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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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