YOU CAN’T TEAR THIS ONE DOWN
By Jason Reza Jorjani, PhD
Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) and Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists with their “Woke” agenda have almost completely destroyed our educational system by rejecting meritocracy in favor of “equity” and “fairness” and by “cancelling” many of our canonical thinkers and classic writers in favor of curricula “recentered” on anti-Western indoctrination. There can be little doubt that the same Last Men – as Nietzsche called them – driven by slave morality who, since 2020, have been tearing down statues of our greatest presidents, like Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, and even Abraham Lincoln, will eventually direct this resentment toward smashing busts of Aristotle and Plato. The same zombies have fully embraced the Palestinian Cause and Open Borders, effectively acting as the fifth column of the enemies that are invading the West.
These “activists” are utterly lacking in every aspect of the Promethean ethos that has most uniquely defined Western Civilization in general, and America in particular as the core state and leading country of the West. From the age of Aeschylus onward, for the past twenty-five centuries, the mythic symbol of the titan Prometheus has epitomized the wisdom of forethought, industrious innovation and creativity, strategic depth, rebellion against tyranny, and heroic self-sacrifice. These are the qualities that we intend to symbolize with our colossus to Prometheus in San Francisco Bay, rising from out of the ruins of Alcatraz. The promulgators of Woke ideology are utterly lacking in forethought or the capacity for long-term strategy. They are hell-bent on destruction and incapable of creating anything. They claim to be for liberation while they usher in tyrannical thought-policing. They are driven to tear down all of our heroes out of petty resentment, without any higher ideals or any positive vision of community for which they would be willing to sacrifice themselves. It is ironic that they have embrariced a cultural form of Marxist discourse because Karl Marx himself, however misguidedly, had great reverence for Prometheus – a reverence that could never be shared by these looters and parasites.
My essay “Prisoners of Property and Propriety,” which appears in Lovers of Sophia (2017), features a deep engagement with the thought of Karl Marx on the ontological level from which it emerges out of Hegelian phenomenology. In Prometheism (2020), I show how the young Marx considered Prometheus to be both his personal deity and also the patron divinity of the entire enterprise of Philosophy. In the same book, which launched the Prometheist movement, I express profound admiration for both Russian Cosmism as it was embraced by the Soviet Union through the work of the Promethean rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky as well as for Soviet Psychotronics (Eastern-bloc Parapsychology). My philosophical novel Erosophia (2023) goes so far as to lament the fall of the Soviet Union, which in my estimation was a far more constructive and respectable rival than contemporary China or a forthcoming Neo-Caliphate – both of which America promoted and facilitated, beginning in the 1970s, as a means to contain and then forcibly collapse the USSR. All of which is to say that if I am now explicitly writing against Cultural Marxism, it is because this Woke mind virus represents a mutation of classic Communist ideology that is not at all respectable in the same way as the misguidedly Promethean vision of Marx himself or of the Soviet futurists who built on his thought.
Karl Marx argued that the means of production needed to be seized in order to establish Communism. This seizure of the means of production is ultimately not about production in the factory with a hammer or production in the field with a sickle. It is about seizing the means of production of the inherently incomplete human being, who lacks a nature and must be completed by society as a social product. For Marx, what makes man special as compared to the animals is his being incomplete and knowing that he is a being that is incomplete. When the “haves” are redefined from the economic category of the Bourgeoisie into the ethno-cultural class of “whiteness” and the “have nots” are redefined as the “marginalized and systematically oppressed” then classic Marxism has been translated into contemporary Cultural Marxism.
In 1993 legal scholar Cheryl Harris published an essay called “Whiteness as Property” in the Harvard Law Review. She argued that whiteness has historically functioned as a form of property that has allowed white people to accumulate wealth and maintain social privilege at the expense of people of color. Harris begins the essay by noting that property rights have been central to the development of American law and society. She argues that property rights have been used to determine who has access to resources and opportunities, and that these rights have often been tied to race and ethnicity. Harris then turns to the concept of whiteness and argues that whiteness has functioned as a form of property. She notes that white people have historically been able to accumulate wealth and privilege by virtue of their whiteness, and that this wealth and privilege has been passed down from generation to generation, much like other forms of property.
Harris argues that this system of white property has been reinforced by legal and cultural norms that have treated whiteness as a valuable and desirable commodity. For example, she points to laws and policies that have excluded people of color from certain areas of the economy or limited their access to education and housing. She also notes that cultural norms and social expectations have reinforced the idea that whiteness is a desirable and valuable trait.
Harris concludes the essay by arguing that the concept of whiteness as property has important implications for efforts to address racial inequality in the United States. She suggests that efforts to challenge the system of white property must go beyond simply challenging individual acts of discrimination. It must also address the broader legal and cultural norms that have reinforced the idea of whiteness as a form of property. This laid the foundation for the “woke” or Cultural Marxist conception of “systemic racism.”
Such an argument totally disregards all of the dramatic socio-political changes that have taken place on account of the classic Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 70s. Nor is there any consideration of the tremendous American advancements in science, technology, and innovation for which whites are principally responsible and from which blacks have benefitted greatly, both financially and in terms of health care and their standard of living in general. Would they really prefer to reject all of that, together with “whiteness”? Surely not. As for slavery and xenophobia, it has existed in all of the great non-white civilizations of the world as well as in black and Muslim Africa. It was Arabs and fellow Africans who sold black slaves, which they had themselves enslaved, to white European and American slave traders. Arab and Ottoman Muslim slave traders also sometimes dealt in white slaves, especially enslaved white women, which they had captured during their conquests of Spain or the Balkans, and which they sold to non-whites.
…if whiteness is a form of property, then this property must be abolished in order to have Communism.
Following Marxist logic, if whiteness is a form of property, then this property must be abolished in order to have Communism – now defined in racial terms rather than simply in terms of economic class. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx had written that the one-sentence summary of Communism is “the abolition of private property.” “Woke” Cultural Marxists now consider whiteness as a form of property that affords one the systematic opportunity to acquire other forms of private property. One need not even necessarily be white. Being “white adjacent” or “acting white” counts. “People of color” are supposedly oppressed by the systemic racism of any system that affirms this “whiteness” by allowing it to be dominant. According to this ideology, “White Supremacy” is not even believing that white people are or should be superior, let alone that they should rule over non-whites. Now it is defined as the “systemic” persistence of whiteness as a form of cultural capital. Approving of that makes one a “white supremacist” according to these cultural Marxists. To become “woke” means awakening a racial instead of a class consciousness, so that racial and other minorities band together as if they were a class in order to seize the means of cultural production that reaffirms “whiteness.”
Cultural Marxist discourse is driven by resentment and a refusal to take personal responsibility. Instead of taking advantage of the equality of opportunity that they have had for a half-century now in order to succeed, they want to drag everyone else who is capable of achievement down to their level and then pummel them. Those few blacks who have taken advantage of a system that has not been institutionally racist since 1965, are a testament to the fact that it is certainly possible. One of them, namely Barack Hussein Obama, served two terms as President of the United States. Another is Colin Powell, who grew up poor in Harlem, and who served in two presidential administrations, including as Secretary of State. Underachieving minorities, and especially American blacks, have been victimized and taken advantage of by the peddlers of Woke ideology. Welfare and anti-family policies have ghettoized black communities, while this population has also been targeted with a Mao-style Cultural Revolution.
Antonio Gramsci and George Lucasz theorized about why a Marxist revolution did not take place in Western and Central Europe, where Marx predicted that it would, rather than in feudal Russia where it was forced onto a society that was not really ready for it. They decided that this was because the capitalist system actually produces enough wealth and has enough cultural and ideological power to keep the working-class sufficiently content for them not to rebel (potentially at the cost of their lives). They concluded that the working class of native Europeans could not be counted on for the revolution. So, they came up with Cultural Marxism as a way to enter the cultural institutions and develop a discourse that unifies all of the marginalized minorities, from racial and religious minorities to queers, in order to defeat what it is about Western culture that repels Socialism. Herbert Marcuse was among those who argued that because capitalism works for the working class, they are no longer to be the base of the revolution. Marxists no longer need to be responsible for the welfare of the working class. The working class, which is of course the majority in the white Western world, is actually the problem, not the solution. Marxists can make friends with corporations against the interests of the working class as long as it serves to create a corporate agenda that is against whiteness and “systemic racism.”
This Western Marxism further evolved (or devolved) through the development of Critical Theory by the Frankfurt School. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and other German Jews who relocated to New York City during and after the Second World War, argued that “the Culture Industry” that sustains capitalism needs to be seized and reoriented so that its aim is racial, gender, and sexuality based agit prop – a new form of the old Soviet and Maoist state propaganda. This seizure of the Culture Industry is what produces concepts like “cultural appropriation” and “cultural relativism” as part of a “culture war.”
Adorno’s coinage of the term “the Culture Industry” certainly referred to Hollywood, which the Cultural Marxists have now successfully seized as a machinery of propaganda for their anti-Western and anti-White agenda. But it also meant “a Long March Through the Institutions,” a phrase first deployed by the Communist red brigade in Germany. This meant a gradual and incremental capture of college and university curricula and a dominance over the discourse in the press and news media. In the decades since they began this plan in earnest after the failure of street demonstrations and the more direct activism of radical Marxist groups (such as SDS, the Black Panthers, etc.) from 1968–1975, Cultural Marxists have succeeded on both of these fronts as well. They have now engineered an all-encompassing propaganda machinery, from education to media and entertainment, in support of a new and more successful battle in the streets of our cities, let by activists who have been programmed with this now mainstream agenda for an entire generation.
They have now engineered an all-encompassing propaganda machinery, from education to media and entertainment, in support of a new and more successful battle in the streets of our cities…
That Woke politics is a new “cultural” form of Marxism can also be seen from the way that it aims to advance “equity.” According to public administration literature written by George Frederickson, as part of an attempt to import Woke discourse from America to Europe, “equity” is defined as “an administered political economy in which shares are adjusted so that citizens are made equal.” This does not simply mean the redistribution of economic or material capital, but also of social and cultural capital.
So-called “equity” makes the departure from meritocracy in the Soviet Union on account of Party politics pale in comparison. The USSR was able to rival the USA so competently in the space race and other areas of technological development because their system did, to a great extent, reward merit – including and especially in scientific education. The Soviets managed to put a female cosmonaut into space, Valentina Tereshkova, as early as June of 1963, probably because she was qualified, but they never took “Affirmative Action” or embarked on “Diversity and Inclusion” initiatives favoring Soviet citizens from Turkic or Siberian backgrounds.
Soviet officials could never have imagined a day when their American rivals in the Cold War would abolish universal standards even in mathematics education and the exact sciences at high schools and colleges, instead calling for an Orwellian “ethnomathematics” in which 2+2 can sometimes equal 5 if the person solving the equation happens to be black and is exploring a diverse and ethnically unique route to problem solving. They would have been shocked to see American high schools disband Advanced Placement (AP) programs and tests for entry into college courses in math, the sciences, and even history, because the fact that whites (and Asians) consistently do much better on average on these tests, regardless of socioeconomic background, shows that AP programs are “systemically racist.” Notice how this also disadvantages the minority of blacks who do succeed in AP programs – or rather, who did succeed in them before they were disbanded across most of America.
The American shift from a concern with meritocratic equality of opportunity to “equitable” equality of outcome, as determined by “diversity” and regardless of merit, is even amusingly baffling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). With an economy now surpassing that of the United States, and with the highest IQ population on the planet, the Chinese are poised to surpass America in every area of scientific research and technological development, including and especially all those – such as Artificial Intelligence – that have military applications as decisive today as nuclear physics was from 1945 to 1949, when only America had nuclear weapons. That was an edge that afforded the United States an opportunity to forge a post-war Pax Americana in Western Europe and in parts of the Pacific formerly dominated by the defeated Japanese Empire.
Cultural Marxist policies pose an existential threat to America and the West
As China leaves Maoist Communism behind for Neo-Confucian Corporatism, by means of which they intend to capture the world economy through their BRICS bloc and their Belt and Road Initiative, Cultural Marxists in America are intent on producing a Maoist Cultural Revolution in the United States. Xi Van Fleet’s Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning (2023) is an excellent study of this situation. Since at least 2020, when the Wuhan Virus was unleashed to wreck our economy, facilitate election interference, and further deteriorate our social fabric, every element of Mao’s vision has been implemented in America: political correctness, reeducation, censorship (“cancellation”), struggle sessions (coercively conformist public shaming and brainwashing), and a mindless destruction of the treasure trove of a great civilizational heritage by zombified and zealous youth brigades. Cultural Marxist policies pose an existential threat to America and the West and, consequently, Cultural Marxists should be considered as domestic enemies who are far more dangerous to our survival as a cohesive country than any foreign conflict with the CCP. It is these very same traitors who, with their Open Borders “Refugees Welcome” Social Justice policies, have let tens of thousands of plain-clothes Chinese soldiers into the United States over the past several years. They are pre-positioned to cut our power lines, derail our transportation systems, and tamper with our water supply. If we face such an attack from within, as part of any confrontation with China in the South China Sea, it is first and foremost the Cultural Marxist SJWs in America who will be responsible for that catastrophe.
That is a dark prospect to contemplate. It is all the more reason why, without delay, we need to retrieve the hope that remains at the bottom of the Pandora’s box that is already open, by building a colossal beacon of liberty at the Golden Gate to America. Silicon Valley needs to see this titanic specter enshrined. Hs torch blazing with the fire of industrious innovation, Prometheus is both a monument to the inevitable triumph of the American spirit in our homeland and a vigilant guardian against the encroachment of collectivism from across the Pacific.
Man Also Rises.