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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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You mean academic singular. I watched this happen in real time. The extreme right-wing types that desperately wanted to put the cultural marxism myth on to wikipedia were having a hard time with power users and their citation gatekeeping. Eventually someone just went to google scholar and found a book with the title Cultural Marxism from the 80s or 90s from some literal who. Not a single conservative I've seen citing this "proof" has read said book, that I know of. Nor has any serious Marxist. Nor have I. There might be others, I don't know, since culture and marxism are two very popular buzzwords for overproduced academic hacks, but no serious Marxist has ever talked about such things. This might not be obvious to you, but trust me, It's really obvious to me because I am actually somewhat familiar with this ground.

  1. Whether the Cultural Marxists call themselves Cultural Marxists or not is not relevant to the usefulness of the term; 'Death of the Author' and all that. Deer don't call themselves deer either.

  2. There definitely do seem to be a subset of >1 academics that do/did call themselves that; here's another: https://scholars.duke.edu/person/jameson. And his book ('Conversations on Cultural Marxism'), which you could buy if you want to read it: https://www.amazon.ca/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Marxism/dp/0822341093

  3. That aside, the class struggle components of regular Marxism are so much in the academic water of post-war humanities studies, it seems implausible that academics would not incorporate them into their studies of culture, even if it were unconscious - which in some cases it maybe is. So why not call a spade a spade?