The New Leninists

Woke progressive thought, Social Justice, and Critical Race Theory are related to traditional Marxism and communism but they are not quite the same thing.  Marxism is purely materialistic and while elements of the current movement are also, the Woke are primarily focused on achieving the cultural hegemony first championed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) who originated the concept of "the march through the institutions".   Unlike Marxism, with its class focus, the current movement uses race (with other strains emphasizing gender) for its societal analytical purposes.  In that regard the current moment in America is as if the Weather Underground terrorists of the 1970s, who advocated violent revolution, justified the murder of Robert Kennedy because he voted to sell military jets to the Jews in Israel, and celebrated the Manson murders, were now running the New York Times and the Democratic Party.  The Weathermen split from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) because they rejected the traditional Marxist class analysis, instead placing their hopes on an alliance with revolutionary black groups (for more on the Weathermen read The Company You Keep).

However, both movements share a disdain for democratic institutions that allow for a variety of viewpoints and permit the possibility of the dominant viewpoint being changed by the electoral process.

I was struck by this common viewpoint when recently reading the testimony of Daniel Tobin, Faculty Member, China Studies, National Intelligence University (NIU) to U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission on March 13, 2020.  The NIU was formerly known as the National Defense Intelligence College and the Joint Military Intelligence College, and is a federally chartered research university in Bethesda, Maryland.  The Commission was created by Congress and its members are appointed by the Senate and House of Representatives majority and minority members.

Tobin's testimony is valuable and insightful regarding the long-term aims of the current regime in Beijing and it has certainly influenced my thinking.  His analysis is quite different from what is normally seen and demonstrates an unusual and in-depth acquaintance with party documents often not examined by Westerners.

In the context of our current American crisis, it was this passage that demonstrated common themes in the views of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Woke Progressives.  Just substitute the references to "class" with those of "race", if you are Woke make inoperative the references to "scientific" since that is a concept linked to White Supremacy, and share the horror both movements share regarding any dissent.

To begin, the Party's values, rooted in Marxism-Leninism, offer a view of politics incompatible with values of the United States and its allies.  In the Free World today, we see individual people as ends and believe liberty is worth prioritizing, even if it makes political decisions more difficult and costly and even if at times works against our collective security.

Leninism, by contrast, makes individuals into means toward the achievement of collective ends.  For Beijing, as for Lenin, collective material welfare ("common prosperity" in the Party's contemporary official lexicon) rather than political freedom is the criteria by which it judges success.

Lenin saw democratic institutions as mere tools of oppressive class interests and the democratic process as a mask for the class interests of the group in power.  He advocated instead rule by a single Party governing on the basis of its scientific deduction of the laws of history.

Beijing today continues to argue that the Party, representing the Chinese people's interests as a whole, is a bulwark against the particular interests that capture the political process in liberal democracies.  For the Party's leaders, the dictatorship remains justified by the need to repress the enemies of the Chinese people's collective interests.  Worse, since Leninism defines the Party's ideas and decisions as "scientific" and "correct", for Beijing dissent is not the legitimate expression of individual interests or those of a specific sub-group but rather sabotage of the Party's collective, nation-building effort.  It is not political participation but state subversion.

The difference between the CCP and the Woke is that the CCP uses a very structured planning process that gets into the details of implementation and execution of policy.  It is extremely disciplined.  Woke on the other hand, is very good, because of its origins, in deconstructing reason and institutions, but is incoherent as a consistent ideological path to the future, and resists detailed planning, relying instead on sloganeering as its end point.

Should the CCP and Woke ever come into conflict, the former, with its discipline, planning, and ruthlessness, will prevail.