“Were this dread specter of a society totally engineered by the state to materialize further, a newly radicalized America would take its place next to a long-radicalized China, and together, these two autocracies, one soft and one hard, would tower over humanity and the world as a two-headed superpower despotism…”

Marxism and related ideologies are still very much with us. The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall may have come crashing down some 35 years ago, but the pernicious threat that is Communism and godless Socialism remain. They are found throughout Western institutions, be it the media, academia, or the political and cultural arenas.

In a recent piece I examined a new book by the important Christian thinker Os Guinness: Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (Kildare, 2024). In it he argues that there are four major harmful waves that are crashing over the West:

The Red Wave: Radical Marxism
The Rainbow Wave: The Sexual Revolution
The Black Wave: Radical Islamism
The Gold Wave: Corrupt Elitism

I already examined his thoughts on Islam and its war against the West.

Here I want to look at the Red Wave which he discusses in Chapter 4. He explains it this way:

The Red Wave is the combination of radical and revolutionary political movements that have flowed down from the French Revolution in 1789. Along with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution is a watershed event in the breakdown of Western Civilization, and its ever-evolving influence is now global and spreading. With deadly accuracy, the great revolution and the revolutions it has spawned, all aim at the heart of the evils and weaknesses of the West, and the West has never recovered from the forces of its eruption. In the shape of its current formulations, the French Revolution is now undermining even the American Revolution and calling the ideas and ideals of the American republic into question. (p. 89)

Guinness looks at the traditional revolutionary movements and the earlier emphasis on economics, and then notes how the cultural has become the new form of Marxism:

Below the major shifts from economic to cultural Marxism, the underlying revolutionary algorithm applied to all of life, is the same. The power differential between “oppressor and oppressed” is not only political; it can be found everywhere – in families, in schools, in businesses, in relationships of every kind; in fact, everywhere, with no exception (including, of course, themselves). This means, logically, that there is not a single relationship and no human situation absolutely anywhere that is not vulnerable to revolutionary accusations. The shifts from classical to cultural Marxism are therefore significant, but the foundational analyses of the two types of Marxism both proceed in broadly the same way: the radicals’ task is to analyse the difference between the “majority” and the “marginal minority,” the “normal” and the “abnormal” or “queer,” the “powerful” and the “powerless,” and above all, to discover the “oppressors” and the “victims.” (p. 96)

He goes on the say this:

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