Cultural Marxist corporate bedfellows

Posted By Mahabodhi on Jul 17, 2024 | 0 comments

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book…

© Mahabodhi Burton

8 minute read

This excerpt is from Chapter 4: ‘Postmodernism and the academic mindset’ and follows on from Environmental, Social and Governance practices (ESGs.)

Cultural Marxist corporate bedfellows

So we’ve taken a look at the World Economic Forum and Stakeholder Capitalism. With that in mind let’s return to James Lindsay and his talk to the European Parliament. Many people have been confused about why ‘the woke Left’ is allied with the corporations, rather than with the working-class: Jake from Rattlesnake TV experienced a genuine a-ha moment:

‘That the corporations are now the friends, and this makes so much sense, because the Left used to be about fighting the billionaires and fighting the man, and the corporations, and the institutions man, but now they’re in bed with those very entities.

 

‘This is by design, they barely even disguise it these days, the corporations are their allies and they have absolutely zero regard for the working-class, but moreover it goes to show that this is an ideology that fundamentally preys on the weak and disenfranchised for survival. … But what I really got from that was the sinister nature of these ideas and how far intellectuals will go to win the ideological battle.

 

‘It’s designed to look at society and say who are the most downtrodden individuals that we can recruit for the revolution. They do not care about these people. It’s always been about the ideas. It’s always been about the revolution, and just as they ditched the working-class for the corporations, they will happily ditch the minorities for the next batch of revolutionaries.’[1]

And so, the Marxists took on culture:

‘And so, they started to transform the culture industry, to sell racial, sexual, gender sexuality-based agitprop as though that were genuine culture, and so we get concepts like cultural appropriation, we get concepts like cultural relevance, cultural this, cultural that, cultural everything, and it’s all provided in pastiche, it’s all provided as a mockery of what’s really going on. And this evolved in America’s highly racialized context. And we ended up with Woke, a form of identity-based Marxism, a constellation of Marxist species.’[2]

Lindsay says that LGBTQ+ and other ‘folk’ think of themselves as nations, … they all have flags, [and] they put them on your buildings like colonizers, … They think of themselves as occupying nations, bound together, … and seeking liberation from Western civilization.[3]

‘Now you know the theory is Marx, it’s just evolved into different species to attack the West at its weakest points, through our tolerance, through our acceptance, through our openness, through our generosity, through our best traits, actually the things that we should be proud of, being the things that we are proud of being, but Mao Zedong knew how to use identity politics.’[4]

America has a very red–washed education, ‘The Communists have stripped out all education about communism entirely:’ students are not taught about Mao.[5]

‘Mao used identity politics, he created 10 identities in China, five he labeled red for communist, five he labeled black for fascist, and he categorized people into these identity categories. … They were things like landlord and rich farmer, and things like this. Right winger is a bad category in and of itself by the way, conservative, all of them bad, bad influences, that’s another one. You could be a bad influence for just thinking the wrong thing or saying the wrong thing at any time, or because the government decides it doesn’t like you. These are the bad categories, and if you have a bad category very importantly your children have a bad category by default, so they create a social pressure for your children to identify as revolutionaries, at which point they get a red identity, a communist identity, a good identity, and they get rewarded for it. And the youth led the revolution in China, because Mao did this identity politics through the children in the schools.

 

‘This should feel very uncomfortable to you, because here we have at least in the United States, we tell our children being white is bad, being white is oppressive, you automatically hurt people of other races by your very existence, but by the way if you become queer we’ll celebrate you, and you can create a radical army of people who identify as gender minorities and sexual minorities at seven years old, you can lead them into paths of puberty blockers in transition, medical transition, which of course big Pharma profits off of at seven years old behind their parents back.’[6]

Lindsay continues: ‘It’s the same program that Mao Zedong used to radicalize the youth in China, the only thing different is the identity categories have shifted: it’s Maoist Cultural Revolution with American characteristics. Mao used a formula to transform China called ‘unity-criticism-unity,’ ‘First you try to create the desire for unity then you criticize people for not living up to that, then you bring them into unity under a new standard:’ Lindsay compares this strategy to today’s idea of ‘Inclusion:’ ‘We’ll have a place where everybody feels like they belong, we just want to have an inclusive space, but unfortunately you have racist ideas, and we have to criticize you for those, you need to criticize yourself for those:’[7]

‘Mao called [this] socialist discipline, which we in the West would not buy, we call it in the West ‘Inclusion,’ and so we have this new program, and within inclusion we have, or above inclusion actually, we have sustainability, we have a sustainable and inclusive future.’[8]

Lindsay then turns his attention to the WEF and the United Nations:

‘I see the Agenda 2030 here with an X over it, the sustainable and inclusive future is the new socialist standard, that we will have freedom under socialist discipline and Mao said the way that that will work is through what he called Democratic Centralism. We call that Stakeholder Capitalism, and my shot at the World Economic Forum is taken, because it’s one of the things coordinating this, my shot at the United Nations is taken, because it’s one of the things that’s coordinating this.

‘So Woke is Marxism. It’s advancing through Maoist Cultural Revolution, it’s using Americanized identity categories, and while some of those will not work in Europe, I guarantee you the colonial aspect will. They will find your weakness, they will adapt the theory to fit, because it’s like a virus that will evolve to its host, and Europe is at great risk.’[9]

Jake from Rattlesnake TV reiterates:

‘[Communism] is not taught in our education system [maybe] because they don’t want the students to know that Mao used to use students and young people as part of his Red Guard, partly because he wanted to indoctrinate the new generation into his ideology, but also because he knew that young people are the most brutal and malleable.

Their objective was to destroy the customs, of old statues, literature, cultural customs and usher in the customs of new: the religion of Maoism that adhered to the principles laid out by Mao in his Little Red Book, something that they all had a copy of on them at all times. Young people were turned against their parents, and the older generation for that matter, and the older generation was sent to re-education camps, and sent to struggle sessions and forced to do public humiliation ceremonies, if they were even lucky enough to survive.

The West is currently undergoing a Cultural Revolution that has been happening for some time, and it’s not overly dissimilar to the philosophy of Maoism. The cult of Intersectionality and Woke cultural Marxism has successfully penetrated our institutions across the board, and has spread like a highly malignant cancer that is eating away at our vital organs.’[10]

Lindsay concludes with a warning about how the attack (from Marxism) will come; and how to best combat it. He says that Marxist provocation is always through something called middle level violence:[11]

‘They don’t come at you with full-blown Bolshevik assault very often, it’s middle level violence they provoke, which means if you give in and you do like John Paul Sartre said in his forward to The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, the post-colonial book. He said the violence is coming so Europe’s best bet is to give it away, so that they don’t kill you. They’ll murder you and take it, or maybe you can give it away, give your culture away, give your countries away, and they’ll let you live.’[12]

This is what we do on a personal level when we self-censor: we erode our own values in pretending that each issue, as it arises, is not that important, until ultimately we are not exactly sure what we stand for anymore. Or, Lindsay says,

‘We can react and overreact, which sadly Europe has had a rough history in the last century with overreactions, and if you overreact, what will they do, they will weaponize your overreaction for a century, forever, and gain moral authority, so that you end up having to give it away later anyway.’[13]

Lindsay proposes that we have to stand firm in our principles, but to do so cleverly: to understand that we are being provoked, but not react as the provocateur wants us to; we have to outsmart our provocateur, which is only possible when we can diagnosis the problem. Woke is Marxism, evolved to attack the West. If we don’t understand that, we will not act correctly and not cure it,[14]

‘And it will conquer your countries, it will conquer all of Europe, and we will have a very very long sustainable and inclusive future, with absolutely no freedom.’

 

‘Because the goal is to make us into what they call global citizens, have you heard this term? This term is nonsense, there’s no Global Sovereign so there is no global citizenship, there’s no relationship because there’s no ruler, and we don’t want a ruler of the globe. It’s a nonsense term, but they tell you, if you actually read their literature, what is a global citizen. It’s somebody, I kid you not, I make no joke, they say this themselves, it’s somebody who supports the 17 sustainable development goals of the United Nations Agenda 2030. that’s a global citizen. And they say, what are the rights of a global citizen? This isn’t a book about global citizenship education published two years ago. What are the rights of a global citizen? And the answer, one paragraph later, is we’re not that interested in rights with global citizenship, it’s more about global responsibilities, in other words, slavery.’[15]

Lindsay claims this is a pivotal moment in the history of the western world, and that the model that they are pushing us toward is the model we see in China. If you want to know what your future looks like look at China, look at the social credit system, look at the oppression, look at people disappearing for having the wrong opinions.[16]

‘So we have to fight back against Woke, but to fight back against Woke, we have to understand it, and I will close by restating my thesis: Woke is Marxism evolved to take on the West, and it’s been very successful so far because we haven’t known our enemy, we cannot name our enemy, and I’ve come here to name our enemy. So, thank you for your time and attention and letting me do that.’[17]

Jake, Rattlesnake TV:

‘[When Lindsay] says that China is the model that they want to implement, he’s not plucking that out of thin air, this has been explicitly stated at the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, and Klaus Schwab[18] has repeatedly heaped praise upon Xi Jinping and China and the social credit system, and how they’re running the joint in China.’[19]

Jake concludes with the hope that with the help of individuals–such as James Lindsay, Maajid Nawaz and Jordan Peterson—’we can bring these sinister agendas to people’s consciousness, … that ‘gives people a road map and a way to push back, whether that be big or small, and this pushback happens with grand speeches at the European Parliament, but it also happens with you and I on a personal level.’[20]

So for Buddhists reading this, I propose it would be help to at least consider that if we put seeing ourselves as disadvantaged—that is, being gay, female, a person of colour or transgender–in front of being a Buddhist, if Lindsay is correct, then we might be  contributing to the undermining of Buddhism in the West: as being a Buddhist cannot sit side-by-side with Communism.

The chapter goes on to explore the Buddha of Wisdom.

[1] James Lindsay SHATTERS Woke Ideology: EU Parliament Speech. Rattlesnake TV. YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aviyl1eiC1s

Permission has been sought from James Lindsay on multiple occasions to use the transcript of his European Parliament talk.

Below is the transcript of Rattlesnake TV’s video which I have consent to share:

https://archive.org/details/james-lindsay-shatters-woke-ideology_202312

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] In April 2018, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Schwab and said China’s cooperation with the WEF had coincided with the country’s reform and opening-up process. ‘China Reform Friendship Medal Recipient: Klaus Schwab, involving China into WEF.’ CGTN. 18 December 2018

https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d414d786b7a4d31457a6333566d54/share_p.html

[19] James Lindsay SHATTERS Woke Ideology: EU Parliament Speech. Rattlesnake TV. YouTube.

[20] Ibid.