Neo-Marxist Critical Theory Assumes Reality Is Literally Created by Cultural Beliefs

Woke Ideology Rejects the Proposition That There Are "Real Truths" About Reality

This Substack article is an excerpt from my book The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation.

The ideological roots of today’s revolutionary Left derive from neo-Marxist critical theory as advanced by various modern political thinkers ranging from Antonio Gramsci to Herbert Marcuse. Subsequent chapters will analyze the ideological evolution of today’s neo-Marxism. For our purposes here, we reference Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s 2020 book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. Pluckrose and Lindsay expanded on Pieper’s concern by explaining that the radical Left’s embrace of language manipulation results from a postmodern conviction that objective reality does not exist. Consider, for instance, the following excerpt:

Cultural constructivism is not the belief that reality is literally created by cultural beliefs—it doesn’t argue, for instance, that when we erroneously believed the Sun went around the Earth, our beliefs had any influence over the solar system and its dynamics. Instead, it is the position that humans are so tied into their cultural frameworks that all truth or knowledge claims are merely representations of those frameworks—we have decided that “it is true” or “it is known” that the Earth goes round the Sun because of the way we establish truth in our current culture. That is, although reality doesn’t change in accordance with our beliefs, what does change is what we are able to regard as true (or false—or “crazy”) about reality. If we belonged to a culture that produced and legitimated knowledge differently, within that cultural paradigm it might be “true” that, say, the Sun goes round the Earth. Those who would be regarded as “crazy” to disagree would change accordingly.¹

---

The neo-Marxist Left rejects the proposition that there are “real truths about an objective reality ‘out there’ and that we can come to know them.”² Pluckrose and Lindsay correctly understand that this neo-Marxist cultural confusion about reality necessitates the radical Left’s rejection of Enlightenment thinking so central to Judeo-Christian ethics. Instead, the belief that all reality results from subjective personal experience shaped by cultural beliefs put identity politics at the center of the radical Left’s rejection of traditional American values. Once the “mass line” narrative is established in the space of mass media, political correctness takes over as an enforcement mechanism to implant neo-Marxist objectives into the popular political culture.

Republican Party politicians today tend to “shrink from Constitutional principles for fear of being accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.”³—a tactic the radical Left utilizes to marginalize supporters of traditional American values. By subordinating traditional American values to the public policy outcomes that neo-Marxist narratives are designed to propagate, Republican leaders end up “subordinating those principles to neo-Marxist narratives.”⁴ Coughlin and Higgins continued, explaining how political correctness operates to turn GOP politicians into pawns of the neo-Marxist political warfare strategy:

By submitting to these narratives, establishment Republicans first become pliant, and then obedient to the Left, accommodating it through “words that work” that create the illusion of opposition while signaling surrender in the information battle space. In that role, regardless of the mandates that got them elected, establishment Republicans will defend the issues that got them elected in deliberately under-inclusive manners that conditions those issues for dialectical negation while demoralizing their base. What Republicans demoralize, the Left then disenfranchises. In this role, establishment Republicans become the defeat mechanism of the Left.⁵

Coughlin and Higgins stressed that a strategic understanding of the neo-Marxist Left demands recognizing that it is dialectically driven. The neo-Marxist Left executes tactics of negation through a rewriting of American history that involves demonizing traditional American political values along a Hegelian arc. The goal of the Hegelian dialectic is to negate traditional American values so as to perpetuate the type of “hope and change” themes Barack Obama used as his 2008 campaign themes. In propagating those themes, Obama masked the reality that “hope and change” were neo-Marxist revolutionary codewords for ending capitalism and destroying the United States.

---

Now, let’s return to the subject of “social justice” and neo-Marxist critical theory. “The obsession with language is at the heart of postmodern thinking and key to its methods,” Pluckrose and Lindsay correctly observed.⁶ The cultural relativism of the neo-Marxist Left rejects “the commonsense idea that words refer straightforwardly to things in the real world.”⁷ Instead, words are subjective, given a “commonsense” or consensus meaning only within the context of culture. Since the neo-Marxist Left views modern American culture as inherently corrupt, personal meanings attributed to words have greater power in expressing and defining personal realities. Pluckrose and Lindsay explained as follows:

In this understanding, language operates hierarchically through binaries, always placing one element above another to make meaning. For example, “man” is defined in opposition to “woman” and taken to be superior.⁸

Thus, “critical theory” becomes a code word for viewing and “deconstructing” reality from the perspective of this neo-Marxist subjective truth. “White privilege” becomes a key concern because critical theory begins by accusing the dominant cultural identity of America as being “white, male, wealthy, and Western.” This benefits white people unjustly because “society was already set up for their benefit.”⁹ From this follows the “social justice theory” aims to elevate the cultural importance of the subjective reality of oppressed minorities. “If knowledge is a construct of power, which functions through ways of talking about things, knowledge can be changed and power structures toppled by changing the way we talk about things,” Pluckrose and Lindsay wrote. “Thus, applied postmodernism focuses on controlling discourses, especially by problematizing language and imagery it deems Theoretically harmful. This means that it looks for and then highlights ways in which the oppressed problems they assume exist in society manifest themselves, sometimes quite subtly, in order to ‘make oppression visible.’”¹⁰

Coughlin and Higgins stressed that radical Left narratives embody socially enforceable speech codes by design. They explained the following:

“You can’t say this” until one day, you cannot even say you exist. This is neither latent nor theoretical. In a complete negation of a biological fact, you cannot declare yourself to be a man (if you are a man) or a woman (if you are a woman) because that is genderism.

The fact of being born an American, living in America, you cannot say you are American because that is racism. You cannot defend the Constitution on college campuses because that is white privilege.¹¹

Coughlin and Higgins stressed that the “very way we have come to speak of these issues renders them incomprehensible because that is what narratives are designed to do.”¹² Today, the average American is bewildered because we fail to comprehend Mao Tse-tung’s perspective in 1949. Mao viewed the rise of Marxism worldwide as a historical necessity whose inevitability was sure, not a subject open for debate or revision by reactionary thinking. Mao felt he was giving birth to a new reality of social justice in a world without class or race divisions. He saw his mission as “working hard and creating conditions for the natural elimination of classes, state authority, and political parties so that mankind will enter the era of universal fraternity.”¹³ Pluckrose and Lindsay observed that “the intense scrutiny of language and development of ever stricter rules for terminology pertaining to identity often known as political correctness came to a head in the 1990s and has again become pertinent since the mid-2010s.”¹⁴

---

1 Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020), 32.

2 Ibid., 33.

3 Coughlin and Higgins, Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left, 3.

4 Ibid. Bold type in original.

5 Ibid. Bold type in original.

6 Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 40.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., 48.

10 Ibid., 61–61.

11 Coughlin and Higgins, Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left, 96. Parentheses in original.

12 Ibid. Bold type in original.

13 Mao Tse-tung: “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship (July 1, 1949),” 450.

14 Ibid., 62. Italics in original.