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Marxist Wokism
By Dr. Peter Jones
I finished my last essay on American Marxism with the following paragraph:
Marxism via Stalin and Mao killed millions of human beings during the twentieth century, and Marxist Pol Pot in Cambodia systematically murdered about three million of his own people (a quarter of all Cambodians) from 1976 to 1978. Anyone considered an intellectual was targeted for special treatment. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, and clergy were put to death. Pol Pot’s regime of terror even murdered people wearing glasses! One might think that a system so unthinkable would never enter the American system. For the moment, America’s Marxism conceals itself and is generally accepted in its subtle form: Wokism, which I will discuss in my next essay.
As I shuffled around in my endless collection of dossiers, I found a text that dealt with wokism that I had already published, entitled “Wokism: The New Pagan Morality.”[1]
A Post-Christian Culture
We now live in an increasingly post-Christian society. In his book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Left Conquered Everything,[3] the brilliant young cultural analyst Christopher Rufo traces the origins of CRT/Wokism, showing how America has been quietly taken over by the ideological heirs of 1960s radical neo-Marxists.[4] In his groundbreaking research of contemporary Western culture, Rufo discovered a “hideous face of revolution” that is “a rot spreading through American life. The country’s foundations are starting to shake loose.” If this is true, we all need to know about it.
America is easily seduced by false notions of reality. One recent study found that the median number of people in a Christian congregation in America in 2023 is 60—less than half of what it was twenty years ago, when the number was 137. This steep decline has been called the “Great De-churching” of America.[5] Any respect for or worship of the Creator-Redeemer God is virtually absent.[6]
People cannot live without morals, since God created an ethical universe. Those who reject God’s moral order are now busy normalizing LGBTQ ideology, eliminating the nuclear family, and living according to the moral norms of neo-Marxist wokism. Marxism is thoroughly anti-Christian, denying the being of God and seeing matter as ultimate. It worships the creature rather than the Creator (Rom. 1:25).
Marx had a close friendship with the radical New Testament scholar Bruno Bauer, who claimed that the Christian Gospels were forgeries. Marx himself believed it was necessary to “recognize as the highest divinity the human self-consciousness itself,”[7] thereby dismissing God. Today’s Critical Race Theory is a modern form of atheism derived from Marxism, as we shall show. CRT embraces postmodern “truth,” which does not come from God but is instead an expression of human power.
Many—even Christians[8]—are abandoning their personal faith in the God of Scripture and seeking a new source of morality. Wokism’s false morality plays skillfully on the sensitive conscience of young Americans.
The Marxist Framework of Oppression
White supremacy theory argues, in classic Marxist fashion, that society is always divided into oppressors and the oppressed. In today’s framework, whites are cast as oppressors, and minorities—particularly Blacks, women, illegal aliens, and LGBTQ groups—are cast as the oppressed. Biblical morality is therefore viewed as oppressive, especially its standards of sexual behavior.
As noted in my previous article, Stanley Ridgley has done excellent research on the semi-religious movement of wokism in his book Brutal Minds (2023).[9] The subtitle describes his findings well: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities. Ridgley documents a deliberate effort by university administrators not only to undermine classical academic thinking, but also to instill a profound sense of ideological—and quasi-religious—guilt.
I have often wondered why the history of the West, and of America in particular, is no longer taught in American universities. Jesse Jackson’s 1987 rallying cry at Stanford University comes to mind: “Hey ho, what d’ya know, Western civ has got to go.” We now see that, indeed, it did.
Wokism as Cultural Control
Wokism is a progressive political program that has infiltrated American culture—government administrations, corporations, and educational institutions—where DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) officers are empowered to “cancel” anyone who does not comply with the new rules. This “hideous system,” to use Rufo’s term, is dangerous precisely because it presents itself as virtuous, claiming to seek social justice and oppose racism.
Cultural analysts trace its roots to the Sixties Cultural Revolution. Rufo explains that when violent revolutionary movements such as the Black Panthers failed, radical intellectuals turned instead to ideological transformation. They abandoned street violence in favor of “a long march through the institutions,” making cultural revolution a philosophical project developed within universities and bureaucracies.
This strategy originated with the Frankfurt School—German Jewish Marxists who fled Hitler’s Germany and relocated to Columbia University. One of them, Herbert Marcuse, later moved to the West Coast and became highly influential among radical students. Marcuse and Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke (who coined the phrase “the long march through the institutions”) were collaborating as early as 1966. In 1971, Marcuse wrote approvingly to Dutschke:
“Let me tell you this: that I regard your notion of the ‘long march through the institutions’ as the only effective way.”[10]
Marcuse predicted that if Western society could be liberated from capitalist repression, its moral and religious foundations would collapse. Rather than a dictatorship of the proletariat, he proposed “a dictatorship of the intellectuals.” This neo-Marxism is the intellectual foundation of Critical Race Theory.
Marcuse also provided the theoretical basis for modern “cancel culture.” Long before the term existed, he defended “repressive tolerance”—the suppression of dissenting ideas in favor of progressive ones. Liberalism, once rooted in free speech, has lost its footing. As one observer noted, by the 2020s it had become “a marginal belief held by a few college professors at odds with society.”[11]
Marcuse reframed the Marxist revolution around race rather than class, thus transforming racism into a revolutionary ideology. As Rufo documents, this movement has reshaped language, law, and historical interpretation, gaining control of institutions and redefining public orthodoxy.
Race as a Marxist Weapon
Almost by accident, I came across a little-known fact crucial to understanding the modern attacks on white supremacy, white privilege, and white anger.[12] The accusation of racism as a political weapon is not new.
Its origin was documented by African-American eyewitness Manning Johnson in Color, Communism and Common Sense (1958).[13] Johnson described a deliberate effort by Soviet and American communists in the 1930s to undermine American institutions by portraying the nation as irredeemably racist. The goal was to create “a common front against the white oppressors.”
Johnson revealed that Stalin himself devised the strategy in 1928 to use “Negroes as the spearhead” for revolutionary agitation. American communist leaders cynically promoted racial conflict as a “cold-blooded struggle for power.”[14] The objective was simple: make “the white man’s system” responsible for everything.[15]
“Smear is a cardinal technique,” Johnson wrote. “Black rebellion was what Moscow wanted. Bloody racial conflict would split America.”[16]
Ironically, Marxists themselves showed little regard for Black people. Walter Williams noted that Marx dismissed Blacks as closer to the animal kingdom.[17] Robert Robinson, a Black American who lived forty-four years in the Soviet Union, testified that Soviet anti-racism was one of the greatest propaganda myths ever created.[18]
Neo-Marxism Today
Marcuse argued that racial conflict was the new axis of revolution. He rejected free speech and free assembly as dangers to revolutionary justice and promoted “liberating tolerance”—intolerance toward the political Right. Today’s revolution is no longer based on class and economics but on identity and race. Whiteness is portrayed as inherently guilty, while minority identities are defined primarily by oppression.
According to Marti Gurri, “nothing like the woke DEI ideology has transpired since the conversion of Constantine.” Nearly every major American institution—government,[19] universities, corporations, media, and the military—has adopted DEI ideology. Employees can be fired for challenging its definitions. We see the early formation of a soft fascism uniting state, media, and corporate power.
The failed Disinformation Governance Board demonstrated how close we came to institutionalized speech control. Though premature, such efforts may return.
Angela Davis praised Marcuse as the intellectual leader of the New Left and declared: “We cannot combat racism until we have destroyed the whole system.” This explicitly ties wokist racism to Marxism.
Objective Christian Reality
Political control of speech and behavior marks a critical stage in the advance of cultural Marxism. Though Rufo does not directly address theology, he warns that abandoning Christian morality and constitutional liberalism risks a Weimar-like collapse.[20] To sum up, wokism is the invention of Sixties Western neo-Marxists to undermine American history, especially its Christian elements, by dismissing them as “racist.”
Human beings cannot survive without God’s law. Christians are therefore called to proclaim God as both Creator and Redeemer, as Paul declares in 2 Corinthians 4:6:
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Though the future may appear bleak, God’s creation still testifies to His glory. Those drawn to the Creator may yet be drawn to the Redeemer, who welcomes all who place their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Footnotes
[1] Jones, Peter, Wokism: The New Pagan Morality, https://truthxchange.com/?s=Wokism
[2] Bond, Paul, Newsweek, “Has Hamas Hastened the Demise of ‘Woke’” (Nov 6, 2023).
[3] Rufo, Christopher, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023).
[4] Page references in brackets refer to Rufo’s book.
[5] Henrickson, Charles, “Christ Will Build His Church” (Sermon, Oct 29, 2023).
[6] Doyle, Rob, UnHerd, Aug 2023.
[7] Skousen, W. Cleon, The Naked Communist (2017), 40.
[8] Miles, Lucas, Woke Jesus (2023); Robles, A.D., Social Justice Pharisees (2022).
[9] Ridgley, Stanley, Brutal Minds (2023), x.
[10] Marcuse, Herbert, Collected Papers, vol. 6, 336.
[11] FrontPageMag, “The University States of America.”
[12] Collins & Jun, White Out (2017), 72–73.
[13] Johnson, Manning, Color, Communism and Common Sense (1958).
[14] Johnson, ibid., 37.
[15] Johnson, ibid., 44–54.
[16] Hippolito, Joseph, FrontPageMag, Sep 24, 2020.
[17] News-Herald, Aug 16, 2020.
[18] FrontPageMag, Feb 2021.
[19] RealClearInvestigations, Feb 14, 2023.
[20] Rufo, Christopher, Substack (Oct 21, 2023).