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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   46002 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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This reminds me of endless discussions around the term woke which was first adopted by woke crowd as a positive label and suddenly overnight it turned into right-wing slur "somehow". As for cultural Marxism, this was also something adopted by the left. Just one example, in this paper named Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain. And from the "praises" of the paper it is obvious that Cultural Marxism term was viewed at the time in positive light. Here is one example:

“Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain fills an especially acute need in the contemporary reassessment of the social roots and cultural contexts of avant-garde academic movements. . . . Dworkin assembles a convincing historical narrative of how a seemingly provisional reaction to the crisis of British welfare capitalism in the post-war period developed into a coherent and compelling subtradition of European Marxist social theory. . . . Dworkin’s new study manages to both creatively historicize a familiar—yet often misunderstood—recent academic and political formation as well as raise pressing methodological questions that cross the major disciplines of the human sciences.” — Alex Benchimol , Thesis Eleven

Cultural Marxism itself is a cornerstone of Western Marxism, a branch distinct from Marxism-Leninism. It has to be understood that Marxism itself is by definition not static but dialectical philosophy that "evolves" until socialism leads into utopia - that is the "permanent revolution" concept: as soon as powers at be settle down creating their own power structures with their own contradictions, the revolutionary wheel has to turn again to revolt in order to resolve those contradictions. As soon as history uses the revolutionaries to move forward into progress, it discards them.

Specific cultural part was developed especially by Antonio Gramsci, who investigated why revolutions in late 1910s and early 1920ies failed in the west. His conclusion was that the main obstacle was so called cultural hegemony. He focused on the dialectical opposition of so called base/infrastructure vs superstructure in cultural and not only economic production. It is culture created by superstructure that reproduces capitalism and gives rise to so called "structure" to society. And in accordance with Marxist ideology the society reproduces the structural ideas, which create the society which create the idea and so forth. You may have heard of some of those "structures" and related theories - that were developed by later Critical Marxist or Identaritarian Marxists - here in CW thread: patriarchy, white supremacy, cisheteronormativity and so forth. That is the relevance of Cultural Marxism to gender.

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