Cultural Marxist vs. Material Marxist, Part 2:
Is Capitalism the Real Racist?

2,696 words

There are reasons why the neoliberal establishment hates Bernie Sanders so much, and it’s not just because he’s a threat to their donors’ stock portfolios. Class-based material Marxism — once a pillar of Leftist thought — is not only incompatible with but also heretical to the neoliberal worldview and agenda.

We’ve all heard about normiecon meme DR3: Democrats aRe the Real Racists. ^[1] There is a parallel meme among Leftists that could likewise be called “Capitalism is the Real Racist.” With class reductionists and material determinists, everything is a game of The Six Degrees of Capitalism. If a dog farts, socialists can explain to you how capitalism made that happen. All roads lead back to class conflict and the pursuit of capital. And to material Marxists, racism is no exception.

According to the materialist worldview, racism is the result of the competition for resources. If everyone’s needs were taken care of, then there would be no need for racism. Very dubious, I know; silly, even. I’m pretty sure that if everyone had enough and the same amount of everything, we’d still get on each others’ nerves. Blacks would still talk loud in movie theaters, Asians would still be bad drivers, Mexicans would still have terrible taste in music, and Jews would still continue being Jewish. I mean, why is it always up to white people to stop being racist? Why can’t other races just stop doing the stuff that annoys us? If you want to reduce racism, learn what annoys white people and then stop doing it. I guarantee it will get results. My job as a hater would be a lot harder if these people were actually likable. I digress.

Materialists also claim that big business has an interest in promoting racism so as to undermine working-class solidarity and make it harder for labor to organize. How they explain Big Tech censorship of white nationalists within that context, I’m unsure. I guess you could say that capitalism promotes anti-white racism, but:
A) I’m pretty sure that’s not what most socialists mean when they say that, and
B) why not promote both sides of the racial conflict?

Anyway, there’s a lot of memes about how capitalism is at the root of all racism ^[4].

In an article for Socialist Viewpoint entitled Capitalism, Bigotry, Racism and War ^[5], Bonnie Weinstein explains the “Racism is a Capitalist Conspiracy” meme:

Capitalism uses bigotry to justify and enforce the criminalization of immigrants everywhere. They bank on their ability to pit immigrants against “citizens” by convincing the working class of one country that the immigrant workers from another country are their enemies, and the cause of their own economic distress. It is nothing more than the old magician’s trick of “misdirection,” a form of deception in which the attention of an audience is focused on one thing in order to distract its attention from another.

The capitalists don’t want us to focus our attention on how they increase their own wealth by exploiting raw materials and cheap labor in less developed countries, making it impossible for the working class in those countries to survive and support their families within their own borders. At the same time they inflict draconian austerity measures against the working class in their own countries in order to increase their rate of profit. They get away with it by misdirecting the blame onto the immigrants struggling for their lives.

Anyway, that’s the meme. And there are all sorts of variations of it, which amount to “if it weren’t for capitalism, everyone would love each other,” and there’s a lot of hogwash about how people had no conception of race until the rise of capitalism.

This meme is really dumb. You’ll notice that it works similarly to the DR3 meme in that it affirms the power and importance of racism as a concept, but shifts the blame on to someone or something else; a false narrative. Racism is simply the natural and inevitable result of multiculturalism. It’s what you get when you try to impose the same set of rules on people with vastly different values and cultural norms. But as far as false narratives go, CIRR is less harmful to whites than the seething anti-whiteness of the neoliberal establishment.

From a Rightist perspective, you might be thinking “Well, who cares? Either way, it adds up to anti-racism and more immigration from their proletarian brothers from south of the border. It’s a distinction without a difference.”

But from a neoliberal perspective, these “capitalism causes racism” memes are deeply subversive on both a moral and philosophical level. Even though it is an anti-racist meme, it is implicitly anti-anti-white. It acknowledges that while, yes, whites have done bad things in the past, it absolves whites of moral responsibility: “Capitalism made them do it.” Material conditions and class conflict made them racist.

To the neoliberal anti-white Left, this is heresy. Only non-whites can be the helpless playthings of faceless systems and impersonal forces. If white people do bad things, it was pure will-to-power, and if they fail in life, it was due to a lack of will-to-power. Whites are immune to the social or cultural forces which pull on the strings of POC like marionettes, forcing them to abandon their children and kill each other over sneakers. But anything white people do is done clear-headed and with eyes wide open.

The primary determinant of privilege in society is wealth. This is a blatantly obvious point that any random person off the street will agree with and only by gathering the smartest academics in the world together can you find people dumb enough to call it controversial

— $ean P. McCarthy (@SeanMcCarthyCom) December 28, 2019 ^[8]

The neoliberal establishment would like people to believe that the only way to achieve equality, and the only way for POC to thrive and live up to their potential, is for white people to be destroyed as a group. Materialists say that’s not necessarily true: All you really need to do is overthrow the capitalists and that will fix everything. Everyone will love each other, be happy, and we’ll have perfect equality. While materialists may not exactly oppose white genocide in principle, they just do not see it as a necessary step in creating an egalitarian society.

For the anti-white neoliberal establishment, this will not do. They can’t have a bunch of people running around the Democratic Party saying that white genocide is optional. This is one of the reasons the DNC is worried by Bernie Sanders, and why Democratic Socialism could become — if not a threat — a severe inconvenience to the neoliberal Democratic establishment should it get too big.

While Bernie Sanders may now be bending the knee to the neoliberal race narratives, he still has a huge base of committed Marxist ideologues. Much in the same way that Ron Paul mania triggered a renewed interest in Ayn Rand, Bernie Sanders has gotten a lot of young whites to start reading Marx again. Even if the establishment can break Bernie down and get him to cuck to Cultural Marxism, the fact that he exists creates a sociocultural environment where these kinds of material Marxist ideas can flourish. As long as he is around, he serves as a rallying point around which commies can congregate, socialize, and organize.

Like Trump, a lot of Sanders’ supporters are more hardcore than Bernie. This became obvious to everyone a few weeks ago when James O’Keefe released undercover footage of a Sanders campaign worker Xenuposting about Gulags ^[11]. I discussed the phenomenon of Xenuposting in my last article, and ^[12] that video was a classic example of it: Maybe you want to start off with “Ya know, capitalism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” and get them on board with that, and then maybe work them up to “gulags were great” later. You don’t lead with Xenu.

An example of this conflict between the Material Marxist and the Cultural Marxist flared up a few weeks ago. Jewish anti-white activist (and cartoon villain) Tim Wise started trending on Twitter after going on a tirade against Bernie Sanders for not being explicitly anti-white enough. This resulted in a lot of “OK Boomer”-ing from his supporters in the Bernie Bros brigade.

The cause of this outburst was a recent interview Bernie did with the New York Times. ^[13]It’s an interesting read, and he shows some populist leg. The Times is clearly hostile to Sanders: They interspersed the interview with “fact checks” which were disingenuous at best, and blatantly dishonest at worst. When speaking on the exploitation of illegal immigrant labor and its effect on domestic workers, the New York Times just outright lies:

Binyamin Appelbaum: But you don’t think that that exploitation results in lower wages for domestic workers?
[Sanders:] Sure it does. Right now, we have people who are being exploited. If you’re undocumented, and you’re being paid five bucks an hour, why am I going to pay her $12 an hour?
[Annotation:] The prevailing view of economists ^[14] is that immigration increases economic growth, so it is not tethered to lower wages or less employment for American workers.

Labor scarcity increasing wages is Economics 101. That’s basic supply and demand. The NYT just lies to your face. But the part that really got Tim Wise’s panties in a bunch was when asked about why people voted for Trump, Bernie gave economic and class-based explanations:

New York Times: I think it’s — how about the fact that Trump has touched a chord in 40 to 44 percent of the people? I mean, what about that issue is that Trump is a symptom of a widespread problem. I mean, how do you address that? The problem exists whether Trump is president or not is what I’m saying.
Sanders: I wish I could give you a great answer, brilliant answer to that. But this is what I will tell you, because that’s, you’re right. What is the issue? How did Trump become president? O.K. And I think it speaks to something that I talk about a lot and that is the fact that the — not everybody, but tens and tens of millions of Americans feel that the political establishment, Republican and Democrat, have failed them. Maybe The New York Times has failed them, too.
New York Times: That explains the appeal of racism?
[Sanders:] Yeah. O.K. What you have is that people are, in many cases in this country, working longer hours for low wages. You are aware of the fact that in an unprecedented way life expectancy has actually gone down in America because of diseases of despair. People have lost hope and they are drinking. They’re doing drugs. They’re committing suicide. O.K. They are worried about their kids. I have been to southern West Virginia where the level of hopelessness is very, very high.

Sanders acknowledges that there are racist elements in the Trump movement but holds firm that Trump’s primary appeal was his economic populism. He continues:

There is a hard-core support for Trump, which I’m not going to be able to get through. You’re right. It is racist. It is sexist. I run into that. It’s hard to believe the attitude toward women in some parts of the country. You really would have a hard time to believe it. We’re back into the 18th century in some these places. It is homophobic. It is anti-immigrant. Do I think I’m going to win those people over? Nah, no way. But do I think we can get a sliver? I can’t tell you how much, 3 percent, 5 percent, 8 percent, of people who voted for Trump because he said, “I am a different type of Republican. I’m not going to cut Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. I’m going to have trade policies that work for workers. We’re not going to be shutting down plants in America.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” raged Tim Wise. Wise, the Cultural Marxist’s Cultural Marxist, maintains that Trump’s election was due to white supremacy, and to say otherwise is painfully ignorant, appallingly irresponsible, and morally inexcusable. The original tweet has since been deleted:

I have to interrupt Tim’s rant here to comment about how ridiculous that last tweet is. Sure, Tim, when whites vote, it’s 100% racial tribalism. When black people vote, they carefully weigh each candidate’s positions, the pros and cons of their policies, and then vote rationally in their own best interests.

Blacks have repeatedly shown not only willingness but enthusiasm to re-elect politicians who have made their lives objectively worse by every conceivable metric. You only need to look at the catastrophic political careers of DC mayor Marion Berry ^[15], or the — currently imprisoned — former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to understand how absurd Tim’s last tweet was. Blacks re-elected Marion Berry after he was caught on video smoking crack with a prostitute. The blacks of Detroit re-elected Kwame Kilpatrick after he murdered a stripper who was about to testify against his wife. Does that sound like a group of people who vote rationally?

I’ll let Tim continue…

Poor Bernie has been under a lot of fire lately. Elizabeth Warren called him a misogynist, Tianna Lowe called him an anti-Semite ^[16], and now he has Tim Wise accusing him of being an apologist for white supremacy.

Bernie Twitter responded to this more with eye-roll than genuine anger.

Tim Wise makes the perfect avatar for Cultural Marxism for this example. For one, being anti-white is the whole point of his existence. He’s not some politician or generic liberal activist who just so happens to be anti-white. Being anti-white is the whole point. He is a professional anti-white. That’s it. That’s all he does. Tim Wise literally puts food on the table by nothing other than being anti-white.

So Tim Wise has not only philosophical and moral reasons for opposing class-based Leftism — I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that he believes his own bullshit and is not a self-aware conman — but also financial ones. He built his entire career on telling everyone that white people are evil. It’s all he knows how to do. He has no other marketable skills. The last thing he wants is a bunch of people going around saying that Capitalism is the Real Racist when he’s spent the last 30 years of his life telling everyone that white people are the real racists.

Tim is correct in that “Capitalism is the Real Racist” is bullshit. But then again, so is the flapdoodle that Tim pedals. That’s not to say that there is no value to class-based political theory, but class is just one of several lenses that one can look at the world through. It’s a nice tool to have in your box, but you can’t get the full picture through class analysis alone. Commies tend to take material determinism to autistic levels; before you know it, they’re claiming that Scrooge McDuck is the reason why people don’t want blacks moving into their neighborhoods.

More importantly, Wise understands why CIRR is such a subversive meme. It is implicitly anti-anti-white and morally lets whites off the hook. It tells whites that there is no need to feel guilty about the past. “It wasn’t your fault.” That’s why Tim Wise sees CIRR as a threat and gets so triggered by it — and he’s scared shitless that it will catch on.

Wise has good reason to worry. Millennials and Zoomers are too young to remember the Cold War and the glory days of Marxist critique, but they have been hearing anti-white bullshit their whole lives. So to a lot of young people, Marxist critique and class-based politics are new and exciting. It is, in fact, quite old, but to millennials, it’s fresh and novel — and has the added benefit of telling young whites that they may not be the real racists after all.

In our cultural environment, there is a demand for any alternative to pure anti-whiteness. The Dissident Right is one such alternative, but there are high social costs to coming over to our side. Democratic Socialism offers a safer option for people who hate the whole SJW thing, but don’t want the risks that go along with getting into white identity politics.

I think some whites can envision a future for themselves in Bernieland. But they can not see a future for themselves where the neoliberals are taking us. Tim Wise can kvetch all he wants, but Bernie is objectively offering whites a more attractive vision of the future.