Marxism: Key To Understanding Leftists
An excellent summary of the principles of Marxism is provided by the article, Understanding Marxism Is Key To Understanding Today's Leftists, by Glenn Spitzer, American Thinker, 9 July 2023. Here are a few excerpts:
As Americans, we are being assaulted by numerous alphabet ideologies we don't understand—from DEI to ESG to LGBTQ+... The only way to understand what's happening is to recognize the ideology that underlies all of it: Marxism. When Patrisse Cullors, BLM's co-founder, acknowledged that BLM leaders were "trained Marxists," we failed to understand the significance...
Marxism's central idea is that the world is broken down into two groups; or as Marx stated: "in a word, oppressor and oppressed." This is from his opening statement in the Communist Manifesto (published in 1848)...
The Frankfurt School is the key to understanding how Marxism is used today. It is responsible for what we now term "cultural Marxism" or "neo-Marxism." The Frankfurt School was established in the 1920s to study Marxism with the goal of understanding why communism was not taking hold in Western societies. The most important idea that came from the Frankfurt school is "critical theory."...
In short, critical theory runs everything through the filter of oppressor and oppressed... For Marxists, critical theory becomes the tool to address all disparate outcomes between oppressor and oppressed...
The New Left expanded critical theory beyond analyzing the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and, instead, looked at a multitude of different power struggles...
In other words, critical theory trains people to ignore the far more obvious and simple explanations, such as cultural differences, fatherless homes, and other factors that more directly lead to differences in school performance. In that way, critical theory prevents us from effectively identifying and addressing real problems...
This video is probably The Best 30-Minute Explanation of Marxism by James Lindsay. It's a 30-minute video, but even the first few minutes are revealing. Here are a few excerpts from the video.
The following 5-minute video gives an excellent definition and explanation of woke / wokeism / wokeness. What is Woke? by Vivek Ramaswamy:
Video: Marxism vs The Church: James Lindsay & Charlie Kirk at The Pastor's Summit in Nashville, 2023. A very interesting discussion of Marxism:
Here are more resources worth reviewing:
Democrat Definition Of Democracy Is Like Marxist Definition Of Peace
Cultural Marxism, Political Correctness, and Critical Theory
Leftism - a Hegelian spiral toward Marxism
Podcast: Antonio Gramsci, Cultural Marxism, Wokeness, and Leninism 4.0, New Discourses with James Lindsay. (1 hour, but you can speed up playback speed.)