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‘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.

What’s interesting about Lukács is that while all the other Marxist Revisionists talked and wrote about their plans to undertake the cultural revolution, he had actually lived it. Lukács had become a Communist just in time to serve in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, founded after the war by Bela Kun. Lukács was Kun’s dep­uty people’s commissar for education and culture, and as his biographer, Victor Zitta, noted, Lukács undertook the following to ensure the “proper” education of the next generation of Hungarian Communists:

Special lectures were organized in schools and literature printed and distributed to “instruct” children about free love, about the nature of sexual intercourse, about the archaic nature of bourgeois family codes, about the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasure. Children urged thus to reject and deride paternal authority and the authority of the Church, and to ignore precepts of morality, easily and spontaneously turned into delin­quents with whom only the police could cope. . . .This call to rebellion addressed to children was matched by a call to rebellion addressed to Hungarian women.

Recently, the British author Joanna Williams gave a speech at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a private educational institution in (ironically enough) Budapest. The topic of her speech was the connection between education and voting patterns throughout Europe and the United States, specifically how and why more education has become correlated with left-wing voting behavior. Before getting into the data about voting, Williams explained how and why educational attainment translated into left-wing, “woke” voting. Among other things, she noted that “Across much of the West, education has become politicised.” “Schools,” she continued, “have introduced new subjects such as Citizenship and Sexuality Education with the sole aim of changing children’s attitudes and values, while traditional academic subjects, like history and literature, have been ‘decolonised’ so as to alienate children from their national cultural inheritance.”

Over the past several decades, Williams insisted, Western schools have “not [been] transmitting knowledge but imposing values and enforcing behavioural norms.” And those values and norms are those of the elites, who detest traditional Western faith and beliefs.

Williams concluded by noting that successful students are those who learn most effectively to conform. “Children are not expected to critique the idea of gender they are taught in Sexuality Education classes or the importance of ‘thinking globally’ that they learn in Citizenship. Instead, they must demonstrate having accepted these values.”

It is profoundly ironic. The Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed after only 133 days when Romanian forces routed Kun’s Communists and sent them fleeing to Vienna. Nevertheless, the educational agenda championed by Lukács appears to have survived. Indeed, more than a century later, it has become de rigueur in the institutions of cultural transmission throughout the West. As Joanna Williams suggests, Lukács’ educational agenda was internalized by his fellow Revisionists and has become the model for elite education in the aftermath of the Long March’s ideological capture of Western education.

Even more ironically, György Lukács died a broken man. After Stalin died in 1953, Lukács participated in the Hungarian de-Stalinization and eventually became a minister in the revolutionary government of Imre Nagy. When the Soviet tanks crushed the revolution in November 1956, Lukacs was deported, along with the rest of the Nagy government, to Romania. Nagy was executed, but Lukács was spared and was allowed to return to Hungary, where he repudiated his heresy and was allowed to live out the rest of his days as a reviled and rejected intellectual misfit.

In the end, Lukács recanted his ideas. His fellow Communists mocked them. And today, Hungarian conservatives see him and those ideas as an embarrassment to their national heritage. Only in the benighted Western educational establishment are György Lukács and his agenda revered—although not by name, given most of that establishment’s profound historical ignorance. A pitiable fate – for him and us.

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About Stephen Soukup

Stephen R. Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)

Photo: Lukács György filozófus, mellette Déry Tiborné.

Notable Replies

  1. Avatar for task task says:

    It is not the woke hyper educated and well indoctrinated that will be the most serious problem to overcome in future elections. No matter the advantage provided in voting numbers by self-praising, elitist, white, educated, suburban women who identify as compassionate and sensitive, that can be counted upon to vote for progressive and Marxist ideologues, who are as insane as is Charles Manson (I’m not kidding), the numbers will never add up to win national elections. And there are still not enough on the dole to make a difference.

    The last election was not conducted without considerable fraud, as was evidenced in California and Arizona, when it came to the down ballots that stole representatives and senate seats which gave MAGA thin legislative margins. The idea was, and always will be, to aid those Republicans who frequently hamstring their majority. After four years the techniques used to steal seats in 2024 and the Presidency in 2020 will again be employed in 2028.

    Even more important than closing the borders, subduing inflation and dealing with crime nothing is more relevant than addressing and fixing election schemes which permit far left candidates to win elections without real votes. It will never be “too big to rig”. When people once again become satisfied, less enthusiastic and more trustful the same evil enemies will do what they always do. They will steal Tyranny from the jaws of Democracy just as they did in 2020 and, to a lesser extent, but just as visibly, in 2024. Election fraud is the number one issue which MAGA must deal with.

  2. Always appreciate your excellent commentary, thank you.

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