James Lindsay, author of “Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis,” says that the critical race theory currently moving through American society is a modern iteration of Marxism that uses identity and race, rather than class, to pit people against each other and advocate for revolution.
Herbert Marcuse’s Impact on Critical Race Theory
Herbert Marcuse, Lindsay says, is the most influential neo-Marxist of the mid-20th century and author of a short book called, “An Essay on Liberation,” in which he says that the working class has stabilized and a new group is needed to fight the “socialist revolution.”“They’ve stabilized, they are now a conservative, even counter-revolutionary, force and so he feels betrayed at that point by the working class,“ Lindsay said. ”And he says, ‘We need to look for the populations of the groups that have ... the vital needs for a socialist revolution.’”
Marcuse was a German-American political theorist and a member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
Lindsay noted that Marcuse targeted inner cities and the black power movement in the 60s as the group that was needed for the socialist revolution and began mentoring one of the movement’s leaders, Angela Davis.
Marcuse focused on identity instead of class. “He said ‘We need to look to the ghetto population’—so the feminists, the sexual minorities and the outsiders, the unemployed, and then he said, what we actually need to do is make sure that they get the right theory. They have the energy, they don’t have the theory. And where we get that? We get that into the into the students,” said Lindsay.
“So, we'll create a student movement, just like we saw in Paris in ‘68, just like Mao [Zedong] used in China.”
Lindsay names another Marcuse essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” in which Marcuse says that movements from the political left should be tolerated, but movements from the political right should not be tolerated.
“Therefore, [Marcuse] says, violence can be used against conservatives, conservatives may not use violence in return,” said Lindsay.
Marcuse also calls for censorship and pre-censorship of conservative thought. Lindsay said Marcuse justifies this by claiming, “that the society is already censoring the revolutionary left, it automatically is always doing that, because it’s trying to preserve the status quo.”
According to Marcuse, the working class has become the enemy of the current socialist effort.
“When he identifies the working class as being conservative and counter-revolutionary, he believes that it is now justified to pull out the full machinery of censorship, pre-censorship, and violence—he says that withdrawal of ‘democratic tolerance,’ he says the suspension of their rights—this is all necessary,” said Lindsay.
Lindsay gives some examples of pre-censorship, including political correctness and algorithms on social media platforms that feed people targeted information to influence their thinking.
“It could be kind of self-censoring, you know, with this preventative thing, or it could actually be to the point of … conditioning somebody’s thought so that they only think in particular and approved ways.” Lindsay points to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) social credit system as an advanced censorship tool, which Western countries, including the United States, appear to be moving toward.
Marcuse advocated violence against conservatives if there is a “clear and present danger.” Currently, the mainstream corporate media and the government are saying that vaccine hesitancy and domestic terrorism are presenting a danger to the public, creating an opportunity to justify violence against groups like the Jan. 6 protestors and trucker convoys who are protesting lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
“I think that the leftists who hung on most every word that Herbert Marcuse spoke and wrote in the 1960s and 1970s, have shaped leftist thought and leftist politics for a long time now, and they genuinely believe that they have a right to ’move society forward,' and therefore to repress the right and to advance the causes of the left,” said Lindsay.
Lindsay sees Marxism as an entitlement complex, noting that Marx displayed his own sense of entitlement by writing letters in which he was often begging people for money. He draws a parallel between how the left ridicules and condemns people for being “racist” or “transphobic” to bullying done during the Cultural Revolution under China’s communist dictator Mao.
Lindsay says the left is now pitting whites against all other races instead of Marxism’s original, rich verse poor.
“So, you have a racial bourgeoisie that has access to bourgeois racial property called ‘whiteness,’ and you have a proletariat and the people of color, a racial proletariat, in their interactions across this stratification ... a ’structural racism' in society that is a system that pervades everything—it’s embedded in the laws, it’s embedded in the language, it’s embedded in how we think about ideas,” Lindsay said of the ideology.
People can only be accepted, or “anti-racist,” if they adopt critical theory, even if they are black. “Well, you become ‘politically black’ in the words of Nicole Hannah Jones, you become a ‘black voice’ in the words of (U.S. Rep.) Ayanna Pressley, you become an ‘expert on racism’ or an ‘anti-racist’ in the words of CRT activist Ibram X. Kendi. You take on the ideology, you take on critical race theory, you become a race Marxist—then you’re authentically black.”
Critical race theory is based on a kernel of truth, not the whole truth, says Lindsay.
“And so, it’s not universally true that people want to maintain power for the sake of maintaining power. To believe [this] is psychological pathology,” said Lindsay, suggesting it’s more of a projection by those who make the statement.
This revolution that race Marxists believe needs to occur includes overturning the so-called systematically racist structures currently in place in all U.S. institutions.
Kendi believes that in order to fix the racist society, Congress must pass an anti-racist constitutional amendment.
“Democrats in Congress, behind us, are currently trying to do [this] legislatively, rather than through a constitutional amendment. They just proposed a $70 billion racial equity bill [that] reproduces this exact same program.”
“That’s supposed to establish a department of anti-racism, it‘ll have jurisdiction over all local, state, and federal policies, private policies, expressions of public and private officials. But he also tells us that the department of anti-racism will be staffed entirely by formally trained ’experts in racism,'” said Lindsay.
Marxism Is a Religion
Lindsay says critical race theory is rooted in Marxist teachings and has all the components of a religion, but replaces God with man.“If you read Marx’s writings before ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ especially … the various manuscripts he wrote in 1844, it’s very clear that Marx was not outlining a political and social theory—he’s outlining a theology,” said Lindsay.
“This is an absolute religion. Every piece of a religious faith is present; It has an ontology and axiology, and epistemology.”
“But what he actually put in God’s place is what he called man in himself—a man that’s become truly independent, that no longer needs God no longer needs his parents, whom he was mad at because they stopped giving him money, frankly,” said Lindsay.
He said that, unlike other orthodox religions, redemption in race Marxist ideology is elusive.
“The redemption is off at the end of history; the redemption is that we will get to the perfect society if everybody participates. So, you cannot redeem yourself. All you can do is take up the theory and do the work and be on the ‘right side,’” Lindsay said. “So, long as you are upholding the attempt to bring Marxism into the world, you’re in the general good graces of the saints or whatever, but there’s no full redemption, there’s just more activism.”
