Progressivism has recast the Marxist conflict between classes as a struggle over race, sex, language and the family. Its vocabulary and methods have changed, but its division of society into oppressors and oppressed remains intact.
Over recent decades, Western society has undergone a cultural and ideological transformation whose speed and scale have surprised even close observers. What began as a legitimate effort to expand civil rights, secure equality before the law and protect the vulnerable has gradually developed into a comprehensive worldview extending far beyond the bounds of conventional politics.
That worldview, commonly described as progressivism, displays a striking continuity with neo-Marxist thought. It does not mechanically repeat old slogans about class struggle, but applies the same underlying logic to questions of culture and human nature.
Contemporary progressivism is no longer simply a movement for gradual reform. It has replaced economic class struggle with a cultural battle over identity, language and biological reality.
Its defining features are readily recognizable: the division of society into oppressors and oppressed according to race, sex, sexuality or supposed vulnerability; the moral authority accorded to designated victim groups; demands for the transformation of every sphere of life, from language and education to marriage and the family; and the systematic capture of institutions.
Other characteristic features include cancel culture, the elevation of emotional grievance over facts and the rejection of objective truth in favor of the subjective perspectives of marginalized groups.
Progressivism frequently alters, conceals or even disavows its own premises when they come under scrutiny. Yet its underlying logic remains Marxist. Where Marxism attacked economic relations, progressivism targets culture, identity, sexuality and the upbringing of children.
Examining this continuity is not an exercise in conspiracy theory, but a necessary analysis of the methods, institutional coercion and psychological mechanisms eroding Western society from within.
Classical Marxism was primarily a doctrine of economic materialism. Karl Marx and his followers understood history as a succession of class struggles in which the decisive conflict concerned ownership of the means of production. The bourgeoisie oppressed the proletariat, and the proposed remedy was the revolutionary transformation of economic relations through nationalization and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This framework proved inadequate during the 20th century, particularly after the economic failures of real socialism in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba. Marxist thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, members of the Frankfurt School and later postmodern theorists recognized that culture, language and consciousness offered more resilient and effective battlegrounds than the economy alone.
Progressivism represents this mutation. It inherits from Marxism a fundamentally antagonistic view of society. Social relations are not understood as potentially harmonious or mutually beneficial, but as expressions of an enduring struggle between oppressors and oppressed.
Where classical Marxism located this conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, progressivism has transferred it to the realm of identity: between white and non-white people, men and women and heterosexuals and LGBT people.
Marxist theories of economic conflict laid the foundations for later struggles over culture, identity and the family. Photo: wal_172619/Pixabay
The application of Marxist categories to relations between men and women is not a recent innovation. Marx regarded inequality between the sexes primarily as a product of social and economic conditions rather than a biological or natural phenomenon. Friedrich Engels developed this interpretation most fully in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, a work based partly on preparatory research undertaken with Marx.
Engels explicitly described relations between men and women in the language of class conflict. He wrote: “The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.”
He characterized monogamy in similarly antagonistic terms: “It appears as the subjugation of one sex by the other, as the proclamation of a conflict between the sexes entirely unknown hitherto in prehistoric times.”
Elsewhere, he applied the class analogy directly to the household: “Within the family he is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat.”
These ideas were enthusiastically adopted by the feminist movement, developed further and eventually extended through gender theory. Relations between men and women, marriage and the family came to be interpreted not primarily as forms of cooperation, mutual obligation and social continuity, but as structures of domination requiring political transformation.
This antagonistic view leaves little room for reconciliation or organic development. Every relationship is interpreted through the prism of power and exploitation and therefore requires not reform, but the deconstruction of the existing order.
Economic class has been replaced by categories of identity, race, sex, sexuality, ethnicity and various forms of “vulnerability”. The struggle is no longer directed against the bourgeoisie, but against “cis-hetero-patriarchy”, “white privilege” and marriage itself.
The method, however, remains the same: the dialectic of oppressor and oppressed. Biological differences and historical facts may be denied or distorted in the name of a supposedly higher truth. Once this dialectic has been accepted, it can be used to justify the transformation of society in its entirety.
Classical Marxism sought to nationalize factories. Progressivism seeks to nationalize language, biology and education. LGBT ideology, gender theory and critical race theory are not merely obscure academic theories, but instruments for redefining fundamental human categories.
Language is purged of “offensive” terms, while historical figures are judged exclusively by the moral standards of the present. This is a more sophisticated form of Marxism, one that recognizes that control over culture and human identity permits a deeper and more enduring transformation than a change in property ownership alone.
Progressivism is therefore not a straightforward continuation of Marx’s economic project. It is an evolution of that project, adapted to a post-industrial society in which symbols, narratives and identities have become more politically potent than ownership of the means of production.
A Revolt Against Reality
Progressivism also displays a systematic resistance to reality. Empirical evidence, biological truths, historical context, statistical data and accumulated social experience are routinely subordinated to ideological doctrine.
When reality contradicts the approved narrative, the ideology refuses to accept it. This applies to innate biological differences between men and women, disparities in average cognitive ability or crime rates among ethnic groups, the social and cultural consequences of uncontrolled mass migration and the damaging results of experiments involving “gender-affirming care” for children.
Instead, reality is redefined, suppressed or morally discredited. Basic concepts are altered: a woman becomes “a person who identifies as a woman”. Inconvenient scientific research is censored and history rewritten.
This rejection of objective reality is not an accidental error or a passing excess. It is a defining feature of an ideology that regards itself as a morally superior truth, above ordinary facts, experience and human nature.
Every institution – from kindergarten and university to the courts – must therefore be subjected to ideological discipline so that reality itself can be brought into line with the vision of a progressive utopia.
The second major connection between progressivism and neo-Marxism lies in their approach to power. Classical Marxism envisaged revolution in the streets and the violent seizure of the state. Neo-Marxism and progressivism have chosen a quieter but more effective strategy: the long march through the institutions.
Universities, once intended to be places of free inquiry, have become incubators of a new ideological orthodoxy. From there, it has spread into the media, corporations, government, the judiciary and international organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union.
In many parts of the West, progressivism now functions as a de facto state ideology without an official name. A “woke nomenklatura” has emerged as a new ruling class, occupying influential positions without a direct democratic mandate.
Its power rests on control over public narratives, institutional funding and professional advancement. Dissent is punished not through the gulag, but through cancellation, dismissal and social excommunication. This institutional capture shows how neo-Marxist methods have been adapted to democratic societies and used to transform them from within.
The judiciary has played a central role in this process. It has gradually shifted from acting as a guarantor of order and protector of individual liberty to serving as a powerful accelerator of progressive objectives.
Court rulings impose ideological constructs on society, from the redefinition of marriage and the introduction of gender quotas to restrictions on free speech in the name of the “fight against hate”. The judiciary not only hastens these changes, but converts political demands into legal norms that are subsequently difficult to challenge.
An activist demand advanced by a marginal group can thus become a “human right” protected by the highest courts. The judiciary assumes the role of a normative power that preserves and legitimizes the progressive agenda despite the absence of a democratic mandate from the majority. This judicial transformation from within is among the most dangerous manifestations of institutional capture.
The most important connection between progressivism and neo-Marxism therefore lies not in direct quotations from Marx, but in the practical mechanism through which a new elite is created and its authority legitimized by claims of moral superiority and a struggle for “justice”.
The deepest connection lies in culture and human nature. As traditional religion declined in the secular West and real socialism collapsed, a void emerged, creating a demand for a new source of meaning. Progressivism filled it with a secular story of salvation through the liberation of every marginalized identity.
In many respects, it resembles a religion. Its doctrine of original sin encompasses whiteness, masculinity, heteronormativity and Western civilization itself. Confession takes the form of publicly acknowledging one’s privilege, followed by conversion through allegiance to the oppressed.
There is also heresy, punished through exclusion from public life and the social ostracism of those who dissent. Finally, there is the promise of paradise: a future utopia of complete equality and diversity.
Subjective grievance is granted greater authority than facts or personal liberty. The result is a perpetual competition for victim status in which individuals and entire groups vie to be recognized as the most oppressed and therefore the most morally authoritative.
This quasi-religious character explains the emotional force of progressivism. It is concerned not merely with politics, but with the human desire for transcendence, moral purity and meaning. Neo-Marxism has retained the old schema of exploitation while recasting it in the language of identity and psychology.
Economic exploitation has been replaced by cultural, symbolic and emotional forms of oppression. The marginalized are elevated to the status of saints, while criticism of the ideology becomes sacrilege. This religious dimension makes progressivism unusually resistant to rational debate because challenges to its dogmas are treated not as intellectual disagreement, but as evidence of moral failure.
Progressive identity politics has turned sexuality into a central arena of ideological conflict. Photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Judging Ideologies by Their Methods
Progressivism converges with neo-Marxism on three fundamental levels: its transformation of political categories, its restructuring of institutions and its response to the human desire for meaning and moral certainty.
It is not merely a continuation of 19th-century Marxism, but a culturally more refined, psychologically more sophisticated and institutionally more successful version of it.
Understanding this continuity is essential for anyone seeking to defend a genuinely open and free society founded on truth, individual liberty and empirical reality. Yet contemporary progressivism increasingly denies the very openness it claims to champion.
Karl Popper’s critique of the closed society can therefore be applied to progressivism today. The characteristics he associated with totalitarian ideologies – dogmatism, the suppression of criticism and a claimed monopoly on truth – are plainly visible in the progressive movement.
The open society is being transformed into a closed caste of new priests who, in the name of “justice”, are destroying the foundations of human dignity, tradition and Western civilization. Only by identifying these mechanisms clearly can a rational discussion begin about how this decay might be halted.
Citizens should therefore judge political movements not by the labels they adopt, but by the ideas they promote and the methods they use. History has repeatedly shown that changing an ideology’s name does not change its nature. Its language, symbols and tactics may evolve while its underlying logic survives beneath more appealing slogans.
Every political movement must therefore be judged by the same standard, regardless of whether it invokes tradition, progress or justice.
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