an excerpt from my manuscript-in-progress

The following is another excerpt of my manuscript-in-progress on Woke Ideology, its excesses, its religious nature, and its full divergence from older leftist analyses of class.

It is part of a chapter in which I discuss the roots of “cultural change” (sometimes described by right-wing critics as “Cultural Marxism”), an idea which is now firmly at the core of Woke Ideology. The basic thrust of the philosophy is that children must be liberated from the older patriarchal and authoritarian beliefs of their parents so as to create future societies in which cultural change can occur. The idea originates in Utopian Socialism, though it is has appeared variously in Marxism and especially in anarchism. It now manifests in the belief that parents should allow their children to explore their sexuality and gender at as early an age as possible and that the “nuclear” or “traditional” family—along with all its cultural norms—is an enemy of progress.

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The Kinderläden

…Weirder in my experiences were the radical political ideas some of the anarchist parents had about veganism and child-rearing, especially certain beliefs about sexual liberation and children. I saw nothing that approximated child abuse or anything that probably should have been reported to a child protection officer or the police, but the ideas themselves were often enough for me to worry for the children. Some expressed beliefs that children should be able to explore their sexuality with adults in a playful manner as a way of avoiding future psychoses, an idea I’d heard expressed in many other radical spaces as well. Years later, I encountered those beliefs again and saw incidents that did really concern me, including some encouraging early adolescent children to sexually flirt with adult friends of the parents. One parent of such a child explained that encouraging such things was an act of radical political liberation.

What I witnessed might have been rare or exceptional, though the beliefs these adults were expressing are rooted in a particular form of radical theory and a peculiar historical experiment decades before these parents were even born: Kinderläden.1

Kinderläden were anti-authoritarian day care programs started by anarchists and other leftists in West Germany during the 1960’s. Founded upon a mix between the anti-authoritarian and sexual repression theories of Adorno, Habermas, and Reich, Kinderläden were an attempt to implement many of the radical ideas that have become core features of left-utopian beliefs: communal child-raising, autonomous and local control, and a focus on raising children to be independent thinkers, unashamed of their bodies and free of patriarchal and capitalist indoctrination. On the other hand, they also represent a tangible example for many of the fears and conspiracies in “Cultural Marxism,” a belief that leftists are secretly attempting to erode traditional society through introducing decadent and perverted sexual norms to children.

Though Kinderläden predate the birth of Woke Ideology by many decades, they are relevant to understanding its framework now because they were implementations of a kind of reflexive liberation and cultural change ideology iterated as a bulwark against fascist and authoritarian movements. As with the current push to introduce declarative gender and critical race theory into early education within the United States, Kinderläden were born of a belief that children were where cultural change must start. Such change needed to begin with dismantling all the authoritarian ways of seeing the world that their parents had inherited from the system. Similar to the logic of introducing self-declarative pronouns in kindergartens or teaching children about racism in elementary school, Kinderläden attempted to introduce and implement anti-authoritarian theory to children of very early ages in order to build a better future.

It…didn’t quite go so well. The result was lots of children practically sexually assaulting their adult teachers, smearing feces on the walls, and eventually growing up to embrace the very way of life their parents were trying to liberate them from.

The theories behind the Kinderläden—or “children’s shops”–would likely sound very familiar and perhaps even self-evident to many American anarchists and others steeped in Woke Ideology now. Put plainly, the founders of the day cares believed that the nuclear family and traditional moral stances on sexuality were negative forces in society. Those forces reproduced authoritarian behavior by repressing sexual desire and expression, limiting the development of liberated personalities, and inculcating psychological problems in children which later manifested in oppressive and aggressive enforcement of hierarchies (the patriarchy, for example).

Kinderläden were designed as a way to break these cycles. Within the day cares, children were encouraged to explore their bodies and the bodies of others in an environment absent of shame, judgment, and “authoritarian” sexual limits. To ensure the children in the Kinderläden were protected from these negative influences, the adult teachers and the parents of the children were also encouraged to examine how authoritarianism and sexual repression existed in their own lives, and to do everything possible to counteract this. This included avoiding at all costs any interventions into disputes between the children and actively avoiding setting any rules or limits:

Kinderladen activists’ celebrations of child sexuality and lamentations about adult dysfunctionality were inextricably linked to a more broadly held New Left conviction that the nuclear family was a diseased and pernicious institution for which collective arrangements were the sole possible remedy. Declaring the nuclear family to be “rotten to the core,” many Kinderladen activists not only rotated caregiving at the preschools, but actually worked to rupture what they called parent-child “fixations.” The deliberate rotations of caregivers with the Kinderläden was not just designed to reduce burdens on the grown-ups; the main aim was to give children many adult reference points rather than just one or two. And the insistence that children manage their own conflicts and that the adult caregivers avoid intervening if at all possible was yet another aspect of the Kinderläden’s efforts to destabilize children’s dependence on parents, for even beneficent authority was still authority. Only in collective experiences, activists believed, could people develop attitudes of solidarity, overcome their fear of authorities, and develop shared strategies for resisting oppression.2

The larger framework for these ideas derived from a general belief by radicals that the mass convulsions of fascist political expression which had overtaken Germany during the Nazi regime were manifestations of sublimated and repressed sexuality, as well as psychological and cultural indoctrination into authoritarian personality traits. To prevent fascism from ever happening again, an anti-authoritarian culture needed to emerge and take hold of the masses, and the only true way to create that culture was to start with children because the sexual inhibitions which led to authoritarian and fascist personalities began in childhood.

As the German journal Der Spiegel describes the logic:

To them, it seemed obvious that liberation should begin at an early age. Once sexual inhibitions had taken root, they reasoned, everything that followed was merely the treatment of symptoms. They were convinced that it was much better to prevent those inhibitions from developing in the first place. Hardly any leftist texts of the day did not address the subject of sexuality.

For instance, “Revolution der Erziehung” (“The Revolution in Education”), a work published by Rowohlt in 1971, which quickly became a bestseller, addresses sexuality as follows: “The de-eroticization of family life, from the prohibition of sexual activity among children to the taboo of incest, serves as preparation for total assimilation — as preparation for the hostile treatment of sexual pleasure in school and voluntary subjugation to a dehumanizing labor system.”

Issue 17 of the cultural magazine Kursbuch, published in June 1969, described the revolutionaries’ position in practical terms. Published by German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the issue contained a report by the members of Commune 2 in Berlin, titled “Educating Children in the Commune.” In the summer of 1967, three women and four men moved into an apartment in an old building on Giesebrechtstrasse, together with two small children, a three-year-old girl, Grischa, and a four-year-old boy, Nessim. For the residents, the cohabitation experiment was an attempt to overcome all bourgeois constraints, which included everything from separate bank accounts and closed bathroom doors to fidelity within couples and the development of feelings of shame. The two children were raised by the group, which often meant that no one paid much attention to them. Because the adults had made it their goal to not just “tolerate but in fact affirm child sexuality,” they were not satisfied to simply act as passive observers.

The members of this commune also felt compelled to write down their experiences, which explains why some of the incidents that occurred were reliably documented. On April 4, 1968, Eberhard Schultz describes how he is lying in bed with little Grischa, and how she begins to stroke him, first in the face, then on the stomach and buttocks, and finally on his penis, until he becomes “very excited” and his “cock gets hard.” The little girl pulls down her tights and asks Schultz to “stick it in,” to which he responds that his penis is “probably too big.” Then he strokes the girl’s vagina.

Kursbuch 17 contained a series of poster-sized photos. Under the headline “Love Play in the Children’s Room,” it depicted Nessim and Grischa, both naked. The oversized images are of the sort that one would expect to see in a magazine for pedophiles today — certainly not in an influential publication of the leftist intelligentsia. The caption reads: “Grischa walks over to the mirror, looks at her body, bends forward several times, encircling her buttocks with her hands, and says: ‘Look, my vagina.’”3

A peculiar aspect of the Kinderläden has particular parallels with the way Woke Ideology manifests now. Because the Kinderladens were seen as anti-authoritarian, revolutionary, and antifascist projects, those who criticized them were therefore seen as likely harboring internalized authoritarian, fascist, and counter-revolutionary psychoses. Parents and teachers involved in the Kinderläden who expressed reluctance, doubt, or moral hesitation about the sexual liberation of their children later reported having censored these misgivings so as to not become accused themselves.

As explained by the previously-cited article:

Others found it noticeably more difficult to deal with the situation. The records of a Stuttgart Kinderladen from December 1969 include an account by a mother who suddenly found several children reaching under her skirt. When one of the boys began pulling her pubic hair, the woman wasn’t sure how to react. On the one hand, she didn’t want to seem inhibited, but on the other hand, the situation was unpleasant for her. “That hurts,” she finally said, “I don’t like that.”

An account by the sociologist Monika Seifert, who described her experiences in the “Parents’ Collective of the Frankfurt Children’s School” in the magazine Vorgänge (excerpts of which later appeared in SPIEGEL in the fall of 1970), reveals how difficult it was for the Kinderladen parents to eventually decide between their own ideological expectations and their sense of right and wrong.

In the account, Seifert critically asks herself why, in her project, “no cases of attempted, direct, purposeful sexual activity between a child and an adult were observed.” It should be noted that she sees this as a shortcoming, not a success. As a mother, Seifert concludes that the “inhibitions and insecurities of the adults” were probably to blame for their passivity, and that the children were likely “suppressing their sexual curiosity in this regard because of the subconscious reactions of the adults.” 4

Again, parents and teachers were encouraged to let their children sexually explore their bodies—their own and also the bodies of their parents. The logic here was that sexual repression was an authoritarian tool and ultimately led to fascism. Thus, if a child wanted to play with his father’s penis or mother’s vagina, to tell them ‘no’ would be to do the work of the authoritarian state. Any parent who admitted not feeling comfortable with all this was actually admitting their own authoritarian tendencies and sexual repression.

To understand the Kinderläden, and to avoid the very easy mistake of dismissing it as a mere anomaly within a long current of progress and radical liberation, we need to look directly at its place within larger radical critiques of fascism, especially in its divergence from Marxist class analysis towards a structural, cultural, and psychological model of liberation….

…This tension between the material causes of oppression and the cultural or social causes is the true point of separation and divorce between Woke Ideology and Marxism. In Woke Ideology, the reasons for injustice are “structural” and “systematic,” which means they are social, cultural, and most of all psychological. Internalised homophobia and racism, as well as patriarchal ideas regarding binary gender and sexual difference, are all the primary causes of oppression against black, queer, transgender, and non-binary people. Once these beliefs have been fully educated and disciplined out of the masses, true liberation can finally occur.

Marxist class analysis looks instead to the material conditions of people and their economic (class) relations to understand the causes of social, cultural, and psychological phenomenon, including fascism and authoritarianism. Fascism, then, cannot be explained by recourse to psychological theories such as sublimated sexual drive and authoritarian parenting styles, but rather by an analysis of the material conditions (poverty, joblessness, societal and economic disruption) affecting those for whom fascism becomes appealing.

For Woke Ideology, authoritarianism and oppressive behaviour—just as with the “felt sense” of gender and the inter-generational trauma of blackness—exist outside the material realm in a secondary realm, both internal and external to the physical body. They are problems of psychological development, learned behaviors and internal beliefs that cannot be explained by material conditions or class analysis. So it is here where we should most remember the meaning of one of the Greek roots which form the modern word psychology: psyche, the soul