From class to race and gender: How Neo-Marxists birthed the Woke movement

Remember when workers of the world needed to unite? That they had nothing to lose but their chains? With the broad real-world failure of Marxism and Communism, radical thinkers needed a new set of victims to spark their longed-for revolutionary fires. Welcome to Critical Theory and Wokism, staples in local progressive's arsenal of divisive politics and inaccurate rhetoric. Mike Gonzales at the Heritage Foundation, via the Claremont Review of Books, explores.

On the ideological front, the activists had realized that the vehicle for radical change would not be the workingman, but the identity group. They were influenced by European Communist thinker Antonio Gransci, who in the 1930s had a transformative epiphany: Marx had promised that the working class would overthrow the bourgeoisie, but the working class had been astonishingly bad at achieving revolution. He and others later, particularly Columiba University professor Herbert Marcuse, agreed that it was nearly impossible to instill into the proletariat the feelings of resentment that would be needed to provoke widespread revolt. Man can aspire to improve his economic condition, after all. What he cannot change is his race or sex.

These weren’t just theories: Marcuse took a personal hand. He directly shaped the worldview of the future Black Panther Angela Davis, to whom he taught philosophy at Brandeis. His exhortations to destroy the patriarchal family were repeated nearly verbatim by  the feminist theorist Kate Millet, with whom Marcuse held a famous “Dialogue on. Feminism and Socialism: at U.C. San Diego in 1975. “All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude,” noted Marcuse in his 1964 book, One Dimensional Man. The working class, however, had no interest in such self-realization. “They find their soul in their automobile, hi-fit set, split-level home,  kitchen equipment,” Marcuse despaired. {Editors' note see article nearby re: progressives' attempts to end home ownership} The vanguard of the revolution therefore had to come from “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors.”

Read the whole thing here.

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Photo taken by Thad Zajdowicz.