Today’s progressive movement—different from the American Progressive movement of the late nineteenth century—has repackaged Marxist theory into Critical Race Theory (CRT) with new actors and injustices but the same old drama.
The epic struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is replaced by the morally laden struggles between privileged and oppressed actors with new names. In this contemporary version of Marxist drama, people of color are pitted against a white male power structure supported by a mysterious but powerful force of institutional racism. Women are pitted against a male patriarchy that invades not only the workplace but intrudes into the very intimacy of the home to wreak injustice.
As the blinders of the new false consciousness fall from the eyes of the oppressed, new oppressed groups emerge. Some are based on “sexual minority status”—gay people, transsexuals, intersex, non-gender conforming—others on physical traits—the disabled, the unattractive, fat people. In place of an exploitive bourgeoisie there are heterosexists, cis-gender persons, those who exploit the disabled and those who engage in “lookism,” that is, those who exploit others due to their appearance.
Added to these colorful actors are the multitude of colonized people of the third world and their exploitive evil colonizers. Because this is a drama, the respective roles of colonizer and colonized are always simplified, with few benefits but much evil attributed to colonization. And even long after the departure of the colonizers from formerly colonized lands, the injustice of the original colonial sin is said to persist, as every problem of the newly independent peoples is attributed to the legacy of colonialism.
In the same way, injustices based on race and ethnicity are said to live on, in the form of the legacy of racism, even after much of the oppression is alleviated.
More recently the world has seen a northward migration of millions from impoverished and violent lands in the south. Amidst the confusion of roles—are these immigrants, migrants, or refugees?—these folks join the long line of oppressed people who are unjustly exploited and abused in their adopted countries. There is nothing more dramatic and poignant than these huddled masses, to use the words of poet Emma Lazarus.
These are new actors (through the lens of CRT) in an old drama around the struggle between persecutor and victim, between exploiter and exploited. Marx’s focus on labor has now extended to every conceivable human difference, as if the very existence of difference is morally wrong.
This section is courtesy of the SAPIENT Being's “Marxism and Progressivism: A Play in Two Acts” chapter featuring the article by Dr. Raymond M. Berger published in June 2018: