On Cultural Marxism, the Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory?

This went up last week at Minding the Campus.

And in case you missed this, here are a few thoughts on my favorite cultural Marxist, Antonio Gramsci.

A bit from a forthcoming review of Mark Levin’s American Marxism, summarizing something essential I believe is going on here:

What important things do Levin’s readers fail to learn in his book? That the woke movement facing us is not Marxist, and that insights from Marxism may even help us understand and defeat it. Marxism sees domination and exploitation as fundamentally a matter of the conflict among socio-economic classes. All other forms of hierarchy—based on ethnicity or race, gender or sex, sexual preference, religion, or anything else—are reducible to the primary mechanism of power.  And power is based on the simple matter of whether you are a member of the class that owns the means of production or a member of the class that does not and must sell its labor on a market controlled by the owners to live.

Wokeism rejects the Marxian principle of class as the only real structure of domination because that gets in the way of the woke desire to babble endlessly about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and the rest of the lexicon of hateful phobias. This woke anti-Marxism is a boon to the economic elites who provide the loudest megaphones for the preaching of the new revolutionary ideology. They thereby pretend to be critics of power, while they wield it unchallenged. Marxism offers tools for the critique of those who objectively sit at the top of a social class hierarchy but cynically claim solidarity with the “oppressed” while giving up none of their real power.

Levin seems not to know that the 1619 Project he rightly criticizes has been subjected to an even more witheringly pointed attack by a group of Trotskyists in a recent book, The New York Times' 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. The mere existence of that book disproves Levin’s basic thesis.

Twitter-length summary for those pressed for time.