Cultural Socialism

So far we have focused on the economic agenda of the socialists, yet any conversation with them, or visit to a socialist conference, shows that the vision of these activists is not merely economic. They are equally energized, if not more so, by cultural issues. This is especially true of socialists on campus. …


Asked by an interviewer for the website PragerU to define her brand of socialism, a female student said it would really hard to do because socialism had so many dimensions. For example, “You’re socializing with me right now. Socialism!”

If this seems laughable, it’s not. A Gallup survey, released in May 2019, found that 6 percent of respondents defined socialism as “being social, social media, talking to people.” …


Jarrett Stepman, a writer for the Daily Signal who attended the Socialism 2019 conference, sponsored by Jacobin and Democratic Socialists of America, captured the mood of identity socialism nicely.

He went expecting to hear mostly about topics like minimum wage, student debt and the Green New Deal.

Instead he found, somewhat to his puzzlement, that “transgenderism, gender nonconformity and abolishing traditional family structures were huge issues.”

Typical of the speakers was Corrie Westing, a self-described “queer socialist feminist activist” based in Chicago who works as a “home birth midwife.”

Westing insisted that the traditional family is an instrument of capitalist oppression, and the transgender movement is critical to achieving “reproductive justice.”

Economics, she said, is based on “heteronormativity,” and pregnancy is a tool of oppression to remove women from the workforce, thus reinforcing a “gender binary.”

The solution, she said, was to reorganize society around what she termed “queer social reproduction.”

The traditional family would have to go.

No more parents having and raising their own children. Rather, women and men would seek out one or more partners, of whatever gender, with whom to raise children, and then they might seek out a third party to carry the child.

The third party, after giving birth, might or might not be involved in raising the child.

Drawing on a term coined by the feminist writer Sophie Lewis, Westing called this “open-sourced, fully collaborative gestation.” …


For Marx, to attempt to repudiate or to “correct for” these inevitabilities is to misunderstand the inexorable development of human history.

Bernie Sanders seems to be the only leading Democrat still holding to this tradition. He indignantly rejects the idea that because he is a white male he should step aside and make room for women and minority candidates.

“We’ve got to look at candidates,” he told Vermont Public Radio, “not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age.” Rather, people should be judged “based on their abilities, based on what they stand for.”

Whoa! This is now heretical talk in the Democratic Party. Bernie, moreover, is skeptical of illegal immigration because he believes, as Marx would, that it is a tool of employers to drive down the wages of native workers.

While identity socialists have put Bernie on the defensive for these positions and forced him to retreat in his antipathy to illegal immigration, he has not fully backed down.

In this respect, however, Sanders is not the mainstream—not even among card-carrying socialists.

American socialism is now imbued with issues of “intersectionality,” a term that refers to the crosscurrents of race, gender, sexual orientation and class.

What Marx considered a divisive ploy is now the avowed strategy of progressives and Democrats: to turn black and brown against white, female against male, gay and lesbian and transgender people against “heteronormativity.”

Source: United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It. by Dinesh D'Souza


My great-uncle also wrote about Karl Marx as one of 7 men who rule the world from the grave.