Also—just to clarify—humans DO NOT reproduce through parthenogenesis like aphids, water fleas, and Komodo dragons. Sorry to disappoint.

What does any of this have to do with trans people’s right to exist in public space? What does Marx pointing out that humans are dependent on biological reproduction necessarily entail for Rees? Maybe we just haven’t gotten to that part of the argument. But before we continue, let’s pause to name what Rees’s argument-shaped word flow appears to be: a motte-and-bailey fallacy. Based on medieval architecture, motte and bailey is a manipulative strategy where someone defends a controversial claim by shifting to a more easily defensible claim, and then insists that the more difficult claim has been proven, despite the fact that the difficult claim was never addressed. The above section was the motte: humans come from the natural world and reproduce biologically. Hard to disagree with that. But what is the bailey here? What is he asserting? Nothing yet. But we know he’s going to assert something, because he is here to defend Marx’s ontology against some people.

Wait, the Piece Is Called “Marx’s Ontology.” Where’s the Ontology?

Ontology is a branch of philosophy that seeks to analyze existence through categories in order to determine how reality works. Is the universe made of substances? Are attributes things that entities possess, fundamental aspects of their being, or relational phenomena? How do we assess particulars and universals, parts and wholes? Since Rees’s argument is a defense of Marx’s ontology, we would imagine that he would, at minimum, describe the elements or criteria of Marx’s ontology. But we don’t get anything like that. The closest we get is Rees saying Marx has “a social theory of being” that is under attack and must be defended. Descriptions of those attacks are not given, but we can reconstruct what they might be. For example, we might imagine that Rees would oppose a nonsocial theory of being: for example, that existence consists of eternal truths that transcend social, historical, and experiential fact; or a theory that rejects Marxian laws of change and transformation. When Marxists talk about social relations, we don’t tend to talk about eternal, timeless social relations. Instead, we tend to argue that existence is conditioned by material social relations, rather than inborn essences shaped by gods or immutable genetic code. One might expect the latter to be a good candidate for something that would raise a Marxist’s hackles. But nope. That’s exactly what Rees claims Marx’s ontology is: “Labour, and therefore the reproduction of labour, is a timeless, universal property of being human.”³Rees, “Marx’s ontology.”

There are Books on These Things, You Know…

In Rees’s last few bullet points, the enemy is finally named: subjectivists and postmodernists: “Against modern subjectivists and postmodernists, Marxists insist that women’s oppression is not only an ideology that can be abolished by criticism or transcended by personal choice. It is a social structure which shapes the lives of biological females in a way which it does not do to men.”⁴Rees, “Marx’s ontology.”