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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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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.

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.

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.

What do you mean? This is how OP described Cultural Marxism:

Cultural Marxism, on the other hand, seeks supporters by appealing to the cultural grievances of marginalized groups in predominantly right-wing hierarchical social environments.

And here is an excerpt from Cultural Marxism: Nonsynchrony and Feminist Practice

Hartmann's proposed progressive union will not solve these problems. There can be no shotgun wedding of marxism and feminism as Hartmann defines them. Not even a living together.

Instead, the task for socialist feminists is to develop a cultural marxism that can adequately explain the intricate interactions of the oppressions of race, class, and sex; a cultural marxism that helps give a clearer articulation of our various voices: feminist, black, chicano, Native American, Asian, male, female, gay, lesbian, heterosexual; a cultural marxism which understands human needs-family, ritual, religion, sex, fun, insanity, pain, fear and so on.

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?

I think what frustrates me about this kind of piece is a kind of strawmanning or oversimplification of even just classical Marxism

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.