Marxism, Feminism and CRT
The Unholy Trinity
The shared Marxists roots of feminism and Critical Race Theory aren’t widely known, but they can be outlined clearly. Kolakowski noted that once-popular philosophies ‘never die out entirely’:
Marxism drags on its poor existence….supported by certain intellectually miserable but loud movements which look for issues that can, however vaguely, be presented as issues of capitalism or anticapitalism.
One of these movements is radical feminism, and its roots are in the Frankfurt School, founded in 1923 by some young German intellectuals. Having originally planned to call it the Institute for Marxism, they chose the Institute for Social Research to be more subtle.
But they clung to the Marxist analysis of society in terms of abstract categories. Marx’s daughter said, ‘women are the creatures of an organised tyranny of men,’ and Critical Theory, developed by the Frankfurt School, also regards race this way:
Following the failings of the German Social Democrats in the 1920s, the Frankfurt School thinkers modified Marxism from economic to cultural terms. They wanted to infiltrate what Marx called the ‘hidden abodes’ of social power and considered the family ‘the central reactionary germ’.
The Marxist attack on the family started when Engels studied the German attorney Bachofen’s theory in The Mother Right (1861) that there had been a matriarchal stage in human history. There was no war; the sexes were equal; and people were promiscuous. All these ideas were fantasies.
Even Wokepedia notes that ‘Emile Durkheim credited Bachofen with upsetting the "old conception" that the father must be "the essential element of the family". Before Bachofen, Durkheim claims that "no one had dreamed that there could be a family organization of which the paternal authority was not the keystone".’
Engels then traced civilisation’s problems to the invention of animal husbandry. He believed this meant private property developed. Men then controlled women’s sexuality to ensure their real heirs inherited their property. Engels called this the ‘world historical defeat of the female sex’.
Erich Fromm, a Frankfurt School member, also found in the theory of matriarchy ‘a close kinship with the ideals of socialism, especially because private property does not yet exist’. ‘The theory of matriarchy,’ he argued, ‘could not but win the sympathy of Marxists.’
Fromm even termed the ‘psychic basis’ of Marxism the ‘matricentric complex’. Matriarchy became ‘a canon of Marxist thought’ despite no archaeological or ethnographic evidence of an actual matriarchy. But just as there has never been a matriarchy, there has never a stage of human history without private property.
If the family is intrinsic to capitalism, and capitalism is corrupt, then the family must be corrupt. The Soviet Commissar of Education said, ‘our problem now is to do away with the household and to free women from the care of children’.
Marx is the prophet, Marcuse is his interpreter, Mao is his sword, said the revolutionaries. And Marcuse saw feminism as ‘a revolt against decaying capitalism,’ calling it ‘the most important and potentially the most radical movement that we have’.
But this is only radical feminism, right? Wrong. As Laura Wood explains in her excellent article ‘The Balance Myth,’ ‘third-wave feminism normalises the radical tenets of feminism. Thanks to the Balance Myth, the casual neglect of children, marriage and home are now mainstream phenomena.’
I am studying an undergraduate Philosophy programme at Edinburgh university where feminist and critical race theorist discussions about the social construction of race and gender by Sally Haslanger is being shoehorned into classes on metaphysics, which wouldn’t be so bad if it were being considered in the abstract alone without calls for political action.
The author performs a slight of hand where they talk about materialist Marxist roots in feminism (3rd wave presumably) but that they have moved toward the social and the cultural as if to suggest they have detached themselves from Marxism and that this isn’t the exact same move the cultural/identity/neo-Marxists have made, as you make clear.
The faculty also omit the context of the Critical scholarship and it’s Marxists themes during the lectures and ignore the foundational problems with the arguments false assumptions (race and gender not being biological categories and so are purely socially/politically constructed instead).
This was only addressed by the faculty after I posed a series of questions in a Q&A and they still talked around the flaws that I proposed and was very dismissive about the Marxist influence in the content.
I apologise for the long comment but the amount of effort that is clearly going into getting students to blindly adopt this Critical consciousness paired as social justice causes is staggering.
It’s quite condescending that they think so little of their students that they can either knowingly omit such context from content that makes calls for political action on the basis of such arguments; or do not fully understand the material themselves and do not feel it necessary to do so before presenting it.
I have made the rector and the vice-principal aware of this and other instances of the same ideological manifestations. Though, I am largely being ignored, or passed onto the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Director (who is also ignoring me) and have been treated as a customer service issue over this last year since I started here. Still, they only harm themselves in the long run by ignoring my arguments and failing to substantively respond to them.
It is a shame to see these great institutions captured by this twisted ideology.
New to sub stack and very much enjoying your content.
All the best.
Matthew Brown.