the traditional Marxist Klassenkampf was to be entirely replaced by a neo-Marxist Kulturkampf.[1]
Are there any people in academia that are Marxists and want to influence culture more through e.g. education as opposed to direct armed revolutionary political means like Lenin? If so, how are they not cultural Marxists?
‘Cultural Marxism’ is a term that has at least since 1981 been used to refer to Marxist or Post-Marxist authors' ideas of reaching some of the goals projected by Karl Marx through cultural influence (such as Education) rather than direct political action such as in 1917 Russia. "the Frankfurt School reconstructed the basic premises of Marxism and is clearly not reducible to Marxist historical materialism." Gottfried14
In this case I had to share the spotlight with my friend of many years, Bill Lind, who is introduced in Wikipedia as a one-time spokesman for the Free Congress Foundation and a reviewer of my book The Strange Death of European Marxism. Just about everything ascribed to the two of us in the entry is inexcusably misleading. Neither one of us has argued that there is a Frankfurt School or Cultural Marxist “conspiracy.” Indeed we have stressed the opposite view, namely, that certain Frankfurt School social teachings have become so widespread and deeply ingrained that they have shaped the dominant post-Christian ideology of the Western world.
— Paul Gottfried, 2014, Philosopher, historian
The term "Cultural Marxism" is becoming part of the common parlance now, especially as people like Jordan Peterson explain the links between Marxism, academia and postmodernism. I've never heard of a "conspiracy theory" called Cultural Marxism though, simply a phenomenon.
— anon, Wikipedia talk page, 2018
See differentially: Marxism & Cults.
Media[]
- 1981 «Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology» by Richard R. Weiner. "A thorough examination and analysis of the tensions between political sociology and the culturally oriented Marxism that emerged in the 60s and 70s is presented in this volume. In order to create a strikingly original synthesis, Weiner considers the work of theorists as diverse as Jurgen Habermas, Claus Offe, Alain Touraine, Anthony Giddens and Alvin Gouldner, many of whom fall ideologically outside the cultural Marxism movement."
- 1997 «Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain» by Dennis Dworkin "fills an especially acute need in the contemporary rassessment of the social roots and cultural contexts of avant-garde academic movements. . . . Dworkin assembles a convincing historical narrative of how a seemingly provisional reaction to the crisis of British welfare capitalism in the post-war period developed into a coherent and compelling subtradition of European Marxist social theory. . . . Dworkin’s new study manages to both creatively historicize a familiar—yet often misunderstood—recent academic and political formation as well as raise pressing methodological questions that cross the major disciplines of the human sciences.” — Alex Benchimol , Thesis Eleven
- Cultural Marxism: A survey Jérôme Jamin First published: 06 February 2018
"This paper examines Cultural Marxism as a regular theory in social sciences with its own history, and as a global conspiracy theory. It tries to locate and identify the exact moment the theory changed itself from a regular and well‐known knowledge in the field of cultural studies towards a key element used in multiple books and articles to explain the so‐called destruction of Western traditions and values. This paper also scrutinizes various usages of this conspiracy theory in politics, which is found more commonly within radical groups' speeches, rather than in mainstream conservative rhetoric's."
Criticism[]
Accusations of, and fuel to Anti-Jewry[]
the Hungarian Jewish Marxist Zoltan Tar famously accentuated the Jewish connection of his subjects. Tar treats the ideas of the School as a creative outgrowth of its members’ view of themselves as marginalized Jews in a Christian world. I’ve no idea why noting the obvious in this case turns one into a bigot. I myself have brought up Tar’s highly plausible thesis in discussing the development of the Frankfurt School worldview. Like Tar, I have done so as a research scholar, while being of the same ethnic origin as my subjects.
— Paul Gottfried, 2014
Conspiracy theory[]
Starting in the early 1990s, right-wing think tanks in both Germany and the United States began promoting conspiratorial narratives about critical theory. The conspiracies allege that, ever since the failure of “economic Marxism” in World War I, “neo-“ or “cultural Marxists” have infiltrated academia, media, and government. From inside, they have carried out a longstanding plan to overthrow Western civilization by criticizing Western culture and imposing “political correctness.” To the extent that it attaches to real historical figures, the story typically begins with Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács, goes through Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and other wartime émigrés to the United States, particularly those involved in state-sponsored mass media research, and ends abruptly with Herbert Marcuse and his influence on student movements of the 1960s (Moyn 2018; Huyssen 2017; Jay 2011; Berkowitz 2003).
— Moira Weigel, 2020[2]
Rhizomata[]
- Marxism; Leftism; Cultural engineering; Social engineering; Totalitarianism; Ideology; Neomarxism
- Cultural conflict; Cultural replacement
- «The Protocols of the Elders of Zion»; Fabianism; Illuminism; Freemasonry
- Capitalist Realism
References