When Karl Marx first published “Das Kapital” in 1867 with the help of Friedrich Engels, he created the theoretical foundation for a materialist political and economic philosophy. It described all of history as a dialectical, back and forth, class struggle between workers and their overlords, or at that moment in industrializing Europe between oppressed laborers and bourgeois capitalists.
History was an ongoing class struggle that must end with the overthrow of the economic ruling class. Marx’s ideas were implemented by Lenin in Russia resulting in the Stalinist regime of the USSR and the Iron Curtain countries of the Eastern Bloc. And it was followed by Mao Zedong in China and countless other countries that experimented with Communism, even off the coast of Florida in Cuba. But they have all proven to be failed experiments. Centralized economies don’t succeed. Even China has given up on a centralized communist economy (but hasn’t relinquished totalitarian control over centralized thought).
As the failure of Communism has become so blatantly obvious, where do the ideological Marxists go? They can’t promote class struggle any more. That is so old school and a losing proposition. So how about tweaking the formula of opposition, using race instead of class. Instead of fomenting revolution and the dissolution of society based on labor vs. capital, let’s promote the division between racial identities. Let’s use racial politics and propagandize the oppression of one over the other. That will divide people, weaken society, and allow a militant vocal minority to control the conversation . . . or as the media would say, the narrative.
Enter Black Lives Matter, Inc., who openly professed on their website to be a Marxist trained organization, intent on weakening the nuclear family and bringing down a capitalist society. The argument against BLM is that they don’t really care about Black lives. They are totally silent on the destruction of the Black community in Chicago, where 75% of victims are Black and over 70% of offenders are Black, and had a record high 774 murders in 2020. But I am cherry picking my facts, as a friend would warn me. Maybe. But it is definitely an example of hypocrisy.
So the class struggle of Marxism has reincarnated itself as the tension of systemic racism in 2020. Coupled with Critical Race Theory and the pandemic response of totalitarian control via lockdowns and we have the perfect storm. Add in Cancel Culture that purposefully erases the past and we are living in Orwell’s 1984.
If you don’t believe in reincarnation, reconsider. Cultural Marxism is alive and growing in the United States of America.
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