‘Woke’ Education—Then and Now

Of all the Communist thinkers and advocates to have played a role in the reworking of Marx’s crackpot theories in the aftermath of World War I, perhaps none played a greater role yet has received less popular attention than György Lukács.

By all rights, World War I should have been the end of Marx and his utopian fantasy. The workers of the world refused to unite. They decided that they had a great deal more to lose than their chains. And contra Marx and Engels’ expectations, the workers went to war—happily, joyfully, willingly, for country, for family, and for GOD.

The working classes’ willing participation in the Great War essentially disproved Marx and thoroughly undermined his entire worldview. His conception of class consciousness and his belief in the inevitable Hegelian rise of the working class were shattered. But that was merely the prelude to the greater indignity, that which should have ended the Marxist fantasy forever.

The war itself was a deep and practically fatal wound to the Marxist weltanschauung, but the aftermath was perhaps even uglier and more painful for true believers. It was the salt that the Fates rubbed into that wound. For starters, only the backward and largely unindustrialized misfit nation on the continent’s eastern frontier could sustain a people’s “revolution.” And if that wasn’t humiliating enough, the heart of industrial Europe emerged from the war shattered and broken, not just physically but psychologically, emotionally, and most especially, spiritually. The new Europe was exhausted and scarred, increasingly frustrated with the old gods but far from enamored with the new ones. It rejected Marx openly, just as it rejected every theological ethos.

Unfortunately, Marx’s few remaining fans in Europe did not give up so easily, and they spent the next several years rehabilitating his image by revising his predictions and explaining away his failures. In Italy, Antonio Gramsci outlined the need for a “cultural revolution,” one in which anti-Christian Marxists would make what the German Marxist student leader Rudi Dutschke would later call “the long march through the institutions.” In Hungary, Lukács re-interpreted Marx’s notions of reification (a special case of alienation) and commodity fetishism (a special case of reification) and, in so doing, developed, in much greater detail, the idea that man’s consciousness is dissociated at a fundamental level from society. In Germany, Felix Weil funded the think tank that would become the Frankfurt School (the Institute for Research at Goethe University Frankfurt), which would, under the leadership of Max Horkheimer, become the spark for Cultural Marxism. […]

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