CulturalMarxism
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Quora Answer : Who came up with the idea/conspiracy of Cultural Marxism?
It's been brewing for a while.
There's a core of truth to the idea that in the second part of the 20th century, Marxism, as an idea and body of work, was far more strongly taught and promoted in, and far more influential in, various types of "cultural studies", social sciences etc.
Whereas it had shrunk to a small corner of academic economics. (To their credit, academic economists tend to recognise that their discipline is under-determined enough by the evidence that there is room for alternative "heterodox" models.)
Marxism was also out of fashion and of minor interest to mainstream philosophy.
So "cultural studies" has been the bit of academia where Marx has, indeed, been most in evidence.
Unfortunately, the kind of people who worry about this are usually so hostile to both Marxism and the modern humanities / post-humanities that they tend to jumble everything up into a big ball of "what-we-don't-like-ness". (Including that Canadian guy that everyone seems to love at the moment and who is probably responsible for all these Quora questions about neo-Marxism.)
Their criticisms of both Marxism and the humanities end up being vague, uninformed, and usually attacking straw-men.
I first came across the idea of "Cultural Marxism" from William Lind, a guy I have some respect for, in the context of his military, "fourth generation war" thinking. As far as I can tell, he's from what used to be called the "paleo-conservatives". These were strong social conservatives in the US, who rejected both the "neo-con" military adventurism of the Bush Iraq-war years and gung-ho neoliberal economic globalization. They held strongly conservative Christian values and valued stability and order highly. But were not necessarily racist or xenophobic. They often advocated isolation and mutual, disengaged respect as the policy for the US's interaction with other cultures. They seemed fairly "live and let live" conservatives as long as their values governed in their own locality.
[Update : I just read a bit of Lind's novel via the link below. I change my opinion, the guy is a full on racist in a way I hadn't seen in his writing before.]
Obviously these conservatives identified the radicalism and fervour to challenge and undermine existing order, as a common thread in all branches of modern humanities, and saw all as their enemy. I believe they were the ones raising the banner of Cultural conservatism against what they saw as cultural Marxism. Lind even ran the Centre for Cultural Conservatism at some point.
Ten or twenty years later, this current in conservative thinking has been pulled into, first the alt.right, where it's been blended with a much stronger racist / white supremacist / nativist ideals. And now brought fully mainstream by Breitbart and Trump.
See Donald Trump Meets William S. Lind
Related :
Phil Jones (He / Him)'s answer to As a liberal, what do you think the alt-right is right about?
Good Twitter thread : https://twitter.com/deonteleologist/status/1666598377591824384
Also at https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1666598377591824384.html
Quora Answer : When people look at the situation of the world, how can they deny that cultural Marxism exists?
Because it's an incredibly vague, broad-brushed claim.
To the degree that it's "true", it's more or less equivalent to saying "Marx was a very influential thinker and writer, and much 19th and 20th century intellectual work, in economics, sociology, cultural studies, humanities, philosophy, the arts, political activism etc. has been influenced by him in one way or another".
Well ... er .... yeah. That's true. But, so what?
Lots of big thinkers have been influential. That's why we label them big thinkers.
No-one denies Marx is a big thinker and has had influence on the intellectual scene. That's not a "Gotcha!"
But the moment the "Cultural Marxism" accusers start trying to firm up their claim. Or to drill down and make more specific points, eg. about how or who is influenced, then suddenly they're all over the place.
Either it just becomes a salad of rants against anything they don't like in contemporary thinking, whether it's historical relativism, or socialism, or women's rights or political correctness etc. etc.
Or the targets of attack are so blurred together that you can't really find any kind of interesting criticism.
The way people who complain about "Cultural Marxism" talk, it's like, having found that a thinker was "influenced by Marx", they just found the mark of original sin, or witchcraft and it's off to the inquisition for Marxist thought-crimes.
But that's not how you should do this at all.
Popper's "The Open Society and its Enemies", Deleuze and Guattari's "Capitalism and Schizophrenia", and Baudrillard's "The Mirror of Production" are all books which have the following characteristics.
- They are "influenced by Marx"
- They say positive things about Marx.
- They think some of Marx's ideas are right. And some are wrong.
But to say that tells you nothing until you drill down and see what they were actually saying about Marx, what they think is right and wrong in his work. And how they critiqued or adapted his model.
Popper is lauded by the right-wing as the leading anti-Marxist philosopher of his times. He was Margaret Thatcher's favourite philosopher. Right-wingers love to hold up Popper against Marx (or at least they did when they still had some intellectual credibility and weren't just relying on YouTubers for their arguments)
Deleuze and Guattari are the leading thinkers of, and (depending on your perspective), some of the worst examples of "post-Modernism".
Baudrillard is very much a French Post-modernist too. But is considered hardcore "anti-Marxist" despite writing about and developing and critiquing ideas that Marx first kicked off.
You'd be a fool if you dismissed The Open Society and its Enemies based on my previous statement that it's "influenced by Marx" and thinks "some of Marx is right". It's one of the most important anti-Marxist works of the 20th century.
And yet you are probably willing to dismiss Deleuze or Baudrillard or "Post-Modernism" on just as little evidence. Having heard that they are post-modern and influenced by Marx, you immediately assume they are part of the "Cultural Marxist" conspiracy. Despite knowing nothing of how they engaged Marx and critiqued his ideas.
THAT is why we don't take people ranting about "Cultural Marxism" seriously.
Because they don't know enough about either Marx or Cultural Theory to say anything serious or make any interesting or valid criticisms of them.
Related :
Phil Jones (He / Him)'s answer to Who came up with the idea/conspiracy of Cultural Marxism?
Phil Jones (He / Him)'s answer to Why do cultural Marxists say that cultural Marxism doesn't exist?
Quora Answer : Why do cultural Marxists say that cultural Marxism doesn't exist?
I'm not going to be as emphatic as Linus Skov. Although he's right.
But even with the most generous interpretation possible, "cultural Marxism" is a term invented by people who are enemies of Marxism AND of most socially liberal developments in recent decades AND of trends in modern thinking, and who have concocted "Cultural Marxism" as a unifying explanation / criticism for them all. It's steeped in their world-view rather than in the world-view of anyone who is any of Marxist, socially liberal or a participant in mainstream cultural analysis.
That doesn't mean it's automatically wrong. Sometimes the enemies of something have the best understanding of that thing. (It would, of course, be ironic for Marxists to reject such a possibility ;-)
But it's clearly dependent on a lot of assumptions that no Marxist would recognise as being true.
Related :
Phil Jones (He / Him)'s answer to Who came up with the idea/conspiracy of Cultural Marxism?
Quora Answer : What does the expression "Cultural Marxism" have to do with Karl Marx? What if anything is there in his writings or speeches that can be used to imply that he would have approved of what is being done under the theme of political correctness today?
So, as everyone else is going to point out shortly, when they discover this question, "Cultural Marxism" is a catch-all term invented by a bunch of right-wing reactionaries intended to discredit all kinds of social progressivisms, like feminism, anti-racism and LGBTx rights by pretending that they're all part of conspiracy dreamed up by Stalin to enervate and bring down Western Christian civilization.
That's true. But let's put it aside for a minute.
Marx is indeed a historically major thinker because he did transform the way that people thought about politics.
Before Marx politics was mainly about who was in power. There were good rulers and bad rulers. And politics was all about replacing the bad rulers with good rulers. (Whatever your perspective was.)
Marx, though, argued something different. For Marx, politics and power wasn't about who wore the crown or who was in government. Marx identified the true origin of power, and the locus of political struggle for power, in the economy. In the everyday production of food and goods and services that we all need.
Politics and power, for Marx, wasn't something that happened only in a detached sphere occupied by a special political class. It was something that everyone participated in; everyone was (whether they like it or not) caught up in it. Politics was the struggle over the organization of everyday life.
For Marx that organization was mainly about production and economics. But he did recognise that it also included the "reproduction" of new human beings within the organization of the family. And to an extent, the organization of leisure and consumption.
What has happened since then is that progressive politics of all kinds does, indeed, follow that fundamental Marxist insight. Or to put it another way, Marx's change of perspective is a "Copernican Revolution" in the way that we think about politics. Taking it away from a political class and putting it in the hands of everybody.
So feminists don't just worry about trying to have a queen rather than a king on the throne. Which is what a "pre-Marxist" feminism might concern itself with. Instead feminists worry about how men and women interact on the street and social media and in the bedroom.
Anti-racists don't just worry about whether there's an institution of slavery. But whether ethnic minorities are passed over in job interviews or discriminated against in school.
LGBTx campaigners point out how everyday practices like the derogative use of the word "gay" are microaggressions that add up to systematic prejudices.
All of these are concerns that come after Marx's "Copernican Revoltion" in politics. And would be unimaginable without it.
All modern progressivisms are, in some sense, influenced by Marxism. As is any plausible modern politics.
Related :
Quora Answer : What exactly are "cultural Marxism" and "postmodern Neo-Marxism"?
They aren't anything very much.
The reality is ...
This dude called Marx was a major thinker of the 19th century. EVERYBODY read and thought and argued about him. He is a major cultural influence in modern western society.
He's also pretty controversial. Some people HATE him.
So today, a bunch of people who don't like him, have rather weirdly and foolishly decided to start a culture war to try to expunge him from cultural history. They now assert that any intellectual school of thought that has at any time engaged with Marx (which is pretty much all of them), is "influenced by" and is therefore a closet form of "Marxism". And that anyone doing cultural analysis is a closet "Marxist"
So ... cultural theories from the Frankfurt School, to the existentialists, to the post-structuralists to the post-modernists and many others today ALL have Marx in their reference list.
So now these critics have decided that all cultural studies are part of The Great Marxist Conspiracy, even the many flavours of post-modernism which are completely inconsistent with and incompatible with Marxism.
Seriously, you're now hearing people argue that "well, even if technically post-modernism doesn't say the same things as Marxism, it's like Marxism because it makes young people rebellious and question the values of their elders. It plays the same role."
Because, yeah, without Marx, young people would never have rebelliously questioned their elders.
That's how much of a joke this thing has become.
These days when I see the words "Cultural Marxism" I automatically translate them into "New Fangled" because basically that's all that "Cultural Marxism" means to its critics : "These are thoughts that are new, different and confusing and I don't like them."
Quora Answer : Was it Jordan Peterson who started the disinformation campaign that claims post-structuralism is the new Marxism? What exactly is the agenda of misinterpreting PS literature that is largely confined to academia?
He's a guy who has popularized it.
It's a much older conspiracy theory. For example William Lind and Paul Weyrich who were pushing it earlier than anyone even heard of Peterson : Cultural Marxism-William S. Lind