Can someone define "Cultural Marxism" Please?

[Acid_Lamp]

I’m hearing this term thrown around lately from a few of our posters but I cannot seem to find anything that actually describes what this term actually means at all. The Wiki on it merely alludes to applying Marxist economic principles to culture, which really makes no sense. Help anyone?

Started in GD because of content, Mods please move if appropriate.

[GreasyJack]

The key is how you define “class”. Marx almost exclusively defined class based on what role you had in production. In practice, this meant that certain cultural groups more often ended up as producers and others as capitalists, but this was in no way central to Marx’s ideas. Cultural Marxists took Marxist (or more accurately pseudo-Marxist) ideas, particularly with regard to class struggle, and applied them to different definitions of class like race, gender, cultural groups, etc.

However, this is all pretty obscure mid-last-century stuff. It sounds like the term is being used these days as a code-word by the far right to try to equate multiculturalism and tolerance with scary authoritarian-style communism. I can see why you’d be confused, since I’ll bet most people who throw the term around have no idea what the term actually means (nor any particular handle on what is actually entailed by Marxism of any variety).

[Acid_Lamp]

@GreasyJack

The key is how you define “class”. Marx almost exclusively defined class based on what role you had in production. In practice, this meant that certain cultural groups more often ended up as producers and others as capitalists, but this was in no way central to Marx’s ideas. Cultural Marxists took Marxist (or more accurately pseudo-Marxist) ideas, particularly with regard to class struggle, and applied them to different definitions of class like race, gender, cultural groups, etc.

However, this is all pretty obscure mid-last-century stuff. It sounds like the term is being used these days as a code-word by the far right to try to equate multiculturalism and tolerance with scary authoritarian-style communism. I can see why you’d be confused, since I’ll bet most people who throw the term around have no idea what the term actually means (nor any particular handle on what is actually entailed by Marxism of any variety).

Pretty much all I’ve read agrees with your assessment. It seems to be used as a buzzword for *anything *that the far right doesn’t like.

[Giles]

I think the only person using the term here is RaleighRally, and as far as I can tell it’s any kind of sentiment falling on the political spectrum to the left of Genghis Khan. It serves him as a term of abuse, overlapping considerably with “political correctness”.

[BrainGlutton]

Cultural Marxism is a school of critical theory – i.e., a thing done by and for academics. It is not a political strategy or movement, which is what some RWs such as RaleighRally seem to believe. Most likely, they believe it because certain dishonest RW commentators have been promoting exactly that message.

Post-World War II, conservatives remained opposed to socialism and notions of social engineering. Some[who?] argued that “Cultural Marxists” and the Frankfurt School helped spark the counterculture social movements of the 1960s as part of a continuing plan of transferring Marxist subversion into cultural terms in the form of Freudo-Marxism.[citation needed]

Since the early 1990s, paleoconservatives such as Patrick Buchanan and William S. Lind have argued that “Cultural Marxism” is a dominant strain of thought within the American left, and associate it with a philosophy to destroy Western civilization. Buchanan has asserted that the Frankfurt School commandeered the American mass media, and used this cartel to infect the minds of Americans.[9]

Lind argues that,

“Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.”[10]

Lind argues that “Political Correctness” has resulted in American citizens, particularly in academia, being “afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic” and that such changes can be attributed to the influence of cultural Marxists. [11] According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Lind’s argument linking political correctness in contemporary public speech to the influence of Marxism is a conspiracy theory.[12][13][14]

IMO and IME, any sensible person will trust the SPLC over its opponents on these kinds of judgments.

[Acid_Lamp]

Brainglutton, bear with me here for a moment.

If I understand this correctly, This is a term that started it’s life as an academic intellectual exercise and has been co-opted since into firstly: a sort of nebulous conspiracy theory touted by nationalists, racists, and homophobes and has ended up secondly: as a catch all phrase used by the far right to criticize anyone cynical of said beliefs?

If so, then anything left of, or different from, a white, god fearing would be “cultural Marxism?”

[Saitou]

In the 1920’s several Marxist scholars first started forming theories about media. The aim of their studies was to explain the failure of the revolutionary movement and the rise of consumerism/capitalism. Scholars such as Adorno and Horkheimer theorized that media and cultural industry system are enslaved to the capitalist system: the don’t inform, but reshape peoples minds. Media leads people to believe and accept their [difficult] social conditions. (In short: media are supreme and omnipotent, people are passive; meaning media can inject their influence into society and manipulate it directly.)

Since then in the cultural studies has moved on from these theories and Marxist roots (though some concepts still remain). There still is a post-Marxist branch of culture studies that believes research should be carried out into meanings. For them culture is understood as being actively produced through complex processes, the production of meaning that happens at every level of the social and at every moment within cultural processes. They believe that in industrial societies dominant groups try to defend their interests with the aim of preserving the existing social structure (through hegemony) This results in a minor social struggle as every group wants to see its own interests served by society as a whole. The questions that define this particular branch of cultural studies are: what meaning is being construed, why this particular meaning and how does this particular meaning relate to power, knowledge, identity.

From what I can see these right-wing groups often see this branch of post-Marxism (these “cultural Marxist”) as representing the whole of cultural studies and blame them for propagating social constructivism and anti-essentialism (the believe that properties possessed are not universal; by claiming Christians are not by definition superior these cultural Marxist define Islamist are their equals) Furthermore it are the liberals who control the media and through it demand to be served by society as a whole. (In short they embrace the same believes about culture as these so called “cultural Marxist” they hate)

[Gyrate]

[nm]

[BrainGlutton]

@Acid_Lamp

Brainglutton, bear with me here for a moment.

If I understand this correctly, This is a term that started it’s life as an academic intellectual exercise and has been co-opted since into firstly: a sort of nebulous conspiracy theory touted by nationalists, racists, and homophobes and has ended up secondly: as a catch all phrase used by the far right to criticize anyone cynical of said beliefs?

If so, then anything left of, or different from, a white, god fearing would be “cultural Marxism?”

Apparently.

[BrainGlutton]

Now, the parties who use “Cultural Marxism” that way do purport to perceive a connection between that and 1960s New Left – a movement abominable to social conservatives but rather reassuring to economic conservatives (as it shifted the focus of “Left” away from workers’ control of factories and such, and toward racial and gender equality and such). I would be surprised if Cultural Marxism were not one of several influences on the New Left, but, so what? The New Left arguably achieved some of the most reasonable of its goals and then it just . . . went away. What does it matter now?

[elucidator]

Cultural Marxism is so last year. Sharia Law is the hot number.

[RickJay]

Sharia Law is so 2008.

You’ve got to anticipate the trends, and I predict the next one will be “job creator oppression.” I’m not sure what one word term they’ll use for it, but you’ll see. Soon “hatred of the job creators,” e.g. the rich, will be the new Fox News thing.

“Classism” is too old. They’ll come up with a new word.

[elucidator]

I hope its not “Kill the hippies!” again. Can’t run as fast as I used to.

[Jas09]

I think the Norwegian dude killed “Cultural Marxism” for good - it was all over his manifesto.

[Der_Trihs]

@Jas09

I think the Norwegian dude killed “Cultural Marxism” for good - it was all over his manifesto.

That assumes that the people who use the term disapprove of what he did. Killings by the anti-abortionist extremists certainly haven’t led to the movement changing its rhetoric. Much of the Right likes the idea of mass murdering its opponents.

[John_Mace]

Is this unique to the European, nativist, right? I’ve never heard this term in an American context, although the first time I ever heard it was on this MB in the last few months thanks to one of our new Guests.

[SherwoodAnderson]

“Cultural Marxism”, as it is used within e.g. the Counter-Jihad movement (Pamella Geller, Robert Spenser, David Horowitz, Fjordman et al) is a rebranding of what is more commonly known as the Frankfurt School (a marxist branch of culture studies). The rebranding as “Cultural Marxism” was as far as I understand it made by american value/christian conservatives in the 1990s. Specifically by the Free Congress Foundation.

Here’s the part from that Wikipedia article that is relevant wrt Cultural Marxism:

[The Free Congress Foundation] has also been willing to spark controversy on other fronts. It rejects what it calls Political Correctness, dubbing it “cultural Marxism” and blaming it on the Frankfurt School of left-wing thinkers. Accordingly, it has been more willing than many other conservative groups to endorse or entertain views that some, especially on the left, would consider offensive and evidence of bigotry. It is arguably hostile to Islam as a whole, rather than confining its criticism to extremist Islam or Islamism. With regard to Judaism, in his column of April 13, 2001 (Good Friday) titled Indeed, He is Risen!, Weyrich argued that “Christ was crucified by the Jews… He was not what the Jews had expected so they considered Him a threat. Thus He was put to death.”

In that modern sense “Cultural Marxism” is really a conspiracy theory where Cultural Marxists (understood as a secret cabaal) have imposed values like tolerance, equality and multiculturalism on modern society. Those values in the aggregate are called “political correctness”.

This youtube video from the Free Congress Foundation (which RaleighReilly posted in the thread on cultural marxism destroying contemporary sweden) is a good introduction.

That conspiracy theory has then apparently spread from the US to various european xenophobic/racist/conservative organizations and individuals, e.g. Anders Breivik.

[BrainGlutton]

@John_Mace

Is this unique to the European, nativist, right? I’ve never heard this term in an American context, although the first time I ever heard it was on this MB in the last few months thanks to one of our new Guests.

American paleocons transplanted it here; see post #5.

[SherwoodAnderson]

I might add that the William S. Lind mentioned by BrainGlutton above is the guy speaking in the Youtube video and is currently serving as director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism, within the larger Free Congress Foundation.

Also taking note that Breivik, while describing his own political convictions in his Manifest 2083, defines himself as a “Cultural Conservative” which is probably not by accident.

[Der_Trihs]

@SherwoodAnderson

In that modern sense “Cultural Marxism” is really a conspiracy theory where Cultural Marxists (understood as a secret cabaal) have imposed values like tolerance, equality and multiculturalism on modern society.

How nefarious of them!