Just Church (7)

When we left off last week, we were talking about the roots of the Social Justice movement. We traced things back to a philosopher named Hegel, who passed on some basic ideas to another guy, Karl Marx. Marx might well be the most evil character in all of history, judging by the number of people dispossessed, starved, tortured and killed as result of his ideology. (Let nobody tell you that ideas do not have consequences.)

But Marx died way back in 1883, and went to his own consequences. So we might well wonder why we would be thinking about him now. How did some old atheist guy with a bad idea end up causing problems for the Church a century and a half or so after he was dead? Good question. It deserves an answer. So here we go.

Chapter 2: From Among Your Own Selves (continued)

Marxism Revived

The Frankfurt School

We jump ahead now to just before the World War II, in Germany again. There’s a group of scholars gathered in Frankfurt at what’s called “The Institute for Social Research”, later just called “The Frankfurt School”. And they’re unhappy. You see, they’re all Marxists, but Marxism is having a bad time. Marx’s theories about the proletariat, the industrial working class rising up and overthrowing the bourgeoisie or mercantile middle class, have not come about. Capitalism has turned out not to be totally oppressive, and has even begun to raise the lower classes to a higher standard of living; and as middle-class consumer culture expands, the prospects for Marx’s revolution look thinner and thinner. Marx has been shown to be wrong about history as well; it’s not marching in his prescribed way. Worst of all, Marxism is already a PR disaster worldwide because of its work in places like Russia and China.

But these guys love Socialism. They don’t like the National Socialism that’s rising in Germany, with its talk of race and “blood and soil” and its white “master race”. But they still long for International Socialism or Global Communism, which they still think offers the best prospect for human social engineering toward the ideal state. So they’re trying to work out how to save it.

The Failures of Old Marxism

If you want to know, these guys had names like Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Fromm. That’s not so important here, but you might want to look them up. These people were certainly in the wrong place at the wrong time. The rising National Socialist Party had two reasons to hate them: firstly, that they were International Socialists (i.e. Communists); and secondly, that many, like Marx himself, were also Jews. Racial hatred and injustice were going to turn out to be burning problems for these folks. It was time to get out of town. So the Frankfurt School, as they became known, migrated across the ocean and took up residence at Columbia University in New York.

But there were other serious problems. For one thing, these lovers of Marx had already begun to realize that Marxism itself had a horrendous track record. It had never worked, and when it failed, it failed badly. In public. Deeper still, Marx’s own ideas had failed badly. His predictions of the workers’ revolution had not come about anywhere and, even more perplexingly, the very conditions upon which he based his theories had ceased to exist: the poor classes were being transformed gradually into more comfortable, consumerist middle classes as time went on. Apparently, capitalism was proving not to be the unmitigated disaster for the lower classes that Marx had insisted it would be. This made old Marxism seem implausible. If Marx was to be saved, and if there was to be social agitation leading to revolution, the old grievance of worker-against-capitalist would have to be replaced with something new.

The Rise of Identity Politics

They found their solution. It was in a thing called “identity politics”(1). Instead of pointing to the grievances between workers and bosses — class-based stuff — the New Marxism would keep its hatred of capitalism, but would now point more to things like gender, race, sex, and other forms of difference between one person and another, making disadvantaged “communities” into the new “oppressed working class” that had gone missing. They would pit man against woman, youth against establishment, cultural minorities against majorities, black against white, straight against gay, and so on, until they had a sufficient quantum of aggrieved people to drive the Marxist revolution they believed could still come, and usher in their utopia in spite of all of Marx’s failures.

The New Marxists became incredibly influential in America; at first, only in elite academic circles, but soon in popular culture as well. By the time the war was over, they were already laying the groundwork for youth radicalization of the Sixties. As Ushi Derman has written:

“The Frankfurt School’s heyday came in 1960s America. The hippies in San Francisco, the Counterculture, and the Civil Rights Movement went searching for culprits and the Frankfurt School offered them the perfect nemesis: the system, the establishment, the mammoth and centralized monolith that manages itself in accordance with mechanical logic, apathetic and alienated to the suffering of man and the dreams of people. Thus, they passionately read Adorno and Marcuse to the strains of Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez enhanced by the curling smoke of marijuana. They were addicted.”

If you’re old enough, you may remember when Marxist radicalism reared its ugly head briefly, back in the ’60s — the New Left, the SLA, the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the Port Huron Unionists — a lot of neo-Marxists groups were briefly up and active in a very high-profile way … and then disappeared, it seemed.

Hey, Where Did They All Go?

You may have wondered where they all went. As the hippie generation moved into middle age, it took its Marxism with it, still yearning nostalgically to fulfill its adolescent dreams of social revolution. Where it went is into all our significant cultural institutions: into law, politics, entertainment, media, other businesses, and especially into education — both in the universities and colleges and into the lower levels of public education as well. Isaac Gottesman, himself a Marxist educator at Iowa State University tells the story this way:

“ ‘To the question: “Where did all the sixties radicals go?”, the most accurate answer,’ noted Paul Buhle (1991) in his classic Marxism in the United States, ‘would be: neither to religious cults nor yuppiedom, but to the classroom’ (p. 263). After the fall of the New Left arose a new left, an Academic Left. For many of these young scholars, Marxist thought, and particularly what some refer to as Western Marxism or neo-Marxism, and what I will refer to as the critical Marxist tradition, was an intellectual anchor. As participants in the radical politics of the sixties entered graduate school and moved into faculty positions and started publishing, the critical turn began to change scholarship throughout the humanities and social sciences. The field of education was no exception.”

To those familiar with the recent controversies over neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory in public education in the US, such a frank admission must today come as a surprise. Recently, CRTers have been absolutely insisting, for public consumption, that CRT has never been anything but an abstruse legal theory, and is in nowise being put into the schools. However, neo-Marxism has been incubating for a long time now, not just in the universities and colleges but in the faculties of education and in public schools, and is only now just showing its ugly head. The traditional insidiousness and dishonesty of Marxism’s advocates is once again on display here.

Infiltrating Church and Family

Perhaps most insidiously, they knew that they could not bring about their agenda if they left two important social institutions untouched: the church and the family. Subverting all of these things, getting into them and changing them to serve the Marxist agenda was a deliberate strategy on the part of these ideologues: and they called it “the long march through the institutions”(2). Like Mao’s famous “Long March”, it would be a marathon, not a sprint. It would take many years before they could exert enough influence in all the necessary places to convert an entire society to their cause. But they were patient, in the way that only complete ideologues can be.

By embedding themselves into the major Western institutions — particularly public education, but also the media, law and politics, and by influencing to increasing degrees in the remaining ones, the Marxist ideologues of the sixties began to raise a generation of people influenced by their covert dogma. By the seventies and eighties, you could just about guarantee that every student of any kind was being exposed to some kinds of progressivism, some “soft” Marxism, at the very least.

Marxism Today

A couple of new generations have come since. That which was radical in the sixties has long become part of the mainstream. The ideas and values of Marxism are so deeply embedded in modern culture that we aren’t even aware of them. Marxism’s long march through the institutions has had its desired effect: most people now accept at an intuitive level that collectivism is our hope, that globalism would be good, that racism and other such prejudices are the main human problem, that global warming and poverty are caused by capitalism or unequal distribution of resources, that social pathologies are caused not by individual choices but by social conditions, that sexual restraint is bad, and so on. We’d now all “like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony”, even if it doesn’t turn out to get us a Coke.

Thus, in the end, the ancient human belief in collectivism, ideology and technology has found what may well be its final form. Nowadays, we’re starting to see global-scale Socialist projects break out into public consciousness: and perhaps the most extreme manifestation of this is in the fusion between the United Nations and the Socialists of the World Economic Forum. They can now talk publicly about their plans for the world, which include the following: Socialism for everybody except the elites themselves (who get to remain rich), a single worldwide government, environmental protectionism, comprehensive management of all human beings (including tracking and tagging of everyone) and all aspects of life, and a rather insidious fusion of human beings and technology, which they call “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”. (If all that sounds far-fetched, go and read it for yourself on their own website.)

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(1) There’s no certainty as to who first coined this term, but it has become the approved one, and it nicely captures the idea upon which the neo-Marxists settled, and their strategy for advancing their cause. In fact, they now refer to classical Marxism as “vulgar Marxism”, because neo-Marxists are at pains to disassociate themselves completely from Marx’s basic mistakes. See James Lindsay, Race Marxism (Orlando: New Discourses, 2022), p. 5.

(2) The term was apparently coined by Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, then later turned into an actual strategy by Rudi Dutschke, the leader of the Socialist Students’ Union in Germany. The idea was that in a way similar to how the Chinese Communists had marched across China, the Marxists could take over all public institutions by gradualist means. See Nicholas Parsons’ essay “The Long March Through the Institutions” in Hungarian Review XI:3.