Five Essential Essays on Marxism and Socialism
Anton 
Marx & Religion
This essay, published by Commonweal in 1968, provides a great introduction to one of the most important but widely ignored aspects of Marx’s thoughts: theology and, in particular, the influences which shaped Marx’s ideas on religion, God and the relationship between man and the Divine.
The publication traces the roots of Marx’s anti-religious sentiment to the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, a German anthropologist and philosopher who heavily influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Feuerbach’s “achievement” was a consequence of Hegel’s philosophy of religion which, as the German Marxist August Thalheimer wrote in Introduction to Dialectical Materialism, “Hegelian philosophy undermines religion from within. […] The revolutionary character of Hegel’s philosophy stands out in sharper relief in some of his students than it does in Hegel himself. These students directly attacked Christianity, which was then the state religion. Attack on the Christian religion was thus a political attack on the existing state. The most important and the most radical of these students of Hegel was Ludwig Feuerbach. […] Feuerbach accomplished the open break with religion which Hegel had not achieved, and it is precisely in this respect that his book, The Essence of Christianity, was epoch-making.”
Although the article correctly highlights the incompatibility between Marxism and theistic religion (Marxism has a strong atheistic component), the language is soft and the tone lacks conviction. This is perhaps because in 1968 America news of the atrocities committed against people of faith were largely unknown. Nevertheless, this essay offers a great introduction to the anti-religious sentiment in Marx’s writings.
Mark Avis’s Analysis of Woke-ism (Identity Marxism)
Mark Avis is an academic from New Zealand with substantial knowledge of economics and history. His essay, split in two parts, on the current version of Marxist dogma that is infecting the West and quickly spreading to other countries – Woke-ism or Identity Marxism – are a must read for anyone who wants to understand the roots of this strain of Marxism and how it manifests.
In the first part, Wokeism: A New Fascism, Nazism or Marxism?, Avis looks at how Woke-ness compares with similar regimes that have been “inspired” by Marxist dogma: fascism, national socialism and international socialism. They are different in many aspects, as Avis points out at length. However, they all have in common at least one element: their Marxist core.
Meanwhile, the second part, Comparison of Wokeism and Other Evil Ideologies, puts Identity Marxism in the broader context alongside previous authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies. The chart below comes from this essay.
Importantly, the mainstream argument that Woke-ism is just “young people who are upset because of the economy” is dispelled by Avis in this essay, showing that the Marxist plight is despite economic prosperity and thus, pointing out that its source is from the intellectual class – the academics. Indeed, Avis brings substantial evidence that the universities have been moving further on the Left since the 1960s, which a US professor named “the decisive decade” (the years between 1965 and 1975). You can also watch the essays on Rumble.
Ideological Foundations of Critical Race Theory
This essay comes from the World Socialist Web Site, “the online publication of the world Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International, and its affiliated sections in the Socialist Equality Parties around the world.”
Its focus is on the ideological foundations of CRT, showing the strong mix between Marxist ideology (in particular Neo-Marxism) and postmodern radical thought in creating the foundations for CRT. The essay was itself a report which was delivered at the Socialist Equality Party (US) 2021 summer school.
“While its philosophical roots are in postmodernism and subjective idealism, what gives critical race theory its essential character is the addition of another ingredient: racial chauvinism and separatism, which itself has its roots in the right wing of American petty-bourgeois black nationalism.
Critical race theory takes the rejection of the Enlightenment from the Frankfurt School and postmodernism and adds a racial spin. According to Delgado and Stefancic, critical race theory challenges “Enlightenment rationalism” by questioning whether “Western philosophy is inherently white by its orientation, values, and method of reasoning.” […].”
CRT is an abominable force in destroying Western society. From the Heritage Foundation: “CRT makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life, categorizing individuals into groups of oppressors and victims. It is a philosophy that is infecting everything from politics and education to the workplace and the military.”
On the Resilience of Ideology
One of the best essays I read on the ideological nature of Marxism – from Acton Institute, a foundation with a mission to “to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.”
The last bit – “religious principles” – is a key insight: the people who write for the Acton Institute have substantial understanding of religion and therefore, they are well positioned to assess and explain the dangers of Marxist ideology which is essentially a manmade religion that replaces man with God, i.e. an atheistic or secular religion.
The piece is dense however and will require the reader to be committed to go through it. However, it is very rewarding to understand how ideologies form and their power in putting a spell over our minds.
“In fact, as a European living in the U.S. for many years, I like to complain that often Americans (especially on the “liberal” side) are not fully aware of the nature and inner workings of ideological thinking in general. Their understanding of ideology tends to be fairly generic, as if the word just denoted any general cultural-historical vision applied to politics and did not represent a specific historical-philosophical development. Here, inspired by the works of eminent thinkers from the last century such as Augusto Del Noce, Hanna Arendt, and Luigi Giussani, I will argue that, in fact, ideology is a very specific phenomenon tied to deep historical-philosophical currents.”
What Herbert Marcuse Got Right – and Wrong
Marcuse is one of the most influential neo-Marxist thinkers, associated with the Frankfurt School from which critical theory (the ideological backbone of critical race theory, critical pedagogy, critical consciousness, critical hope and so on) originated.
“In the upheavals that rocked universities during the first half of 1968, Marcuse, the “prophet of the New Left,” was suddenly everywhere. Students in Berlin held a banner proclaiming “Marx, Mao, Marcuse!” — an alliterative slogan more elaborately formulated by demonstrators in Rome: “Marx is the prophet, Marcuse his interpreter, and Mao his sword!” Although dismissed by most liberal critics and increasingly denounced by a motley chorus of conservatives, left sectarians, and Soviet apparatchiks, One-Dimensional Man maintained its position as the “bible” of the New Left through the end of the decade […].”
Written for and published by Jacobin, a US socialist magazine, this essay analyses one of Marcuse’s most influential works, One-Dimensional Man, highlighting what Marcuse took from Marx and what he did not. Additionally, it is a straightforward way to digest a highly pessimistic and dense work as the essay focuses quite well on its main points.
For example, if you read this publication, you can quite easily see that one of the things that frustrated Marcuse in terms of why socialist revolution was not a viable potentiality in the future was that the working class was not revolutionary – of course, he attributed this, as all Marxist do, not to the intricate and mystical human nature that cannot be boxed into labels, but to the “capitalist” cultural machine that indoctrinated the workers with the pleasures of a better life.
Jacobin did a great job at bringing to the readers a condensed version – with substantial criticism, both positive and negative – of one of the most influential books (unfortunately) of the twentieth century.
Bonus:
Why young Westerners hate Hitler but are unsure about Stalin?
Read by over 2,000 people in 20 different countries since it was published in January 2022, my analysis of why many young Westerners hate the national socialist dictator but are still unsure what to make of the international socialist dictator, remains an interesting read for anyone who is keen on understanding the current indoctrination of young minds with pro-socialist views through the academia and the entertainment industry.
I bring together substantial analysis from polling results to show that there is definitive proof of young people embracing socialism across the West despite there being no shortage of information about the evil of socialist regimes with a nationalist or an internationalist overlay.
The essay also provides a brief but very important history of Woke-ism, or Identity Marxism, and it also offers a clear way of distinguishing between Marxism, socialism and communism as these terms are often – and wrongly – used interchangeably.
A Brief History of Identity Marxism
From James Lindsay’s website, New Discourses:
“The ideology that is most conveniently identified as “Wokeness” is much more accurately described by the phrase Identity Marxism. That is, Wokeness is a Marxian approach to identity politics for similar aims to those Marxism has always touted. In this regard, Critical Race Theory is Race Marxism; Critical Gender Theory is Gender Marxism; Queer Theory is Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Marxism; Fat Studies is Fat Marxism; Postcolonial Theory is Postcolonial Marxism; and Disability Studies is Disability Marxism. All together, working intersectionally, they are one new species of Marxism: Identity Marxism.
In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay walks the listener through a history of the various strains of Marxist thought to make the case that Wokeness is best thought of this way. Indeed, it must be understood this way. In so doing, he elucidates what Marxism really represents as a broad, overarching philosophy (or, religion) and indicates that the various species of Marxism, including vulgar, Cultural, neo-, and now Identity Marxism, are all essentially the same project in different guises. Join him for a penetrating discussion that frames Wokeness as it really is.”
“Socialism seeks to reduce human personality to its most primitive levels and to extinguish the highest, most complex, and “God-like” aspects of human individuality. And even equality itself, that powerful appeal and great promise of socialists throughout the ages, turns out to signify not equality of rights, of opportunities, and of external conditions, but equality qua identity, equality seen as the movement of variety toward uniformity.” – Extract from the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s forword to Shafarevich’s The Socialist Phenomenon: A Historical Survey of Socialist Policies and Ideals
