It is not egalitarianism. Economic marxism was the belief that the capitalist class needed to be overthrown and the system that led them to be in power overthrown. The end game was egalitarianism but first the old system needed to be destroyed. Cultural marxism is the same but replaces the capitalist class by white heterosexual men. They believe that society’s rules were created by them for their own benefit and the only way to get to egalitarianism is to first destroy the rules that the evil white men have used to keep every one else down. Once the old system is destroyed then egalitarianism can be achieved.
“Economic marxism” is just a theory of a Stateless society.
“Cultural marxism” is non-sensical as anything but a propaganda tool to justify fascism.
The myth that there is even a real tangible thing that is “white men” is what is the target to be destroyed, not the system.
Even if “Cultural marxism” was a real thing, please explain how “the old system need to be destroyed” to reach egalitarianism, or a state where people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities? Or is a system that throws people who happen to not match the current, changing definition of “white” under the bus the “old system” in your argument?
Because I am having a hard time finding any real way to apply this with marxism, and it seems to apply more to the theory of social contract that was imperfectly implemented by the american and french revolutions.
Are you saying that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” is a marxist ideal?
Marxism is a stage theory. The stages as I understand them are feudalism, capitalism, dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally communism. Marxism is the science of how to get to communism and the stateless society.
Marx spent very little time in describing feudalism, dictatorship of the proletariat, or communism. Most of his work deals with capitalism and why it is going to be replaced. His theory was that the contradiction within capitalism was that there were several classes, the proletariat, the bourgeois, and the capitalists. All of history, economics, and culture was produced by the war between the classes over the economy. All of the government forms, ideals, and morality were superstructure and the underlying structure were the economic interests of each class. Because capitalism tended toward monopoly it would inevitably produce a situation where the tiny capitalist class would receive more and more and everyone else less and less until violent revolution was inevitable. When this happened the capitalists would be exterminated and then the proletariat would rule. After this the state would wither away and true communism would be achieved.
Cultural marxism is the belief that class could be replaced with race, gender, and sexual preference. Thus the white men have created a system that is designed to benefit them and the ideals and ideas that justify them are just superstructure. The real reason things are set up the way they are is to perpetuate the power of white men. Because the system is set up to benefit white men the only way to help women or black people is to first destroy the system and then set up a new one in its place. This is where such ideas as Smash the Patriarchy or heteronormativity or systemic racism come from. They are describing what they see as the system just as economic marxism used to fight capitalism, by which the meant the system designed to benefit capitalists at the expense of everyone else.
So it’s interesting at this point to note that Wikipedia refers to the “Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory” which is pretty much the only framing this thing deserves. It’s a conspiracy theory that suggests Marxism is somehow a foundational doctrine in the American cultural wars. You can read all the debunking in the article if you wish; it’s too much crazy for me to digest.
How is it not egalitarianism?
I guess it depends on the end goal. Is the end goal the subjugation of christian, hetero white men? Or is it just to create a system where non-christians, non-heteros, non-whites and non-men are on an equal footing with christian, hetero, white men?
95%+ of people who fight for social justice would agree with the latter goal. In my experience, only people who benefit from the current system and want to maintain it claim the goal is the former because that makes it easier for them to justify the system of privilege that gives them better outcomes.
Also the rules that have been used are both legal and social. Jim crow, stigma against gays and muslims, cultural attitudes about women in the workplace, laws limiting the number of jews who can attend college, etc. ‘Cultural marxists’ try to break down these legal and social constructs that keep the oppressed classes oppressed.
I don’t see how it isn’t egalitarianism. There is anger on the left here and there, but for the most part very few people fighting for social justice want to do to white christian hetero men who defend the power structure (because a lot of people who fit that description do not support the system either. Many liberals are white hetero men) what they do to others.
Limit their ability to get an education
Limit their ability to get a good job
Ban them from owning weapons
Ban them from freedom of assembly
Persecute their religion
Claim people of their religion shouldn’t be allowed to hold elected office
Increase the authoritarianism of law enforcement when they deal with them
Take away their voting rights
Use drug laws as an excuse to persecute them
etc
Very very few people on the left are seriously pushing for those things. Even when people say they are, they are usually saying them to make a point or in a moment of anger. I’ve mentioned how after a mass shooting involving a white man maybe we should pass laws making it much harder for white men to own guns. But I wasn’t being serious, i was making a point about how conservative white men, after a muslim commits an act of terrorism, claim that muslims deserve extra restrictions and observation. If the oppressed classes applied the same rules to people who endorse the power structure that the social elite endorse to people on the bottom, there’d be rioting in the streets by the social elites.
Black people who marched for civil rights weren’t marching to lock whites up in a ghetto, or to take away their right to vote, or to encourage the police to be more violent towards white people, or to limit white people to the lowest positions on the socioeconomic totem pole, or to make it legally risky for white people to defend themselves against black crime.
Presently it’s used to describe viewing most everything through a lens of oppressor vs. the oppressed. If you know people like that then I guess it is indeed a thing. I know I unfortunately do.
So you’ve defined cultural marxism. Now the next question we can ask is according your definition, does it exist? That is, are there people who believe in it? Would anyone in the world identify themselves as a cultural marxist, or is it only a label applied by others? Can you name any cultural marxists?
I don’t think that’s true. In his essay “Marx and Feminism”, Marcuse says that modern sexism and oppression against women is a function of modern capitalism, and that there’s no way to achieve social equality in a capitalist system. So for him, the system isn’t set up to perpetuate the power of men. That’s just a side effect of capitalism. And, he argues, the advances in feminism and the woman’s movement are due to economic and social factors. …free love and birth control, mechanization, reduction in heavy labor, and increased education.
I haven’t looked at at the other critical theorists, but I don’t think any of them spent much time worrying about feminism, gay rights, racism and so on. The impression I get is that they were against racism and sexism, but they viewed them in a fairly orthodox Marxist way…that they were byproducts of modern capitalism and that they’d disappear as society moved towards socialism.
Right the end goal is egalitarianism, but the way to do it is explicitly not. Thus to a marxist the capitalists were to be treated totally different than the proletariat until the system was destroyed and then everyone would be treated equally. Culturally we can see this in the debate about affirmative action. Egalitarianism would treat everyone the same and judge black students no differently than asian students. However, AA advocates say you first have to use it to restructure society so that whites are no longer advantaged and only then can asian students and black students be treated equally.
Historically the civil rights movement was not culturally marxist but increasingly it is.
It definitely exists and is growing in influence. However, almost no one would identify as a cultural marxist. They would identify as feminist, social justice advocate, or something similar. The movement has outgrown its origins. Just like millions of people do yoga without realizing its origins in Prussian calisthenics, many people have been influenced by the ideas of the cultural marxists without ever hearing the term.
Right, the failure of the Soviet Union and the obvious triumph of capitalism over communism inspired some people to reject the economic parts and embrace the cultural parts. Marxism and feminism was delivered in 1974 which was very close to the high water mark of communism in the world.
Today you can see the difference in how an old school socialist like Sanders was treated by BLM. In response to them protesting him, he said "“I think it is unfortunate because, among other things, I wanted to talk about the issues of black lives, the fact that the American people are tired of seeing unarmed African-Americans shot and killed, But there are other issues as well that we have to talk about, and that is the fact that the middle class of this country is disappearing and most importantly, we don’t bring change in this country… unless all people stand together. That is what we have to do.” That is the classic critique that capitalism oppresses everyone and all people need to stand together.
Contrast that with Hillary Clinton who is much more open about having her finger in the air. ““Not everything is about an economic theory, right?
If we broke up the big banks tomorrow—and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will—would that end racism? “Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” That is a the new critique, that class is not the dividing line but identity is.
The egalitarian end goal of BLM is to have people treated the same under the law, nothing more and nothing less. It is about removing systemic biases caused by the mythological concept of race.
The egalitarian end goal of BLM is to have people treated the same irrespective of their gender. It is nothing more and nothing less than a equal rights movement.
None of these methods are trying to move anything into a collective state except for equal rights.
Under this new definition the founding fathers were “Social Marxists”, even if they didn’t directly target the above groups.
Outside of groups who think that “white” is an actual biological trait (which it is not it is just a social construct) who else is asking for more than a level playing ground?
Uh, that would lead to the point that some leftists that do talk about the right nowadays would be correct when they call them fascists, and not just the cultural kind. 
While I do know that some misguided ones on the left indeed do, overall most of the ones on the left side of things do understand the difference between a Nazi, a fascist a neo fascist or a plain conservative.
Getting back to the issue, I really can not see how an idea that is considered a basic one (like equal rights for women) should be considered Cultural Marxism, it would be like identifying the dangers of smoking with Cultural Nazism. Just because the Nazis did identify something bad properly it does not mean that the modern understanding of being against tobacco smoke = Cultural Nazism.
So when you’re talking about Cultural Marxists, you mean people like Hillary Clinton.
Uh huh.
Can I have a cite for this that’s not a right-wing source? I couldn’t find this anywhere except the National Review.
Both the former and the latter are equally factual.
Here’s an interesting thing, I am a direct descendant of Charlamagne, I actually have my whole line traced up to him for all 42 generations.
But here is the thing, anyone with a drop of European blood is also directly descended from Charlamagne. In fact any person who was alive in the Middle East and Europe in the 900’s that has a living descendant is also a direct ancestor for you.
At 42 generations, Charlamagne is only one of 4,398,046,511,104 direct ancestors I have at that level, well except there weren’t trillions of people alive then so there was lots of inbreeding.
The concept of lineage past a few generations is completely flawed as the number of your direct ancestral paths grows exponentially.
You cannot select 1 path out of 4,398,046,511,104 while ignoring the rest. Every single one of with European ancestry is is a Direct descendant of all of the “sub-humans” no matter if that is Prussian, Basque, Kurd, all of the Indian subgroups, Arab, Finn’s etc…
If you claim that you are not you are basically admitting that your family line has been purely incestuous for trillions of births. But numerically that is just impossible that you don’t have these histories.
Note that the “European” segment is far worse than other parts of the world. In fact there is more genetic diversity in Siberia than there is in the entirety of Europe. Africans have more genetic diversity than the entire rest of the world population. And the genetic diversity of chimpanzees makes the human genome look tiny.
The common pop-scientific myths about a European culture are also based on the eugenicists flawed theories of the Nordic race. And that theory is fully discredited and not supported by modern genetics.
It isn’t even well defined, but I am mostly Finnish, and my great-grandfather had to sneak across the border because the US considered us Finn’s to be Asian and subject to the Asian exclusion act.
In fact the Nazi’s, who were based in the American eugenicists ideals, with Hitler plagiarizing from them in his book though that the Finn’s were equivalent to the Jews.
[
](Der Untermensch www.HolocaustResearchProject.org)
Yet today I would be laughed at if I said that I wasn’t white, or a part of the white culture that this movement is trying so hard to protect.
To be clear, I am in no way saying you are a Nazi, but this whole “Cultural Marxism” is a propaganda tool manufactured by people who are. It is a useful tool to convince far more noble individuals to fear change and to join their cause without phrasing it in a way that would be repugnant to these same people.
Mass movements need an ‘enemy’, and in this case it is the ‘destruction of the white race’
Here is a link to the wikipedia entry for the book I referenced above; the one that Hitler actually called his “bible”. If you browse it you will see these exact same themes packaged in a slightly less digestible format in this era.
Pay attention to this graphic specifically, and it will show the flawed concept of what was the “master race” which now has grown to include more in “white culture”.
If you go back to my SS propaganda quote above and think about the number of ancestors you have, we are all mulattos and there is no pure race even in the cultural sense. As I said before there is no biological basis for the concept of race so that is a given.
Edited to add:
The really funny thing is that the modern eugenicists claims on what makes up the “modern European” is actually closer to being African than the populations that were in Europe before their arrival with was very recent (around 10-60K years).
Not surprisingly, since it’s absolute rubbish. If you want a responsible research-based analysis of the history of modern yoga, try here.
It is true that the Victorian/Edwardian bodybuilder and physical-culture promoter Eugen Sandow had an enthusiastic following among physical-culture advocates in India, and that his exercise regimen was one of the physical-training systems that influenced the development of modern postural yoga.
But saying that yoga “originated” in Prussian calisthenics is kind of like saying that Indian cuisine “originated” in the importation of the potato to South Asia by Portuguese and British traders.
For a complete history you should read Mark Singleton’sYoga Body. For a taste of it here is a story by him in the yoga journal.
Briefly it shows how modern yoga was created by an Indian named Krishnamacharya out of the meditative practice traditional yoga combined with various European exercises that were popular at the time. One of his students taught it to a russian lady who brought it to the US.
A few things. First, Cultural Marxism is already a termfour a specific school of thought, and it’s one that has nothing to do with identity politics or the things you described. So calling the latter group cultural Marxists is just confusing and misleading.
Second, your definition is vague. Generally, you should call people what they want to be called, but as you said, nobody identifies themselves as a cultural Marxist. So who are the leaders and thinkers of the movement? Because, there is, for instance, Marxist Frminism. Shelia Rowbotham, for instance. Because, it seems like you’re just bringing together a lot of different parts of the new left and labeling it cultural Marxism.