My comments in the MY CORNER of December 6 were picked up, in slightly edited form, and have been published as the lead essay by today’s UNZ REVIEW. The title is: “Black & White Together in Culturally Marxist America”. And I noticed as I read through it this morning that one of the commenters made a fascinating point. Black identity politics, he suggested, is “not Marxism of any kind, which is opposed to this kind of identity politics, as is easily demonstrated by the comment sections of socialist websites, the conflicts raging between old-school leftists and trans activists who are attempting to demonize/purge them….”
While I would not completely agree with his description, his essential point is well taken, a perceptive observation on how in some ways the Marxist conception of equality has evolved over the years. Traditional Marxism, including the internationalist brand advocated by Leon Trotsky, the Frankfort School ideologues who found their way to Columbia University in the 1930s, and socialist intellectualism of the 1950s, employed the narrative of “equal rights”—egalitarianism—during the older “civil rights movement.” Thus, in the 1960s and for a couple of decades since then, home-grown American Communists and Marxists could be found marching in the ranks of civil rights demonstrators and liberals, advocating new legislation that would insure “equality,” not just of opportunity but also, in increasing cases, of outcome.
The premise of the template of “equality” was that by abolishing racist and prejudicial laws that we had inherited from an earlier and “unjust time of white dominance and oppression,” and then enacting a new legal structure based on the concept of across-the-board equality in everything from employment, housing, educational opportunity to set-asides and quotas, we could achieve that mythical goal.
But even then, back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were increasing demands for more radical “affirmative action,” “reparations for slavery and past racism,” and othercompensatory action. These broadened demands included reforming and dismantling not just the “white power [political and legal] structures,” but deconstructing and dissolving “social constructs and oppressive societal oppression” that also supposedly prevented blacks (and women) from achieving equality.
We should have known—we should have understood from the beginning—given the basic unrealizability of the egalitarian vision, which violates the laws of Nature—that additional revolutionary action would be demanded and required. Indeed, those very laws of Nature would have to be rejected and bent out of shape if the fullness of the civil rights revolution were to continue and be fulfilled.
Thus, in the quest to create “equality” for all people which is the invoked Marxist ideological mantra, some people—whites—would need to be treated unequally. How reminiscent is this of Orwell’s description in his dystopian anti-socialist fantasy, Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”?
The egalitarian template that formed a benchmark of traditional Marxist rhetorical attack on traditional Christian Western society, culture and politics has had to, necessarily, account for this seeming contradiction…if it is a real contradiction. Or, perhaps it is, more accurately, just a recent manifestation and developed evolution of the Trotskyite Marxist brand, in which race theory and sexual politics now play a primary and dominant role, but synthesized with the earlier emphases on “economic justice and distribution” and the “deconstruction of the oppressive Capitalist system”?
Certainly, older Stalinist/Soviet Communist theory embraced “liberation” from racial injustice, and especially in the so-called “Third World” (think here of the famous Bandung Conference, in 1955, held in Indonesia, in which a broad “anti-colonialism” and “anti-racist” template were enunciated), and utilized that narrative strategically with some success, as one means, along with a developed economic critique, of subverting and overthrowing the Christian West. But a newer and more virulent cultural Marxist formulation employs what it calls “critical race theory” [See: hlrecord.org/2016/02/racism-
This contemporary “cultural Marxist” revolutionary vision advocates the complete uprooting and destruction of “whiteness” and “the legacy and structures of white oppression,” and a concomitant total sexual liberation—revolutionary actions which were unimagined by most earlier “mainstream” Marxist theoreticians. And many university campuses have seen the growth and frightening triumph of these academic approaches, which are, in fact, sharpened and intolerant ideological proselytization and indoctrination masquerading as intellectual disciplines.
And what makes these lunatic theories so dangerous is the fact that increasingly our dominant culture and politics buy into them, at the very minimum shielding them from the needed critical scrutiny they deserve. Often such a defensive and protective praxis is premised on the college level on the idea of “freedom of speech” or “academic freedom”; but the result of this traditional liberal posturing about “fairness” is that the zealous advocates of critical race theory and feminist and gender studies—who do not in reality believe in “academic freedom”—have taken full advantage of the intellectual incapacity and vacuity of our traditional academic elites, both “liberal” and “conservative,” to run amok in higher education. And the result is thousands and thousands of indoctrinated graduates who will only confirm the revolutionary rot that infects our society, our politics and our culture—and may eventually destroy it. After all, that is the goal of these race and sex revolutionaries. They may well succeed where their intellectual godfathers did not.
To develop these comments, let me refer to my cited essay, “Black & White in Culturally Marxist America” and link to an excellent and concise analysis on “Critical Race Theory,” published last year by the Harvard Law Record which examines that theory and its implementation from a horrified, admittedly traditionally-liberal point of view: that theory turns the idea of “equality” on its head, the author declares. Or, to quote Orwell once again: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Dr. Boyd D. Cathey
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