# Can someone define "Cultural Marxism" Please? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 25, 2011, 1:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262 "2011-07-25T13:26:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2012, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/121 "2012-07-13T23:05:19Z")
> [@OnePercent](#): > > Actually political correctness does have a marxist goal at its heart and here is the proof: “white trash”. It is perfectly acceptable to for anyone anywhere at anytime to openly label people as “white trash”, the term appears in the MSM frequently and leftist columnists and commenters use it with reckless abandon. Contrast that phrase with a similar disparaging phrase for blacks, hispanics, asians, or any other group and the hypocrisy is apparent. This is cultural marxism in action. Given that the term white trash originated around the time that Marx was a teenager, (long before he published any ideas), and underwent a change of meaning utterly divorced from its cultural roots without any effort by any Left wing pundits, (it was pretty mucha Right wing expression among whites when it changed meaning and remains so, today), trying to blame it on “cultural Maxism” is rather like blaming Catholics for spreading the use of “papist” as an epithet. ---
**Author:** ![Chuck11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Chuck11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chuck11)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2012, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/122 "2012-07-13T23:54:09Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Similarly, if someone wanted to discuss the philosophies of a few now dead academics who embraced “cultural Marxism,” I might choose to participate in those discussions in the same way that I would discuss Athenian Democracy or other long departed social trends. Yet Pericles isn’t living. [Jurgen Habermas](http://mises.org/journals/jls/19_2/19_2_3.pdf) is. So it makes sense to speak of contemporaneous Cultural Marxists, assuming we grant Habermas that status. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2012, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/123 "2012-07-14T00:31:17Z")
> [@Chuck11](#): > > Yet Pericles isn’t living. [Jurgen Habermas](http://mises.org/journals/jls/19_2/19_2_3.pdf) is. So it makes sense to speak of contemporaneous Cultural Marxists, assuming we grant Habermas that status. Feel free to discuss Habermas, but realize that branding him a “cultural Marxist” is simply using a stock phrase fom his opponents to marginalize his more complex discussions. I don’t even often agree with him, but it seems pretty clear that his “Marxist” influence has rather more to do with dialectic than with attacking bourgeoisie. At any rate, he is certainly not out promoting the sort of bumper-sticker revolution that people condemning “cutural Marxism” fear. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2012, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/124 "2012-07-14T15:21:07Z")
> [@Chuck11](#): > > The same holds for “cultural marxist.” The point again is that there is a neutral usage of the term. And, if there’s one source that’s bound to use a term neutrally, it’s VDare. :dubious: ---
**Author:** ![wildorchid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/82dd89/32.png) [@wildorchid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wildorchid)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2012, 1:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/125 "2012-12-24T01:11:56Z")
when you randomly ask someone “do you believe in a central bank?; …in heavy income taxes? …in compulsory gov’t run public ‘education’? …in farm subsidies? …is gov’t control of labor?” and you hear a resounding ‘of course i do.’ (…and you will) it’s the result of cultural Marxism. they sure haven’t read Marxs communist manifesto, or are familiar with it’s 10 planks, or have even _heard_ of Karl Marx, and they may even recoil from the word ‘communist’ but they just agreed with it 100%. why? how did this phenomenon happen? people agreeing with what amounts to a very violent, almost anti-human philosophy without ever recalling being presented with it as such, much less adopting it? VOILA! Cultural Marxism!! …and this is exactly what the Frankfurt school set out to accomplish: they know that people would’nt accept Marxism at face value. they knew people found it ‘icky’ when it was presented to them straightforwardly and plainly. They did know that people are very suggestible, and that through the medium of popular culture the ideas and values of Marxism could be introduced, and core American values, like individuality, oppurtunity, self-reliance, ect… could be gradually removed from the population. They used infiltrators (ie. professors) in the public university systems to spread this trend throughout the culture, and it goes on in public schooling, too. just ask kids today if they prefer the idea of a world gov’t or keeping nat’l sovereignty/ borders, and if their white colonist ancestors were blood-thirsty killers that came here to ‘steal the Indians land’, and see what answers you get overwhelmingly. See, after WWI it had become apparent that _hard Marxism_, or communism established through violent upheaval of the prole masses against their oppressors was’nt going to ever come off (they werent falling for it), so the Frankfurt school came up with plan B, which was achieving the **same end goal** through the slow and incremental means of deception, demoralization, subterfuge, and the manipulation of impressionable people through culture, and ‘critical theory’. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2012, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/126 "2012-12-24T01:46:21Z")
**wildorchid** , could you give us an example of a genuine human who would engage in the the sort of rhetoric that you are describing? There are certainly genuine Marxists around, (although fewer now than prior to 1989), but the question concerns Cultural Marxism and you appear to have created a portrait of an imaginary person and then slapped the “Cultural Marxist” label of that figment of your imagination. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2012, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/127 "2012-12-24T03:15:45Z")
President Obama, of course! ---
**Author:** ![wildorchid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/82dd89/32.png) [@wildorchid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wildorchid)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2012, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/128 "2012-12-24T19:58:43Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > **wildorchid** , could you give us an example of a genuine human who would engage in the the sort of rhetoric that you are describing? > > There are certainly genuine Marxists around, (although fewer now than prior to 1989), but the question concerns Cultural Marxism and you appear to have created a portrait of an imaginary person and then slapped the “Cultural Marxist” label of that figment of your imagination. try it yourself: ask a random american: “do you believe in income tax? in a central bank? in govt run compulsory education? ect…” and when they answer ‘yes’, you have a Marxist who has become a Marxist (they just agreed w/ the planks of the communist manifesto having never read it). they agree with it because its become a part of our culture. how did this happen? well, the Frankfurt school openly tried to achieve this from Columbia University. In 1991 Gorbachev started the ‘State of the World’ forum in San Francisco. I live there, and almost everyone describes themselves as socialist’ now. they aren’t referring to the socialism of adolf hitler (national socialism), or of the socialism that Mao practiced when he killed 80 million of his own people, or Stalin when he killed 7 million. they are referring to a warm fuzzy version of socialism? they don’t care, really because they mostly don’t know the nightmarish history of socialism. I went to public schools, and a public University and got taught socailist writers over and over and was NEVER TOLD they were hard-core socialists: George Bernard Shaw (founded fabian society), Erich Fromm, Franz Boas, Margeret Mead… why did my teachers not mention their socialist/ communist credentials? because Cultural Marxism relies on it being undercover. thats the idea of it: Marxism presented honestly will get rejected. They have to ‘sneak it’ in. ---
**Author:** ![wildorchid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/82dd89/32.png) [@wildorchid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wildorchid)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2012, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/129 "2012-12-24T20:10:21Z")
‘a rose by any other name’, right? just because someone doesnt or wouldnt describe themselves as a Marxist doesnt mean they arent essentially one in principle, If you ask them if they are a Marxist, and they say ‘no’, which sounds reasonable since they have never read Marx, but then they agree with all of Marxs ideas, which they have absorbed through popular culture, then they are an unwitting Marxist. that was the goal of the Frankfurt school; look into it yourself: to create a nation of UNWITTING MARXISTS. which is what we have. look at articles from RT: [http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/19-11-2012/122849-obama\_soviet\_mistake-0/](http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/19-11-2012/122849-obama_soviet_mistake-0/) Obama is the darling of the UK Fabian Society, too. their journal sings his praises. the fabians had a similar strategy for spreading communism; do it gradually, and do it through popular culture. now are you going to tell me that they arent real either. Frankfurt School: FACT Fabian Society: FACT are you suggesting these arent real?? ---
**Author:** ![Docta\_G](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/2bfe46/32.png) [@Docta\_G](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Docta_G)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2012, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/130 "2012-12-24T20:17:42Z")
OMG, they’re under his bed. ---
**Author:** ![wildorchid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/82dd89/32.png) [@wildorchid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wildorchid)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2012, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/131 "2012-12-24T20:29:53Z")
look at history: Americans didn’t believe in a central bank. Thats a big reason we started this country, to get away from the central bankers, and their influence. Jacob Schiff, founding member of the federal reserve bank helped fund the bolshevik revolution in Russia just years after the formation of the fed along w/ the Warburgs, and Kuhn and Loeb, co. (historical facts)… Tolstoy was supported by the Rockefellers and prepared in NYC to start revolution in Russia. now, (almost) everyone loves the fed here. call it Stockholm Syndrom, or the result of Cultural Marxism, whatever… semantics… i would appreciate some worthy arguments, instead ofthe weak invective and name calling that i’ve seen so far. (even from mods??) ---
**Author:** ![wildorchid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/82dd89/32.png) [@wildorchid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wildorchid)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2012, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/132 "2012-12-24T20:50:21Z")
Fabian Society journal from 2009 celebrating Obamas first election. obv they view him as ‘one of their own’? [http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/pdf/Mediated-Public-Spaces/TheChangeWeNeed.pdf](http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/pdf/Mediated-Public-Spaces/TheChangeWeNeed.pdf) but if you use the world ‘socialist’ it’s called into question. clueless… see, people don’t even know what it is that they believe in. They are illiterate cultural parrots, and socialism/ collectivism/ communism is the ‘cool’ thing. just don’t call it by it’s real name… ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2012, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/133 "2012-12-24T20:54:52Z")
Your effort to infiltrate our community of right-thinking patriots has been detected. You left out the Rothschilds. Comrade. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2012, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/134 "2012-12-24T21:58:48Z")
> [@wildorchid](#): > > when you randomly ask someone “do you believe in a central bank?; …in heavy income taxes? …in compulsory gov’t run public ‘education’? …in farm subsidies? …is gov’t control of labor?” > and you hear a resounding ‘of course i do.’ (…and you will) > it’s the result of cultural Marxism. Nonsense. We had all those things before the Frankfurt School existed, and we had them because the public approved of them. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2012, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/135 "2012-12-24T22:00:34Z")
> [@wildorchid](#): > > I went to public schools, and a public University and got taught socailist writers over and over and was NEVER TOLD they were hard-core socialists: > George Bernard Shaw (founded fabian society), Erich Fromm, Franz Boas, Margeret Mead… > why did my teachers not mention their socialist/ communist credentials? Probably because they wanted to be allowed to continue teaching them. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2012, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/136 "2012-12-24T22:03:04Z")
> [@wildorchid](#): > > Obama is the darling of the UK Fabian Society, too. their journal sings his praises. So does the Communist Party USA, given the alternatives; that does not make Obama a Communist or a socialist or even much of a liberal. (You **do** understand that, don’t you?) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2012, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/137 "2012-12-24T22:08:23Z")
> [@wildorchid](#): > > look at history: Americans didn’t believe in a central bank. Thats a big reason we started this country, to get away from the central bankers, and their influence. 😕 No. The Bank of England had very little to do with it; what frightened our FFs was the English ruling class. From [_The American Way of Strategy,_](http://www.amazon.com/American-Way-Strategy-Michael-Lind/dp/0195308379/sr=8-1/qid=1166282273/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-9788122-0265632?ie=UTF8&s=books) by Michael Lind: > [@](#): > > Many people remember vaguely that the American Revolution had something to do with taxes. A few remember that the issue was whether the power to tax lay with London or the American colonies. But this was a surrogate for the real issue: preserving the American way of life. > > In the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, the British colonists in North America developed a distinctive way of life quite different from that of their British cousins. Something like Britain’s aristocratic society endured in the South and parts of the Northeast. But in general, colonial society was characterized by a degree of middle-class prosperity and widespread property ownership unknown in any other society in the world. Not only were America’s yeoman farmers, artisans, and merchants better off than most Britons and Europeans, but also the cost of government was much lower. > > The trouble began in the aftermath of the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War) of 1754-63. The British imperial government insisted that the colonists pay more of the costs of their own defense. The colonists, however, feared that the London parliament was trying to destroy the system of colonial self-government that had grown up in the preceding generations. They remembered that the London parliament had destroyed the Scottish parliament in 1707 (it would eliminate the Irish parliament in 1801). They feared that the same thing was now happening to them. They would pay ever higher taxes, even as their colonial assemblies lost authority to the London parliament. As a result, British North America might come to resemble Ireland or Scotland, impoverished countries where absentee landlords held vast tracts of land and where major decisions were made by well-connected aristocrats and merchants in London with little or no accountability to the people whom they ruled. > > \ > > This history may be familiar but the point is not. For Americans, the independence of the United States from Britain and its organization as a democratic republic was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end was the safeguarding of the communal right to self-government and the individual liberties that the British settlers in America had already enjoyed for generations under British rule. Americans adopted their own strategy for defending the American way of life against imperial centralization – independence as a democratic republic – only because their first choice, self-government within a federal monarchical empire, was rejected. Democratic republicanism and national independence were only two of several possible methods for preserving what by 1776 was the traditional American way of life, characterized by personal liberty, widespread property ownership, low taxes, and an inexpensive military. > [@wildorchid](#): > > Jacob Schiff, founding member of the federal reserve bank helped fund the bolshevik revolution in Russia just years after the formation of the fed along w/ the Warburgs, and Kuhn and Loeb, co. (historical facts)… Tolstoy was supported by the Rockefellers and prepared in NYC to start revolution in Russia. :dubious: You’re **really** gonna have to provide a cite for all that. > [@wildorchid](#): > > now, (almost) everyone loves the fed here. call it Stockholm Syndrom, or the result of Cultural Marxism, whatever… semantics… Actually, it is because since the Fed was founded, we have had far fewer financial crises per decade than we had before. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2012, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/138 "2012-12-25T00:47:29Z")
The notion that things like a central bank, income taxes, and public schools are Marxism could only be believed by an insane person. Marxists believe in complete government ownership of the means of production, rule by a revolutionary vanguard, the impossibility of peaceful transition to socialism and the necessity for revolution, and so on. You know, the sort of thing that happened in the Russian revolution. Capitalists and aristocrats lined up against the wall and shot, forced collectivization of the means of production, dictatorship of the proletariat, suppression of all non-communist political parties, and on and on. It used to mean something to be scared of the Marxist boogey-man. If you’re scared that public schools and the Federal Reserve and hurting conservative’s feelings are communism, then good luck to you. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2012, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/139 "2012-12-25T02:01:58Z")
> [@wildorchid](#): > > try it yourself: No. You made the argument; you provide the examples and citations to support the examples. (Most of the silliness posted under your name in this thread is just wrong, either because it factually never happened or because your explanation of events that did happen are incorrect. I am not going to exert the effort to disprove a slew of errors until I see some concrete facts to address. ---
**Author:** ![wildorchid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/82dd89/32.png) [@wildorchid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wildorchid)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2012, 2:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262/140 "2012-12-25T02:12:26Z")
[http://laissez-fairerepublic.com/tenplanks.html](http://laissez-fairerepublic.com/tenplanks.html) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob\_Schiff](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schiff) [http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF\_Books/WallStreetCommieRevolution.pdf](http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/WallStreetCommieRevolution.pdf) Anthony Sutton (Hoover Institute Stanford) cited^^^ That international banking cartels would fund and foment communism should actually come as no surprise if one knows history, and philosophy. Bankers have been creating arbitrary enemies, arming governments against each other, and creating debt slaves since ancient Babylon (5000 years)… this is nothing new. Dirty tricks like funding the bolshevik revolution is exactly the province of intl bankers like Schiff (a german btw). Hegels dialectic describes the problem-reaction-solution method of indirectly achieving a goal which would never have flown on it’s own. The intentional creation of a problem gets a public who would never have accepted, much less endorsed the pre-determined _solution_ to the contrived problem, to do just that because of their predictable reaction to the problem, the solution is what was intended to be imposed in the first place… manipulation; kids stuff really. If a football team ran the same play like this over and over season after season, no one would fall for it, yet we seem to never gather anything from history. Hitlers’ ‘enabling act’ is a perfect example of the hegelian dialectic in action, and history has shown that they did indeed light up the Reichstag fire on purpose, swaying the public to accept the lose of their rights, and the promotion of a more collectivist state. We can’t just dismiss things because we didn’t learn it in public schools. there is plenty that got left out on purpose. what gets left in is a lot of socialist garbage; Boas, Mead, Fromm (but hush hush about their communism) (That’s another one i can easily site, the merger of the education systems of the US and the USSR under Reagan). I was taught George Bernard Shaw in high school honors english; no mention that he founded the Fabian socialists, or about his anti-human tirades like this: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBZsTf6oLfY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBZsTf6oLfY) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262.md?page=6) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-someone-define-cultural-marxism-please/590262.md?page=8)