Origins and the socialist promise
Joshua Muravchik, author of Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism, told Bob Zadek that Karl Marx did not take the time to describe exactly how a socialist society might work, but said that once socialism arrived everyone would do just what they felt like, whatever was fulfilling to them. Marx offered the example that he might hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and write literary criticism in the evening. Muravchik said socialists believed that everyone doing exactly what fulfilled them would somehow produce super-abundance, so that everyone would have more than enough of everything they could possibly want. They also held that socialism would create a “new man,” better and more capable, with greater powers of creativity than human beings had until then; Trotsky once said that under socialism every human being would have the creative powers of a Beethoven or a Goethe. Muravchik characterized this as letting your imagination roam free. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Muravchik argued that the key to understanding socialism’s staying power is that it is not just a political idea but a substitute religion. He said Marx and Engels, when they were very young men, before they even came to the idea of socialism or communism, started out as two guys who hated religion, saw religion as the great enemy, and sought to criticize and bring it down; over a few years they hit upon communism as the real solution to the problems they were interested in. Asked by Zadek whether they learned from the success and growth of religious belief, Muravchik said no — they were not very brilliant promoters, except in one sense: Engels was a quite brilliant promoter of Marx. In Muravchik’s account Marx was in some sense deeper or more complex in his thought but a truly horrible person, and Das Kapital, which he spent 16 years or more writing, is actually unreadable; no one has ever read it, more or less. Engels, by contrast, could really communicate and was a great PR guy: no one reviewed Das Kapital, but Engels reviewed it 10 or 12 times under different pseudonyms to trick publications into thinking different people had submitted reviews, and it was Engels who promoted the idea that Marx was the great genius of all time who had figured out all problems. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Industrial Revolution and the working class
Muravchik told Zadek that the world was changing in the second half of the nineteenth century with what is called the Industrial Revolution, with a huge migration of people all over Europe — not so much from one country to another as from the countryside into the cities — so that the world was becoming industrialized and urbanized. The socialists, really the next generation coming along after Marx and Engels, took from Marxism the idea that the natural constituency for socialism was the working class. The socialist parties that were growing up devoted themselves to winning over voters and supporters from among the workers, and the other parties did not so much. It became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, Muravchik said, in which socialist parties won a lot of support among workers because they were the ones paying attention to them. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Marxism in ethnic studies
In an episode on California’s ethnic studies model curriculum, Williamson M. Evers told Zadek that the people behind it have no new ideas on race: they take a vulgar Marxism, a vulgar socialism, and put a racial patina on the top. In the curriculum, Evers said, they say that capitalism is a way of exploiting people — this is right out of Marx — that it captures the surplus labor value of work, and that it particularly oppresses racial minorities. That is their whole theory, imported from Marxism and given a slight racial cast. Evers contrasted this with an understanding of capitalism as entrepreneurship, as trading between parties, as investment, as economic growth, as wealth building up in society and in essence trading between individuals; instead, he said, it is all a hierarchical thing in which the big bad capitalist boss exploits the worker and makes profits he or she is not entitled to. He traced the picture back to the late 1800s of Karl Marx and other wrong-headed socialists such as Robertus. California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum vs. Trump’s Patriotic Education (2020)
Zadek put to Evers that in the ugly, racist history of the country, in the Jim Crow South, when government was itself racist, the Jim Crow laws were there to fight capitalism, because capitalism would allow blacks to purchase goods and open stores. Evers cited Walter Williams, a retired economist at George Mason University, and Jennifer Roback Morse, who explained that the Jim Crow laws and segregation laws in the South were meant to prevent up-and-coming, striving blacks from competing against entrenched white interests, whether workers or companies. Evers said the racism legally embodied in the South was blocking capitalism and blocking competition. He drew a parallel to California’s fight over AB 5, which he described as the anti-gig worker law, anti-Lyft, anti-Uber, anti-Postmates, anti-DoorDash and anti-Uber Eats: the companies are a platform where consumer meets provider. After the Civil War, he said, the South had anti-immigrant labor laws; immigrant labor contractors would seek out a black worker in the countryside, provide a railroad ticket or carting money to get him to a new job, and collect a fee from the company — a platform similar to the electronic platforms that help Uber drivers meet Uber customers — and the Jim Crow laws outlawed these labor contractors. Evers called it the same mentality: stop the productive middleman in order to keep racial privilege in place. California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum vs. Trump’s Patriotic Education (2020)
Critical Race Theory’s Marxist roots
Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at the Heritage Foundation and author of Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth, told Zadek that Critical Race Theory is a worldview that believes everything in public and private life should be viewed through the lens of race, and that it is rooted in Marxism. He quoted the original Critical Race theorist Angela Harris, a law professor, saying that Marxism’s dazzling analysis of capitalism and his conviction that the laws of historical materialism would bring on the revolution of the proletariat as inevitably as the sun rises are still riveting to contemporary theorists. He also quoted Kimberlé Crenshaw saying that they are adding discussions of race to social justice and adding discussions of social justice to race. Butcher described the idea as taking a theory built on Marx’s idea that there is a conflict between classes, adding race to it, and applying it to everyday life. Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022)
Butcher said the original Critical Race theorists do not believe there is simply a bill or some laws that can be passed to rectify what they see as systemic racism or systemic injustice today. They argued with the Critical Legal theorists and felt they had to develop their ideas outside of Critical Legal Theory, because Critical Race theorists said the liberals and conservatives in law in the 1960s and ’70s held within the confines of the Constitution and American law — debating civil rights and saying that changing the law, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, would make America live up to its potential of providing equality under the law and freedom and opportunity to everyone. The Critical Race theorists said no: America is systemically racist and will always be that way. Butcher identified Derrick Bell as the godfather of Critical Race Theory, a Harvard law professor who also taught a couple of other places and wrote Faces at the Bottom of the Well, whose subtitle points at the permanence of racism; Bell does not believe it is going to go away. Butcher said the connection between Critical Race Theory and Marxism is important to make because Marxism, socialism and communism are completely antithetical to representative democracy, and Marxism is at the heart of Critical Race Theory — so there is no repairing of the American system that Critical Race Theory thinks will be enough; it must be taken apart. Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022)
The Frankfurt School and American law
Butcher traced the intellectual lineage to Germany in the 1920s, where a group of Marxists were frustrated that the Bolsheviks had been successful in Russia but that the working class in Germany had not, at least in the ’20s and ’30s, overthrown the system in the way these Marxists thought should happen. They held what they called their first Marxist Work Week, a gathering of Marxist academics and writers to talk about where Marxism needed to go, and created the Frankfurt School, an institute at the University of Frankfurt to discuss the future of Marxism and flesh out what became known as Critical Theory. Original Critical theorists Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and several others wanted to connect Marxism to culture, adding Freudian ideas of relativism and the idea that there is no objective truth; they were suspicious of the Enlightenment and of the rule of law. Chased out of Germany in 1937 by the Nazis, they landed at Columbia University — the Teachers College no less — where Horkheimer, Adorno and Herbert Marcuse attracted others and disseminated and developed their ideas of Critical Theory in American higher education. Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022)
From there, Butcher said, the ideas bled over especially into law schools, which were easy to pick up on the idea that there are systems of oppression and an ongoing conflict between economic classes, brought on at least in part, if not completely, because of American law. Law is not neutral, according to Critical Legal theorists; it is meant to establish power and maintain power — as opposed to the ideas of the founders, in which law was there to protect rights and the Constitution and laws built in limitations on what government was able to do. Butcher said Americans have wrestled with those limitations and seen the ebb and flow of those boundaries on American power up until today, and that this is the unique feature of the system. The Critical Legal theorists said the constant struggle, the economic struggle between classes, will always be with us as the result of American law; then the Critical Race theorists — many of them law professors, including Delgado, Bell, Crenshaw and Harris — developed the Critical Legal Theory idea and said it only explains it up to a point: they must add race to the equation and make it more radical. Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022)
Across episodes: continuity, not development
The three episodes treat Marxism as a single continuous inheritance rather than a developing argument. Muravchik, in 2019, supplies the nineteenth-century origin story — Marx’s promise of super-abundance, the “new man,” the substitute religion, Engels as promoter, the Industrial Revolution and the working-class constituency. Evers, in 2020, and Butcher, in 2022, each describe later American applications of the same body of ideas: Evers finds vulgar Marxism with a racial patina in California’s ethnic studies model curriculum, and Butcher traces Critical Race Theory through the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory into American law schools. The later episodes do not revise Muravchik’s account; they extend it to new venues — the K-12 curriculum and the law school — and the excerpts show no development or disagreement among the three guests.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the specific contents of Das Kapital beyond Muravchik’s remark that it is unreadable, nor do they set out Marx’s or Engels’s arguments in their own terms. The Frankfurt School segment breaks off before Butcher explains how Critical Theory moved from the Teachers College into law schools in detail, and the ethnic studies excerpt ends before the discussion of the 1776 Commission. No excerpt states what any court held about Marxism, what statutes beyond AB 5 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are at issue, or how the three guests would respond to one another.