James Lindsay on Marxism and Critical Race Theory

The latest fashionable nonsense from American academia is known as “Critical Race Theory,” henceforth, “CRT.” It alleges that the Anglo-Saxon nations are saturated with “systemic racism,” and that their white inhabitants benefit from it — they have “white privilege.” Its method of teaching includes treating people differently according to their race. When teachers started using it to abuse schoolchildren, a fightback began. The best source of information about this fightback is Christopher Rufo’s website, christopherrufo.com.

Two critiques of CRT have been published recently. One of them, James Lindsay’s Race Marxism, claims that CRT is an expression of Marxism. The Amazon page for the book says

The evidence of this claim is so overwhelming upon even casual examination that it is a shock that it isn’t immediately plain to everyone who encounters it,

and Lindsay repeats this confident assertion several times in the text.

The other one, by the International Committee of the Fourth International, claims CRT is completely antithetical to Marxism, and leans on the latter methodology in its demolition of one of CRT’s recent expressions. It’s called The New York Times’ 1619 Project: a Racialist Falsification of History.

They can’t both be right.

I probably need to say at the outset that, though I find the Marxist critique to be better than Lindsay’s, I am not defending Marxism per se. In labelling itself “the Fourth International,” the Committee identifies with the Trotskyist tradition. Leon Trotsky didn’t murder as many people as Josef Stalin, but that’s only because he was kicked out of the Soviet Union in 1929.

My aim is simply to show that Lindsay is wrong — CRT is not a branch of Marxism. It’s important to get it right, because the fightback requires bringing on board as diverse a collection of people as possible. The International Committee realised this, and interviewed leading historians of the American Revolution, slavery and the Civil War, most of them not Marxists. Some conservative critics of CRT also realise this, and give credit to the Committee:

Well, I can’t say I expected it to be the International Committee of the Fourth International that most effectively ripped the New York Times’s ‘1619 Project’ apart, but here we are.

— Historians vs. the ‘1619 Project’, Charles CW Cooke, National Review, December 2nd 2019

Likewise, the National Association of Scholars reprinted an essay by Trotskyist Tom Mackaman on February 22nd 2022:

nas.org/blogs/article/review-the-new-york-times-1619-project-a-new-origin-story

The 1619 Project is currently being force-fed to thousands of schoolchildren around the country. There are several other rebuttals of the Project in print, but A Racialist Falsification is the most comprehensive.

Lindsay does not justify his claim that CRT, and its parent ideology, Critical Theory, is “Marxist,” “Marxian,” or “neo-Marxist” with quotes from Marx or Engels. You might assume, in a book whose title includes the word “Marxism,” it would include many references to the works of Karl Marx.

An exception is on page 223, where Lindsay quotes Marx’s Introduction to Capital, in order to show his connection to G.W.F. Hegel. This is the beginning of an introduction to the German philosopher’s ideas, which is said to explain a number of phenomena, from mass murder under Stalin and Mao, to Nazi pseudoscience and the neoconservatives, who after all are “former Trotskyites” — page 227. But Lindsay seems unaware that there are faithful Trotskyites who have avoided the ideological traps laid by Hegel.

Race Marxism came out on February 15th 2022. The essays and interviews which are now collected in A Racialist Falsification began to be posted on the World Socialist Website on November 24th 2019. There is no evidence in Race Marxism that Lindsay has looked at them, though he refers to the 1619 Project as an expression of CRT several times.

Lindsay called his work “Race Marxism” in the belief that Marxism is a “conflict theory,” and that if you substitute one conflict for another — race for class — it’s still a type of Marxism. Apart from the obvious logical error in claiming that, if two theories have something in common, one is an expression of the other, there is also the question of how much truth there is in either theory.

Critical race theorist Robin DiAngelo wrote, in 2018, in her bestseller White Fragility, that white people need “people of color” in order to define their “whiteness.” Marxists believe the CEO of Amazon needs people working in the company’s warehouses, but he doesn’t need them to be of any particular race. A corporation cannot make a profit unless what its employees produce is worth more than they are paid. This is simple mathematics. Lindsay never deals with this argument, instead putting Marxist phrases like “exploitation,” “surplus value,” and “alienation” in quotes, as if they are so obviously ridiculous he doesn’t need to explain why — see, for example, page 299.

The phrase “false consciousness” occurs seventeen times in Lindsay’s 357 pages. It occurs just once in the collected works of Marx and Engels, in a throwaway remark in a letter written by Engels in 1893.

Lindsay uses the term “conspiracy theory” to describe ideas he disagrees with, without saying what’s wrong per se about a conspiracy theory, and he uses it to describe ideas which have nothing conspiratorial in them. For example, he says on page 35, that CRT analyses race in the same way Marxism analyses class, “with a view to the ‘capitalist superstructure’ that’s upheld by ‘bourgeois values’ (i.e., a vast conspiracy theory).”

Though he uses quotation marks, he doesn’t say where he gets the quotations from. Neither does he say why the process Marxism allegedly describes is in any way conspiratorial. Marx wrote, in The German Ideology, 1845,

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force… The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

I don’t believe this is correct — but this isn’t a review of the works of Marx.

Lindsay’s treatment of other communists, such as Antonio Gramsci, is similarly sloppy. He lists Selections from the Prison Notebooks in his references, but his claim that he “spread much of the soil in which Critical Race Theory later germinated” is not backed up by citations. Gramsci’s career was not about infiltrating religion, family, education, media and the law, and “changing those key institutions from within”, as Lindsay alleges on pages 110, 117, 125, and 188.

In Chapter 3, Lindsay describes the Frankfurt School as “neo-Marxist.” But after the School relocated to America, its work eschewed the materialist conception of history. It owed far more to Freudian psychoanalysis — in their influential work The Authoritarian Personality, these refugees from Nazism used unfalsifiable pseudoscience to paint normal American families as psychologically disturbed, and prone to raising “fascists.” Lindsay’s own quotes from the Frankfurters show that they had broken with Marxism. If there is one central plank of Marxist theory, it is the irreconcilable conflict between the interests of the bourgeoisie and those of the proletariat. Lindsay quotes Frankfurt scholar Herbert Marcuse at length to the effect that the workers have been bought off, and are no longer revolutionary, so someone else has to take their place. But a theory which substitutes minorities for the proletariat is not Marxist, any more than a theory which puts race in place of class.

Contrast this with how the International Committee analyses the role of CRT, from a Marxist starting point. From page 292 onward, they claim that CRT is part of “identity politics”, which is used by the Democratic Party to divide the workers by race, etc.. Nothing could be further from Marx’s “workers of the world, unite”.

The Trotskyists have a “dialectical” approach to history, where, for example, the American Revolution is progressive, but insufficient. They reiterate Marx’s cheerleading for Lincoln in the Civil War. But even if you don’t agree with any of this, the Committee’s interviews with scholars constitute irrefutable evidence that the 1619 Project is an attempt to mislead Americans about their country’s history.

The Committee’s writers are not surprised that big corporations such as Bank of America have enthusiastically adopted CRT; they think it’s in their “material interests”. This sounds to me more sensible than Lindsay’s claim that they have adopted a variant of Marxism.

Frankly, I find it hard to understand what happened to James Lindsay. His previous work, with Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the intellectual roots of CRT, backed with citations and references. Race Marxism is simply preaching to the choir, since the only people who will believe it have already made their minds up.