Over at Chronicles Magazine Jewish Intellectual Paul Gottfried advances the idea that “Marxism is not Woke.” In this conversation with Gottfried I am disagreeing with that sentiment. This is part II.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/recent-features/marx-was-not-woke/

Paul Gottfried wrote (PG)

Corporate capitalists who donate money to the Democratic National Committee and to its counterparts in Western Europe and the Anglosphere will not go begging if the eco-militants get their way. The state-protected rich are already making profits by converting to green energy. The corporate class enjoys the benefits of government contracts and having their earnings protected in tax-exempt funds. If capitalists pour their money into Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and LGBT, it is not because they are Marxists. Rather, they represent what Pedro Gonzalez characterizes as “the counterrevolution of the left.” Citibank, Disneyworld, Coca Cola, Pfizer, etc. belong to the privileged class in woke America, and it is the predominantly white working class who will pay by taxes for the woke regime in which our corporate giants are invested.

Bret responds,

In part II we already established the long history of mega Corporatists (Crony Capitalists) working hand in glove with the Marxists throughout the history of Marxism. That it is happening once again is just business as usual. As such we would say that PG is just in plain error when he says that  “If capitalists pour their money into Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and LGBT, it is not because they are Marxists.” Quite to the contrary we would say that this does indeed provide yet another piece of evidence that they are, at the very least, fellow travelers with the Marxists. I mean, of course the Crony Capitalists may not be doctrinaire Marxists, but you can bet they will continue to say “comrade” and speak with a Marxist lisp until another ideology provides a better opportunity for profit. These “Capitalists” are worse than Marxists. They are those who St. Paul said of “their God is their stomach.”

Finally, its always the white working class who pay for the various Marxists expressions. Jewish Bankers and their Shabazz Goy never pay for their own disasters. PG has yet to provide any proof that WOKEism is not Marxism.

PG writes,

Even the Biden administration’s proposed hike in corporate tax rates from 21 percent to 28 percent will likely impact wage earners far more than the upper 5 percent of the income scale. It has been predicted that 50 percent of these added costs will result in wage reductions and increased prices for consumers. The inflation already produced by our present administration has hurt the working and middle classes far more than the earnings of those making annually $500,000 or more, yet that is the class on which the Biden administration claims to be imposing the cost of green energy and social redistribution programs. In the end, the rich may have the least to fear from the government-manufactured rise in the price of essential goods, starting with food and fuel. According to the Congress’ Ways and Means Committee, by June of last year, Biden’s inflation had wiped out the life savings of over 26 million low-income families.

A heavy progressive or graduated income tax was one of the planks of the Communist (Marxist) manifesto. PG with this paragraph gives us more proof that WOKE is indeed Marxist.

PG writes,

Behemoth, a famous Marxist study published by Franz Neumann in 1934, seems to be as applicable to our present ruling class as it was to economic elites under the Third Reich. Neumann’s study may be describing our woke capitalists even more plausibly than those German plutocrats whom Neumann thought were building a corporate state in alliance with Hitler. Curiously, German industrialists and bankers may have been more reluctant to jump onto the Nazi train than our corporate elites have been to join the cheering gallery for gender reassignment and anti-white racism. In any case it is exceedingly difficult to imagine that “American Marxists” would threaten the corporate wealth of our crony capitalist wokesters.

Bret responds,

A main premise of PG seems to be that crony capitalist wokesters can’t at the same time be Marxist. I mention yet again that Antony Sutton in his trilogy in part II of this series just destroys that premise. Crony Capitalists have always worked hand and glove with Marxists, regardless of the ideological flavor of the day. Marxists have never threatened the corporate wealth of the mega rich crony capitalists.

I guess I should say here that I don’t agree with PG that Fascism wasn’t likewise just another variant of Marxism. It is the case with WOKEism, Fascism, and International Socialism that each desires to concentrate power and control in the state. Each are leveling ideologies. Each are the ideological consequence as affecting political orders, law orders, and social orders found in the denial of God in favor of man being God walking the earth. Each, not only being Atheistic, are materialistic and so behavioristic practicing a vicious social engineering. Each practice some version of legal positivism. Not having the concept of absolute transcendent truth each embrace the Marxist materialistic dialectic to arrive at truth and to support their notion of “progress.” Each are opposed to the Kingdom of God and so are committed to building the Kingdom of Man. Each believe that man is good and the progress is inevitable. Each believe that the progress of evolution can be controlled and guided by the elite. I grant some of the whistles and bells may differ between each but the essentials of Marxism are all there in all three.

PG writes,

Unlike Marxism, moreover, the woke left has long ceased paying homage to science and rationality. The left is driven by hate against traditional Americans with fixed gender roles, communal hierarchies, and some form of inherited religious faith. Truth, for the woke left, is determined and redefined by those in power. Woke beliefs have no necessary connection to what is empirically provable, since from the woke perspective, Western science and empirical demonstration are tainted by white, masculine, racist prejudice. Communism in Europe, at least in practice, never showed the frenzied nihilistic energy that seems endemic to the woke left. From tearing down statues to abolishing genders to inciting mob violence against white Americans to throwing open borders for invasion by Third World migrants, the woke left seems far more socially and culturally destructive than most past Communist governments.

Bret responds,

Here, upon reading this, I almost bust a gut laughing.

Has Gottfried never heard of the Marxist “Scientist” Trofim Lysenko whose science resulted in mass murder on a gargantuan scale?

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/trofim-lysenko-soviet-union-russia/548786/

“Although it’s impossible to say for sure, Trofim Lysenko probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history…. Lysenko, a Soviet biologist, condemned perhaps millions of people to starvation through bogus agricultural research—and did so without hesitation.”

Why would PG ever think that Marxism ever paid any homage and rationality? That is itself a irrational statement of staggering proportions on the part of PG. From the experiments of Alexandra Kollontai in social science on the family to Mao’s “science” as applied to industry which established ‘Backyard furnaces’ among the peasantry that would be used to smelt (meltdown and purify) scrap iron – from old farming tools to household implements such as cooking utensils and woks, which ended in disaster Marxists have always been fools when it comes to “science.” PG again is in significant error when he suggests that we know WOKE isn’t Marxist because of its foolishness when in comes to science. Marxists have killed scores of millions because of their neanderthal “science.”

That whole paragraph above this response by PG is deserves nothing but a long and sustained belly laugh. One thing that Marxism and WOKEism have in common is their insistence that they can bend scientific science to support their social construct reality non-reality.

Indeed, I would argue that the whole recent plannedemic was born of Marxist ideology. Anthony Fauci was the second coming of Trofim Lysenko.

One way I know that WOKEism is Marxism is because each of them think they can bend “science” to their utter, complete, and total irrationality.

Allow me to say again, that this assertion by Paul Gottfried that Marxism is unlike WOKEism inasmuch as Marxism payed homage to science and rationality goes a long way toward not only discrediting this article by Gottfried but discrediting much of what else PG might write.

This was a useful course of action because, by the 1960s, blacks had become more and more drawn into revolutionary activism, although they would soon be joined by others in what can be described as the post-Marxist left. Although members of what eventually evolved into the woke, antifascist left looked for an “oppressed class,” their choices had nothing to do with Marx’s proletariat. The real working class wanted nothing to do with cultural revolutionaries, and fights broke out between the two groups in American cities in the 1960s.

Bret responds,

But what PG misses here is that structurally speaking the WOKE anti-fascist (so called) retained the conceptual idea of a proletariat. The only difference between classical Marxism (CM) on this point and CulMar is who would do the proletariat dirty work. The concept of the proletariat remains but the team jerseys are changed. The proletariat is the same only different.

Secondly, I am not convinced that the choices of the WOKE left had nothing to do with Marx’s proletariat. Keep in mind that WOKEism still has an economic component. WOKEism still strums the string that the poor are oppressed. It is just that CulMar WOKEism has expanded the oppressed class to include more than the economic woebegone. The genius of  WOKEism is in how it expanded the base of the aggrieved so as to create a new proletariat.

PG writes,

Marcuse and his followers also fatefully redefined the “realm of needs,” as understood in traditional Marxism. No longer was it the labor required to sustain the working class but rather the acquisition of psychological and esthetic fulfillment. This lent weight to the complaint that capitalism was emotionally repressive. In the post-World War II Western context, the capitalist form of production was accused of leaving the youthful vanguard of a future revolution inwardly stunted. Marcuse believed Western countries were materially able to create a “rational economy”—that is, a socialist one—but simply lacked the will and the vision to establish the sexually and economically liberated society that he desired.

Bret responds,

Yes, the deck chairs on the Titanic are rearranged but it remains the good ship Titanic. Putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t make it not a pig. Cosmetic changes were made but, contra Gottfried, the essence and goal of both Classical Marxism and WOKEism remain the same and because of that WOKE is Marx.  CM and WOKEism both remain committed to the project of overthrowing Western Civilization with it Christian roots and though the players may have changed and the rules of the game tweaked, WOKEism is Marxist. Another way that is seen is the fact that Biblical Christianity remains the only force that can finally defeat both Marxism and its bitch chid WOKEism.

PG writes,

Such ideas represent a countercultural alternative to traditional Marxism as well as to the still recognizably bourgeois Christian society that Marcuse and other Critical Theorists hoped to transform. Communist parties throughout the West as well as Soviet critics condemned this reconfiguring of Marxism as a distortion of Marx’s dialectical materialism. Instead of highlighting the class struggle centered on the ownership of productive forces, Critical Theorists were talking about fighting prejudice and increasing erotic satisfaction. If such notions passed for Marxist theory, so went the critique; these notions would reduce a true revolutionary doctrine based on an analysis of material forces to a bourgeois campaign against emotional repression and discrimination. The invective against this transmogrified Marxism among Communists and orthodox Marxists was every bit as furious as those denunciations against the Frankfurt School that have issued from the Christian right.

Bret responds,

Yes, yes, yes, among the purist Marxists the WOKEism of CulMar was heresy. However, if we are follow this Gottfried reasoning then Trotskyism was not Marxist, nor was Syndicalism Marxism, nor was Maoism Marxism, nor was Fabianism Marxism, etc. etc. etc. Marxism has had more facelifts than Madonna. However, under each facelift the leering visage of Marx remains.

Gottfried is correct that the WOKEism of CulMar is contradictory on the matter of Marx’s dialectical materialism, but as dialectical materialism is itself contradictory I am not sure why this matters except to the Marxist purists. Keep in mind here that the common Marxist thread that remains between CM and WOKEism is philosophical Materialism. Gottfried needs here to keep in mind Marx’s watch cry;

“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Gottfried is playing the philosopher here insisting that Marx is not WOKE all the while the WOKEism of Cultural Marxism is changing the world.

So, PG and I agree that the WOKEism of Gramsci and the Frankfurt school has tweaked Marx but a tweaked Marx remains Marx. Some have even offered that the Marxism of CulMar and WOKEism is a return to the earlier writings of Marx as opposed to the later writings of Marx upon which Classical Marxism is based.

PG writes,

The woke left is an even more grotesque distortion of Marxism than anything the interwar and postwar Frankfurt School brought forth. This left has shed any recognizable Marxist theory, but it continues to venerate Communist heroes while appealing to the interwar struggle between the Communist left and “fascism.” Despite socialist proposals that occasionally enter woke wish lists, corporate capitalists are integral to the post-Marxist left. Nor are such capitalists likely to suffer any ill effects even if the green agenda that most Western countries are pushing is put more broadly into effect.

Bret responds,

It is kind of humorous to talk about something being a more grotesque distortion of Marxism than some earlier grotesque distortion of Marxism given how grotesque a distortion Marxism is itself. I mean when one is dealing with a grotesque distortion to begin with it might be a clue that if something is even a more grotesque distortion than the original grotesque distortion in question, that even more grotesque distortion might indeed be related to the original grotesque distortion.

Second, the fact that “this left” continues to venerate Communist heroes might be a clue for all of us “this left” of Gottfried identifies with Marxism. I mean who are we to question them on who their heroes are? If I tell you that my hero is Che Guevara or Barack Obama or Vladimir Lenin why would you question my Marxist bonafides?

Surely PG has to know that corporate capitalists were also integral to the rise and ongoing success of the Marxist left. The fact that corporate capitalists are integral to the left in no way proves that that left is not Marxist. Anybody who is familiar with the works of Antony Sutton

1.) Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution: The Remarkable True Story of the American Capitalists Who Financed the Russian Communists

2.)Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler

3.) Wall Street and FDR: The True Story of How Franklin D. Roosevelt Colluded with Corporate America

The fact that the Corporate Capitalists are integral to the left proves that what we are dealing with now is not Marxism, frankly is ridiculous. I’d be more inclined to believe that what we are dealing with now isn’t a Marxist variant if what we are dealing with now weren’t in bed with Mega Corporate America.  Corporatism and Marxism go together like Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light beer.

Who does Gottfried think profited from the rise of the USSR besides Western Mega Capitalists? Certainly Gottfried has heard of names like Armand Hammer, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Guggenheim, the Vanderbilt family, and many other less known names that were part of what we call the Corporate Establishment.

The Mega-Corporatists very seldom suffer ill effects from the rise of Marxism.