Why Critical Race Theory Is Not Marxist
Herein, I question the hypothesis that the latest fashionable nonsense from American academia is in any significant way influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883). It is generally 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”. Some critics believe this is a variant of Marxism. I explain why this is not the case, and introduce a Marxist critique of CRT.
Introducing Critical Race Theory
Some defenders of the “white privilege” hypothesis say we should reserve the term “Critical Race Theory” for the original scholarship by Derrick Bell, Mari Matsuda, et al., excluding recent work, such as the bestselling books White Fragility and How To Be an Antiracist, and the New York Times’ 1619 Project. However, CRT has become an umbrella term, under which I include all defences of the existence of white privilege, and the practical consequences of these critiques.
Helen Pluckrose, in her essay Demystifying Critical Race Theory So We Can Get to the Point, says
Many of the people advocating for CRT seem to believe it is any historically literate understanding of racial history in the USA, how horrendously it oppressed black Americans, why this was bad and how its aftermath is still felt today. Some even seem to think that CRT just means ‘talking about racism.’
It’s true that advocates of CRT “seem” to believe this, and there is considerable effort to make the rest of us believe it. But American schoolchildren are already taught all of the above, so we are entitled to be sceptical of the activists’ sincerity.
The Guardian published an article on 14th September 2021 entitled ‘These are the facts’: Black educators silenced from teaching America’s racist past, referring to twenty-two proposed laws against CRT in primary and secondary (K-12) education. But none of the laws are aimed at black teachers in particular; nor do they ban teaching about America’s racist past.
In the podcast series First Name Basis, anti-racist educator Jasmine Bradshaw tells us that CRT is nothing more than “teaching truth about history”. If you question this, she asks “What makes you nervous? Why are you so anxious about CRT?”
In Texas, some teachers claim “nobody in K-12 is teaching critical race theory,” while others say the opposite.
On July 6th 2021, the head of the American Federation of Teachers denied that CRT was being taught in schools. During the same week, another teachers union conference passed a resolution conveying its support for teaching CRT in schools. The resolution was disappeared from the website of the National Education Association. Here is the missing resolution at web.archive.org.
Radical teachers have been caught red-handed trying to make white children believe there is something wrong with them, and some have conspired to sabotage opposition — “anyone know any hackers?”
The advocates of CRT are among the practitioners of “cancel culture,” and among those being cancelled are good left-liberals whose only sin is being white. A couple of examples: a lawyer named Maud Maron was driven out of the US Legal Aid Society in 2020 because she refused to recognise her “whiteness”. Jodi Shaw had a similar experience at Smith College in 2018.
The philosopher Karl Popper thought there is a “paradox of tolerance”, where tolerance of the intolerant leads to intolerance. For me, the solution seems to be quite simple. The opponents of CRT should put into practice the words of the activist students who forced Nicholas Christakis out of Yale in November 2015: “I want your job to be taken from you.”
The fightback against CRT
Around the country, and beyond, parents are holding meetings to fire activists from school boards which practice racial discrimination. Here is an example from Brighton, UK, The Argus, Sarah Booker-Lewis, 24th June 2021. This is a YouTube video of a parents’ meeting in Colorado Springs in August 2021:
On September 15th 2021, a superintendent in Rockland County, New York, who was pushing for a CRT-based curriculum, was forced to resign.
Investigative journalist Christopher Rufo has made a major contribution to this fightback by enabling victims of CRT to anonymously submit evidence of its harmful effects: see his website christopherrufo.com.
However, I think he makes one mistake. He writes
Critical race theory reformulates the old Marxist dialectic of oppressor and oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of white and Black. But the basic conclusion is the same: In order to liberate man, society must be fundamentally transformed through moral, economic and political revolution.
In simple terms, critical race theory can be seen as a form of “race-based Marxism”; they share a common conceptual framework. Critical race theory was derived from “critical theory,” a 20th century ideology sometimes called “neo-Marxism.”
– States are right to pass CRT laws, USA Today, July 8th 2021.
Dialectical or otherwise, a theory of struggle between races is not “basically” the same as the notion that there are differences of interest between social, economic classes. National Socialism emphasised conflict between races too, but this does not make it a variant of Marxism.
Perhaps Rufo’s strongest point is
the basic conclusion is the same: In order to liberate man, society must be fundamentally transformed through moral, economic and political revolution.
It is true that Marxism and CRT both defend this “basic conclusion,” but this does not show that one is a subset of the other. A variety of non-Marxist movements defend some version of this utopian ideal. For example, Rufo is aware of the “Antifa” movement. Marxists might be found picketing an Amazon warehouse for better pay and conditions; Antifa is more likely to protest outside a spa in favour of allowing men into the women’s changing room. I’m not making this up.
Conflict Theory
In the podcast Antonio Gramsci, Cultural Marxism, Wokeness, and Leninism 4.0, James Lindsay informs us that CRT is a branch of “Critical Theory”, a product of the Frankfurt School of Jürgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, et al.. He argues that they in turn were influenced by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, but doesn’t cite any original sources.
The book he co-authored with Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, August 25th 2020, contains three references to Gramsci, but these just consist of name-dropping by trendy postmodernist academics. The same is true of the references to Habermas and Horkheimer.
On the Quillette podcast, July 13th 2021, Rufo said that his Italian relatives are “Gramscian communist intellectuals,” so he may be able to help clear up Lindsay’s confusion. The scholarly work Amadeo Bordiga and the myth of Antonio Gramsci, by John Chiaradia, November 6th 2013, shows that Gramsci’s principal role was imposing Moscow’s hegemony on recalcitrant Italians. Nothing in Chiaradia, nor Selections from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, nor the contents of the Gramsci archive online, bear any relation to Critical Theory.
Rufo’s and Lindsay’s fallacy depends on the observation that Marxism and CRT both defend a “conflict theory,” and the claim that Marxists invented it. However, the participants in the Spartacus slave revolt of the first century BC didn’t need a theory to see the conflict inherent in their condition.
Two thousand years later, for the Spartacus League to persuade people in Berlin to take part in a desperate uprising against the men responsible for world war one, required more than Marxist theory.
There are food riots in Venice, in Lisbon, Moscow, Singapore. There is plague in Russia, and misery and despair everywhere. Violated, dishonoured, wading in blood, dripping filth — there stands bourgeois society.
– Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet, April 1919
Her skill at defending the theory helped, but the clincher was the fact that what she said was true.
Critical Theory in general is concerned with various identities such as race and sex. CRT concentrates on the race aspect. Marxism is about the relationships between economic classes, and their members’ consciousness of these relationships; this is not identity politics. Luxemburg didn’t introduce herself by saying “speaking as a disabled Jewish middle-class white woman.”
Another way of illustrating the difference between CRT and Marxism is to contrast what CRT claims about the relationship between white people and others, with an example of the actual social relationship identified by Marxism. In White Fragility, June 26th 2018, Robin DiAngelo says that white people need “people of color” in order to define their whiteness. The CEO of Amazon needs people working in the company’s warehouses, but neither he nor I need anyone to be of any particular race. DiAngelo’s claim is without merit; it is simply a projection of her psychological issues. Marxism is completely different. A corporation cannot make a profit unless what its employees produce is worth more than they are paid. This is mathematics, not morality.
Conflict theories in conflict
In summary, I enumerate some of the correspondences and conflicts between CRT and Marxism.
The correspondences are easy to list. To paraphrase Rufo:
- society is divided into oppressors and oppressed
- there is conflict between them
- radical change is needed.
The differences are more numerous — the following are a few of the most obvious.
The 1619 Project, begun on August 14th 2019 by the New York Times Magazine, is currently being force-fed to children in schools across America. It is clearly an expression of CRT, consisting of a series of articles arguing that anti-black racism is an essential component of the nature of the republic. Historian Sean Wilentz pointed out some of the egregious errors in the Times’ claims, in a lecture on November 4th 2109. The World Socialist Website’s offensive began twenty-four days later, with a series of interviews with several expert historians, highly critical of the Project, and on March 11, 2020, the Times changed the phrase
one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery
by inserting “some of” before “the colonists”, which effectively abandons the purpose of the Project, while dialectically preserving it. See 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, Peter Wood, November 17th 2020.
Some conservative critics of the Project simply ignored these inconvenient Marxists. One exception is historian Phillip W Magness, who is piqued that they published their critique before his (The 1619 Project: a Critique, April 7th 2020, page 102). Another is Charles C W Cooke, a senior writer at the National Review, who is more generous:
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’, National Review, December 2nd 2019
This “International Committee,” which runs the World Socialist Website, doesn’t mince words either: its March 1st 2021 book is called The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. In addition to ripping the Project apart, it shows that it is not Marxist.
