Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Late, and there are some pretty good answers/theories from other commentors, but I will give my own highly abridged explanation. I have some more lengthly explanations I posted on Reddit that hopefully I can dig up later.
The failure and the atrocities that arose and were revealed to the West in the latter half of the 20th century. Especially the Cultural Revolution in China, Khrushchev's Secret Speech and other USSR atrocities. This dampened a lot of support for orthodox Marxism and its derivatives.
Liberal/social democracies actually did a pretty good job of give their workers a decent quality of life, especially when compared to USSR (i.e. Marx was wrong). Which made economic/orthodox Marxism and revolution unattractive to the working class.Marcuse in particular complained about this constainly as a barrier to revolution (and influenced the pivot from the workers to the students, academia and the disaffected social groups as the new vanguard of the revolution.
Frankfurt School and neo-Marxists, including figures like Marcuse (who was an academic rockstar), Horkheimer etc grew incredibly popular in academia as an alternative to orthodox Marxism (the foundation of the New Left).
Social liberalism is far easier to subvert with "social Marxism" than economic liberalism is to subvert with economic Marxism. Aided by the postmodern revolution in academia and the obssession with manipulating language.
More options
Context Copy link