Before we get to Social Justice, however, we need to go to the place from where Social Justice, a blanket term to cover a variety of Critical Theory Tenets, hails. The Frankfurt School or the Institute for Social Research was founded shortly after WWI in 1923 and was largely influenced by the works of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, George Hegel and other Atheistic Philosophers of the 19th Century. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse were three of the leading minds, among others in the Frankfurt School. They believed that: “Mass Culture (and subsequently, what we know today as Popular Culture) should, according to them, be rescued from the stigma of crude banality into a valuable and worthy expression of real world experience.” They set about the task of reevaluating Marx's theory that Capitalist Society would collapse and a Communistic Revolution would take its place in a new utopia. Upon the failure of Marx's prediction, the Frankfurt School folks, started to rebrand the movement with Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, and Post-Colonialism.
But before we get to them, let's remind ourselves who these Frankfurt School folks idolized and what they're teachers thought. Freud was of the opinion that God's Plan for sexuality was restrictive in his book “Civilization and It's Discontents”. Karl Marx hypothesized that Work was inherently exploitative of the workers, and those who had money to hire people were inherently evil, or at least at odds with those who had to work. (Now, Marx's mother has been quoted saying: “If only Karl had made capital instead of writing about it!") It's difficult to not succumb to ad hominem here, but Marx was also a racist with the Hispanic, Jew, and African below his nose.
In a quote from a Panama City News Herald article compiling Marx's unsavory remarks he is quotes as such:
“When the U.S. annexed California after the Mexican-American War, Marx wrote: "Without violence nothing is ever accomplished in history." Then he asked, "Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?" Friedrich Engels added: "In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States." Many of Marx's racist ideas were reported in "Karl Marx, Racist" a book written by Nathaniel Weyl, a former member of the U.S. Communist Party.
In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx's son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Paul had "one eighth or one twelfth nigger blood." In an April 1887 letter to Paul's wife, Engels wrote, "Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district." Marx's anti-Semitic views were no secret. In 1844, he published an essay titled "On the Jewish Question." He wrote that the worldly religion of Jews was "huckstering" and that the Jew's god was "money." Marx's view of Jews was that they could only become an emancipated ethnicity or culture when they no longer exist. Just one step short of calling for genocide, Marx said, "The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way."
Marx's philosophical successors shared ugly thoughts on blacks and other minorities. Che Guevara, a hero of the left, was a horrific racist. He wrote in his 1952 memoir, "The Motorcycle Diaries": "The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent."”
So, ad hominem is not inherently off the table when the fruit of the tree continues to remain poisonous. From the Black Book of Communism, we read that 94 million Communist Citizens were killed in the 20th century by Communistic Governance.
65 million in the People's Republic of China
20 million in the Soviet Union
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Africa
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
1 million in Vietnam
150,000 in Latin America
10,000 deaths “resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power.”
And the other 19th century thinkers that the Frankfurt School drew from were similarly flawed men without the guiding light of scripture to reprove and correct the fallacies erected within their own rationale.
But this is not an essay on Marxism or Freudism, but a critique on Critical Theory. However, recurring themes will be playing out among those who subscribe to the Cultural, Philosophical, and Theological premises that we have already discussed. Critical Theory, much like Freudian Sociology and Marxist Political and Economic Theory, does exactly what its name suggests that it does, it critiques. Critiques what, you may ask: Western Culture and we will see Judeo-Christianity.
What really ground the gears of these Frankfurt School Philosophers was that the media and prosperity had supposedly hypnotized the masses into not realizing that they were actually oppressed. “The Consumers are the workers and the employees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them. As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them, is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities. (Adorno and Horheimer 1973, Pg. 133/144)
“Our Humanist ideas will only work if they will just let us try to enslave them again.” These are the Germans, need I remind you. Now, many of the Frankfurt School fled Germany because of their Jewish heritage, but their Atheistic ideology was ultimately incubated in the same stew that Marx, as we've established as a rabid anti-semite, Freud, and the eugenics movement that sought to sterilize the Jews from the face of the Earth. These are the people who we allowed into the universities in the 1960s and 1970s. These socialists and communists simply redesigned their ideology as they saw the colossal failures of Germany, Italy, Russia, China, and everywhere else their Humanist agenda was attempted.
This ultimately comes from a rejection of God's standards in substitution for Human reason alone. Reason is a critical part of the Christian Faith, but without the temperance of God's Justice and Moral Law, Human Reason always ends in injustice.
https://m.theepochtimes.com/c-how-the-specter-of-communism-is-ruling-our-world
https://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/movingwords/quotefeature/marx.shtml
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sigmund-Freud/Sexuality-and-development
https://asavalas.medium.com/freud-and-the-injustices-of-societal-sexual-repression-398c76303e99