THE NEO-MARXIST REVOLUTION IN AMERICA’s UNIVERSITIES, SCHOOLS, AND CORE INSTITUTIONS

David Barnhizer

A Little History

One historical lesson to keep in mind is that once Marxists take control over a system they never voluntarily give up that power. Nor do they function like the “theoretical” savior of the “Common Man” my wonderful Grandfather Thomas Jones urged me to always assist and protect. Grandpa Jones was the kindest and best man I ever knew. He worked in Youngstown’s steel mills for 38 years, and occasionally hosted meetings at his house that, according to my Mother, even included former General Secretary of the Communist Party USA Gus Hall, a man who was heavily involved in what is referred to as the "Little Steel" Strike of 1937. Mom described Hall as a sneaky and tricky man she couldn’t stand.

This was an effort to unionize America's regional steel manufacturers. Although he was not a “card carrying” member of the Communist Party in America, a key driver of union organization at the time, Grandpa had experienced management’s abuses of workers and sought with many others to balance the interests of management and labor. The United Steelworkers Union did get created and I was even a USW member for a time. Grandpa had made his contribution to the efforts and when we talked about this after I graduated from college, it turned out he didn’t like or trust Gus Hall and his minions either. Grandpa was much too decent a person to be a Marxist because at the core of their being the people who want power always hide their real aims and end up serving their own purposes regardless of the heightened rhetoric they rely on to energize “the masses”. Those revolutionary masses, after all, are really just necessary tools on the leaders and demagogues path to power.

By the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s and 1960s reality hit, the true nature of the Soviet Union was exposed, and we endured a very dangerous Cold War that, tragically, has reappeared in another form with China and Vlad Putin’s new Russian Federation. The current conflict over the extent to which Marxism and socialism have infiltrated our universities and K-12 educational systems is a surreal phenomenon for those of us who grew up during the first Cold War between Russia and the United States. The “Reds” or Communists were the enemy. Socialism was not only bad but evil and an affront to everything America stood for.

For my 1950s and early 1960s generation, we had regular air raid drills in our schools. These included crouching beneath our flimsy wooden desks theoretically protected by their black painted cast iron frames. Even though we were naive kids in grade school and high school, we weren’t entirely stupid. Squatting beneath the potentially deadly shrapnel of wood and steel that we knew would come from our shattered desks if the bombs dropped didn’t really instill a sense of safety. Plus, we knew if the H-bombs did come close we would be vaporized.

In the first part of the 1950s we experienced the Korean War against North Korea and China. Then there was the rise of communism in Cuba after Castro took over—complete with mass killings and imprisonment of dissidents or enemies of the state. We all understood the Socialist/Marxist states were our enemies and the truth is that those forms of repressive government still would be if they actually existed. Instead, even though the Soviet Union “morphed” into the Russian Federation and the others kept their same names, we have moved on from the ideological-defined states to a condition of oppressive military dictatorships. Russia, China, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela aren’t “revolutionary icons”. They are criminal gangs of authoritarian thugs who seized power under the pretentious rhetoric of “the people” and “justice” and never gave up power after seizing it.

My generation, and a fair number of those following, also grew up being taught the mantra: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me”.  Not entirely true, but there is an undeniable virtue in having a thick skin. We were tough. Many of our parents had fought in WWII. My Dad’s unit went into concentration camps to free the surviving prisoners and to document the evil that the Nazis had wrought. When I was six years old I found his Army Division yearbook that had been hidden away. Like any kid of that era I looked through it at the soldiers, tanks and other pictures of the heroic men who had smashed a horrific enemy. But partway through the Yearbook, I turned a page and saw skeletal figures in striped pajamas, people who had somehow survived the horrors physically but who would never be the same.

It was unbelievable, but for those moronic people who still deny the reality of The Holocaust, there was no question this five-year old Army book was a real portrayal of what had taken place. Trying to figure out what else was there, I turned more pages and witnessed pictures of heaps of dead bodies thrown into pits. While a six year old boy probably should not have been exposed to such scenes those memories are still in my mind many decades later and will never lose their vividness. They are a part of me and played a role in shaping the person I am, how I have lived my life, and my resistance against abuses of power. My Uncle Bob was also in a POW camp but since he was not a European Jew, or a Gypsy, or one of the other identities hated by the Nazis he survived in a “regular” camp without pits, lime, poison gas or crematory ovens.

While nuclear war was always lurking in the background, for a two-week period it was imminent. From October 16, 1962, until late in the day on October 29, the Cuban Missile Crisis standoff between the United States and Soviet Union over Russian ships at sea carrying nuclear tipped missiles to Cuba dominated everything. In my college’s dining hall on the last day of the standoff when the declared deadline was imminent and the two countries played their game of “chicken,” we toyed with our dinners as we stood, sat, and milled around, wondering whether our world was going to be gone in a nuclear flash. Then the news that the Soviet ships had turned around was broadcast, and we all exhaled a loud collective breath because the world did not end and we got to live another day.

Once in Place the “Marxist State” Never Disappears

The key message to be taken from what any serious examination of the Marxian/socialist state reveals instantly that the state never withers away in such systems, and there is no “proletarian paradise.”  I taught several times in St. Petersburg, Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and there was a significant degree of hope among the young Russians that the nation would become a true democracy. It was a time when Vladimir Putin was in his first term as President, and he was on his best behavior and worked hard to seem benign and even “democratic”.

Putin even allowed Medvedev to be his legal successor for a single term, but it was all a sham. He followed up Medvedev’s term and is running an authoritarian dictatorship while reportedly amassing a personal fortune of over $20 billion while enriching his key cronies to ensure he remains in power.  Thus goes the Marxist/Socialist state, with the same result occurring in Venezuela with Chavez and Maduro. Even though the alleged form of government changed in those situations, the new controllers never surrendered power once attained.

Those who naively or cynically rage on about the evils of America, Western Europe, and similar political systems as being oppressors are either stupid or “blowing smoke” for political and financial gain. It was a very serious matter to discover during the COVID-19 pandemic just how widespread is the Woke/Critical Race Theory movement that is being driven by self-admitted Marxists, with their allies using the “softer” socialist label in an effort to mask what they are doing to create a political system that history shows us never works. Marxism/socialism is always a quest for centralized power by a small group of controllers, and the allied Woke/CRT/Progressive movement is no different.

The oft-stated denials of Marxist and socialist beliefs as being at the base of Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Wokeism should not be believed. Marxist principles have been a dominant part of the Woke/CRT effort since the beginning, although the “principles” are little more than lofty statements of ideals used to justify “The Revolution” and disappear once the key power-brokers have gained control.

I began my career as a law professor after several years of representing poor and minority clients as a Legal Services and civil rights lawyer in Colorado and Massachusetts, and then earning a Masters of Law degree from Harvard and teaching Harvard’s clinical students. Once at Cleveland State University I was contacted by people at Harvard with whom I had interacted and worked while helping create the law school’s first real clinical program representing low income clients who otherwise had no access to lawyers.

I was invited to join the nascent Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement. Our discussion included description of the goals of social justice and equality for which I have always worked, still advocate, and support. But as the discussion progressed, I was informed, almost breathlessly by the individual to whom I was talking, that CLS was dedicated to socialism and European Marxist political philosophy. At that point I stated, “I’m sorry, I don’t do ‘Ism’s’ and can’t be part of what you are doing.” That was the end of the attempt to recruit me, and I lost some friends who remained steadfast members of the CLS movement. My experience with many “Crits” through the years validated my decision.

Social Media Has Created a Brainwashed Generation

Without Courage or Heart

Older Americans grew up in a world without immediate and continuously generated and detailed Social media descriptions aimed at producing a sense of danger and hysteria. They have a problem accepting the dire claims broadcast by members of what are now called “Identity” groups. The assertion that someone’s use of a word or phrase they didn’t like not only offended them, upset them, angered them, and not only caused them to disrespect those who voiced disagreeable opinions, but actually harmed them simply do not “resonate” with many who have experienced far worse or grew up in a culture where people said what they wanted and were judged, but not silenced. The now common assertion that simply hearing disapproved words or perceived nuance that is under the offended Woke person’s subjective interpretational control made them “feel unsafe”, “threatened” “endangered”, or “marginalized” is actually offensive to me. I see it as a deliberate attempt to silence others in a political system grounded on the principles of free speech.

Whether it is real or a cynical ploy to shame and gain power, the ultra-fragility of mind and emotion such claims represent is stunning.  If true, I urge the people to seek professional help. If it is a cynical power play, then please move to another political system that considers such behavior legitimate. We see almost daily the claims that their “hurt feelings” entitle them to condemn, cancel, call for people to be fired, or otherwise punished in severe ways.

A “code of conduct” of the kind we are now allowing destroys the foundations of free speech and expression. But the destruction of free expression occurs only in one direction. This is what we see with the Pro-Hamas/anti-Israeli “Progressive protesters” and the recent firing of the second-in-command individual in Oregon’s Forestry Department. His terrible “sin” is that he stated that in hiring he was committed to finding people who were the most qualified for the jobs, as opposed to prioritizing gender,  ethnicity, sexual preference, queerness or similar characteristics. He was fired quickly after a complaint by six “queer” employees who said his words made them feel threatened.

“All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude.”

Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Law emeritus at Harvard, is demonstrating courage and integrity in opposing the rapidly unfolding corruption of the university as institution, and the dangers this creates for American society. Jan Jekielek and Masooma Haq interviewed Dershowitz about the state of the American university system, and the fact that a considerable element of the Woke and Critical Race Theory movements derive from the political philosophy of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse developed a system of thought that began as anti-Nazism, but ultimately itself became a repressive fascist system that Dershowitz argues provided the philosophical base for the Woke movement. Jekielek and Haq write:

Dershowitz agreed that the left has been heavily influenced by Herbert Marcuse, a German-American philosopher and political theorist associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, who advocated for “liberating tolerance,” which consists of intolerance of right-wing movements and toleration of left-wing movements. [He explains] “[Marcuse’s philosophy] is interesting because although it grew out of anti-Nazism, it turned into its own form of fascism, so Marcuse was kind of the godfather of the woke repressionist movement,” said Dershowitz.

A pre-eminent Marxist scholar of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, offered a telling assertion. He stated that “all liberation depends upon a consciousness of servitude.” The question that demands to be raised is, “OK, now that the workers have been liberated and the leaders of the revolutionary movement are in control, what do our newly conscious band of previously victimized Marxist/socialist brothers and sisters do?”

Ella Kietlinska and Joshua Philipp describe aspects of Marcuse’s philosophy in the Epoch Times. They write that with Marcuse and Marx:

People need to be conscious of their servitude first, of being oppressed before they can react through revolution. … Taking responsibility for one’s own life and dealing with one’s problems individually is not what Marxists advocate. They admit that a person can succeed individually but claim that by doing so the person joins a bad system, [Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation] explained. … In order to dismantle the system, according to Marxist thought, [Marcuse said] “you need to be upset,” he said, to feel victimized by the system, and only then will people act collectively.

History clearly indicates that, after seizing and consolidating their new power Marxist/Socialists quickly impose a state of servitude on those they previously proclaimed they were freeing from the yoke of oppression. The Woke revolutionaries do not have a clue about “what works” after they destroy the existing order—other than to ensure their power is absolute. The question to be asked the American Woke and Progressives at this point in their “transformative revolution” is “what do we do if you win?” The honest answer is they don’t know.  All they care about is getting power and control in their own hands.

It is no accident that the Woke and CRT movements condemn virtually everything they attack into unjust systems of “exploitation” or “victimhood”. The “exploiters” are portrayed as demonic and relentlessly selfish capitalists rather than their human “victims”. That accusation provides the base for Marxist social critique. The idea is that individually, and as part of a community based on the altruistic belief of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to their needs,” the “freed” and no-longer-exploited humans would, by their very inherent nature, act in ways that realized the greatest qualities of the human race once they were no longer deterred by the demonic evils of exploitative capitalist greed.

Marcuse, Marx, Lenin, and many others were delusional if the interpretations and intentions they proclaim about human behavior are taken at face value as opposed to being cynical polemical devices employed to justify the seizure of power and control. As we see through the stark examples provided by the behavior of Russia, China, Guatemala, Cuba and Venezuela, the glorious evolution of the human race claimed to be the result of the Marxist political philosophy has not occurred. Instead, those who are successful in removing deity-based religion from the equation on which their social order is founded simply recreate a substitute system of faith with themselves as the priesthood and laity.

Marxism and Socialism Always Fail:

They Contradict the Reality of Human Nature and Our Quest for Power

When I was teaching law at the University of Westminster in London and serving as a Senior Research Fellow with the University of London’s Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS), I lived a block away from the British Museum. I would frequently wander over to the museum and visualize Karl Marx bent over his books in the British Museum’s Reading Room while he was seeking to decipher political reality. Das Kapital emerged from his efforts. While I have long considered Marx as a brilliant analyst and critic of the unfair conditions of social reality as it existed in his historical moment, I simultaneously see him as someone who was so dedicated to one vision or interpretation that he was blind to the actual motivations and darker behaviors of humans.

Marx, while researching and writing on social conditions in Das Kapital, never was willing to accept the reality of human nature. Or, perhaps even worse, Marx may have understood the falsity of his analysis of human nature and the supposed inevitability of the state “withering away” yet deliberately presented a duplicitous “truth” to justify his political theory and advance the “revolution” he desired.

Due to the power, pettiness, competitive, and jealousy of others realities of human nature that contradict Marxian dreams of human goodness, such systems never manage to move beyond and heavy-handed control and centralized authoritarian power. Marxism’s fatal flaw is that humans differ naturally in the degree of their goodness and evil, and in the lack of altruistic impulses, egomania, physical and intellectual abilities, resentment and jealousy, and in their drive toward creating the wealth, opportunities, and goods required to provide for the overall community versus for themselves and their allies. The fact is that few people who possess power ever willingly surrender that control.  John Stuart Mill understood this essential point about humans, a point Chief Justice William Rehnquist emphasized in his opinion on the imposition of capital punishment.

The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power.

Wanting human reality and behavior to fit into an ideal of innate human goodness does not make it so. Differences in talent, merit, good and bad fortune, and the distribution of social goods are inevitable. While extremes in opportunity and outcomes can be destructive to the social order, there is no viable system in which perfect equality or perfect “equity” is possible. We can and should act decently with an eye toward advancing the overall human good, but we can never achieve a perfect system. Taken too far, the attempt to do so will always produce repressive authoritarian systems, resentment, and violence.

Marx also asserted that a main function of religion was preventing people from demanding social change. He argued it did this by reducing the sense of oppression. The idea was that, by promising a heaven, organized religion gave people something to look forward to even as they endured the darkness of earthly existence. The thought was that you were better able to put up with misery now if you have the promise of a life of “eternal bliss” to look forward to after earthly death. Of course, the system worked even better if there was a hell in which the “bad guys” suffered eternal pain and despair. At least you could look forward to your tormentors “getting their just desert.” But Marxism ironically simply substituted a new religion, “Marxism” for that it supplanted.

America’s “Progressives” Are “Soft Marxists”

There were innovative thinkers such as Derrick Bell in the Progressive and Critical Race Theory movements. Duncan Kennedy was OK but full of himself, and Roberto Unger was someone whose work I enjoyed as a conceptual challenge to the orthodoxy that controlled legal education.  But many of the new faculty and administrators who entered the university during the 1960s and 1970s Civil Rights movement weren’t intellectuals in the traditional sense of that concept.

The new entrants weren’t even necessarily teachers, researchers, or scholars in the traditional meaning of those roles. They saw their mission as a political one of bringing “their” political agendas into teaching and scholarship, not to offer a full and balanced critique. They were activists on a mission possessed of a specific agenda and worldview.  They weren’t seeking truth because they already “knew” the “Truth.” They treated subjective interpretations of their own “lived” experiences—which is a relatively recent strategic device—and European Marxist treatises on the deficiencies of Western society as objectively valid.

The difficult transition that has occurred is that there is absolutely no doubt that racism occurred in America, that to a far lesser extent it still exists, and that it is a contradiction of the philosophical ideals we long professed.  That is the easy case that anyone could make, even without a Harvard degree.  The problem for the Woke and Critical Race “Theorists” is that the “bad” was so obvious, and many of us were seeking to deal with that fact, that they had an extremely weak message unless they could alter the meaning of racism and discrimination itself.  So they did.

They worshipped the big words and almost impenetrable language that they read in books written by European leftists and Marxist deconstructionists and decided they had undergone an “epiphany” presenting incontrovertible and sacred “truths”. They did this even while paradoxically asserting, like the European deconstructionists and Marxists they were parroting, that “objective truths” did not exist.  What was really going on was the invention of a new religion, “Wokeism”—which to a disturbing degree was a “stealth” paraphrasing of Marx, Lenin, and European Marxist/Socialists such as Marcuse.

Heather Mac Donald exposes a form of Marxism and the pursuit of centralization of power. She writes:

The core claim of both critical race theory and feminist jurisprudence is that law is merely a mask for white male power relations. … But the Crits' real gripe was not with law but with liberal society. They berated liberalism’s emphasis on individual freedom and limited state power. Many called for a world without distinct public and private spheres, in which the individual would not be “alienated” from the collectivity. The Crits were particularly scornful of “illegitimate hierarchies,” a phrase that included every possible type of ranking or distinction among individuals. Harvard’s Duncan Kennedy . . . infamously called for breaking down law school hierarchies by rotating all law school jobs from dean to janitor on a regular basis and paying all employees the same salary.

Bruce Abramson and Robert Chernin argue that American progressivism already follows a soft form of the Chinese model. In that model, an enlightened, elite oligarchy broadcasts official facts, beliefs, and values that none may question.

In a China-dominant world … Human rights, civil liberties, rule of law, and representative government will be greatly diminished. More than the world order will change. National governance, including our own, will follow suit. . . . American progressivism already follows a soft form of the Chinese model. An enlightened, elite oligarchy broadcasts official facts, beliefs, and values that none may question. Those who fall in line are allowed to prosper in ways that serve the oligarchy’s conception of the public interest. … An America without the fundamental rights and liberties that have always defined our national soul is an America fertile for an era of Chinese dominance. Nearly every trend in contemporary American life appears to be heading in that direction.

A False Identity Politics Is Using Marcuse’s “Oppressed” and “Oppressor” as a Strategy to Undermine and Dismantle America and Create Hate

The struggle to develop our fullest humanity depends on being able to utilize our minds to perceive as broadly and deeply as possible. The Woke’s cancel culture, and the conversion of the role of human individuality into a kind of collectivist submission is part of a deliberate effort to suppress our minds and block the range and depth of our insights. This strategy is done to create the energized base of adherents who become convinced they are unfairly victimized and those who are responsible for their plight.

This is an essential step by which an “enemy” is created, blamed, and targeted in order to generate the needed “revolutionary fervor.” We see this clearly in the inventions of “White supremacy,” “White privilege” and “White guilt.” Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation who specializes in analysis of Critical Race Theory, explains the connection between identity group politics and the creation of the revolutionary split between what is labeled as “oppressor” and the “oppressed” victims.

Identity politics is the reimagining of America as not a united country or a united nation but as a confederation of identity groups. … “Some of these groups are considered to be oppressed and then one of these groups is the oppressor,” Mike Gonzalez said. These groups have been created synthetically by activists on the left for the purpose of instilling the members of the oppressed groups with a sense of victimhood and grievances so they would act as a catalyst to change the society and to change America, Gonzalez said. This is consistent with the archetypal Marxist conflicts between “the oppressor” and “the oppressed.”

Simply put, money, power, ideology, and control have major roles to play in the concealment and denial that accompany the implementation of the “Woke agenda” in our universities. We are well into a second generation of individuals who have been mis-educated as students and as teachers in an intellectually deficient educational system. That system has ignored the teaching of fundamental concepts, skills, methods, civic duty, and collective and individual responsibilities of the kind necessary to sustain the ideals of the American political community.

What is missing includes a rapidly growing lack of respect for the spirit of the Rule of Law.  Along with this destructive mind set is the absence of civic awareness concerning the terms of membership in a healthy democratic community, and not being taught how to think. Along with these deficiencies is a dramatic lack of learning the essential foundations of data and unbiased knowledge on which rich and legitimate “thinking” must operate. The human mind may well be understood as a kind of “organic computer,” but without the best quality of data created by educational and experiential inputs, as well as the creative and methodological conceptual structures by which those inputs are processed and interpreted, the “computer” can’t function at any real levels of quality.

Even that is only a part of the problem. Our educational systems also fail in teaching the skills needed to resolve disputes, and being able or willing to engage in the political and intergroup compromises needed to maintain the health of an incredibly complex democratic republic such as exists in America.  As the shifting systemic demographics rapidly change the cultural identity of the nation, and identity group tribalism undermines the traditions of individualism that are at the foundation of democracy, it becomes even more vital that we learn how to mitigate conflicts between collective groups that are seeking greater shares of America’s social goods.

Part of the problem is that “identity” and “diversity” are not obvious standards. They are being used as open-textured terms being applied to give special advantage to “favored groups.” In many instances, while seemingly benign and obvious, such concepts are being used to suppress true and wide-ranging diversity and identity across the total national population. It is not that the concepts themselves are inherently bad conceptually and morally. It is that they are being used as weapons to gain power for specific political interests.

Bob Zeidman is the president of Zeidman Consulting, a contract research and development firm in Silicon Valley and president of Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering Corporation. He writes about the contradiction between the activist form of identity and diversity and that advocated by Martin Luther King and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence:

Our irrational emphasis on diversity is creating the problem that it’s intended to eliminate. Instead, let us try to enact the color-blind society envisioned by Martin Luther King and strive to live up to the philosophy inscribed in our Declaration of Independence that all people are created equal and should be treated equally.