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Cultural Marxism seems to be a subject that starts discussions here from time to time (this is the latest example, I guess), and one conclusion I came away with from these is that apparently many Blue Tribers are convinced that the concept is nothing but a neofascist myth, similar to how the same group dismisses "political correctness" as something not real and instead existing in nowhere else but the imagination of GOP propagandists.
Anyway, it's not like I want to reinvent the wheel here, but I propose a simple concept to differentiate cultural Marxism from economic Marxism. For the sake of argument, let's assume that both Marxist tendencies actually exist, although I understand that this is a very big jump for the leftists mentioned above. Instead of observing what these tendencies argue, let's look at how they find purchase in society, to the extent that they do.
Economic Marxism seeks supporters by appealing to the economic grievances of marginalized groups in predominantly right-wing hierarchical social environments.
"How is it possible that I'm working my ass off yet still remain nothing but a poor shmuck while assholes who never worked a day in their life drive around in fancy cars and fancy clothes?!"
"When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men." (John Ball)
It's not difficult to see why economic Marxism lost most of the allure it ever had: the people who keep appealing to such grievances are no longer the Marxists. This has multiple causes of its own, but I won't try going into this here.
Cultural Marxism, on the other hand, seeks supporters by appealing to the cultural grievances of marginalized groups in predominantly right-wing hierarchical social environments.
"Why is everyone in this town such a homophobic garbage Nazi shithead? I bet they'd start pelting me with rocks if I tried walking down Main Street holding hands with my BF."
"I'm from Alabama and my pal got thrown out of the house by his shitty Fundamentalist parents just for being gay and trans. Why is it such a cesspool, man?!"
"Everytime I visit family I get cold stares and they keep pestering me when am I finally getting married. I'm done with these fuckers."
"Why is it still considered normal here for shitbag rednecks to drive around flying the Confederate flag? I can't even."
You don't find most critical theorists in 90% baptist towns in Alabama; you mostly find them in NY, SF, LA, and college towns - i.e. places where the social order is overwhelmingly dominated by the progressive left. And yet, they're just as, if not more mad than the gay kid with orthodox christian parents. I would edit your formulation to:
"Cultural Marxism...seeks supporters by appealing to the cultural grievances of groups opposed to the existence of low-status social environments they call 'right wing'"
I'd say that when you're already dominating the social order, you're no longer gaining power by recruiting supporters but by raising and indoctrinating them. It's a different dynamic from then on.
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I think a lot of SJ positions are better described not as "culturally Marxist", but as a bizarro-world ideology created by starting with the cultural positions of Marxism (and there are quite a lot of them) and then going in the opposite direction of the traditional Western paradigm.
Tradition: "Men should be in charge of women", Marxism: "Sex divisions are a distraction and should be ignored", SJ: "Women should be in charge of men".
Tradition: "The white man is the best man", Marxism: "Racial divisions are a distraction from class struggle; be colourblind", SJ: "Whites suck".
Tradition: "White culture is scientifically superior to natives' primitive culture and we should raze the latter", Marxism: "All cultures suck and we should make a new, constructed culture designed by science", SJ: "Indigenous ways of knowing are just as valid as science; traditional Western culture should be razed".
The only real explanation I can see for this pattern is that SJ is the result of escalatory virtue-signalling (plus a game of Chinese whispers over the years with social psych accidentally and deliberately laundering ideology into "the science") oriented along the axis of "Tradition bad, Marxism good" and thus has positions that are "beyond" Marxism in some sense. I'm aware that this is a bulverism and basically calling the ideology meme cancer, and I really don't like being this uncharitable, but it's honestly about all I can come up with.
The opposite direction thing you describe is rationalized on essentially the accelerationist idea of hastening the revolution. Basically, once the cultural Marxist project of destroying Western civilization and capitalism has been achieved, then we can move past the "whites suck" and "women should be in charge" stuff. It's kind of like the idea that violent revolution is necessary to eventually abolish all violence.
The whole ideology implicitly endorses the idea that beliefs are only instrumental towards goals, so whatever beliefs hasten the revolution are what you should believe, and that can change depending on circumstance. Truth is kind of besides the point, since it's a distraction from winning. This is why it can be practically impossible to have a good faith dialogue with some of these people.
That said, I agree with you more broadly. In an anthropological, perhaps even ecological, sense these are just a rationalizations of runaway virtue signaling. What the participants in this culture believe they are doing is somewhat immaterial. However, the rationalizations do somewhat orient the direction of the virtue signaling spirals even if they do not provide the fuel, so they are not entirely irrelevant. It is meme cancer.
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I can get behind the use of cultural marxism in a sort of genealogical sense. It seems clear that early critical theorists saw themselves as marxist and were familiar with marxist theory, but as an actual descriptor of modern ideology it's always felt weak to me.
Basically, so it goes, cultural marxism is marxist oppressor / oppressed framework but applied to identity. Except really what is unique about Marx isn't the oppressor / oppressed framework, people have been writing about hierarchy and exodus from oppressors since ancient times. What made Marx unique was that he took the oppressor oppressed framework and interpreted it through a lens of economic materialism. All conflict no longer has to do with your identity or specific role in society it's all about economic output and who controls the means of production. As a descriptor the term doesn't seem to help much since modern political discourse seems less marx and more just a return to more typical conflicts. Different identity groups fighting and forming alliances to further their interests.
When it comes to how the term seems to actually be used in the real world it seems like early critical theorists happened to identify with marxism as it was the well known revolutionary theory that predated them so they were familiar with his arguments and inevitably drew from them. Paleocons seem to have latched on to the word at some point because it fits with their outdated views on the world being some sort of battle between capitalism and communism. Meanwhile most normal people just don't really care about the term since these days both capitalism and communism have shown their flaws and the distinction doesn't really offer them much utility.
The big divider these days seems less about private and public and more about centralization and decentralization. Both Capitalism and communism have centralizing features, communism explicitly and capitalism through things like natural monopolies, economies of scale and prohibitive start up costs, so people aren't too enthusiastic about the prospects of either and just tune cultural marxist talk out.
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If cultural Marxism is anything other than a snarl word, it refers to trying to force cultural issues into an economic framework.
The left does do this, but mostly by expressing frustration about it not working very well. See, for example, What’s the matter with Kansas?. I suspect that this kind of thinking is often the justification for gay race communism; clearly the white working class voting against their economic interests is due to racism when you’re deep in a Marxist framework.
Remember, Marxism is a theory of economics driving history. Marx’s psychohistoric conclusions might be the obvious end result, but they’re not the only one possible. So when it’s been falsified you look for a different narrative.
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Marxian economics is already a precise term used to describe Marx's economic theories. The reason why "cultural marxism" (more precisely, Critical Theory) became more prevalent is because Orthodox Marxism is empirically indefensible, so you need to start grafting a bunch of other stuff onto it to explain away why Marxism didn't work. The easiest way to think of it is as a conspiracy theory which has too much academic credentials to get accurately described as a conspiracy theory. Marxism didn't fail because Marx was wrong. Marxism failed because there's a distributed conspiracy where elites use their dominant cultural power to shape reality in a way that indefinitely maintains their status and makes Marxism fail. This then has a bunch of sub-conspiracies. Most relevant here, explaining away the failings of Marxian economics because all scientific theories produced by a capitalist society are just discourse serving power.
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I apologize if this is too basic of a question, but why do any of these italicized concerns need to be associated with cultural Marxism? These all seem like legitimate issues that could be addressed without such a label. Like, each one of these probably happens at least once per day somewhere in the US.
I've never seen any of such complaints raised anywhere in any context other than one promoting cultural Marxism.
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Realistically, I think it's just because to conservatives of a certain generation, 'Marxism' is the scariest and most evil word available, so calling everything they don't like Marxist is just a habit. It's equivalent to the way people on the left call everything 'fascism'.
Marxism definitely exists, just as fascism exists, but once the word comes to mean 'the polar opposite of everything I believe, i.e. everything good and right', the temptation to deploy it to describe everything under the sun quickly becomes irresistible.
Would you classify Black Lives Matter as a Marxist movement, or no?
I would not, no.
I'm aware of that time a couple of its founders identified as Marxists, but I don't think that makes the movement Marxist.
BLM is amorphous enough that it's difficult to nail down any specific principles, but some are outlined here, and I don't think they're Marxist. Based on that page alone I think there's a clear anarchist influence on BLM, with a heavy emphasis on the abolition of punishment, end of coercion, and mutual aid, but I think that to be Marxist specifically, there would need to be something about the ownership and distribution of capital.
So, anarchist or at least anarchist-adjacent, yes, but Marxist, no.
Mm.
So in your opinion, when some guy spraypaints #BLM, multiple hammers and sickles, and the publication date of the Communist Manifesto on a public structure, what do you think is going on in that guy's head? Would you expect the misconception he's suffering from to be common or rare?
I think that someone who paints hammers and sickles and 'CPUSA' on to a block is almost certainly a communist. That imagery is pretty unambiguous.
(You can't see the BLM in that image, but the reverse of the block shows it.)
But all that proves is at least one person supports both communism and BLM. My priors on the kinds of people who go around spray-painting slogans on skate parks make me think it's quite likely that the person is an idiotic, edgy teenager with no developed political platform. At any rate, I do not draw conclusions about the ideologies of entire movements supported by millions of people from individual graffitos.
Would you expect American Communists, or indeed communists generally, to not support BLM?
If you were persuaded that hammers and sickles were a common addition to BLM-riot graffiti, would this be weak evidence of a connection between the two movements? To be clear, the best I can do after a brief search is two instances, and the vague memories of seeing many more at the time. I'm more curious about your reasoning process.
More generally, do you think the examples linked in this comment are likewise lacking a "developed political platform"? Are those people Marxists, in your view?
...Could it be that you were mistaken, and the hammer and sickle in that first example only represented "a union of social classes"? Maybe that guy wasn't a communist at all?
I expect there to be a range, actually. The far-left in America, as I understand it, is pretty diverse. For instance, CPUSA seems pretty pro-BLM, but meanwhile, WSWS denounces BLM as capitalist stooges, and sees it as a ruling class ploy to divide workers.
My overall sense is that this is probably a relatively low ebb for the link between communism and black politics in the US. The Black Panthers were explicitly Marxist-Leninist - BLM indulge in anarchist rhetoric sometimes (abolish the police etc.), but aren't as directly ideological.
Yes, that seems reasonable enough.
My current read at the moment is that the George Floyd protests and aftermath were quite incoherent, ideologically. Apart from a general sense that something is wrong, there wasn't a clear platform or idea, and what we saw after the protests and riots was a wide range of competing actors trying to capture the energy of the moment. I wouldn't say that any wholly succeeded.
Yep, those seem pretty Marxist, or at least, Marxist-influenced. I could probably pick some nits if I really wanted - Marxism is one specific school of socialism, socialist thought is broader than just that, anti-capitalism is not synonymous with Marxism - but I think no one could deny that, at the very least, those writers are familiar with Marxism and it has influenced their thought. A couple of them strike me as more intersectional (this one, for instance, strikes me as an all-of-the-above approach to critique), but I'm not going to argue that much.
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Given the history of ‘а вас негров лунчают’, almost certainly, but that just makes them fellow travelers from a common enemy.
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I think the idea is that the framing of these issues is done in an oppressor vs oppressed (ie Marxist) narrative style, wherein the dominant mainstream culture is "oppressing" the "lifestyles" and "identities" of those who diverge from it.
So if we take the example of the woman who feels pressure from her family to marry (and presumably have children), of course this happens all of the time and has happened since time immemorial but the question is how you frame it. The cultural Marxist would say that this an unjust application of social pressure that is meant to limit the woman's autonomy. It's a raw exercise of power by those who have it against those who do not have it. A more traditional cultural analysis might say that this is beneficial social pressure which applies the embodied wisdom of the older generation and nudges the younger generation to make choices that maybe they wouldn't choose on their own, but which they would greatly benefit from if they just take the leap (not to mention that they would perpetuate the physical existence of the species and ideally the cultural stability of the civilization).
Thank you, that makes sense. It seems like the cultural Marxist in your example might be exaggerating the concerns of the parents whereas the traditionalist might be restraining the autonomy of the woman.
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First off, I’m surprised that nobody has brought up James Lindsay and his New Discourses project. Lindsay gets a ton of ridicule from many on the right (some of it justified) and is treated as a joke by the left, but I think he has done a wonderful service on this front. He does sprawling podcasts where he actually reads and deconstructs some of the foundational works of 20th-century post-Marxist thought, tracing the explicit genealogy not only of the ideas but also of the authors. It’s trivially true that most of the writers and thinkers people are taking about have common intellectual mentors and influences, and I think Lindsay does an able job of demonstrating this.
Secondly, people are getting hung up on the specific term “cultural Marxism” when in fact most of the proponents of that school of ideas would instead call it “critical theory”. (There are, of course, various subdisciplines - most famously critical race theory, but also critical fat studies, critical pedagogy, gendercritical, etc.) Critical theory also comes with critical praxis - the specific actions and analytical approaches applied by practitioners of critical theory, who for a while were calling themselves crits. (I don’t remember if it was Richard Delgado who coined the term. I’d have to go back and check.)
In discussions about whether or not “critical race theory” is being taught in K-12 schools, educators will usually protest that critical theory is a college- and graduate-level set of ideas which are both inappropriate for, and impossible to teach to, children. And that’s true! What they are teaching children is critical praxis. They’re teaching children how to apply a critical (and this word has a very different meaning in this context than it does in the phrase “critical thinking”) lens to specific real-world examples.
And what is critical theory? Succinctly, it’s the view that social relations can be accurately described as a set of unequal power relations between socially-constructed affinity groups, such that groups can possess and accrue social capital - the power to disseminate and reproduce a hegemonic set of cultural norms - which, barring intentional efforts to redistribute social capital/prestige, will allow those groups to maintain their dominant cultural power indefinitely. In this sense it is applying the analytical tools and framework of Marx (the dialectic, the identification of complex power relations, the belief in accrued capital as an inherently unjust state of affairs) and treating social/cultural hegemony as the unit of capital, rather than money or land ownership. And much as communists seek to intentionally seize and redistribute/democratize the means of economic production, crits seek to seize and redistribute/democratize the means of cultural production.
Just as the end goal of communism is a world in which no person or group can possess and selfishly hoard more economic capital than another, crits want a world in which no group has more prestige than another. No group feels more “at home” in a certain place, no group feels confident as a majority to impose its cultural norms on others, etc. To get there, we must first identify the current power relations and actively subvert them; the formerly-marginalized must be centered, the hegemonic/bourgeois cultural norms must be relentlessly critiqued and negated, and the means of cultural production must be actively turned toward the dissemination of counter-hegemonic narratives.
I fail to see how anyone can miss that this is Marxist analysis applied to culture and status instead of money. I think that a fair reading of the authors in question will make their intellectual foundations very obvious.
I remembered another thought I had about this. Whenever I have a moment to dive back in to some of the things these folks are saying, I'm always struck by how it seems to me that they should be obviously anti-education. At the very least, against any sort of specialized education that is not completely uniformly applied and achieved. I think the crits have abandoned the old Marxist line of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need", and that might be one of the biggest dividing lines. Because the conceptual point of education is to improve oneself, in terms of understanding and ability. And if one is improved in such a way, they become unequal and unfair. They may feel like their enhanced understanding and ability provides them more prestige. They may feel more "at home" in places that use/need such specialized understanding/ability.
So all through the discussions of things like affirmative action at Harvard, I often find myself wanting to know why these folks are not staying true to their theory and simply saying that prestigious institutions like Harvard should simply not exist. I vacillate in my theory. Could be that I have, indeed, misunderstood something about their theory. Could be that their theory is a mostly-bullshit veneer of credibility slapped on top of what is really just class/race/etc warfare at its core. Could be that it's pure cognitive dissonance in that they've gained all of their power/prestige by means of taking over academia, so they can't bring themselves to 'deconstruct' their own source of outsized power/prestige.
As an aside, I'm pretty sure they've abandoned "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need", because I've asked multiple times if people who are otherwise spouting ideological beliefs that shall not be named are willing to apply this idea to the one area where it is the most likely to succeed - tracking in schooling. Where else do we have such close involvement by parties that are highly invested in accurately assessing a person's ability/need? Parents and teachers are incredibly closely-involved, and they can use a wide variety of assessment methods, methods that are vastly more suitable to the task at hand than we have available for similar assessments in any other realm of life. Where else do we have vast quantities of state dollars committed specifically to providing precisely to the needs of each individual child? If "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is going to work anywhere, it should obviously work best in schools, and I can't interpret that meaning anything other than tracking, identifying those of high ability and asking much of them (with difficult/advanced coursework), as well as those of low ability and providing their needs as best as possible. Yet I cannot find a single person, either an economic Marxist or an ideology-that-shall-not-be-named-ist who is willing to embrace "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
They're way ahead of you. "Why do they go to Harvard, though?" isn't that much of a gocha for people who think society-improving action must be collective. It's on the same level as "if you're in favor of higher taxes, why don't you donate your money to the government?".
I think the slogan was for the workers of the world to unite and slay the capitalists, not that the workers of the world needed to become capitalists in order for their society-improving action to be collective. And at least the people who have a theory that implies that higher taxes are better are willing to say that they're in favor of higher taxes, admitting that it doesn't make sense for them to individually donate their money to the government because of the collective action problem. I would be perfectly happy to just hear people seriously saying that academia is a problem, that it needs to be banished by law, but that due to a collective action problem, they're stuck individually having to game the system. I'm not seeing anyone doing that.
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I'm not criticizing you, as you're just describing, but man. The last one contradicts the others! They have to impose their own preferred cultural norms on others in order to get those things. And can you imagine how utterly insane such an imposition would be? I've talked here before about the Khmer Rouge banning free enterprise and preventing people from picking berries in the countryside, because they might acquire a lot of berries, maybe even sell them on a black market or something, then become unequal and unfair. And that's just economically. Can you imagine not allowing anyone to have more prestige than another? One of the diagnoses I've seen here for what is perceived as a cultural malaise today is that, in the before-internet days, people had all sorts of little local hierarchies that people could climb and feel good about. You could knit the best socks or play the best chess or cook the nicest meal in your little local social circle. Nowadays, everything is so globalized that people can always tear down any hobby you just want to self-improve on and point to the few on Insta that you'll never match up with. Forget whether this diagnosis is true or not or which of those worlds you'd prefer, but can you imagine the extreme anti-prestige black shirt brigade you'd need to make sure that nobody was feeling just a hair too smug about how they won a local chess tournament? When it's worded as bluntly as this, I don't see how they could possibly accomplish their goals without completely grinding down all the hopes and dreams of literally every person on the planet, even more brutally than forcing them all onto the State farm and prohibiting them from picking berries.
That's the contradiction at the heart of all liberalism. They want to be tolerant. But that requires discriminating against "the intolerant." They want everyone to be equal. But that requires unequal power to impose unequal treatment on the naturally unequal. And crits want to get rid of all cultural superiority but that requires themselves to hold cultural superiority.
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The 'crit' term is older than Delgado and actually originally applied to the predecessors of the critical race theorists like him: the critical legal theorists. Once the critical race theorists began to think of themselves as a real distinct group in the 80s and 90s, they were actually the crats, as opposed to the crits, who they were reacting against.
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The predominantly right wing environments is wrong and there is an inaccuracy in "marginalized communities". We should select a description that is less biased in favor of the cultural marxist lingo.
Cultural Marxists are very willing to keep pandering to the same favorite groups, if they aren't marginalized and if the hierarchy favors them. The narrative is one of marginalized communities and right wing heirarchy, but you can, and in fact it is the increasing model, of increasing cultural marxism with the communities not being marginalized. If they marginalize disfavored groups, you will not see the kind of people called cultural marxists, reversing cause.
If a space becomes less diverse, by becoming more black, and less white, you won't sdee them complain.
In fact, your definition seems to accept the assumptions of cultural marxists.
I would say that cultural marxists are those who are biased in favor of progressive favored groups, of intersectional alliance, such as blacks, Jews, women, LGBT, and more, are identitarians in favor of such groups, on the basis of deeming them oppressed, and favor the destruction, or disminishment, with especially hostile against whites, and are also hostile against men, straight, etc, treating an environment that favors them, or is even even handed, as inherently oppressive and an example of the crisis of misogyny, antisemitism, racism (agaisnt blacks). It is about those who are dogmatic and see as heroic favoring such groups and a reforms in that direction.
It is about the presumption of ism being against those groups. So your quoted definition is great if one says that a cultural marxism is someone who makes that presumption. But inaccurate, if you use that definition on face value.
Where there is some difference between more naked tribalism, although I consider cultural marxism, to be fairly seen as progressive supremacist, and supremacist movement of supremacists for those groups and against their outgroup is that there is an argument that promotes disingenius one sided critique and promotes a motte of against identity politics, inequalities. Then they change it, to favor superior treatment for their favorite groups.
Some do this while arguing for the destruction of their outgroup, and painting them as nazi evil threat for opposing their own self destruction.
Another element, is the utopian dream that after destroying their white, or heteronormative, or any combination of identities they are against, they will reach an utopian without racism, or oppression. There is a certain egalitarian pretense, or belief at least with some of the less well off groups. But cultural Marxism is not sincerely egalitarian.
The most pervasive cultural marxist ideology is on areas of ethnicity and race in the USA. Elsewhere it is more complciated.
It is the people who see men rights activism, white nationalism, transphobia, homophobia, etc, etc as a great evil and are incapable of seeing whether a certain level of rights and interests for men, whites, straights, etc, and moves that can limit and go against a certain level of rights they favor for such groups. Basically they don't care for any compromise with the interests and rights, of those groups and with the right wing opposition who identify with such interests.
There is also continuity with historical marxism that shared cultural marxist elements, even if in weaker proportion and had in it an element of destroying the family, or nation, and also had these kind of biased tribalists among its ranks. Even if this element was a weaker part of it. Modern actual marxists have often adopted cultural marxist beliefs or be even more hardcore for them.
Calling liberals with the title cultural marxists would be a fair, and accurate description and not at all uncharitable. They are just going to be displeased about this, because they want to potray themselves as moderates and their opposition as extremists. And obviously they are very willing to censor and fight to not let us have an accurate picture of this. And other groups like most leftists who don't self describe as liberals agree with cultural marxism but might disagree with liberals on some things, fake conservatives who share this bias and hostility. Some fake conservatives are actually especially cultural marxists in their rhetoric, who are basically the version of cultural marxism that tries to be more consistent with the motte but still fails to be consistent and still is biased in favor of progressive identity groups and tolerates them in the manner that doesn't right wing ones.
A cultural leftist is in fact a cultural marxist. Cultural leftism cannot be seperated with cultural marxism. Marxism is central to leftism. Modern liberalism is cultural marxism. And it is very pervasive. We live in very cultural far left times.
There are elements associated with liberalism that aren't cultural marxism, that some right wing edgy figures might not like, although modern liberalism and really historical liberalism has its own blame which gave ground to socialism also failed to be consistent with those and isn't fair to give it ownership of those exclsusively. Especially when they undermined say natural rights. For example, lets take human rights. Cultural marxists rely on their interpretation of human rights, but it is possible to have one that isn't cultural marxist and still value human rights, and even despise cultural marxists for the harm they do towards genuine human rights, by promoting fake ones.
Their rhetoric is less important, the most important element of cultural marxism is the bias in favor of the identities they favor, the bias against the identity they disfavor, their complete disregard of the rights and interests of those groups and how they prioritise their dogma in favor of reducing nations, (which they aren't consistent about and target particularly their outgroup nations and make exception for their ingroup nations), gender roles, masculine and female duties and obligation, in a manner that is destructive to society.
However, while cultural marxism is an illegitimate, ironically it is a very ist ideology that distorts the situation, it is possible in a limited way and not the limitless maximalist way cultural marxists push, in certain circumstances, for some of the groups cultural marxists, are biased in favor, to be mistreated. Currently it is the opposite problem at play, because of the influence of cultural Marxists.
Wokeness can also be used to describe it. Or really identify it as the new left ideology which grew from important elements of the old left.
There is an interesting question about whether someone who isn't a cultural marxist in some other areas but is a super hardcore SJW type behaving individual when it comes to one of those groups, and shares the core ethnic enemy of the progressive intersectionally, most notably and usually in my experience of American online discourse, is for the Jews, but one sees it with Muslims who are tribalist for themselves, carry those grievances and share the enemy, but don't like Jews. Are they part of cultural marxism? Mostly yes. Ideological purity is less important than the fact that they are part of the intersectional team and have the same enemy.
There are also people who are part of the intersectional alliance, who are more sadistic, hateful, openly tribalist, and don't buy into this idea that they are fighting against oppression, even if cynically they might pretend to do so. They know that by not tolerating identity politics of the outgroup, they are harming it and creating a caste that favors them and they like that. That they belong in the same team and are even more hardcore in harming the out group, is more important than whether they buy into the idea, that they are fighting "oppression".
Finally, just cause some cultural marxists who agree that it is morally superior to favor the groups they favor and to disfavor the groups they disfavor, disagree with the rhetoric of other more edgy cultural Marxists, or with how far they push some things, doesn't make the first to belong in a different faction. Especially if the first are putting on a mask and pretending to be against nobody, while the later are saying the quiet thing loud. Like compare Noel Ignatiev, or people cheering that X European country will no longer exist and they are colonizing it, with someone who shares Noel Ignatiev position that opposing this is white supremacy, but uses weaker rhetoric.
At the end of the day compromising with right wing identitarians and giving extreme far righters too, what they want on the issue of their own people and favorite groups not being screwed over, is the obvious limited requirement for someone to not be a cultural marxist. If you are unwilling not to screw over white people, or men, or other groups that are disfavored by progressive paradigm, and you deny the legitimacy of their collective rights, then that qualifies as cultural Marxism, especially if you see such compromise as giving nazis what they want.
So is about a bias for progressive identities, and against disfavored groups, especially favoring destruction of those. People not compromising with the legitimate rights and interests and therefore sharing ground with negatively symbolized right wing associated groups and advocates. Another element is whether those with such biases are unwilling to consider whether their dogma wrecks society.
There is a huge connection between excessive social liberalism in general and cultural Marxism, and again being sufficiently conservative is a requirement to be a moderate, and not be a cultural marxist. Because cultural Marxism, excessive social liberalism includes in its agenda, breaking down important identities and roles and responsibilities that help keep society working (even though cultural Marxism has double standards and the bias of cultural Marxists is the most important element of it).
People just want to both be excessive on the left on such areas, (including people who choose to claim that they are conservatives and conservatives must compromise more to appeal to women, and insert ethnic group and LGBT types) and to have the fame of the even handed moderate, or of the conservative.
Liberalism and much of leftism does not work in isolation as a goal to strive upon, but in combination with conservatism, and must exist in a limited manner. Same with the interests of the groups cultural Marxists favor, and limiting the rights and interests of the groups they disfavor. Cultural Marxism is very extreme on the later, acting as if their rights and interest are inherently illegitimate, under the false pretense, that identity politics and interests are illegitimacy Sympathy for other groups must be balanced with concentric circles of concern, and objectivity. The idea of constantly progressing and moving in a more left wing direction that lead to Cultural Marxism is like swallowing ten packages of panadol to get rid of a headache, because in a limited quantity it would help with a genuine problem.
That can be explained by their opportunism and dishonesty. But it doesn't explain how the ideology recruits followers in the first place.
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It’s basically naked tribalism as most in-group out-group political ideology is. There’s no way around it, and frankly it’s no different than any other sort of political tribal alliances that existed in every society that ever existed. Political hegemony is produced by convincing various tribes to unite against the common enemies of the powerful. In this case it’s whites mostly because they have the legacy money and connections to effectively fight back against regime power. By destroying the rivals in the name of other tribes, they cement their power.
It’s still tribal. And pretty nakedly tribal. Blacks being outright told that they’re betraying their tribe if they vote republican or pretty much calling it “self-hating” if they bite the hands of the elites. And yes, the white tribe is the Dalit of modern political discourse. Any hint of the kind of tribalism that is encouraged by the discourse for others is evil for the political Dalits.
They’ll pick something else. I’m already seeing people start to include East Asians and Jews and Indians as part of the tribe.
But to be honest, Equity is the problem. It’s impossible for any society to create a situation where everyone is capable of doing everything equally and with equal results. You are not an interchangeable cog. And so the tribes simply use the cudgel of “inequality of outcomes” to secure the ability to cut in line to the good positions society has on offer. You don’t hire the only black guy to apply — you’re obviously racist even if he isn’t qualified. And as not everyone wants to do the work, it often means active discrimination against whites to meet the quotas.
I think honestly the law shouldn’t see race, sex, religion, or gender at all. If a field is 99% white, fine. If it’s 99% black also fine.
I agree with most of your post but disagree that the way forward is for the law to not recognize race, etc.
These are relevant. You can’t have a country by not recognizing that it belongs to a particular people or in the harder arrangement of a multiethnic country, peoples.
Cultural Marxism uses as part of its toolset the idea that evil forces create this idea of race, gender and other dinstictions.
It is the ideology that says you can't discriminate against women and men should include women in their organisations. And then demands female exclusive organisations. You don't do the later, but the first has been an important component of it.
Trying to not see race, religion, gender leads to that and becomes oppressive in its own right. What are you going to do about people who do see race, religion, gender, or ethnicity? Do you genuinely have the stomach to go against Jews or Indians who do that and force them to not see ethnicity, or race? Because what I have seen is that in practice this doctrine ends up with double standards and tolerating highly tribal groups like Indians and Jews. The later which have obvious powerful NGOs in their favor, which makes the whole idea of the law not favoring race, contradictory with seeing them as oppressed by this arrangement. It would require the law to crush those organizations and to pressure very woke demographics like Indians and Jews to change their behavior. It is actually a good thing and not oppressive for women and men to have male and female exclusive groups.
Maybe it would be a good idea if in the labor market we saw more gender, and we encouraged women to take more the nurturing role. To be fair, the fact that this is more, and not entirely, is itself a compromise to the direction of what you say. But I wouldn't consider what I advocate to be cultual marxist, even though it isn't 100% the opposite. It rejects the idea of leveling the differences as a goal, and considers it stupid and destructive.
Having people prioritize their family first, is not inherently exploitative, so long they don't act in a parasitical manner against other families. In fact it is laudible to care for your people and work to plant trees that your descendads will enjoy. An atomising antisocial, every man for himself sentiment would be worse. Why shouldn't male only organizations exist as they used to.
The problem with cultural marxism, isn't that they see race, but that they are very biased and parasitical in favor of their ingroup, and destructive and don't respect the value of nations, families, and many more for their outgroup by using the motte and bailey of "it is bad in general" and then tolerating it and supporting it for the ingroup under the idea that we will not see race only when white supremacy is defeated.
This is a bit nuanced because people who are a little ideologically divergent but part of the same team because they are more blatant tribalists do exist with people who might buy more into the universalist anti-traditional identities framework.
Another element of nuance, is that there is SOME room for opposition to maximalist identity essentialism of the conservative sort, and in general. What i find to work best, is basically a wise mixture, that definitely is completely against these mentality that we reach utopia by destroying distinctions, that has been used to retain dinstictions that favor progressive in group and desttroy other ones, some very necessary for well functioning of society. Where heterornomativism or native ethnic identity are undermined under anti-identitarian claim, while LGBTQ or foreign nationalism is promoted.
A good society will be heteronormative and would see the distinction and prefer promoting straight behaviors.
But in line with the idea that some liberalism might be tolerable and compatible with promoting better ends, it shouldn't imprison homosexuals for example. And there are gray areas that are up to debate, even if the level of social liberalism and the bias that cultural marxism has for its favorite identities and against its hated identities, some core to society, is wrong.
To further elaborate on an example: if women take sufficiently the nurturing role, they lose job opportunities, but they gain a greater connection with their children, are more likely to have them and earlier, and enjoy from that. Society also benefits from having enough children to replace it self, something very basic.
This isn't an exploitative arrangement when considering the benefits both for those involved but for society in general, and requires seeing characteristics and their relevance. However, it is possible as I argued for objections to be made against a certain too conservative arrangement, and not be unwarranted, (like the fantasy of the Handmaiden tale) but we are in the situation were it is excessive social liberalism and bias in favor of those identities and disregards of favorite identities that is the primary issue.
Do I have a solution that is simple, yes and no. I think on some areas you should see such distinctions, in others you should see it, but as part of other important things and not the priority.
Same with family. I am going to listen to a foreign scientist who is working in a manner that shows competence, and proffessionalism. But I wouldn't let him take over my country.
Ethnicity, race, property, family, all these are important. I work to provide an inheritance for my family, not for foreigners who are equally smart to my children, to enjoy the efforts of my labor.
Not the only things important, I believe it is important to recognize the importance of such issues to other groups too, and is part of international justice. And wealth, good interpersonal relationships (both weal and such relationships actually necessitates taking the other categories into consideration because foreign groups will screw you over if you have no ethnocentrism), learning from foreigners, and more also have their own importance.
Having borders, nations, gender roles, is different than trying to colonize and destroy a hated ethnic group, while replacing their historical figures, and forcing them to hate themselves and demonizing any positive identity as evil.
Part of its destruction is the disrespect of valuable nuclear families, ethnic communities, the masculine role in society, the disrespect of the value of pro natalism, of society being mainly heteronormative (whcih is superior than a society that have incrased homosexual behavior). Anti-conservatism is part of the tool set for breaking up the bonds of the outgroup, and not allowing them to be a healthy united nation that would oppose parasitism at its expense. That this is an unworkable arrangement matters, and is an additional problem of cultural marxism.
I’m not suggesting for ten seconds that the solution is to make race or gender “not exist”. To the contrary I think they exist in a strong sense via cultured preference and whatever else you choose to name. What I’m suggesting is that those with power stop noticing and certainly stop catering to these notions. If a woman applies to be a programmer, that’s fine, she can do whatever she wants. But she shouldn’t ever expect to have a leg up on getting a position simply because she exists and has a vagina. The laws and policies should not be giving special treatment to anyone. We shouldn’t concern ourselves with whether enough of a given demographic is obtaining certain goals. That’s their job to work that out.
And as far a# culture goes, I’m firmly in favor of having one culture that people generally abide by. You can worship anything you want, but you may not undermine the cultural norms of the dominant religion. You can speak any language you like at home, but we aren’t going to translate or hire dozens of speakers to accommodate your lack of English skills. We value hard work, and being on time, and studying hard, if you don’t want to work, fair enough, but you get nothing from the rest of us. We will be teaching our culture here. Your culture is okay, but we aren’t going to accommodate the entire culture to what you want.
International affairs are a bit different, and in that case I agree with nationalism— a country should primarily look after its own national interests and avoid treaties and wars that don’t serve their interests.
Well, you are kind of promoting a version of a new soviet man here but I will agree that you aren't promoting privileging progressive identity groups and in fact oppose that. However what you are promoting had been part of the playbook of the cultural marxist arrangement even if you oppose the preferential treatment.
Problem is that, it might in fact be detrimental for society for women to prioritise education and work over being mothers. It is a bad value, to not care about that a Just because you are dogmatic about opposing that, doesn't make it a good idea. This isn't to say that there isn't value in various facets of equal treatment. For example if a foreign tourist is attacked by a native drunk driver, you punish the native drunk driver equally as if they harmed anyone else. Even in gender roles, there is a difference between being dogmatic here in favor of not taking such issues into consideration, and trying to maximize differences in the labor market.
We should care about important things more than just treating everyone equally. And that is different from avoiding parasitical arangements. It isn't a bad idea that should be restricted because we follow some marxist dogma of equality under the law, to give parents for example incentives to have children and benefit them by giving them tax breaks.
Not caring if your nation is taken by other nations, destroys your ethnic community and historical legacy and is an example of indifference to cultural and ethnic destruction.
Just because you claim is irrelevant, in a situation where it is stigmatized precisely by much of this faction, to be ist, doesn't make it irelevant for people to become foreigners in their own land. Humans are collective group, and even as individual are prefferably not to suffer the misfortunte of their own nation, being harmed, replaced, them becoming a minority in their own land and foreigners.
It neglects something important and makes what you want of no prefferential treatment, a complete impossibility as you will be outnumbered by groups who come here to get resources from you, and lord over you, and not only take preferential treatment, but also disminish the native culture both by ridicule, and replacement invited by people who share their bias and want their vote.
Plus, the fact that groups carry within themselves this kind of grievances makes this whole idea of an even handed law an impossibility, if the system plays dumb about this fact. People who favor their own group and want to screw over the native ethnic group are going to get their way, unless the system can name names. You haven't done that, so how are you going to stop a system that privilidges groups the Jews, Indians, when you argue that they are going to be targeted?
The reality is that a country that doesn't have the courage to stand for its own people, and compromises by claiming to want new soviet man type of ideology which is already the bailey of cultural Marxism, is not going to stop preferential treatment for groups progressives favor.
Promoting a single unified culture has been a part of every national movement since the Greeks and Romans. Calling “treat everyone in society as legal equals and insist on a unified culture” is a concept that would be as close to universal as can be. The Romans insisted on the unification of their territory into being Roman. Major business and cultural exchanges were in Greek or Latin. If you wanted to be an elite, you better learn to speak the language. It was the same with unification of various countries in Europe— the French promoted Frenchness, the British promoted Britishness, the Russians promoted Russian culture. Peter the Great was not Marxist by any stretch of the imagination. He was a Russian Czar promoting the culture of Russia.
I think as far as people suddenly becoming “strangers in their own land”, again, this isn’t some weird new idea that nobody ever thought about until Marx came along. There have always been subcultures and ethnic groups on the outs in any given society. It’s how a unified culture tends to work, you go along with the culture or you are at least somewhat on the outside. I and my near kin would be on the outs in lots of cultures. The Chinese are not going to look kindly on a bunch of white Americans suddenly showing up in their country, nor would they tolerate a situation in which such groups demand infinite carve outs for their particular cultural preferences. I don’t think that legally forbidding someone to practice a religion makes sense, but that doesn’t mean that it should be perfectly legal to do things that the rest of society finds abhorrent in public under the guise of “my religion or culture.”
He quite literally didn’t do this, to the point of stamping out or endangering quite a number of traditional Russian practices.
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Peter the Great didn't give a flying fuck about the culture of Russia; no, that's incorrect, he hated it with a fiery passion. He and his successors promoted 18th century globohomo so ruthlessly that Russian nobility stopped speaking Russian until they rediscovered their heritage during the war of 1812 a century later.
Really? That's fascinating - what did they speak? French?
I'm reminded again that my knowledge of most non-Western-European history is woeful. Do you know any books that you might recommend?
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What kind of single unifying culture you favor promoting here? As an outsider looking in, It makes sense for the USA to promote a unifying culture and also to stop undermining the white American historical nation and part of its unifying culture to be about the continuous American nation. I.E. White Anglo Americanism. While the story of USA will include also black experience but with much less grievances, and sure there is some room for the story of other groups. A multiethnic country which is what the USA is today, can promote a unifying culture, but will also have to promote. And plenty of grey lines on such issues, but your trajectory is not a good idea, and leads to the destruction of American culture, and towards a post-American culture.
Which is not my culture, nor my people, except in a more supra-national way, although it does benefit my people for "genocide the native people and put a lipstipc on a pig" to not be a fashionable ideology. But I object against this cultural revolution from a moralist universalist perspective too. I am not suggesting, anywhere that USA should promote other languages than English.
Saying you favor unified culture is an easy slogan, but black Americans have their own different ethnic community. They speak English. What are you going to do about it? Are you trying to force different ethnic communities in the USA to abandon any of their characteristics. You ought to target especially groups like black Americans or Jews, or Indians who are especially ethnocentric.
There is no Frenchness without the French. Look, you had the opportunity to address mass migration, and you didn't. And now it seems you support displacing Americans while painting this as promoting Americanism.
People becoming strangers in their own land is the local culture and people becoming replaced. And when this happens, those doing the replacement cheer for colonizing it, including the left and fake right, who ideologically favor the native people being disminished and support cultural genocide and advocate for a culture that does not carry the heritage of the past, that has its statues replaced, schools renamed, etc.
You trying to support this as nationalism is just a complete failure to address this issue, and subversive. It basically denies what is happening because it supports it.
Also important to note that actual highly hostile cultural marxists have promoted rhetoric trying to spin cultural replacement and mass migration as something else than it is because they genuinely believed that by lying about this, they will get their way to destroy their ethnic outgroup. So they promoted dishonestly the narrative of opposing identity, while the end result was their focus was on what was destructive on their right wing outgroup identities, while enabling the progressive favored groups like Jews, Indians, migrants. Because the current trajectory is of certain people being replaced, hated and discriminated and that isn't a case of regional cultures of a nation, converging, but of the destruction of European people. Your approach is just to compromise with this and spin it as otherwise.
In regards to whether you are a cultural marxist hiding your power level, I am not saying you have that goal, and I am not saying you don't. Cultural marxism works not by only the people who promote directly racism in the left wing direction, but also people who undermine opposition to it, by promoting the acid of destruction of identities. Most cultural marxists do both and pretend they are just opposing racism, because they see as racist for their right wing outgroups to have things for themselves, being exclusive.
As for the rest, in addition to those doing so deliberately, some, because of the pressure of political corectnest which is key element of cultural marxist, address their message towards those who are less ethnocentric, and are getting screwed over because of it.
The end result of mass migration and the culture of Americans being on the out, is the promotion of a different culture, of the outsiders who replace Americans, and those of native stock who are ideologically anti-American. The unifying culture you favor is not going to be an American culture, but a new Soviet man, that is about a shared ideological vision. And even that is not going to happen, because the cultural destruction you favor, and try to spin as nationalism as usual, has as part of its dna the hostility against the ative people.
I have challenged you and others repeatedly. Look, to have equality under the law, you need to crash organizations like ADL, and to change the mentality extremely pervasive among countless fanatics, even more so of those communities, that "Jews are wonderful, and disagreement is antisemitism", Blacks are wonderful and disagreement is racism, women are wonderful and disagreement, is misogyny, etc. One needs to be critical of mgirants and of thse groups and of even people who don't belong in these groups, who have that mentality.
Generalities about equality under the law mean nothing, because you can have a lopsided system that pretends to be doing equality under the law, while pretending that groups like Indians and Jews are oppressed, while their system benefits them at the expense of others. We need substance that names names, and is specific about the coalition and how it would deal with groups like the ADL and similiar.
Because else, people who want to promote a generality that in the substance is not going to be what it claims, are going to just do that.
The followers of Marx are the people who want to destroy reactionary people like white Americans and are promoting the idea of destroying nations while also respecting more certain nations than others. You are reversing things here and promoting a false analogy between the creation of a nation from regional cultures, to being replaced and not having a homeland.
This is incredibly radical and destructive agenda of cultural revolution. It does have historical paralels but it is of people who have been conquered by a foreign tribe, and subject to the humiliations related to that.
It actually is a key part of the far left tradition to take something and then double down to the extreme, without considering that doubling down takes something that mgiht work in one case, but be destructive in another one. In this case, nationalism reducing some regional differences which it self has its own costs, to then "destroy nations" agenda.
In the American context, the people promoting this have, as a pattern basically constantly concern trolled white Americans, with extreme intolerance, while playing dumb and tolerating far worse behavior by other ethnic communities and migrants.
Rebranding destroying ethnic communities as nationalism doesn't make it nationalism. Which is about ethnic groups which share blood, language, historical tradition and have a common conciousness.
Note, that this isn't a defense of all ethnic groups who migrated in the USA retaining their own language, tradition. Of course, I am in favor of both limited migration and migrants trying to assimiliate, which is destroyng part of their ethnic identity, at least them deprioritising the rights, but also affirming and replacing it with the native identity in part. The reason, being that a nation has a right to its own existence, and migrants are coming to either be adopted into it, or at least to coexist with it, if in small numbers. It is of course a significant harm to a nation to be replaced by foreigners. A world of people who have homelands, and they don't try to destroy others homes, and even there are some minority ethnic communities doing their own thing, but with the trend where there is migration towards assimilation and of limited numbers of foreigners being allowed to migrate, is a better working model.
This "destroy nations" idea, that is related with hardcore authoritarianism and its adherents have also commited attrocities against those who would oppose it, and ethnic communities for refusing to abandon their identity, and become new soviet men is just a bad idea that leads to inevitable disaster and a key part of the cultural marxist dna. That promoters of this idea don't want to consider the consequences of enforcing this, doesn't make them irrelevant. We know the consequences.
However sincere some adherents of this bad idea might be, they have lost to those who promote it to screw the right wing outgroup. It is used to concern troll white people which explains why its adherents are often not concerned about say banning the ADL or NAACP. Because they are comfortable with a status quo that enforces authoritarianism that doesn't allow pro white identity politics and tolerates and promotes the identity politics of such groups. And spinning this status quo as non woke (especially among cultural marxists who oppose the more mask out cultural marxist elements).
The agenda of destroying ethnic communities and opposing conservative identities and dinstiction is a vehicle for the cultural marxists who promote it to harm "reactionary" nations under their belief and agenda that all groups are equal, but some groups are more equal than others.
To be Frank, I’m suggesting a return as much as practical to the culture of the turn of the twentieth century. Cultural Christianity, specifically high church Christianity, as far as manners look for a turn of the twentieth century etiquette book like Emily Post. For mass media and entertainment, I’d bring back something like the Hayes Code (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MediaNotes/TheHaysCode), and alongside that, promote the ideas of hard work, self responsibility, self respect, respect for other people. I’d also teach such things, alongside the old canon of western literature and music in schools. Heck, I’d return to the classical model of education because I think it works much better than what we have now.
As to immigration, I think a very controlled system of legal immigration is fine. I want them to be high quality immigrants, who can read write and speak English, have at least an equivalent to a high school education, and are committed to learning to live as an American and to respect the culture we have.
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Based on the last year's events, I can think we can comfortably say that Jews don't fall into that list. In fact, I'm pretty sure Jews haven't been on there since what, the 60s?
Among those who play the oppression olympics game, Jews are super-whites.
The exact moment is the Six Day War, so 1967. A consequence of Israel embarrassing the reds by absolutely crushing Arab countries which were primarily armed by Moscow.
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The opposite, among those who play oppression games, Jews, who are a key progressive associated group and strongly as a pattern, especially the most influential Jews supporters of cultural marxism might even be the champions of being oppressed and deserving superior treatment because of this.
In the latest year the powerful jewish organisations, and stakeholders have been pushing the mighty and powerful to intimitate opposition and to promote an one sided story of Jews being oppressed in the American congress.
You are doing the thing that is the epitome of cultural marxism, of acting as the group you favor is always oppressed, regardless of all the power and fanatics biased in favoring them and screwing over others. Lets just say that SJW/cultural marxists in favor of Jews are some of the worst and more influential ones but there are definetly some who disfavor Jews in favor of Muslims and others who want to keep both groups not hate each other too much and favor both sides cooling off that hostility, but still support the ADL and friends narrative about antisemitism.
Based on what I explained above, your perspective fits cultural marxism for being so incredibly biased in favor of Jews that you promote the idea of Jews as oppressed, a 50 Stalin type of statement. Of course Jews are benefiting and remain a core part of far left progressive supremacist alliance. And core participants of the game "I oppose identity politics.. but actually for my outgroup". And in general the meme of antisemitism, is precisely a part of the cultural marxist idea of promoting justice by favoring this oppressed group that is under threat of being victimized and oppressing the oppressors.
As per my definition of cultural marxism, a bias, a lack of objectivity, and a permanent dogmatic mentality in favor of such groups is an important component and this applies towards Jews. Also important to note, it is not incompatible with being a jewish chauvinist who uses right wing language in terms of Israel, or even identifies as a Jewish supremacist, and being a cultural marxist. The cultural marxist faction is more pro zionist than has anti zionists. The who/whom is more important to cultural marxism, than any consistency.
To be very clear here, I am not going to pretend that cultural marxists are correct, and aren't biased, and such issues are a mystery. Nor will pretend that core groups of their alliance, probably the most important one, are somehow oppressed by them. It is simply a reversal of reality where black Americans and Jews are oppressed by the system. The Cancel culture contrarilly favors them. This is the reversal of reality that is Cultural Marxism 101.
It is also true that Jewish reputation has deservingly suffered in the current circumstances, and sure some people who dislike them might also be part of the intersectional alliance and might oppose them because they are Muslim chauvinists.
That was a confusing sentence to read (grammatically, I mean). But I think you meant that Jews tend to support the oppressor/oppressed dynamic, is that right?
Jewish organisations may be lobbying for their group to be considered part of the 'oppressed' coalition in America, but it isn't working.
67% of 18-24 year olds answered yes to the question 'Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?'
60% of the same age group answered yes to the question 'Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?'
And crucially, 79% of this cohort agree with the statement 'There is an ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment. Do you support or oppose this ideology?'
That is to say, among people who believe in the progressive stack of opressor and oppressed (young people), Jews are considered more as oppressors than oppressed.
It is working in terms of what enough of the establishment supports and actionable wins through censorship, support of powerful figures in congress, cancel culture. Much of the American establishment is etrmely woke, and quite pro Jewish, and pro Jewish authoritarian at that.
Woke inc, and liberal establishment is Jewish supremacist. Not just them, you have congress adopting very extreme and one sided definitions of antisemitism. The facts are such that it isn't really a speculative issue.
That in a poll, young people consider Jews oppressors, the same young people consider white people to be oppressors to a higher percentage, doesn't negate this. Indeed, there are Muslims who hate Jews and are also cultural marxists and support for the most part the intersectiona alliance.
Such issues at best makes the situation somewhat more nuanced, but Jews are not just a core component of the present progressive supremacist/cultural marxist agenda, but have been extremely important from the start. The Black/Jewish alliance, the Jewish grievance in its own right being cultural marxism oppressor, oppressed, and the Jewish role in these movements from the very begining as they developed in 20th century. Which it self was an evolution, or devolution if you prefer of previous movements, but which have gotten their particular development in 20th century in important part due to Jewish contributions.
The reality is that you show an obvious bias and want to potray Jews as oppressed, even when they are wildly overepresented and it is taboo to note and oppose this.
You even use that poll to also promote this idea of Jews as oppressed, neglecting the favoritism in their favor, and also how their white Christian outgroup interests and rights are denied on the basis that they threaten Jews and they are antisemitic.
Nor should we forget the fact that Jews are at about 70% supporting the Democrats (which are very much pro Israel) and the left. This is a very liberal group which ideologically agrees with cultural marxism and wants Jews to benefit from it in the oppressed/oppressor dichotomy. Considering how compromised non liberals have been with the excess of liberalism, that doesn't mean the rest are moderate. American Jews are polled even lower than black Americans, at only 30% to support the preservation of European civilization in the USA, so in certain ways they poll more to the left, and more hostile to European Americans, than even black Americans.
Rejecting the logic that Jews are oppressed and right wingers, and white Christians are the oppressors and the later have no right to support their own nations, and oppose Jews when they disrespect them, would be a way of escaping the cultural marxist logic on this issue.
Cultural marxist Jewish grievances are a part of an intersectional alliance, today. If tomorrow, this alliance completely breaks over, I doubt the Jewish grievances against the common oppressor would be gone, as its own faction but it would be at least an interesting development to see civil war among the cultural marxists. It hasn't happened yet, but there are some weak elements of conflict today.
It is possible for groups of such alliance to promote grievances against other intersectional groups too. When there is infighting among cultural marxists, the wrong thing to do is to side with one group, and reinforce their narrative of oppression that they use against their common enemy.
I think you're talking past me. The sole point I was making was that Jews are not part of the progressive stack of oppressed identities among Cultural Marxists. Whether the Jewish-Israeli lobby is particularly powerful in the US is irrelevant.
It's possible for Jews to be considered an oppressor class by these people and also have the US government be very pro-Israel, because most Democratic congressmen are not hardcore wokes, even if they do tolerate it as an ideology.
You clearly think that Jews are too influential in American politics, fine. You're not the only guy on this forum who doesn't like Jews. But your statement that they are considered part of the progressive stack with all the other intersectional identities obviously isn't true.
As I addressed your point directly, it is blatantly and unquestionably true that Jews are beneficiaries of DEI policies and far leftists who are zionists are key part of the establishment and promote progressive stack that benefits the Jews. You insisting this isn't the case, doesn't change the fact that Jewish identity is promoted in colleges.
The Democrats are hardcore pro woke, and your attempt to cover up for the Jewish supremacist, woke types, is it self telling.
The reality is that a far leftist who is pro Jewish, hates right wingers, white people and Christians, like Jonathan Greenblat, is a core part of the cultural marxist coalition. This is a point you act as if it hadn't been made, because you want to deny it.
A great deal of Jews do this themselves and as part of their progressive ideology includes opposition to what they call antisemitism, in the same way biased racists in favor of blacks, or feminists complain about racism and misogyny. The Jewish lobby uses the cultural marxist oppressor, oppressed for the Jews benefit and for Israel and against right wingers and white Christians.
They are also willing to use such power against pro Palestinian leftists who include cultural marxists. But they are not the only cultural marxists, and are of less influence and significance today.
This idea that groups like ADL are irrelevant and far leftists who are also Jewish supremacists exist in only our fantasy, is a completely preposterous claim. You wanting to bypass such issues, including the congress adopting ridiculously broad definitions of antisemitism, is a case, of you not wanting to acknowledge this.
American Jews, as a pattern are happy to combine progressivism with Jewish identity politics, and so this extends beyond just the establishment.
This distortion of reality to paint groups like Jews as always marginalized is very much a characteristic of what makes cultural marxism such a damaging ideology. And it also extends beyond just the Democrats. There are instances of nominally claiming to be right wing parties have sided both in isolation and in combo with left wing identity politics, privilidging such groups at expense of their own base.
To the extend there has been a civil war among woke, the pro Jewish wokes have been winning, and you are both denying their existence while also being blatantly on their side.
This is the classic cultural marxist response. Dismissing the whole issue and framing it as people being just haters and the implication being unfairly picking up on such groups. Ironically, those who promote this perspective are those who are hateful and show a dislike towards other groups and towards people who make valid claims, because they are biased in favor of such groups and oppose objectivity. The whole issue is about people being biased in favor of Jews, and other groups and biased and hateful against say white Christians and right wingers, based on this.
It isn't incidentally about just people who belong in those groups AND also want to use, and might even believe it themselves, into the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy to their benefit, at expense of others, in the intersectional progressive direction. Lets not lose track, the problem extends also to those who don't belong to such groups and are supremacists for them. Even though those who belong are more prone to be part of this movement of cultural marxism.
This is the the same as with the blacks, women and other groups that are treated as beyond criticism. Well, with the women it is different, there isn't as big of a taboo, but there is still that same movement. The cultural marxists aren't fighting for the most part against unfair people who dislike women, blacks, but are themselves haters of white people, haters of men, haters of non Jews. They are also haters of people who make fair criticisms of those groups, and make fair criticisms of the cultural marxists. They hate people who talk about crime and don't lie about 13/55, because they prioritize their ideology, over valid problems. And because they don't respect that other groups have a legitimate case to oppose bad behavior of the groups they favor at their expense.
They are willing to support and cover for crimes, while pathologilizing those opposing them.
Lets just say, that people who talk about genuine problems like say, grooming gangs, have the moral highground over people trying to cover up such issues because it is "disliking"/ism Pakistanis. Same, with the problem of authoritarianism and racist preference for such groups. Or a foreign country being prioritized, and those opposing it subject to cancel culture, vile attacks, and targeted by the Jewish lobby.
Bigotry in favor of Jews, Blacks, women, Muslims (when it comes to them being put above white Christians) etc, is a very key component of cultural Marxism.
It is one that is based on false, exaggerated accusation and insinuations of ism, and phobias, to cover its own agenda to benefit those groups at expense of the right wing outgroup, to shut down reality, and to cover up actual crimes and parasitical behavior.
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Can you point to the US anti-Israel or not pro-Israel party?
I'll conceded the Democrats are pro-Israel, I'm unconvinced they're more pro-Israel than Republicans.
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So what do you call a movement that seeks supporters by appealing to the cultural grievances of marginalized groups in predominantly left-wing hierarchical social environments? Is it okay to also call them - presumably including you - "Cultural Marxists"? Is the entire Online Right, as represented on this forum, a Cultural Marxist movement, or is the term reserved for those who fight against a right-wing environment? That seems like it's pretty close to @Primaprimaprima's observation below that part of the motivation is simply to be able to say that opponents of right-wingers = Marxists.
And then, who even gets to define what is right-wing? What do you tell to people like me whose political compass is rotated just enough that the SJW establishment looks like a right-wing movement with a new coat of paint, simply having gone through the usual evolution where a left-wing movement (ex. early Christianity) overthrows a right-wing establishment (ex. the pagan Roman aristocracy) and proceeds to become the new right-wing establishment (ex. the papacy) itself? Now you have to refine your definition to say "no, Marxists is the proper term for whatever instance of this general dynamic my tribe is fighting against", which looks increasingly contrived.
In general, I think it is right to be suspicious of people who insist on using a particular preexisting term for some politically significant notion at all costs, because this is the central element of a widely deployed manipulation strategy to redirect people's intuitions, heuristics and rules that were built up in response to one thing to be aimed towards another. This is what is going on when SJWs insist that you use their definition of "racism" (and relegate portions that were in the old extension but are excluded from the new to the semantic ghetto of "reverse racism"), instead of going the least-resistance path of coming up with a fresh word to capture the exact set of tendencies that they want to suppress, or "fascism", and why the content industry is adamant about referring to copyright violations as "theft" and "piracy", and I'm sure you could come up with many other examples. This is notwithstanding the other extreme, pointed out by @ArjinFerman, where one side is denied the use of any term for a politically significant notion at all - but the answer to a trap being laid in front of you isn't to defiantly turn around and walk into the trap laid behind you.
Of course, "Cultural Marxism" is an interesting example, because part of the intended transference seems to go the other way - the insistent advocate hopes that by being convinced that he is fighting against "Cultural Marxism", the anti-SJW will in the future also take up the torch of the fight against plain (economic) Marxism. I can't think of many good examples of this from other sides, since it requires a degree of having lost but still being around to plot a comeback; perhaps old-school economic lefties should pick up the strategy and push the idea that newspapers, Hollywood etc. are just "cultural Big Oil" that pulls the same tactic of using US foreign policy might to gain access to new markets.
The problem with this transference is not just that it is manipulative, but also that as soon as it is recognised, you lose a big part of your potential coalition, namely all the people (me included) who think that (economic) Marxism isn't particularly good, but the movements that fight against Marxism or think that we directionally need less Marxism are strictly worse. I would like to fight against SJWs, and in fact I consider it very important to do so, but I would be very reluctant to make common cause with a movement that wants to take some or all of my energy to do that and redirect it towards reducing taxes, abolish mandatory healthcare, or give more of a political voice to the wealthy.
Sovereign is he who defines the exception, or so it is said.
Then what is, exactly, the strength of the person who is allowed to make the definitions?
Let me short-circuit the definitional arguments: imagine that we are gesturing at a horse... and I call it a horse. No, some obnoxious college activist emerges, it is a four-legged ruminant ungulate!
Okay, I concede. It's a four-legged ruminant ungulate (bad). We take a step forward on the euphemistic threadmill.
You horrible, horrible person! The college activist says. It's actually an equine monodactyl animal of herding!
And so on. At no point is the discussion is allowed to proceed beyond what identifying the horse is.
Cultural Marxism is identifiably so because it uses the oppressor/oppressed dynamic but replaces the class structure with a whole assortment of intersectional replacements. No, it is not orthodox Marxism. But it very succinctly describes what it is. You are falling for a psy-op, a plausible smokescreen of academic confusion. Strip out decades of cold warrior rhetoric and it is still an accurate description of what they're trying to get at.
There is no distinction between cultural and economic marxism in the end because it all leads to redistribution of wealth from oppressor to oppressed. If you don't recognize that basic fact, you don't really want to fight the SJWs at all: merely moderate their excesses.
I know you are trying to quote Moldbug here, but that's neither the exact quote nor is it a particularly deep insight. The "sovereign" gets to write your dictionary, so He actually defines everything.
What upstart movement can not be glossed as saying that some group is not getting what it deserves and some other group is getting more than it deserves? If this is the definition of Marxism, then the Nazis, the Basque and Catalan independence movement, the Kievan Rus throwing off the Mongol yoke and the American Revolution are all Marxist. Why don't you call it Cultural Patriotism, or Cultural ETAism? This analysis is not predictive of anything either, because it is not a feature of "cultural marxist" SJWs that who they want redistribute wealth from and to has anything to do with who is oppressing whom. No amount of oppression heaped on their political opponents would make them think "huh, I recall that we were Marxists and must pursue the redistribution of wealth from oppressor to oppressed" and proceed to expropriate their allies to pay their enemies.
What exactly is the psy-op I am supposedly falling for? I don't think I'm particularly confused about what SJWs want, or what Marxists want, or what anti-Marxists want, and I'm strongly against the first, mildly against the second, and strongly against the third. If your rhetorical trick made me support the third because I wanted to oppose the first, you would be the one psyopping me. You might be trying to frame things as if there were a contradiction in my position, but your argument only works if you consider "oppressed" and "oppressor" to be pointers that must not be resolved or refined, which as I argued above not even the SJWs do. I want some redistribution from rich to poor, and no redistribution between any ethnic groups, and this is independent of who oppresses whom: even if the rich were publicly flagellated and forced to eat dirt for two hours every day while the homeless get to spit on them, I would still want them to pay more taxes.
I really don't want to get into definitional arguments, because they don't get anywhere.
I am using their terminology. You can argue it as much as you want that it is vague and nebulous, but it doesn't matter, because it describes a real subset of people that do exist that push policy and active goals. I don't have to go back to the Kievan Rus to explain it. What am I, Putin?
Don't dive into generalities. I am addressing a very specific movement (the woke, the intersectionalists, the crt) who can be described as cultural marxists. I am intentionally limiting the scope of the discussion here because there is where an argument can actually be had.
But if you want to continue down this path, please, provide your definitions of these things.
Who are "they"? The vast majority of people you seek to describe as "Cultural Marxists" do not use that terminology for themselves. There apparently existed some group of people who used that term once upon a time, and maybe you can still find one or another stray adherent, but it's not clear why it would even still be popular given that the typical SJW is hustling for a seat at the table of the megacorps and passive-income fatcats.
The definitions are not that hard.
Marxists are adherents of Marx's theories and visions for society and economics, who believe that the principal division in society is between people who own property that generates value and those who have to sell their labour to provide for themselves, and it is inevitable that the latter will rise up and bring about a new form of society where the former mode of existence is impossible and the latter retain control over the property complement that is needed to convert their labour into value.
"Cultural Marxists" are not really a thing anymore; to the extent to which people identified with this, this can be compared to the tendency of metal music fans to create new "types of metal" whenever they stumble upon a non-metal music genre that they like, so folk music as enjoyed by the metal community is "folk metal", J-pop enjoyed by Metal fans is "kawaii metal" and so on. "Cultural Marxism" is a label that emerges when people whose identity revolves around being "Marxist" discover their interest in culture warring, and have to lay claim to still being part of their old community.
The people currently controlling culture in the US and its vassals can be called SJWs, Wokeists or the Awokened or whatever you prefer. I found that in my life calling them "the Social Justice crowd" is specific and inoffensive enough that it gets the point across without eliciting backlash.
Someone who doesn't identify as a Marxist can't be a Cultural Marxist, any more than a folk music fan who is not into metal music or culture can be a folk metal fan. What you are doing amounts to relabelling all folk music fans as folk metallers, because you hate both metal and folk music and during the most recent resurgence of folk music there happened to be a group of metalheads who got into it.
As I said in my reply to OP, the term “cultural Marxist” refers to a specific umbrella of ideas, originated and promulgated by individuals who explicitly self-identified as Marxists, and who applied Marxist analysis and praxis to issues of cultural/social inequality. These people mostly called, and still do call, themselves critical theorists. Do you agree that this is a discrete and identifiable phenomenon or not? If you do, what is the point of quibbling about the term “Cultural Marxism”? Your concern clearly isn’t that you don’t want to use an exonym for this group, because you yourself call them “SJWs” and “the Social Justice crowd” - terms that these people clearly do not use amongst themselves.
Marx himself made it very clear that he believed that capitalism was a necessary step on the way to communism. One of the first major wrinkles in Marxism that caused a lot of consternation and soul-searching in the movement is the fact that the only country where communism had securely taken hold before WWII was Russia - at the time a non-industrialized semi-feudal state that had not yet undergone most of the preliminary steps that would have allowed capitalism to first take root and then expose its own contradictions. Marx himself expected communism to flourish first in countries like the UK and Germany, where the Industrial Revolution was the most pervasive and capitalism strongest.
Modern Marxists have developed corporatist theories of how 21st-century Marxism will necessarily be achieved. They’ve given up on the short-term goal of expropriating industrialists and shifted their focus to working within the existing framework of monopoly capitalism; many of them welcome a paradigm in which megacorps crush smaller companies and centralize the means of production among an ever-smaller group of nearly state-adjacent entities, because it makes it that much easier to infiltrate those organizations and direct them toward ideological ends. Public-private partnerships are the new Marxist paradigm.
Again, have you actually read any of the works of the figures I and others are identifying as Cultural Marxists? If you were to read their works and see that they do actually identify as Marxists, and offer sophisticated explanations of how their work furthers Marxist ends, would that change your mind?
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This is like the guy on datasecretslox who claimed not to know what race is. People know what right-wing is to enough of a degree to be able to talk about it, even if you can "well, aksually" the edge cases.
No, it's not so alike. Germans, Americans, Africans and Chinese would agree about classifying a typical black and a white guy, even as the others might find the US "one drop" boundary weird. Meanwhile, there are real differences between what people consider fairly central examples of left and right, to the point that I've seen German press refer to the BSW (new split-off "tankie" party with direct lineage from the GDR capital-P Party) as right-wing because they are against SJWs, immigrants and Ukraine.
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Ok, but what if I told you I don't want the transference? Like I mentioned, I like MadMozer's analogy to Mormonism, because I can understand the Christians' impulse to say "hey, don't put me in the same bag as those weirdos", but that's not what the Marxists here are saying. What they're doing is more akin to "the Church of Mormon is a conspiracy theory", it's maddening.
See my reply to naraburns elsewhere in the thread. I think the appropriate analogy is more like, if the Mormons denied that God existed altogether, would you still call them Christian?
I do agree that calling cultural Marxism a "conspiracy theory" is dumb. At most, I would describe the term as mistaken or misguided. And regardless of terminology, many of the concrete allegations - the idea that there is a concerted effort among leftists to attain positions of institutional power in order to influence the direction of culture - are just plainly true.
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I don’t know of any atheists out there saying a Mormon state is the end-goal of American Christianity, which is what would garner the equivalent response, “The Church of Mormon is a conspiracy theory.”
It would be easy, actually, to point out how the LDS church is a major driver of conservative culture, trying to match the Roman Catholic Church in cultural power through new media (Angel Studios, Glenn Beck, The Blaze, etc.). Now, build up a conspiracy theory of a group of influential and wealthy Mormons trying to bring about the White Horse Prophecy. Then check the funding of conservative candidates and PACs by Mormons, and you’ll see “evidence” for the theory everywhere you look. Easily disproved, of course, but now you’ve got the mind-worm whispering to you every time you see a Mormon involved in the culture war. (It works because of the successful othering of Mormons since their beginning, the American equivalent of the perpetually-othered Ashkenazi Jews of Europe complete with pogroms.)
But all that aside, the reason “Cultural Marxism” is denied is because most people have no clue what actual Cultural Marxism was/is. The progressive movement’s economic policy wing is rolling along on the momentum of bog-standard envy-driven collectivism, same as it ever was, grabbing and using new terminology by opportunity, not by design.
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So then why do you want to use the term so badly? You should have seen a lot of arguments against using it that are not "it's a conspiracy theory" by now. Can you be baited into doing something if the outgroup condemns you for doing it in sufficiently maddening terms? If the "right-wingers take Ivermectin against COVID because they are anti-science conspiracy theorists" needling had become obnoxious enough, would you have taken it just on those grounds? (If you do actually believe in Ivermectin, replace with drinking/injecting bleach)
You'll note that I don't actually go around calling the woke stuff "Cultural Marxism" in day-to-day conversations. It's only when someone denies that such a movement ever existed, and applied that label to itself, and that they were inspired by Marxist ideas, and that they resulted in what we now call "woke", that I pipe up, and point out that they are wrong.
Well, this is (almost) a motte I'm happy to concede - the only part that I find doubtful is how by "resulted" suggests that the lineage of "woke" is entirely, or mostly, within the movement that referred to itself as "Cultural Marxism". I have seen evidence of existence of communities that used that term for themselves, but the volume of evidence is really too small for there to ever have been more than a fairly small number (on the order of a few academic groups and attached activist groupies? Perhaps 100-1000 people?). If you want to claim that those groups, however small they are, begot the "woke" that we see today to a sufficient degree that "resulted" is justified as a term, when the "woke" themselves see their lineage as a procession of mass movements (civil rights, LGBT etc.), this is pretty close to the textbook definition of a conspiracy (events are secretly steered by a small group). Then the moniker "conspiracy theory" would be appropriate on the surface. Whether one should abstain from using it because of the pejorative connotations, or push back against the pejorative connotations on account of those being obvious enemy action by conspiracies, is a separate question.
Well, you can follow the people who referred to their thought as "Cultural Marxism", see what they were writing later on, when "woke" became a thing, note the lack of differences between "woke", the current academic memplex "woke" is based on ("Critical Theory" as best as I can gather), and "Cultural Marxism" of the past.
This is exactly what we'd expect from a movement that was dismissed, on this very forum, as "just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses", until a few years ago.
I have to stop you there, "woke" is not a term to describe mass movements. Civil rights, and LGBT are not "woke" / "Culturally Marxist" by virtue of being being civil rights / LGBT.
It's not a separate question. The term "conspiracy theory" is deliberately used to slander anyone believing it, the implication being that the theory is false, and the person is a paranoid schizophrenic for thinking it might be true. In colloquial usage a "conspiracy theory" has to be false or else it's not a "conspiracy theory". We could it watch in real time when 2rafa posted about how believing in WEF conspiracy theories are an "embarrassment", and how they magically stopped being "conspiracy theories", according to several users here, when I wrote my longpost about the WEF, even though I explicitly endorsed the term.
If you want to apply the label "conspiracy theory" to "Cultural Marxist" I can endorse it on the condition it is done in a way like "Cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory that turned out to be 100% true", or otherwise made it absolutely clear that the theory is not false.
If you want to insist that the pejorative connotations are a separate question, then we have to come back why you insist on not calling wokism "Cultural Marxism", here too the pejorative connotations should be a separate question.
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Reactionaries, I suppose.
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I think the "Cultural Marxism" discourse on the Motte tends to go down rabbit holes due to arguments about the meaning of words. The core facts are:
The argument about whether or not "Cultural Marxism" is really Marxism is analogous to the argument about whether Mormons are really Christians, and is equally unproductive. From the perspective of outsiders using the word to attack something we dislike, the more interesting question is whether thinking of "Cultural Marxism" as a form of Marxism helps or hinders our efforts to defend against it. *
From a liberal perspective, "Cultural Marxism" and orthodox Marxism are bad for sufficiently different reasons that lumping them together makes you dumber. In terms of epistemics, orthodox Marxism claims to know things which aren't true, whereas "Cultural Marxism" wrongly accuses its opponents of knowing nothing. In terms of political impacts, orthodox Marxism rejects individual action because it might lead to economic inequality, whereas "Cultural Marxism" tries to prevent effective collective action by saying it is impossible until we have all completed therapy for our internal systems of oppression. I oppose using the term "Cultural Marxism" because orthodox Marxists, most "Cultural Marxists", and intelligent liberals all agree that "Cultural Marxism" is not a subset of Marxism, so the word is misleading.
From a cultural conservative perspective, both "Cultural Marxism" and orthodox Marxism are godless, anti-cultural, and anti-us, and lumping them together is harmless. I think this is a bad case of outgroup homogeneity bias, but I understand where the cultural conservatives are coming from.
FWIW, I call the thing "Wokism"
* In the Mormon analogy, it is logical for anti-Christians to think that Mormonism is Christianity regardless of the theological arguments because they oppose it for the same reasons.
I think this is largely correct, yes. We're dealing with a problem of shifting labels - some small number of people have used the term 'cultural Marxism' to self-identify, but almost none do today, the term 'cultural Marxism' today is used extremely broadly to identify ideas or movements with nothing or almost nothing in common with classical Marxism, and ultimately I think it's become a term that obfuscates rather than illuminates. The term 'cultural Marxism' does not reveal anything useful about the people it is applied to.
I don't think I quite agree with the debate about Mormonism and Christianity, because that usually is couched in specific claims about what 'Christianity' means, and what's required for something to be meaningfully 'Christian'. The facts about Mormonism aren't particularly in dispute - Mormons sincerely claim to be followers of Jesus, but they are outside what all historical Christian creeds would have regarded as the bounds of orthodoxy. The issue at hand is simply whether or not one accepts those historical creeds as authoritative.
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So, first of all thank you for outlining the "core facts", because I pretty much agree on every point, and I don't know if I'd manage to list them in such a detached way, but I do kind of disagree that this is the crux of the issue, and what people here end up fighting over. I explicitly stated that I'm perfectly happy to say The Thing is not Real Marxism, that it is in fact a perversion of the real thing, The Last Jedi of Marxism, a CIA op to co-opt it, and make it serve capitalism instead. I'm entirely fine with all of that.
But if we map the arguments we've heard here, and in the other thread, to your analogy, we'd be getting things like "the Church of Mormon is a myth!" or "I'm a Christian, and if there was such a thing as Mormonism, I think I would have heard about it". It sounds like blanket denial, even as the other side is pointing at church buildings and the missionaries standing on the street corner.
Yes. In this model, there absolutely are missionaries wandering around with magic underwear under their cheap suits calling themselves Latter-Day Saints and insisting that there are no Mormon Christians and that the word "Mormon Chrisitan" is a Satanic dog-whistle. And in ten years' time they will be saying that "Latter-Day Saints" is a dog-whistle too.
But the debate among Motteposters appears to be about whether "Mormon Christians" are Christians.
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I can think two better mappings. The crux that makes it different from most of other is that "cultural marxism" is a descriptive term that was never widely used as ingroup denominator, though it makes sense as theoretical construction.
During the George W. Bush years, many leftists here in not-the-US drank all the US leftist messaging about then-political enemy of American Evangelical Christians without much critique. Some people honestly think the US teeming with sex-crazy corrupt religious religious cultists called "Evangelicals", lead by nightmarish ministers who look something that crawled from 1st season of True Detective and Witchfynder General, who are generally corrupt and fully intend to subjugate women and instill visions from Handmaid's Tale.
If I thought it would matter, I could say things like "I have met Evangelicals, they are different from us bu not like the media portrays" or "if there was a conspiracy to turn Handmaid's Tale into reality, I would have heard about it" (and be not believed).
Another example: Patriarchy, as defined by feminism. Yes, there have been social and cultural organization models where men had more rights than women. Yet also the strong forms of "patriarchy" as an all-encompassing cultural force that must fought everywhere, all the time, that both needs to eliminated in our minds to remove hurtful notions and social expectations and also in the social world to remove privileges and old boys networks by setting up quotas ... yeah, we do get arguments lke "patriarchy is a myth" and "I am a man and if there was such a thing as patriarchy that supports me with my career, I think I would have heard about it".
That doesn't work. If we map that back to the debate on Cultural Marxism, it would end up looking like "I've met Cultural Marxists, they're not saying what you're accusing them of". No one here is saying that.
Ok, but that's just a direct denial of Cultural Marxism having existed, and I'm quite prepared to argue the other side of the position (see here), and that just means the "core facts" from MadMozer's post are actually under dispute.
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I believe that I am at least somewhat acquainted with leftist thought, not only through reams of videos and text produced by contemporary leftists online, but also through the works of the Frankfurt school (primarily Adorno and Marcuse), the works of Freudian psychoanalysts from Freud himself up through the 20th century and into the current day, and 20th century European philosophy in general. I have never once heard a leftist refer to themselves unironically as a "cultural Marxist". In fact I have never heard the term used by leftists at all, except when contemporary commentators use it to designate a conspiracy theory. That doesn't mean that no one ever used the term! I could have just missed it. But I am relatively confident that the term has never seen wide usage within actual leftist circles.
More importantly, this preoccupation with cultural Marxism seems to be an instance of the everything-I-don't-like-is-Marxism fallacy, which is the right's analogue of the left's everything-I-don't-like-is-fascism fallacy. Leftists will sometimes collate groups as diverse as ancaps, white nationalists, and monarchists all under the heading of "fascist" (or at least "gateways to fascism"), which is simply incorrect and ignores the many distinctions and divisions between those positions. You can't say that all your enemies are the same just because they're your enemies. There are many people who I would file under the broad banner of "leftism" who are simply not Marxist at all. Someone whose entire focus is, say, trans surgeries for minors or reparations for blacks, could easily be a liberal capitalist who has no overlap with historical Marxism in terms of goals or methodology. And I believe that is precisely the case for many leftists today. (Prosecuting your own particular racial grievances doesn't actually have any necessary connection with forming a global workers' movement to institute a total transformation of the economic system).
We certainly need some term to describe the dominant social phenomenon in Western politics today, whether that term is "leftist" or "woke" or "SJW" or whatever. But "cultural Marxism" is not a particularly good term for it, because the phenomenon isn't particularly Marxist, and the "culture" part is just obvious. What political movement doesn't want to shape the direction of culture? The right wants to influence culture as well, and they're fairly explicit about this.
The thing you are missing here is that it's 'CULTURAL Marxism', not 'cultural MARXISM' -- the Marxism is secondary but still important. We could draw an analogy with 'football'. Everyone agrees that 'AMERICAN football' is descended from and related to ROtW 'FOOTBALL' in important ways, but the 'American' modifier indicates that it is a different thing. In almost every way! An alien watching the two sports would be unlikely to notice very many parallels other than the most banal. ('played on grass or grass-like field with inflatable object' is about as far as I can get)
Similarly, Cultural Marxism was invented by Marxists working on a Marxist playing field, but they changed the rules in order to apply some (core) Marxist concepts (eg. class conflict) to the cultural playing field. Marx did not really do this, and is not around to say what he thinks about it -- but it still relies heavily on his ideas and suffers many of the same flaws. Same playing field, new ball, if you will.
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You're probably just not old enough to remember, then.
This is only kind of true. The cultural Marxists are the ones co-opting Marx. Marxism is modern and materialist; cultural Marxism is postmodern and sociological. The idea was to use Marxist insights to determine how to distribute sociological, rather than material, "equality." It's all right there in the book. As @MadMonzer correctly observes, the actual Marxists often object to the cultural Marxists (today this manifests as, say, Brian Leiter or Freddie deBoer criticizing Wokists).
But in the United States, the cultural Marxists and the originalist Marxists vote as a bloc, so in practical terms...
Did or does Marxism talk about how? Or was it mostly an analysis of current pressures, with a prediction that socialism and communism would inevitably come to pass?
This is a surprisingly complicated question, over which scholars reasonably differ. I do think most of Marx's own writings assert a kind of historical inevitability. He was also unquestionably an advocate for that change, but not to the point where he ever did any real revolution-organizing of his own. But it turns out he was just factually wrong on many questions of economics, and he certainly never formulated a practical approach to revolution.
This ties back to Marx's Hegelian roots. The disciples of Hegel fell into two distinct camps: conservative Hegelians who viewed the unfolding of history as inevitable, but also as collectively transcending any one person's insights or inputs. For them, attempting to "reform" the system was just interfering with processes which no human could reasonably comprehend (or, therefore, effectively guide). Whereas the radical Hegelians were basically accelerationists; they believed that the arc of history bent toward justice and that meant the faster history could be made to "progress" toward the predicted utopia, the better off everyone would be. Arguably Marx's problem with the radical Hegelians was that they weren't sufficiently radical. But stated a little differently, Hegel's focus on "spirit" Marx saw as ineffectual and disconnected from practical reality; he wanted more of a focus on the material origins of oppression.
This focus on oppression as the enemy is substantially what percolates through leftist political thought--to the point that even non-Marxist liberals will often talk about "oppression" as a major focus for political activism (though what actually constitutes oppression, as opposed to say inconvenience or violations of preference, turns out to be a difficult question for honest thinkers). Certainly any theorist styled "critical" is focused on the practical alleviation of perceived oppression. Today, I think most people who like Marx are also very interested in political activism rather than in the academic question of Socialism's putative inevitability. But I assume there are at least some academics out there who could be accurately characterized along such lines.
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Ok. But my question is, is that really still Marxism, necessarily? Redistribution and equality, regardless of their modality, are not intrinsically Marxist ideas; they existed before Marx, and they continue to persist in non-Marxist contexts today. Imagine someone who said "we want to use Christian insights to strive for justice and equality, but we're going to drop all the baggage about Jesus and God and all that stuff, because we don't believe in that". At best, we could say that such a movement is Christian-inspired or Christian-derived, but it wouldn't be Christianity proper, because it rejects the core assumptions of Christianity.
There's been a lot of discussion in the thread over what counts as properly Marxist or not. To the best of my understanding, the core of Marxism would be something like: "capitalism is the name of a self-contradictory economic order; the self-consciousness and self-overcoming of this contradiction, which will take the concrete material form of a mass workers' revolution, will usher in a post-capitalist economic order that is based on transformed relations of production". That's the Nicene Creed of Marxism. If you don't believe in something that's at least close to that, you're not a Marxist. No matter how egalitarian you are, how sexually experimental you are, how resentful of straight white males you are - if your political program can be fundamentally be realized within the limits of liberal capitalism, then you're not a Marxist, cultural or otherwise. You're something else.
There may be individuals who, while adhering to the core Marxist program, decided that they needed to take a more "cultural" angle, and the term Cultural Marxist may be appropriate for those individuals. That's fine, I don't deny that. I do deny that the majority of leftists today (all the way from professors down to disaffected reddit commenters) adhere to the core Marxist program in any meaningful sense; therefore describing them as Marxist is inappropriate.
It seems to be a popular thesis in this thread that contemporary wokeism, while maybe not Marxist proper, is at least Marxist-derived in some crucial sense. This is an empirical question that I'm relatively agnostic on. It could be true or it could be false; it would require the appropriate historical and sociological studies to make a determination. I do worry that, much like the everything-I-don't-like-is-Marxism fallacy I mentioned earlier, this thesis comes close to being an instance of the all-my-enemies-get-their-talking-points-from-the-same-source fallacy. The left is very fond of deploying this against rightists - "no one could actually vote for Trump or oppose leftist social policies of their own accord, they've clearly all been brainwashed by Fox News/Russian bots/etc". And I don't want "cultural Marxist college professors" to be the right's version of Fox News/Russian bots/etc. Your enemies were not all brainwashed by a single malevolent entity. There really are just people who think differently than you.
Voting patterns are not a useful criteria to determine equivalence among ideologies. Most white nationalists voted for Trump in 2016; but so did other groups, and the fact that those other groups voted for Trump doesn't mean they necessarily have any affinity with white nationalism.
Yes, that's true. That's why I limited the (tangential, and so unelaborated) point to "practical terms..."
As for the rest, I've had this conversation many times over the years, and the answer ultimately depends on your question, which you don't appear to have clearly stated yet. Calling out a "Nicene Creed of Marxism" is akin to the "true Communism has never been tried" trope. In my experience, cultural Marxists tend to regard themselves as Marxists, or Marxists-plus, or also Marxists, while avowed Marxists may or may not accept cultural Marxism, but I have never seen a rigorous attempt at putting empirical numbers to these things. Presumably, that would be difficult or impossible now; "cultural Marxism" has been a somewhat contested term for a long time, and its memory-holing into an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory" has only made that worse.
So in general I would say that the term "cultural Marxist" should probably be avoided simply because it's been hopelessly muddied. But at the same time, when people insist that it just is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, or that it has nothing to do with Marxism as an ideology, I just have to point out that this is wrong as a matter of history. It certainly evolved from Marxism; it certainly is intellectually downstream of Marxism; it certainly shares many structural features with Marxism. If a "true Marxist" feels the need to gatekeep and insist that "cultural Marxism" is an ideological heresy, like, fine? I don't have a horse in that race, I'm happy to taboo "cultural Marxism" so long as the conversation is not explicitly about the term "cultural Marxism."
But you seem to be attributing fallacious reasoning to the people talking about cultural Marxism, whereas I and others responding to you are focused instead on the mischief of the people who muddied the term in the first place. If there was a group who called themselves cultural Marxists (there was) and this group believed the things they are accused of believing (they did) and later on the term was abandoned by its users because it had become a useful tool in the enemy's toolbox (it had), then getting conspicuously annoyed with the aforementioned enemies who go on using the term anyway seems like misdirected ire from anyone who is not, well, part of the group-formerly-known-as-cultural-Marxists.
All my enemies get their talking points from Plato. What pisses me off is that they don't seem to realize it.
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If you find yourself surveying the attitudes of actual existing self-identified Marxists, and the vast majority believe one thing while only a relatively small and disempowered rump minority believe another, isn’t Marxism just “whatever most Marxists believe?” Christianity has undergone multiple profound changes - theological, structural, and otherwise - in the two thousand years of its existence. If you described modern Protestant Christianity to one of Jesus’s contemporary followers, that person would find many aspects of it unrecognizable. (In fact, that person might be shocked to learn that the world still exists two thousand years hence, since it’s quite clear that a substantial portion of early Christians expected the Rapture to happen within their lifetimes.) The fact of various schisms, sectarian conflicts, doctrinal disputes, and pragmatic political compromises does not invalidate our ability to discuss “Christianity” as a distinct phenomenon identifiable across time, does it? (If you want to argue that it does, that’d a more interesting conversation, but it doesn’t appear that you do.)
Similarly, Marxism, though a far younger movement than Christianity, has already undergone multiple schisms and evolutions as it has had to interface with the real world. I’m not sure why you believe that Marxists are required to be fully faithful to the dead hand of Marx’s and Engels’ original writings, with no room for adaptation or innovation, in order to still be considered Marxists. Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School - all of these guys were grappling with which parts of Marx’s predictions came true and which didn’t, and have tried to salvage the core theses while figuring out how to make them work in reality. They believe in his fundamental goals and vision, and are trying to discover - through experimental praxis - the means by which to effectively actualize that vision.
Marx was never entirely focused on mere economics; see his famous letter to Arnold Ruge in which he states, “It is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists…” Keep in mind also that Marx was building on the ideas of Hegel and was only one member of a larger philosophical movement derived from Hegel’s thought; in that sense, Marxism has merely been building on previous ideas from the beginning, so it should be unsurprising that its modern inheritors should continue that process of philosophical evolution.
Sure. But the fact that we're still able to recognize it as Christianity means it has to have something essential in common with the forms of Christianity that came before it. It can change and evolve, but there have to be limits on how much it can change as well; otherwise it would stop being Christianity altogether, and it would become something else. Presumably, someone who denies the existence of God cannot be a Christian, no matter how big we want the Christian tent to be.
Certainly there are many mutually contradictory tendencies and sects within Marxism. But they're still united by certain common features that make them recognizable as Marxism (and the belief that capitalism will be overcome by the workers' class struggle seems to be a particularly essential one). No matter how ruthlessly the contemporary SJW criticizes all that is, if they're not fundamentally invested in the notion of a workers' class struggle to overcome capitalism, then I think it's inappropriate to classify them as Marxist.
Their counterargument is: Marx was a fallible man who was susceptible to the biases and perceptual limitations of his time and place. He lived in Germany in the gnarliest part of the Industrial Revolution, so of course the relationship between workers and factory owners seemed like the most important conflict in the world to him. He was surrounded by it every day! However, at the exact same time as Marx was writing, millions of people were literally enslaved in the New World (and in many part of the Old), and women were in a sort of bondage that Marx, being a man of his time, just couldn’t bring himself to grapple with. We, with the benefit of two hundred extra years of learning and dialogue and hearing other perspectives, can now clearly recognize the limitations in Marx’s framework, while still recognizing that his key insights - his analytical approach, his relentless and sincere belief in justice and the shattering of unjust hierarchies, his keen observation of the dialectical nature of power relations, his recognition of historical progress as a result of the resolution of societal contradictions - are centrally valuable to the achievement of our goals even today.
If Marxism has an advantage over Christianity, it’s that Marxists have no obligation to treat any particular thing Marx said as some sacred final word on the subject. Marx was just a man, and other men have been able to take the things he said that are useful, and discard or correct (or, in a Hegelian sense, sublate) the things that were shortsighted. I understand what you mean about there being a sort of Ship of Theseus problem, but Marxism has long been a sort of extended branching dialogue between academics, juxtaposed against but learning from, real-world concrete praxis by committed activists. It’s a sort of evolving religion - which is appropriate, given its roots in Hermeticism and Gnosticism, which believe that humanity is slowing rebuilding God by progressively discovering His nature and becoming more like him over time.
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I've recently revisited the the only Cultural Marxism article on Wikipedia after I saw this discussion (again) in the last 30 days. I keep forgetting to ping you. Wasn't it you who used to maintain the Cultural Marxism subreddit? Did that get binned?
In case it wasn't you, you may remember from the /r/slatestarcodex CW thread days: it was a subreddit where someone had tried to collate a lot of older Cultural Marxist materials, since the Wiki page was already shot by then.
It wasn't me, but several of my posts on reddit were included in the maintenance of a cultural Marxism "thread" (maybe on CWR?) for a time, that included numerous materials. But at some point the creator deleted it, presumably either by quitting reddit or by being banned from it. This was not my first post on the topic, but Google is not helping me find older ones and I haven't got the bandwidth just this moment to dig up the others.
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Do the books, papers, Google ngrams graphs, etc. that people keep linking in these conversations, where the term is used self-descriptively, move the needle for you in any way?
It's very Marxist. Like, anyone you'll drop the term in front of will instantly know this refers to a particular type of feminist / anti-racist / gay/trans/wathaever-rights advocate, that sees everything through the lens of patriarchy / white supremacy / cis-straight-heteronormativity, or if you want to take all these together - intersectionality, the same way Marx was looking at the world through the lens of relations to the means of production.
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For people who might doubt that 'Cultural Marxism' was a term happily used by academics referring to the intellectual project there were themselves engaged in, here is an essay that is still up on Douglas Kellner's academic website: Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies.
I am reminded of a line from a Scott Alexander essay replying to Nathan Robinson about SA's supposed misunderstanding of left-wing thought:
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I think what's missing here, for me, is the history or genealogy of these posited tendencies? One of your examples of 'economic Marxism' is from many centuries before Marx - it seems undeniable to me that whatever John Ball was thinking, it wasn't Marxism, i.e. it was not using the same ideas, analyses, etc., as Marx.
You can, I suppose, redefine 'Marxism' to mean something like 'any sensibility that can be roughly characterised as egalitarian, or opposed to existing hierarchies', and I think I see something like that in your post here. But that doesn't seem like a decent general understanding of it.
If we understand 'Marxism' instead as involving, well, Marx's thought specifically, and then the thought of followers or disciples of Marx influenced him - the wider Marxist tradition, as it were - then I think that forces us to be more precise in our analysis. Thus, say, Jacobs' criticism of 'cultural Marxism' - that the word 'Marxism' functions as a mere bugaboo, associating any roughly egalitarian movement with the spectre of communism.
I am not asserting that there is no way to draw a genealogy that would get you to a 'cultural Marxism'. That's probably there, even if I think the most enthusiastic, even promiscuous, users of the term don't respect that genealogy much. But just as far as it goes, I think the historical connection or tradition matters.
I only quoted Ball to give an example of a purely economic argument for redistribution and equality.
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This criticism doesn't work at all. If you understand "Marxism" to involve the thought of the followers or disciples of Marx, than Cultural Marxism is Marxism, and the word "Marxism" is not any sort of bugaboo, it denotes the use of oppressor-oppressed analysis that Marx first applied to one's relation to the means of production, and the "Cultural" prefix indicates that it's applied to other aspects of the culture. This criticism is extremely dishonest, because people calling themselves Cultural Marxists have explained this in their own words:
What more do you want at this point?
We are not talking about "a genealogy that would get you to a 'cultural Marxism'", we're talking about "the ideas labelled Culturally Marxist do, in fact, have a genealogy going back to OG Marxists, if not Marx himself, and the label itself was originally self-applied by Marxists".
The top-level comment is plainly not doing that, though. It cites a 14th century peasant leader as an example of 'economic Marxism', even though, bluntly, there is no way to regard John Ball as a Marxist except by redefining 'Marxism' so broadly as to be practically meaningless. If John Ball is meaningfully a Marxist, then George Washington or Thomas Jefferson are even more Marxist.
Definitions can't be wrong, so if you want, you technically can define 'Marxism' as broadly as 'the analysis of oppressed and oppressor classes'. But that definition is so broad as to be useless. If that's how you define Marxism - if any analyst who identifies a class of oppressors is a Marxist - then everybody's a Marxist and the term is useless.
I would argue that, in order to be useful, 'Marxism' should mean the broad school or schools of thought historically derived from Marx's ideas.
Are there forms of 'cultural Marxism' that fit that definition! Sure! Entirely possible!
But I think there's a motte and bailey here. Is Martha E. Gimenez a Marxist? Sounds like, yes. Is any analysis of oppressor-oppressed relations Marxism? No.
Thus in the top-level comment here - there's no reason to think that any of the (fictional) examples of 'cultural Marxism' are Marxist at all. It's not Marxist to be LGBT or socially progressive in the Deep South. It's not Marxist to think that your family are annoying, or that people shouldn't fly the Confederate flag. If Marxism means anything at all, it means something more than that.
Ok, and I'm saying "Cultural Marxism" meets that criterion. If you pick a random thinker from an "intersectional" school of thought, and follow their citations, you will land on someone who is indisputably Marxist and, quite possibly, will go through someone who at one point called themselves a "Cultural Marxist".
Not in the way it is used in the top-level comment here, though - and in my judgement, not in the way that it is casually used in right-wing discourse.
Let's take some specific examples. The Federalist has a whole category for cultural Marxism. The currently most recent article is about a day care in Wisconsin. So let's have a look - despite being tagged 'cultural Marxism', the article itself does not mention Marxism once. It describes a training programme that repeats the clichés of the social justice left, but nothing specific about Marxism.
The second-most recent article is the same story. Next. The third-most recent is a piece criticising Tim Walz. This one does use the word 'Marxist' in the article itself. The story here is that Minnesota teachers will be required to 'affirm' a range of protected identities, including LGBT identities. The article frames this as 'banning Christians from teaching', which doesn't seem like the most sober approach, but never mind. Where does Marxism come in? It offhandedly describes "race, sexual orientation, [and] gender identity" as "cultural Marxist categories", and describes department standards regarding race and cultural sensitivity as "race Marxism", but no further explanation is offered. It is not clear how any of the programmes described are Marxist. (For what it's worth, I think the programmes these articles describe are genuinely bad, even though The Federalist's descriptions of them strike me as histrionic to the point of undermining their credibility.)
Skipping down a bit more, let's try to find one that explains what it means by 'cultural Marxism'. Perhaps this story on Bari Weiss and cultural Marxism might help. Let's see what we learn here. It describes 'intersectionalism' as a doctrine of cultural Marxism, and then... we don't see a lot sense. Apparently Marxism denigrates men? Unfortunately there's still no explanation of what it actually is. These are all by one author, Joy Pullmann, and it seems to me that for Pullmann, 'cultural Marxism' or 'Marxism' just serve as a shorthand for culturally progressive politics in general.
Well, enough of The Federalist. Let's try another relatively mainstream conservative publication.
National Review tackles the question of whether cultural Marxism exists by linking to another article. This looks promising! Allen Mendenhall, the author, even traces its genealogy. There is definitely a robust argument here. There are elements I quibble (in particular I'd have liked a clearer sense not only of the genealogy, but of the ideas transmitted themselves, and how they evolved and changed; and also the recognition that many of the later thinkers he describes would not necessarily have called themselves Marxists), but Mendenhall does admit that he is giving only a "simplified, approximate version of a much larger and more complex story", which is limited to his specific field of literary studies. So I would be interested to hear more from Mendenhall. I note that Mendenhall's assertion does not justify the rhetoric of authors like Joy Pullmann - he may be using the term responsibly even though she is not.
Maybe we can get even more mainstream. The first non-video content I found for cultural Marxism from Fox News was this article about a book by Ted Cruz. The summary of the book tells us that Cruz sees an evolution from 'classical Marxism', which recommends a violent revolution by the working class to seize and redistribute wealth (a bit of a simplification, but all right), to 'cultural Marxism', which 'transitioned into critical legal studies'. Cruz describes cultural Marxism as "a method of saying the never ending struggle between victims, and oppressors can only be corrected through force by the government punishing the oppressors and rewarding the victims". (I feel conflicted about that definition - I feel it identifies a real and dangerous trend in American politics, something like Greer's Title-IX-ification of American politics, but I think 'cultural Marxism' is a misleading label for it.)
I think what frustrates me about this kind of piece is a kind of strawmanning or oversimplification of even just classical Marxism, long before we start talking about cultural Marxism. It's the idea that 'Marxism' is just the idea that the poor need to revolt against the rich, or that we need redistribution, or something about violent revolution to create justice. It's true that Marxist rhetoric has included elements like that, but to boil Marxism as a school of thought down to just that by itself is to miss its essential nature.
It's not precisely that I expect Fox News to start explaining the labour theory of value or commodity fetishism to its readers, but I can't help but read a sentence like like "Karl Marx's perspective of an inevitable conflict between the wealthy and the less privileged" without grinding my teeth and thinking that actually the conflict posited by Marx is between bourgeoisie and proletariat, or that is to say, between capitalists and labour, and those are not quite the same thing as 'wealthy' and 'poor'.
Seen in that light 'cultural Marxism' is frustrating for me because what it usually seems to denote, to me, is schools of thought that, while perhaps historically influenced by Marxism in such-and-such ways, ignore or skip over entirely the fundamental principles of Marxism. If you remove all the economic parts from Marxism, there's, well, nothing left. You can't take away all the pillars of Marxism and still be a Marxist, or so it seems to me.
I'm afraid I'll have to slow you down here, because I skimmed through some of these examples and they look like a point in my / OP's favor, not yours.
What do you mean? This is how OP described Cultural Marxism:
And here is an excerpt from Cultural Marxism: Nonsynchrony and Feminist Practice
Emily Hicks is a big fan of Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy, which as far as I can tell are just a rebranded version of what she was writing about back in the 80's. If I look at, say, the training the Wisconsin daycare kids had to go through, do you think I'll find any connection to Critical Theory or Critical Pedagogy through people that designed them?
If that's your concern, I'm more than happy to make a clear separation between classical Marxism and Cultural Marxism. I already called it The Last Jedi of Marxism, I can come up with other catchy names that will indicate how it's nothing but twisted perversion designed to mock and torture Marxists with it's very existence. But it exists! In the other chain MadMozer compared it to fighting over whether Mormons are real Christians or not. I like that analogy. You can say "Mormons are not real Christians" because their ideas are so out there that they do actually look like nothing more than a strawman and oversimplification of Christianity. But don't tell me "Mormons don't exist" after a missionary just knocked on my door, and don't tell they weren't even inspired by Christianity, when they lifted half the story from Christians.
Oh, I'll happily grant that the term 'cultural Marxism' has referents. When someone like Joy Pullmann says 'the cultural Marxists', I know who she means and what they believe.
I don't think it's quite the same as the Mormon case, because Mormons do claim to be Christians. I don't think Mormons are Christians, but if I say that where a Mormon can hear me, I know they will disagree. So I and a Mormon will have a debate about whether 'Christianity' is the right word to use for what Mormons believe.
By contrast, most of the people identified as cultural Marxists don't claim to be cultural Marxists. In fact, they mostly decry the term and claim that it's a conspiracy theory. Some claim to be (generic) Marxists, but most do not. We might still have a debate about whether 'cultural Marxist' is an appropriate word for what they believe, but the direction of that debate will be different.
If those debates happened, I'd insist on the Mormon/Christian distinction because as a Christian I feel I have an interest in policing the boundaries of orthodoxy - essentially I want to clarify that Mormons aren't affiliated with me and I lend no support to their beliefs, which I consider wrong. I would not, I think, insist on 'cultural Marxist' as a label because it's not a label that achieves any of my goals re: the discussion of social justice or wokist politics. In fact I think it muddies the waters by confusing wokist beliefs with Marxist beliefs, and another term would be more clear.
They would probably then also disagree with being called 'wokists' or 'SJers' or whatever other term I came up with, but we have to use some label, so, well, that Freddie post. You know how this goes.
There's two problems here. Like I mentioned earlier, we've had at least a decade, maybe more, of left-wing academics writing rivers of text on "neoliberalism". No one identified themselves as neoliberal at the time, the mish-mash of ideas attached to the label often contradicted the beliefs of people who may have at one point identified as neoliberal, or were even self-contradictory in themselves. None of this stopped a huge amount of papers on the subject being published in peer-reviewed journals, so I don't see why we should be treating "Cultural Marxism" with a higher amount of rigor.
But the bigger problem is that there were people identifying as cultural Marxists. That excerpt I quoted was Emily Hicks writing about how to combine Marxism with feminism, and her answer was: cultural Marxism. Again, at that point what more do you want? You can say the term is outdated, you can say the whole thing was a marginal niche at the time, but what you cannot say is that it's a strawman conspiracy theory.
Now, back to OG Marxists, if the goal is to enforce a distinction between Marxism and the-ideology-that-shall-not-be-named, I'm happy to go along with that, but enforcing a distinction is not the same thing as denying it's existence, or that it at one point used the label "cultural Marxism" as a matter of historical record.
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The reason why term "Cultural Marxism" is perceived as a conspiracy from the perspective of orthodox Marxists, isn't because "Cultural Marxism"/Wokeism doesn't exist. It's a conspiracy because calling the phenomenon in question "Cultural Marxism" muddies the waters for orthodox Marxists. Plain and simply - it makes their lives harder. Because of this new term they have to go around and say: "We actually disagree with wokies! They are not real Marxists! There are no [orthodox] Marxists that I know of that call themselves Cultural Marxists. We are also against Wokeism". And because of this inconvenience, the insistence on the lineage when they reject it, they deem this a conspiracy by the CIA against orthodox Marxism (every failure of Marxism and roadbump it experiences in its way is a CIA conspiracy, to be clear).
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One of the random factoids I heard somewhere, and have no idea what it relates to or if it's true, is that some ancient people had this idea of hell, where it's just like our world, but it's full of terrifying demons, but if you point them out everyone will think you're insane. This is sort of how this whole conversation felt like to me (though thankfully the spell seems to be breaking in recent years), there's a movement-that-shall-not-be-named:
The last one was chronologically first, and it getting memory-holed is particularly annoying, because it's a damn good label. First of all it was originally self-applied, and secondly if you take any mildly intelligent person who has even the faintest clue about Marxism, they'll be able to deduce what Cultural Marxism is supposed to be about, and list a few recent examples of Cultural Marxist ideas floating around in the public sphere. Contrast that with something like "neoliberalism" that is actually a poorly defined slur, that for some mysterious reason was taken seriously by academia for a decade or two, and in my opinion Cultural-Marxism-as-conspiracy-theory has no leg to stand on.
Now, I can understand OG economic Marxists being aghast at what came out of the cultural- variant. As someone watching several institutions, subcultures, and media being hollowed out and worn for a skin-suit, I have some sympathy for someone with a take like "Cultural Marxism is to Marxism, what The Last Jedi / The Acolyte is to Star Wars". There's even an argument to be made that the whole thing is a CIA op to castrate Marxism, but sympathy is not a "get out of jail for free" card. I think they should at least admit it's their skin that is being worn for a suit.
The term "neo-liberal" originates from a 1951 Milton Friedman essay, Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects.
I agree that afterwards, it has became a poorly defined slur, used most often by leftist academics opposed to neoliberalism and adopted by nearly no one.
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Giving something a name and admitting it’s real gives people the ability to fight it as a phenomenon. Terms like Political Correctness and Cultural Marxism give you the ability to abject to the phenomenon without having to be an open heretic. You can oppose the notion that one must have only “correct” opinions or must be forced into silence if you can name the phenomenon behind it. You no longer have to argue for the heresy, just oppose the enforcement of orthodoxy. It’s much harder for the inquisition to fight back because you aren’t officially endorsing the heresies of the day. You didn’t say “trans women are men” you said “I should not be threatened for not using pronouns”. Because we still value free speech, it’s actually an appeal to commonly held values.
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I find it bewildering that they call it a conspiracy. Is Antonio Gramscii a conspiracy?
Is critical race theory supposed to be a conspiracy?
The believers in the conspiracy have even made a long wiki page about cultural marxism in the soviet union.
The left is deeply involved in cultural issues so calling it a conspiracy is just the least sensible way of waving it off. They can't actually debate the issue so they have to use slander. Left wing movements use gossip, shaming and rallying to much higher degrees than right wing movements.
It's an idea that's basically a variation of the old "it's just a few college kids on Twitter, dude" argument. They'll tell you that CRT is ackchyually just a really obscure left-wing legal theory from the '80s that like 50 academics in total are actually familiar with.
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It was a term of art in political philosophy for years, I had legit university courses on "Cultural Marxism". So of course it makes sense, it's even the term the Frankfurt school uses for itself.
There was a deliberate effort by Marxists to switch tactics after the Soviet failure, and they did seek to undermine Western culture specifically. This is undeniable and directly stated in primary sources.
Then the people who use the tactics that the Frankfurt school delineates figured out their enemies found them out and shifted the frame to conceal it and use it as a bludgeon against anybody who noticed the tactics. And then in 2016, it became a conspiracy theory that only antisemites believe in.
They went so such lengths to redact the wikipedia article that it no longer even exists in the history of the page, but it was there.
There is no point in arguing that Cultural Marxism is real, because it is, and the people who use it are extremely invested in making sure people who know it is are ruined. And not just under that particular name. You can call it "Woke" or "DEI" or "CRT" or any number of other names, they will always shift the frame to prevent you freezing a good label. And so long as they control the places that have the writ of legitimacy, there is nothing that can be done.
Labels don't really matter anymore anyways, we now live in a present where everybody knows that the left has abandoned native working classes for a minority coalition. It's a given. The educated urbanites don't even pretend to view the working class as anything else but objective enemies.
The archive page from the screenshot, for the curious:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism
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