The Fundamental Design of Cultural Marxism
Today’s cultural Marxists believe that the reason economic, social, cultural, academic, and health outcomes (to name just a few) show persistent racial disparities is because of a pervasive, systemic racism that can only be eliminated by smashing the system itself. The quickest way to do that is to create a never-ending number of racial and country-of-origin categories (such as Hispanics and Asian Americans, both created by government fiat in 1977 at the insistence of leftist activists), the members of which would be instilled with grievances about the disparity of these outcomes, to the point that they will want to become active soldiers in smashing the system. The Marxist narrative that all of society for all of history has been divided into categories of the oppressed and their oppressors is played over and over. The government, and all society, the purveyors of CRT say, must thus treat people not as individuals with liberties, but as categories that deserve special treatment and benefits as members of these categories.
What is happening today, therefore, is nothing more than this age’s identity category version of Marx’s 19th-century claim that, because individuals have different abilities, and because they belong to different classes, their rights must differ. According to Marx, if government or society in general were to grant people equal individual rights (such as to consumption and services), material inequality (the bugaboo of all Marxists then and now) would ensue. Another reason why Marx thought that government needed to distribute goods and services unequally until the point that communism reached its final stage (a completely elusive target date), was that “socialism inherits inequalities from capitalism that can’t be wished away.”
Fast forward to today, and famed “anti-racist” Ibram X. Kendi declares that “[t]he only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”33
Conference attended by one of the authors.
The government, Kendi—a retail promoter of CRT—is saying, must discriminate in favor of the members of the categories deemed oppressed. But, as Klingenstein rightly observed at the Third National Conservative Conference, held in Miami in September 2022, “A free society will necessarily lead to different outcomes. The more outcome equality, the less freedom there is.”34
Eric Mann, “Building an Anti-Racist, Anti-Imperialist United Front: Theory and Practice From the L.A. Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union,” September 16, 1996,
https://thestrategycenter.org/1996/...the-l-a-strategy-center-and-bus-riders-union/ (accessed October 24, 2022).
Marx, an economic determinist, believed that the different outcomes depended on different classes, and these depended on their relationship to the factors of production. Basing their views on race and other immutable traits, America’s cultural Marxists explain the different outcomes in terms of categories that are racial and sexual. To them, the racial disparities that so bedevil today’s society happen because the dominant sets of practices and institutions, the rules for the construction of all authorized institutions and activities, codify “white supremacy.” To cultural Marxists, all the rules, norms, behaviors, traditions, and mores of Western civilization constitute white supremacy. White supremacy is totalizing—it is the American Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Reformation—everything. It is that which needs to be torn down. Capitalism, for both earlier Marxists as well as today’s, must be demolished—for Marx because he sought “the abolition of private property,” for cultural Marxists, because it rewards the wrong norms and forms of conduct.
The revolution as originally envisioned by Marx and Engels would not only abolish private property and the right of inheritance; it would also centralize credit and communications; factories and instruments of production would be communally owned; it would abolish the family and create “an openly legalized community of women.” It would even abolish countries and nationality. All this, theoretically, to end gradations of social rank or class, which Marx described as having simplified in his day into two antagonistic classes—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The Marxist revolution must thus begin with the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie. All this is consonant with today’s cultural Marxists.
Cultural Marxism adapts Marx’s foundational concepts. Marx believed that revolutions would invariably result when “the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.” Cultural Marxists, abandoning economic determinism, substitute culture for economy and racial and sexual identities for the proletariat. They agree with Gramsci that “popular beliefs and similar ideas are themselves material forces.” And immutable traits, such as race, will now trump class. To the 21st-century communist Eric Mann, “the racialization of all aspects of political life operates as a material force in itself.”
Cultural Marxism is thus a remodeled Marxism, a mutation; but it is Marxism nonetheless, something Americans in the 21st century need to understand. It is entirely distinct from other forms of garden-variety left liberalism, whose proponents are being displaced by cultural Marxists—in the Democratic Party, for example, socialist members of the so-called Squad, such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), and Corey Bush, (MO), receive levels of attention denied to their moderate colleagues, such as Representatives Henry Cuellar (TX) and Carolyn Bourdeaux (GA). The cultural Marxists’ goal is not to improve the system, but to overturn the existing social order entirely—which they consider to be an enforcer of “white supremacy.”
Because of that absolutism, cultural Marxism cannot tolerate or co-exist with other worldviews. It demands censorship, which began as “political correctness” but has since veered into the far more insidious censorship, which leads inevitably to tyranny (as Marxism always has everywhere it has been tried). It punishes alternative views by attempting to drive those who express them from public life, a phenomenon dubbed “cancel culture.” As Klingenstein said in his September 2022 speech, “if the Woke Comms want to overthrow our system, we have to overthrow theirs.” The new Marxists play for keeps, just as the old ones did. Marx’s favorite phrase came from Goethe’s Mephisto (the devil): “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”35
Paul Kengor, The Devil and Karl Marx (Gastonia, NC: Tan Books, 2020), p. 36.
Cultural Marxists took over the universities and transformed the class struggle into one over race, sex, and other immutable traits, and used these positions of power to reinterpret not just history but reality itself. Cultural Marxists also abandoned violent struggle in favor of indoctrination. Socialism evolved from preaching government ownership of the means of production to putting socialists in charge of “the means of meaning production.”
The capture of the university has paid huge dividends, for it is from the university that so much of a nation’s culture emanates. But the takeover by Marxists has been far more totalizing. In fact, sex, sexual orientation, climate, and other issues have been used indiscriminately to advance revolutionary goals, something that Marxists themselves sometimes admit. The former Marxist David Horowitz, for example, quotes an SDS radical as having once written, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”36
David Horowitz, Hillsdale College, July 9, 2010, YouTube video,
(accessed October 13, 2022).
Horowitz explains, “In other words the cause—whether inner city blacks or women—is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.” Eric Mann, the communist and former Weatherman who trained Black Lives Matter (BLM) co-founder Patrisse Cullors for a decade on Marxism–Leninism and how to be an organizer—drove this point home when he told an interviewer in 2015 that whether the issue is race, sex, gender, or the environment, the goal is overthrowing the U.S. system, and the rest is just “a little division of labor.”37
Eric Mann, interview, The Laura Flanders Show, 2015,
https://lauraflanders.nationbuilder.com/ericmann (accessed October 15, 2022).
Even the drug culture falls under that division of labor. Horowitz says that SDS leader and progressive firebrand Tom Hayden once described the utility of the drug culture to him: “Once you get a middleclass person to break the law, he said (and he was thinking of students), they are on their way to becoming revolutionaries,” wrote Horowitz.38
David Horowitz, “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model,” 2009,
https://userpages.monmouth.com/~dmajor/Mail/BHO-rules4rev.html (accessed October 15, 2022).
A few examples of what this looks like in practice should suffice to demonstrate the impact the cultural Marxists have had.
