What Is Identity Socialism? | 5 Minute Video — Transcript

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1. 0:02There’s a new socialism in town.  I call it identity socialism.
2. 0:06The old socialism, the kind Karl Marx  dreamed up, was all about the working class,
3. 0:11the sort of blue-collar worker who, ironically,  voted for President Trump. But today’s socialist
4. 0:16couldn’t care less about the guy in the hardhat.  He had his chance at revolution and blew it.
5. 0:22Today’s socialist is all about race, gender, and  transgender rights.  Class is an afterthought.
6. 0:28To understand this is to understand the  Left’s takeover of the college campus
7. 0:32and all the ills that takeover has spawned: from  MeToo to Black Lives Matter to girls competing
8. 0:38against biological boys. But campus culture has  now metastasized into the culture of the whole
9. 0:44society. As liberal writer Andrew Sullivan  has put it: “We all live on campus now.”
10. 0:50Identity socialism is first and foremost  about division. Not just class division,
11. 0:55but now race division, gender division,  transgender division. Blacks and Latinos are in,
12. 1:01whites are out. Women are in, men are out. Gays,  bisexuals, transsexuals, transgenders are in;
13. 1:08heterosexuals are out. Illegals are  in, native-born citizens are out.
14. 1:13One may think this is all part of the politics  of inclusion, but to think that is to get only
15. 1:19half the picture. The point, for the left,  is not merely to include but also to exclude.
16. 1:25So, where did this identity socialism  come from? Meet Herbert Marcuse.
17. 1:31Born in Berlin in 1898, Marcuse fled  Germany at the dawn of the Nazi era.
18. 1:36After stints at Columbia, Harvard, and  Brandeis, Marcuse moved to California,
19. 1:41where he joined the University of California  at San Diego in 1965. You’d think that living
20. 1:47in a paradise like Southern California with all  the comforts and privileges of academic life,
21. 1:52might have softened Marcuse’s Marx-like hatred  of capitalism. But it was not to be. If anything,
22. 1:59the more he prospered the more he  wanted to bring the system down.
23. 2:03He had a problem, however. A big one.  Socialism didn’t work in America. Life
24. 2:08was too good. The working class in  the US didn’t aspire to overthrow
25. 2:12the existing order, they aspired to own a  home. How could you foment revolution without
26. 2:17revolutionaries? Classic Marxism had no answer  for this. But almost a hundred years after Marx,
27. 2:24Marcuse did. The answer was college students.  They would be the recruits for what he termed
28. 2:30the Great Refusal—the repudiation and  overthrow of free market capitalism.
29. 2:36Conditions were perfect. The students  of the sixties were already living
30. 2:40in what was in effect a socialist  commune—a university campus.
31. 2:45Rather than being grateful to their parents  for providing them with this opportunity
32. 2:49to learn and study, they were restless and  bored. Most importantly they were looking
33. 2:54for “meaning,” a form of self-fulfillment  that went beyond material gratification.
34. 2:59Of course, as with all successful social  movements, timing was critical. Here Marcuse was
35. 3:05very fortunate. The sixties was the decade of the  Vietnam War. Students faced the prospect of being
36. 3:11drafted. Thus, they had selfish reasons to oppose  the conflict. Marcuse and his acolytes turned
37. 3:17this selfishness into righteousness by teaching  the students that they weren’t draft-dodgers;
38. 3:23they were noble resisters who were part  of a global struggle for social justice.
39. 3:28Marcuse portrayed Ho Chi Minh and the  Viet Cong as a kind of Third World proletariat,
40. 3:33fighting to free themselves from American  Imperialism. This represented a transposition
41. 3:39of Marxist categories. The new working class  were the Vietnamese “freedom fighters.”
42. 3:44The evil capitalists were American soldiers  serving on behalf of the American government.
43. 3:50Marcuse found, in addition to the students, other  groups ripe for the taking. The first was the
44. 3:56Black Power movement, which was a militant  adjunct to the Civil Rights Movement. The
45. 4:01beauty of this group, from Marcuse’s point  of view, was that, unlike white students,
46. 4:05its members wouldn’t have to be instructed in  the art of grievance; blacks had grievances
47. 4:10that dated back centuries. Through another  Marxist transposition, “blacks” would become
48. 4:16the working class, “whites” the capitalist class.   Race, in this analysis, took the place of class.
49. 4:23Another emerging source of  disgruntlement was the feminists.
50. 4:27Marcuse recognized they too could be taught  to see themselves as an oppressed class.
51. 4:32This of course would require a further Marxist  transposition: “women” would now be viewed as
52. 4:37the working class and “men” the capitalist class;  the class category would now be shifted to gender.
53. 4:44Marcuse recognized that educating  and mobilizing all these groups—
54. 4:48the bored students, the aggrieved  blacks, and the angry feminists—would
55. 4:52take time. But he wasn’t in a hurry. Soon  enough the radical students would be the
56. 4:56radical professors teaching identity socialism  to a fresh crop of impressionable recruits.
57. 5:03Over time, Marcuse believed, the university could  produce a new type of culture, and that culture
58. 5:09would then spill into the larger society to  infect primary education, the news media,
59. 5:14and entertainment. Even big business, the  hated capitalist class, itself, would succumb.
60. 5:20He was right. Identity socialism has arrived.
61. 5:25I’m Dinesh D’Souza for Prager University.