Editor,

My copy of the Bible is 1,874 pages. Now, imagine if I had only ever read nine pages, which is less than 0.5 percent of it, yet proceeded to write a best-selling book that purports to explain the aims of Christianity and the meaning of the Bible itself.

Suppose this book were some 250 pages long with over 500 citations of “factual sources,” yet I only cited the Bible itself a mere five times, and each of these was a reference to the only nine pages I’d ever read. Envisage, if you will, that I also had the gall to cite my own previously written, poorly researched books three times as often as I cited the Bible itself.

This is what you will be wasting your time doing if you read Mark Levin’s “American Marxism” as Erick Wilcox suggests you do in his July 23 letter to the editor.

Karl Marx’s oeuvre includes some 5,000 pages of writing, yet Levin manages only to cite the 25-page “Communist Manifesto” as many times as you can count on one hand. It seems generous to assume he even read all 25 pages. Rest assured though, he took the time to re-read his own books. He cites himself 16 times.

Passing himself off as an expert in Marxism, one would expect Levin to explain some of the following words and concepts in “American Marxism:” Dialectics; historical materialism; alienation; surplus value; base vs. superstructure; primitive accumulation; and Utopian socialism vs. scientific socialism

These are all very basic and foundational concepts in Marxism. If you can’t define or explain them, you simply do not understand what Marxism is and should excise that word from your vocabulary until you can.

Needless to say, a “Ctrl+F” search on my pdf version of “American Marxism” — you’ll have to excuse me from reading much of this garbage or actually purchasing the book — reveals that none of these concepts are defined in the book. A couple of them are thrown around once or twice without any explanation as to their meaning.

As for the link between Critical Race Theory and Marxism? With even a brief amount of research — yes, probably even the Wikipedia kind — you would discover than many, if not most Marxists, have a serious critique of CRT for its tendency to naturalize rather than historicize racism in America.

The critique is not “America is and never was racist,” but rather, racism in America and anywhere is not unalterable. It can be overcome.

With solidarity among working people, we can take apart the structural hurdles that keep our society segregated and unequal.

K. Durkee

Langley