Florida governor Ron DeSantis is fighting the good fight against woke. But on the question of whether he truly understands the ideological character of woke politics, he and other Republicans regularly put their ignorance on display. Cultural Marxism is not actually a Marxist project. Marxism involves raising consciousness about class position and struggle. Marxists reject the identitarianism that works against class consciousness, condemning those politics as forms of false consciousness. Woke is the epitome of the false consciousness that paralyzes working class struggle.
When I wrote something similar to what I put above on Twitter, a British profile called David Kennaway commented that “Marxist[s] use these woke ideologies to create chaos and dissent. BLM leaders said they are Marxists and typically stole all the money. The kids they indoctrinate are just pawns in a war against the establishment. None of this shit would be allowed in any Marxist country.” He told me to educate myself and shared a New York Post story about Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who confessed in a 2015 video to being a “trained Marxist.”
I pointed out to Kennaway that Cullors is a fraud and huckster who made bank with corporate money. BLM’s function is not to war against the establishment but to secure it by disorganizing the working class—and that’s why capitalists and corporate media backed it. (See my summer 2020 blogs What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter and Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it.)
I reminded Kennaway that Marxists oppose racism, which is why the communists supported the Republican Party in the Civil War, i.e., to end the disorganization of the working class that worked by racializing labor. On behalf of the International Working Men’s Association, Marx wrote to Lincoln in 1865: “While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.” Earlier in the letter, Marx wrote: “From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class.” I told Kennaway that Marx wrote for the party newspaper, the New York Tribune, founded by abolition and communist sympathizers.
Marxism offers an analysis of racism within the broader framework of its critique of capitalism and class struggle. According to Marxist theory, racism is a product of and intertwined with the class-based exploitation inherent in capitalist societies. Marxism argues that racism serves to divide the working class and maintain the dominance of the capitalist class. It asserts that racism and other forms of oppression, such as sexism, are tools used by the ruling class to maintain control, divert attention from class exploitation, and weaken the potential for solidarity among the working class. Marxist theory emphasizes that liberation from racism and other forms of oppression is achieved through the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a democratic society. In this vision, the elimination of class-based exploitation would lay the foundation for the eradication of racism and other forms of inequality. With its obsession over race and gender, is this what BLM represents? Is this why corporate state power has embraced BLM? The capitalist class is trying to overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism?
When I explained how BLM and other similar groups sow disorder, Kennaway said I had described Marxism. No, I corrected him, “I just described identity politics.” Identity politics is a corporate state project, I told him, not working class politics. I then said, “Even without knowing that, you’d ask why capitalists embrace BLM, CRT, DEI if these are Marxist ideas.” British Twitter user Louisa MA approximated the correct answer when she commented: “There is an irony in [that] as groups are pre occupied fighting over climate, biological sex rights and statues to slave owners in universities, the real problem in society, economic inequality, which is front and centre of #Marxism gets ignored. It’s distraction politics.”
But there is no irony here. This is intentional. Woke is a corporate state scam engineered to distract people. People like Kennaway believe it a Marxist plot—and there are millions of Kennaways out there. So I’m over on Twitter trying to explain to folks why Black Lives Matter (BLM), critical race theory, cultural Marxism, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), queer theory, and all the rest of it are not “Marxist” or “neo-Marxist,” but components of a corporate state project to disorganize the working class and manufacture legitimacy for elite interests and objectives. I am meeting with a lot of resistance. The corruption of simple thought works most powerfully against consciousness.
I’m asking people not to believe what race hustlers like the founders of BLM say about themselves and to instead study what they actually say and actually do. If one does this, I tell them, one will find that there is nothing Marxist about any of it. As I write above, Kennaway shouldn’t even need to engage the intellectual side of this at all to figure it out. He need only ask himself why corporations and state institutions design and implement DEI and other woke programming if those things were in fact Marxist in character. I am routinely astonished to see that something this obvious doesn’t occur to a great many people.
Why would corporations wrap their advertising and marketing campaigns in the woke messaging of queer theory and antiracism if these were Marxist ideas? How likely is it to see Bud Lite slapping a hammer and sickle on a beer can? Does Target have a shrine to Marxism-Leninism like they do to queer theory?
If you think all this is Marxist, ask yourself these questions: What or who made you believe that Marxism has captured America’s corporations? What or who convinced you that Dylan Mulvaney’s image on a Bud Lite can, or chest binders and tuck-friendly swimsuits at Target have anything to do with Marxism? Don’t be played like that. Watch this:
freedom and reason 