We think of Marxism kind of as this economic theory or this very discreet thing and it's not. Marxism is a sprawling object that has a at its core I don't know if you know the definition of truth and the solitary ethic of Marxism are the same thing. And a lot of people don't understand this is the only ethic. You've noticed that maybe they're a little bit hypocritical sometimes, right? that they say one thing and they do something else. They say we're going to have inclusion and it seems very exclusive or whatever. Right. Yeah. I think is defined by who's not allowed. That's right. And so the ethic of Marxism, and I'm not exaggerating. I'm not making this up. This isn't my conclusion. This is actually the ethic of Marxism is that which advances the opportunity for Marxists to take power, which is usually phrased that which advances the revolution is ethical. Period. The issue is never the issue. The That's right. As as um David Horowitz, you know, from Radical Sun related to us after his time in SDS, students for a democratic society, which is a communist organization. He comes out and says that one of the slogans that they used was the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. So the criterion for truth and the criterion for ethics in in Marxism are both the same. That which advances the revolution is good and true. Nothing else is. Everything that hinders the revolution by uh converse is bad and evil. So that actually literally explains all their behavior down to the last jot if you think about it for a little while. But what happened is that Marxism was put forth by Karl Marx originally as this doctrine of basically he the big mistake is people think he's giving an economic doctrine. What he actually was giving was an account of human nature and a revolutionary program to advance human nature to its next stages that used economics as the explanation for why people are how they are. In other words, if you want to use kind of the funny language that people sometimes use, Markx assumed that man is homoeconomicus, that we are literally the products of our economic conditions. So when he says sees the means of production, just like Mandami says sees the means of production, what is he talking about? The production of what? Well, economic conditions. But economic conditions produce man. So it's a two-step process to seize the means of production of who man is. So the goal is to not make men into socialists, but to remind them that they're already socialists who forgot that because of private property. Private property gave them the ability to think this is mine, not yours, and that is yours, not mine. Therefore, we can withhold it from each other and we don't have to share, and we're not socialists. We're not communists anymore. We're individuals who get to have stuff. And Marx is like, "No, we're actually socialists. Look how tribes organized themselves historically. We've got to figure out how to do that while retaining all the wealth of previous development, meaning everything, all the benefits of a capitalist and feudal and so on society that we built up through history. That's the point. So, as it turns out in the opening part of the communist manifesto, Markx is very clear. He says that there is the the entirety of history is the history of the conflict of classes. This is the literally for chapter one how he starts the communist manifesto. There's a preface before that, but that's the first sentence of the the real deal. The entire history of man is the history of class antagonisms. And so he then goes on and says, you know, it can take this form. It can be say lord versus surf. It can be slaveholder versus slave. It can be plebeian versus patrician. It can be whatever bourgeois versus proletarian. Whatever it is, he gives a bunch of examples. And I think that's extremely important because at different phases in history, the Marxists believe you have the same conflict of oppressor versus oppressed because that's how Markx says it in a word. He says oppressor versus oppressed after he gives a bunch of examples. But it doesn't matter if it's bourgeoisi versus proletariat because it could have been slaveholder versus slave for example or it could be white versus black or it could be normal versus queer or it could be male versus female. There's some line of stratification that causes an intrinsic conflict that defines not just society but the movement of history and the people participating in it are the actors who make and move history. in his um 18th premiere of Louisie Bonapart which he wrote in 1852 um four years later he says um of course men make their own history but they do not make it under conditions of their choosing our conditions are given to us he famously says something like that the the weight of all previous generations weighs on the imagination of men like a nightmare or something like that so we we we're trapped by our own oppressor versus oppressed dynamic. Now remember the ethic of Marxism is to seize the means of production of man. So once you decide what it is that must be producing man in a given society. Oh so men are the product in industrial society of their economic conditions then you know that you have to seize the means of economic production. But when you have an advanced capitalist society in the United States, let's say, that has figured out, you know, basic worker protections, you know, the labor movement has occurred and been incorporated into the capitalist structure. You've broken the idea of monopoly trust so that you don't have the elomeration of of capital that kind of would have made MarkX kind of right if there was no other solution to it. Turns out there were other solutions which are antitrust laws um and anti problems with those with those laws but we can we can set that aside or dive deeper. That's fine. I'm just saying that we had other solutions that didn't require us to have a revolution and blow up society and give the power to say Lenin. Uh, and so this basically what the Marxists of the 1960s were arguing was that all of these changes, including the budding civil rights movement, all of these changes were causing a change in the capitalist society where the worker is no longer the person who's cheated. The worker's middle class, the worker's got a life. The worker has a decent life that he's proud of. It's may it's modest. maybe he's got his one, you know, he's worked his 30 years so he can buy his Corvette when he turns 55 or whatever it is that makes him happy. And that pissed them right off because now economics is no longer going to be for a century, actually 120 years by that point. They had been believing that economic conditions are fundamentally the maker of man and it's not going to work in an advanced economy like the United States or Britain or Canada or whatever else. You need some other line. And Herbert Marcusa, the kind of arch neo-Marxist, wrote this explicitly. He said, "We need a new proletariat because the worker has been stabilized and turned conservative and even counterrevolutionary." Where did Marcus say to look? He said in the feminists, the ghetto population as he called it, the racial minorities, the sexual minorities, the outcasts and outsiders, which would be criminals and mentally ill and so on. Those people, he said, have the vital need for revolution. They have the energy to carry out a revolution, even if they're not the actual basis for the material revolution and transformation that we need in society. And so this whole apparatus of oppressor versus oppressed in the west shifted into identity politics, which actually followed Maong, which um uh he constructed identity categories out of Marxist theory, but used those in the cultural revolution. and Marcusa was aware of it and proud of it and copied it and we come up with this identity politics that by the '7s late '7s so that's like ' 68 69 with Marcusa a decade later by 77 the Kbehi River Collective is writing about the seeds that become uh eventually intersectionality which is how you kind of fuse all of these disperate identity politics struggles into one struggle and you know Angela Davis is a bridge there Marcus aa student member of the Comi River Collective goes on to inspire Kimberly Krenshaw who defines intersectionality. Intersectionality turns out to be like the super weapon in all leftist spaces that allowed them to consolidate power to their own vision better than anything. Why? Because any leftist anything that was doing anything in the world, so I say leftist because they have to be sensitive to the leftist style of argument. So, let's say you have this great feminist organization that's plowing ahead with feminist whatever. It's very effective. It's very powerful. Maybe it's not great in the objective sense of great, but it's very effective, right? All you have to do is show up and call them racist and say they're too white and all of a sudden you can bend the organization to your will. And let's say that it's a racial organization. You can say that they're sexist or that they're homophobic or that they're you have 10 different weapons you can deploy. And what happens in virtually every case in a leftist space is they all fight with each other. The whole thing melts down. It fragments. And then out of the ashes, let's say, of the critical legal studies movement, which was destroyed in 1985 by exactly that accusation of racism at the heart of their movement, turns around by 1989 and you have critical race theory replace it. So they could actually they had this power seizing and power consolidation mechanism par excalance. But anyway, all they're doing is answering the question of in our society, in our advanced economy, our post civil rights economy, in our our society, our culture. How is man produced? Well, it's not his economic conditions. Most of us are middle class and we're pretty stable there. Yeah, there's some rich people. Yeah, there's some poor people and there's the, you know, issues around that, but most of us are solidly middle class. We're pretty conservative about that. We're going to protect our middle class existence. The production of what it means to be a person for the average person isn't in their economics. It's in their identity categories. Am I white? Am I black? Am I male? Am I female? Am I gay? Am I straight? All these cultural politics issues became the dividing strategy. And the seizing the means of production meant seizing the conversation around each of those identity issues that were core to who people think they are. What you get out of that with one extra piece that I'll save for a moment later in the next part that you wanted to talk about at education what you get out of that is this Frankenstein's monster mandami you know Palestine flag today trans flag tomorrow apparently nonsense movement that's just pulling the same Marxist wedge game the the division game across that line of stratification resentment upward in whatever dimension works today. And when that dimension stops working today, they switch to a different dimension tomorrow. Run it till it stops working. Switch to another one. Run it till it stops working. Switch to another one. And they can do this. They can code switch if you want literally on a time scale of years or weeks or months or hours or single conversation. They can be talking about, you know, the Palestinian conflict and switch to queer right in the middle of it with no blink, with nobody doing anything because the underlying logic is still the same. All of the oppressed are oppressed not by the same thing, but in the same way. Therefore, one oppression is homorphic to another oppression. And if you understand the logic of one, the logic of the next is the same. and in some sense therefore everybody who's oppressed is in some weird solidarity with one another. So they basically were able to create the conditions of the cultural revolution using the Marxist model in a kind of kaleidoscopic spectrum of different issues but it's all still the same first sentence of the communist manifesto. The history of man is the history of antagonistic classes which are in a word oppressor versus oppressed with the piece in the middle that I left out being it doesn't matter what oppressor versus oppressed group you choose you can it changes throughout time and in different locations um it gets recast into an everexpanding set of intersectional identity games to keep people from noticing that the fundamental Um, predictions failed about the worker and about the material conditions of people in a society that's largely free and has private property and the rule of law and contracts and adults consenting to do things with each other without the state getting in the way, also known as capitalism, um, free enterprise. And then we start to get to the present and how this how this ends up playing a role in academia and K through2 education which is actually the area I care about the most. academia feels feels fundamentally downstream um at the level of the individual person and and at the level of our kids because our kids uh I think about there was an article in Vox. I don't remember exactly when it was. It was at the start of our woke reign of terror. It was I am a liberal professor and I'm afraid of my students was I think the title or something very close to it. And it was a good example of how K through 12 and the culture around our kids had produced foot soldiers of nonsense, cancel culture warriors, people screaming about their oppression. Yeah. Um, what happened to take everything we've talked about and pump it into the machinery that that that delivers our K through2 teachers. Critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy is the answer. So a Brazilian Marxist and liberationist and to a degree postcolonialist named Paulo Fray um who lived in Recipe uh in the 1960s early 1960s came up with a program he called education for li for liberation and the idea of education for liberation was that you know you're going to go among the peasants who are peasants and stuck in their lives a lot of them live in these favllas the slums of Brazil And they do so because the society has changed in Brazil, whether through colonialism, whether through capitalism. And so now you have to be able to do things like read, you have to have like professional skills to be able to get a decent job, to make enough money, to make a good living. And basically his claim was that this change had basically created these gigantic semi-urban suburban favllas out of peasant categories. So what's the solution to this? Well, the prevailing belief was the solution was education. Well, this Marxist, and he's actually lightly a Marxist at this point and heavily a liberationist and postcolonialist. He becomes more Marxist later, develops a literacy program for the peasants, which he called education for liberation. It goes on later to be called critical pedagogy. And the idea is that he says that these people need to understand their conditions as much as they need to understand how to read, but they also don't want to learn how to read. They don't see that it's relevant to their lives. Therefore, we're going to use a political education as a motivating structure to get them interested in a, you know, literacy education, okay? Or an actual education. So he comes up with this whole program where it's called the generative model which he literally ex says himself he derived from Mao's mass line and what he says is what we're going to do is to make sure that they're engaged enough to want to learn we're going to ask the peasants in the favllas why is it you know what are the things that are going on in your life and they're going to talk about slum problems because they live in slums right and so then he says what you're going to do is the educator is going have long conversations with them to find out what all their problems are, what they're most frustrated about, where they're emotionally attached and engaged because they're going to be interested in learning about that. Then they're going to codify the material. In other words, they're going to put a communist spin on it is what it boils down to. And then they're going to use that to teach the students, okay, so you live in a slum, you live in a fava, why do you live in a fava? Well, let's talk about that. And they tell them the communist spin on it. And then the punch line is now you're interested in what's going on. Here's how you spell favla and you know f a v e l a and here are the syllables and here's how you can learn how to read um based on that and if you know you can learn all this about your life in the favlla from learning to read. Imagine what else you could learn by learning to read more. And for a little while, this education program actually, for reasons that are kind of unique to Portuguese, was very, very successful at raising the literacy rates of people in the favllas, or at least it's been reported. I don't know if that's actually true. I haven't confirmed it, but that's the report pretty widely. I've not seen any disputing evidence saying that that's not the case, but it was like this kind of weird circumstance. But basically what it was doing was creating an army of radicalized people who could kind of read rather than creating a bunch of people who could read who could then integrate into the economy. And in fact he called that process conscientization um which is a fancy word for awakening to what he called a critical consciousness which was his update explicitly says so that it's his generalization of a class consciousness. So class consciousness is when you're conscious of which class you're in. Critical consciousness is when you are aware of the oppressor versus oppressed conditions in all the dimensions of your life. So you can see that this is the piece that was missing from the story I told earlier. So like in in an example in today, so when I my kid comes home from middle school um e like uh environmental sciences class and is suddenly absolutely distraught over a story about water shortages and how their climate change and yells at me because I used a straw and says I'm a bad father and a bad person because I'm using a straw. This is that is exact that's it playing out. That's the that's our modern experience. That's literally exactly a perfect example of that. And so um it turns out that this goes on to get picked up by Harvard in the mid 1960s. By 1970 he has his book pedagogy of the oppressed come out. He temporarily for 6 months at the end of the ' 68 into 69 teaches at Harvard for 6 months. It was a two-year appointment that he was offered, but he teaches there for six months because he also got offered whole separate can of worms. No time for this today, but he went and spent a decade in Geneva working at the World Council of Churches instead. Uh so he only did 6 months at Harvard. This ends up creating like a little cult around the guy in Boston. Eventually in the ' 70s, late '7s, you know, he's Freddy doesn't disappear, but he's not really relevant. But in the late 70s, a guy Henry Drew, who I mentioned earlier, um has a bad day trying to do his stupid leftist classroom in a conservative school in Providence, Rhode Island or Bridgeport, Rhode Island, one of the two places in Rhode Island, I guess. And um he uh is going to quit teaching. He's done, you know, he's having a bad day. It's falling down for Henry Drew that day. Um referencing the Michael Douglas film. And um somebody had given him a copy of Pedagogy of the oppressed literally like a couple weeks earlier and like you should read this. So he goes home dejected decides to start reading the book reads the whole doesn't go to bed reads the whole book has a religious conversion experience. If you read his description of what happened when he read this book, you know, goes manic, doesn't sleep for days. This is it. Found everything. I now have the language. Goes in carrying the book under his arm to his principal and starts like pointing at, you know, frantic. The whole thing is a religious experience. He basically pushes really hard to start bringing Freddy influence into the education sphere around Boston. Um, where he ends up going back to school. He does leave his job teaching in in Rhode Island. He goes to goes to Boston. I want to say university, but it could have been college. I always get this mixed up. One or the other. One of the big, you know, flagship universities in the Boston area, though. One of the big famous ones. So, he goes there and has a very famous education department has a very famous conservative um chair and he's butting heads with this guy and he's trying to force the opportunity to get Paulo Freddy to come in and speak again. And one way or another, he does. He has very obviously another very rel the guy Freddy stays at his house has another religious experience with the guy. The descriptions are just like lurid about staying up drinking all night and crying and telling their stories and like like Freddy's telling his stories about how he's like getting beaten and destroyed in the failas and like exiled from countries and like chased by the police and then Henry Drew is like crying talking about how like he got fired from his teaching job or something like they're equal somehow. It's the dumbest thing ever. There's this big deal. He writes about it in several books. And so this guy goes on a quest at this point. He has this total fanatical conversion. He calls it his practice. That's the word he uses. And he says his most important practice was from the end of the 1970s through 1984 or five during which he went around to as many colleges and universities in North America, some in Canada, some in the United States as he could and got radical educators tenured. And then in 1985, Freddy publishes another book called The Politics of Education. Jaru writes the forward to it. Harvard Education Review writes a glowing review of this book and everywhere that he got people tenured picks up Paul Freddy in the wake of this. So that this is 85 by 1992 historian Marxist historians of education chronicle that they had generally established full control over colleges of education by 1992. So, seven years later from that, you know, first domino falling or whatever or I guess the first hundred dominoes falling, um they had more or less complete control over the activity and output and standards for our colleges of education. So, everybody who's been trained to be a teacher, uh, education administrator, or anything that requires you to pass through a school of education has been boiled in critical pedagogy, which is to say critical theory as reformulated through Paulo Freddy. And what Drew did was brought in quote unquote the European theorists. And then the feminists and the critical race theorists latched on. Um, by the 80s and 90s, by 95 in particular, it was critical race theory was shot through. And so you ended up with this post structural feminism, critical race theory and critical pedagogy stew that defined colleges of education through the 1990s such that by 2005 thereabouts plus or minus two years complete transformation of what colleges of education are producing. Everything's downstream from there. The logic's simple. You get the college of education, you get the teachers, you get the teachers, you get the students, you get the students, you get the future. 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