Os Guinness On the Threat of Radical Marxism

We must not be complacent about communist and woke ideology:

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 MarxismThe Rainbow Wave: The Sexual RevolutionThe Black Wave: Radical IslamismThe Gold Wave: Corrupt Elitism

I already examined his thoughts on Islam and its war against the West: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/08/10/os-guinness-on-israel-the-west-and-islamism/  

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 culture 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:

One major problem arises from the fact that the Marxist tactic of elevating and exploiting “victims” and “victimhood” is emotionally explosive, as it appeals directly to resentment. The revolution stirs up relational emotions that are personal, and then inflates and blends them with justice that should be objective and impersonal. The resentment stirred against “the haves” by “the have-nots” is bad enough, but the endless, indulgent probing of victimhood from every other possible angle of “intersectionality” serves to stoke feelings of hurt, resentment, bitterness, revenge, and hate that prove impossible to be assuaged. The politics of cultural Marxism is essentially destructive because it focuses on the subjective, personal emotions at the expense of objective, impersonal justice for all. That is why, traditionally, Lady Justice is blindfolded with scales tipped by neither fear nor favor. The radicals fixate on victimhood as a matter of the past rather than the present, and on hurts rather than healing, so the result is a perpetual stirring of rage and hate rather than any striving towards justice. (p. 97)

Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds by Guinness, Os (Author) 

He examines cultural Marxism and the ‘long march through the institutions’ in more detail, discussing figures like Lukacs, Gramsci and Marcuse. He notes how successful it has been in taking over the universities, the media, politics, and even business. The woke takeover of society involves everything from woke education to woke finance.

Guinness says this about what it all entails:

It is a serious mistake to think that “wokeism” is a purely political problem that can be solved by purely political solutions. At its core, wokeism is cultural, and a cultural revolution, but it is also a cultural and educational revolution with openly religious overtones. The term “New Faith” is apt, for wokeism is a pseudo-religion like so many of the avowedly secularist ideologies that flowed from the French Revolution. Far more than progressive against conservative, let alone Democrat against Republican, the new faith is cosmic and apocalyptic – a total war of the oppressed against the oppressors, with all of humanity on one side or the other, in a fight to the death over reality, truth, words, authorities, and boundaries. (p. 104)

Looking further at the scene in the West, and especially in America, Guinness rounds off the chapter with these ominous words:

At the end of the line, the worst-case scenario for America would be a merger between two movements: cultural Marxism (or wokeism), the revolutionary ideology at the radical left; and progressivism, the ideology of the ruling elites of the managerial regime. As each party seeks to co-opt the other for its own purposes, they would together create an almost irresistible trend towards oligarchic one-party politics and a centralized and administrative state that could grow into a woke Leviathan. . . . The result would be a one-party state and a perfect match for Benito Mussolini’s infamous formulation of his own fascist government: “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State. His fascist regime is said to have been the first to declare itself totalitarian.

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, the likes of which the world has not seen in the modern era – as if Stalin and Hitler had won at the same time and formed a lasting alliance of dictators.

God forbid. But long before such a dire result, the impact of cultural Marxism in the form of variance such as Critical Race Theory, represents a disaster for the American republic. In the words of James Lindsay’s searing book Race Marxism, cultural Marxism, in the form of the Red Wave overall, is a “one-hundred-year-long spear that is being thrust into the side of Western civilization.” (pp. 106-107)

Worrying times indeed. But Guinness does not just leave us with bleak prospects for the future. In a forthcoming piece I will look at his closing words in the book and what he says we can do about resisting these menaces and help turn things around.

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