Dr. James Lindsay on Marxism

"Woke, a culture war against Europe"
this conference was organised by the "Identity and Democracy Foundation"
https://id-foundation.eu and MEP Tom Vandendriessche 
at the European Parliament on the 30th of March 2023

Contents
--------------
00:00 The definition of Equity - woke is Maoism with western characteristics
02:10 Marxism is a genus of ideological thought, with many different species in this genus
bound together by intersectionality, but the logic is Marxist 
04:35 Society produces man = inversion of praxis
08:00 Take out class, put in race: CRT falls out of the hat
11:00 How's Queer Theory Marxist ?
14:03 Cultural Marxism appears (or Western Marxism)
16:25 Herbert Marcuse said the working class is no longer base of the revolution, abandons tje working class and focuses on race, sexuality and culture
19:00 They see themselves as nations, evolved to attack the west
21:03 'Being white is bad, being white is oppressive'
22:02 The European Cultural Revolution to destroy western civilisation from within
24:00 Woke is Marxism evolved to attack the West, Europe is at great risk
26/20 The Goal is to make us global citizens: 17 sustainable goals (SDG) of UN = slavery
28:00 I have come to name the enemy

Link to full conference video
   • Woke, a Cultural ...  
_______
Follow Dr James A Lindsay
on twitter: @conceptualjames
on web: NewDiscourses.com

Follow Frank Furedi 
on twitter: @furedibyte
on twitter: @MCC_Brussels
on web: frankfuredi.substack.com

Follow Paul Boonefaes
on twitter: @pboonefaes
on web: pboonefaes.substack.com

Follow MEP Tom Vandendriessche
on twitter: @TomVandendriese
on web: tomvandendriessche.substack.com

Follow MEP Susanna Ceccardi
on twitter:  @susannaceccardi9682  
on web: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/i...

_______
More on the Grievance Studies Affair where James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose highlighted what they saw as poor scholarship and eroding criteria in several academic fields.

SOURCE: Paul Boonefaes on YouTube

I want to address something Tom just said, which is in fact that WOKE is supposed to advance equity in Europe.

see if it sounds like a definition of anything else you've ever heard of.

The definition of equity comes from the public administration literature.

It was written by a man named George Fredrickson.

And the definition is an administered political economy in which shares are adjusted so that citizens are made equal.

Does that sound like anything you've heard of before?

They're going to administer an economy to make shares equal.

The only difference between equity and socialism is the type of property that they redistribute, the type of shares.

They're going to redistribute social and cultural capital in addition to economic and material capital.

And so this is my thesis when we say what is woke?

Woke is Maoism with American characteristics, if I might borrow from Mao himself, who said that his philosophy was Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics, which means woke is Marxism.

It's something you will certainly hear it is not.

And the professors and the philosophers will spend a large amount

I need you to think biologically for 1 moment.

I want you to think how we organize plants and animals when we study them.

They're species, but above species there are the genus of the animals.

So you think like the cats, all the cats, but you have tigers, you have lions, you have house cats, you have whatever, leopards, many different kinds of cats.

If we think of Marxism as a genus of ideological thought, then classical economic Marxism is a species.

Radical feminism is a species in this same genus.

Critical race theory is a genus, or sorry, a species in this genus.

Post-colonial theory that's plaguing Europe is a species in this genus.

And they have something that binds them together called intersectionality, that makes them treated as if they are all 1 thing.

Because Marx had a very simple proposition, but we get lost.

We think that Marx was talking about economics because he often talked about economics.

We think, well, this is about economic theory.

If we go below the surface, what Marx was talking about was something different.

We know what Marx's hypothesis was, was that we must seize the means of production if we're going to bring socialism to the nations, to the world.

We have to seize the means of production.

And if we think that it's about capital, then we miss what he means.

If you think it's about the means of production in the factory with a hammer and

the means of production in the field with a sickle, then you miss what it

Because Marx explained what makes human beings special in his earlier writings.

And what makes human beings special is that man is a being that is incomplete and knows that he is incomplete.

He is a man whose true nature has been forgotten to him, which is social being.

And the reason he doesn't realize it is because

of the economic conditions operating as the means of construction or production, not just of the economy, but of him, but of man, of society, and particularly of history.

Marx said that he had the first scientific study of history.

And man's key activity was economic activity, as he saw it.

And so economic production doesn't just produce the goods and services of the economy, it produces society itself.

And so when he says we must seize the means of production, and he's talking about factories and fields, he's actually talking about how we construct who we are as human beings, so that we might complete ourselves, so that we might complete history.

And at the end of history, mankind will remember that he is a social being, and we will have a socialist society, a perfect communism that transcends private property, is how he put it.

in fact, that communism is the transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement.

That's a quote from the Economic Philosophic Manuscripts of

So Marx was interested in controlling, or understanding and controlling, how man produces himself.

He writes about this exclusively in the 1840s,

And he looks at the economic conditions and he says, this is where it is.

And that's why we get economic Marxism, and that's why we think Marx was an economist.

He wanted to produce a religion for mankind that would supersede all of the religions of mankind and bring him back to his true social nature.

And what the goal was, like I said, was to complete man.

So what he said is, well, how are we building man currently?

All of his economic analysis is about how are we building man at present through what he called material determinism.

And he said, well, what we have is a special form of private property in our society.

Our society is organized around private property.

And so all of our thoughts organize around private property.

In other words, there's a special kind of property that the bourgeois elite class has access to, and then they organize society to exclude everybody else from access to that property, through exploitation, through alienation, through estrangement, through oppression.

And so what Karl Marx was proposing is that economics becomes a vehicle to separate society into a bourgeois class that has access to a special form of property.

The people who have access wish to retain that, so they oppress people and keep other people out of that special form of property.

They erect a system of classism to do that.

It's enforced by an ideology called capitalism that believes that this is the right way to engage in the world.

And what we have to do is awaken the underclass, the proletariat, to the real conditions and the fact that they are historical agents of change and bring them to do a revolution and transform society so that we would have equity, or socialism, whichever word you want.

Now let's say that we step out, we step back from this species, this economic species, homo economicus, and we step back to the genus, and we look at this idea, a special form of property that segregates society into people who have the bourgeois and the people who do not have, who are in class conflict with an ideology that keeps this in place.

And the Lunder class must awaken with consciousness to fight back and to seize the means of production of that form of deterministic property.

And now we say, change out class, put in race.

And watch, we get critical race theory falls out of the hat.

In 1993, Cheryl Harris wrote a long article for the Harvard Law Review called Whiteness as Property.

She explained that whiteness, or white privilege, constitutes a kind of cultural private property.

She says it must be abolished in order to have racial justice.

Just like Karl Marx said that in the Communist Manifesto he wrote, communism can be summarized in a single sentence, the abolition of private property.

Well, this is why critical race theory calls to abolish whiteness, because whiteness is a form of private property.

People who have access to this property are whites, or white adjacent, or they act white.

These are words out of the American lexicon that they've used to describe how people gain access to the private property.

People without that are people of color, and they are oppressed by systemic racism.

Systemic racism is enforced by an ideology of white supremacy instead of capitalism.

If you think of whiteness as a form of cultural capital, white supremacy as they define it is identical to capitalism.

It's the belief, It's not believing that white people are superior.

It's believing that white people have access to the control of society and should maintain that.

Even if you don't actually believe that, if you merely support that, you have adopted the ideology of white supremacy into your mind.

And the goal is to awaken a racial consciousness in people so that they will band together as a class and seize the means of cultural production so that white cultural production is no longer the dominant mode.

In the UK, throughout Europe, I hear this question again and again.

Why on earth is this very American phenomenon about slavery and so on that doesn't apply to our country, Why is it popular here?

It's because it's not about history at all.

It's about creating a class consciousness that's against this form of property called whiteness, that's against the dominant culture that may just be a matter of fact, say, if you're in Europe.

Because it becomes a site by which people can come together and they can channel resentment and try to claim power.

I wrote a book called Race Marxism and I defined critical race theory as it really is.

In that book on the first page, I said that critical race theory is calling everything you want to control racist until you control it.

But couldn't we say the same about Marxism?

It's calling everything you want to control bourgeois until you control it.

Well, the queer theory thinks that there are certain people who get to set the norms of society.

a man and look like a man and act like a man and dress

are women that should be feminine and pretty and all these things.

They're heterosexuals, so they get to define the heterosexuality as normal and other sexualities are abnormal.

And so you have a conflict across this cultural property of who gets to be considered normal and who is a pervert or a freak or some other term that gets used in their literature.

Which sounds like a slur, but they adopted it, and it's a technical academic term now.

An identity that is strictly oppositional to the concept of the normal, as defined by queer theorist David Halperin in his 1995 book, Saint Foucault, toward a gay hagiography.

I didn't make that up, I'm not extrapolating.

So you see, queer theory is just another species of the genus of Marxism.

What about post-colonial theory, which is plaguing Europe, thanks to Franz Fanon and his biggest European fan, Jean-Paul Sartre?

They have access to the material and cultural wealth of the world because they've decided their culture is the default and have gone and colonized the world to bring culture to the world, as they say.

And so they oppress the natives around the world, the people have to band together, and their activity is going to be called decolonization.

They have to remove every aspect of Western culture.

So when they come to Belgium or they come to France or they come to the United States and they say we're going to decolonize the curriculum, or they go to the UK and say, we're going to decolonize Shakespeare.

to remove the cultural significance of your cultural artifacts, because those cultural artifacts themselves are oppressive to us.

goal is always to seize the means of control of the production

Marx merely believed it was through economic means.

The evolution into this sometimes called Western Marxism began in the 1920s.

And the Marxists in Europe were confused.

And so Antonio Gramsci sat down and wrote out some things, and George Lukács sat down and wrote History and Class Consciousness after the failure of the revolution in Hungary.

And they wrote what became cultural Marxism.

The idea that we have to enter the cultural institutions in order to change them from within, because Western culture has something about it that's repelling socialism.

So we have to go inside and change the culture to make it socialist.

Now, you aren't allowed to talk about cultural Marxism now.

They've categorized this as a conspiracy theory.

If they don't like the name cultural Marxism, we can use the name that other people at the time used, Western Marxism.

So much like, I don't know, a virus adapting to the conditions, it changed to try to infect a new host.

It took over in all of these kind of agriculturally driven feudal societies.

But it wouldn't work in actual capitalist nations because Marx was wrong.

Then several Germans from the Frankfurt School started to study this phenomenon in more depth, and they evolved the idea further.

They evolved the idea into what's called critical Marxism.

They developed what's called the critical theory.

And Max Horkheimer, who designed the critical theory, explained the critical theory.

He said, well, what we came to realize was that Marx was wrong about 1 thing.

Capitalism does not immiserate the worker.

So I developed the critical theory because it is not possible to articulate the vision of a good society on the terms of the existing society.

So critical Marxism criticizes the entirety of the existing society.

Everything is somehow needing to be subjected to Marxist conflict analysis.

They sought an answer through the middle part of the 20th century, and World War II breaks out.

The Frankfurt School comes to America, which in this metaphor is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because gain of function began to happen on the Marxist virus very quickly in America.

And American universities adopted these professors from Germany.

And Herbert Marcuse, writing in the 1960s, said extremely clearly, this writing in 1969, not only did he say capitalism delivers the goods, gives people a good life, makes them wealthy and comfortable and happy, He also said that the working class is no longer going to be the base of the revolution because of these things.

In other words, we don't have to be responsible to the working class anymore, which opens up the ability for Marxists who are seeking power to make friends with the corporations.

The bosses are no longer the enemy, they're an opportunity.

He said it's in the racial minorities, the sexual minorities, the feminists, the outsiders.

That's who he said have the energy for a Marxist revolution in the West, not the working class.

And so Marxism was able to evolve to abandon the working class.

Well, all they had studied for 30 years was what they called the culture industry.

An industry that commodifies and packages culture and sells it back to people.

So supposedly stripped of what it actually is.

They seized the means of production of the culture industry, because that's what they do.

And so they started to transform the culture industry to sell racial, sexual, gender, sexuality-based, agitprop, as though that were genuine culture.

And so we get concepts like cultural appropriation.

We get concepts like cultural relevance, cultural this, cultural that, cultural everything.

It's all provided as a mockery of what's really going on.

And this evolved in America's highly racialized context, and we ended up with woke, a form of identity-based Marxism, a constellation of Marxist species that all work with the same operating premise, but locate themselves in different, and I'll use the German term here for this, folk.

And they get folkish identity there and become activists.

Du Bois said it would be when he laid down the foundations that became critical race theory later.

Don't they put them on your buildings like colonizers?

They think of themselves as occupying nations, but they see themselves as bound together just like the various colonized nations around the world in seeking liberation from Western civilization.

And so we end up with Western Marxism taking many forms, but with 1 overarching approach.

And the approach that they use, I started off by saying is Maoist, not merely Marxist.

It's just evolved into different species to attack the West at its weakest points through our tolerance, through our acceptance, through our openness, through our generosity, through our best traits actually.

The things that we should be proud of being.

But Mao Zedong knew how to use identity politics.

I don't know how you study in Europe, but in America we have very red-washed education, as we might say.

The communists have stripped out all education about communism entirely.

You don't learn about it in America at all.

I tell this to American audiences and they're shocked.

And he categorized people into these identity categories.

They were things like landlord and rich farmer and things like this.

Right winger is a bad category in and of itself, by the way.

You could be a bad influence for just thinking the wrong thing or saying the wrong thing at any time, or because the government decides it doesn't like you.

And if you have a bad category, very importantly, your children have a bad category by default.

So they create a social pressure for your children to identify as revolutionaries, At which point they get a red identity, a communist identity, a good identity.

And the youth led the revolution in China because Mao did this, identity politics through the children in the schools.

This should feel very uncomfortable to you.

Because here we have, at least in the United States, we tell our children being white is bad.

You automatically hurt people of other races by your very existence.

But by the way, if you become queer, we'll celebrate you.

And you can create a radical army of people who identify as gender minorities and sexual minorities at 7 years old.

You can lead them into paths of puberty blockers and transition, medical transition, which of course Big Pharma profits off of.

At 7 years old, behind their parents' back.

It's the same program that Mao Zedong used to radicalize the youth in China.

The only thing different is the identity categories have shifted.

It's Maoist cultural revolution with American characteristics and it's being exported to Europe.

And just like how critical race theory has come to Europe, even though it doesn't make sense, it will come to Europe, whether it makes sense or not.

And you will have a cultural revolution here too.

You guys even had a kind of offshoot 1 in 2020.

George Floyd dies in Minnesota, which has nothing to do with you.

And you guys have statues coming down in Europe.

The point is to destroy Western civilization from within using Maoist techniques.

1 last point about Mao to kind of drive that point home.

that his formula to transform China was called unity, criticism, unity.

First you try to create the desire for unity.

Then you criticize people for not living up to that.

Then you bring them into unity under a new standard.

Does that feel like what you're being put through?

We use words like inclusion and belonging.

We'll have a place where everybody feels like they belong.

But unfortunately, you have racist ideas, and you have to criticize for you.

You need to criticize yourself for those.

You need to go study, shuishi, in Mandarin, exactly like Mao said.

And then we can bring you into unity under a new standard, which Mao called socialist discipline, which we in the West would not buy.

And so we have this new program, and within inclusion we have, or above inclusion actually, we have sustainability.

We have a sustainable and inclusive future.

I see the agenda 2030 here with an X over it.

The sustainable and inclusive future is the new socialist standard.

That we will have freedom under socialist discipline.

And Mao said the way that that will work is through what he called democratic centralism.

And my shot at the World Economic Forum is taken because it's 1 of the things coordinating this.

United Nations is taken because it's 1 of the things coordinating this.

My shot at the United Nations is taken because it's 1 of

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