Overdoing Marxism

Folk who haven’t read Marx, and do not identify as Marxist, are not Marxists.

Isi Parente on Unsplash.

The next essay in my Worshipping the Future series is up on Helen Dale’s Substack. It is about the evolution of the politics of the transformational future away from Marxism.

Post-Enlightenment Progressives (“the woke”) are not Marxists. Yes, you can trace intellectual lineages back to Marxism but so many of the intellectual movements that have fed into Post-Enlightenment Progressivism were responses to the failures of Marxism.

Yes, a Herbert Marcuse or Paulo Freire is steeped in Marxist thought. But a Foucault or Judith Butler or Kimberle Crenshaw or Ibram X. Kendi is not.

When dealing with people who have read little or no Marx, and do not identify as Marxist (because they aren’t), it is worse than useless to refer to “cultural Marxism” or “woke Marxism”.

Marxism matters because it was for decades the dominant template for the politics of the transformational future. Ideas from within, or that evolved from, Marxism continue to have resonance. It has much less significance as a continuing belief system.

Marxism also matters in that it represented acceptance within academe of systems of pseudo-knowledge. It pioneered the way for other forms of activist (and so degraded) scholarship to take over ever larger sections of academe.

Particularly as Marxism was such a powerful template for the generation of vanguard capital: networked connections plus rhetorically powerful beliefs structured for acquisition of power within organisations and institutions.

So, the template, patterns and example of Marxism absolutely matter. But Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (“wokery”) is not any form of Marxism and its adherents are not Marxists. It is both misleading, and very counter-productive because untrue, to claim that they are.

To read more on the evolution away from Marxism, see my essay.