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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."
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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...
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.
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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.
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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