Cultural Marxism is everywhere.

It's on our TVs and radio every day and night.
It's at work where you have to be bloody careful about what you say
in case you lose your job.
It invades every aspect of our lives.

"Duck Soup" - A Marx Movie.

Marxism has been replaced by cultural Marxism, an oxymoron that stands classical Marxism – which saw economic forces and relations of production as fundamental, with culture a mere epiphenomenon – on its head.

Cultural Marxism, as it is called, had its origins with the Frankfurt School in the 1920s, cooked up by a group of radical theorists disappointed with the failure of the European proletariat to rise up and overthrow the capitalist system in the wake of World War I.

They formulated critical theory, which in recent decades has developed multiple variants, most relevantly critical race theory, which now has a dominant position throughout Western academe.

And not just academe. As generations of graduates pass out into the labour force, into government jobs, media, politics, the arts, the corporate sector (with human resources departments a key vector), its influence has become pervasive. Even in the military, with the US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, talking about the need to understand “white rage” – a key CRT concept – in congressional testimony last year. You wonder what Herbert Marcuse, one of the originators of critical theory, who discussed the idea of a “long march through the institutions” with German radical Rudi Dutschke in the late 1960s, would make of all this if he were brought back to life. Maybe he would have been elated – until he saw some of the postmodern left’s current allies. Maybe the long march hasn’t challenged the centres of capitalist power after all.

Nowhere has this transformation been more complete than on attitudes to race and racism. So much so that the modern identarian or, if you like, woke left has effectively embraced views that earlier generations of leftists would have rejected as retrograde, atavistic, obnoxious, indeed reactionary – the worst epithet an old leftist could level against a person or idea. You can still find that perspective, albeit in small pockets, among far leftists who stick to the old tradition. Having been around left-wing politics since the late ’60s, I never cease to be amazed by this transformation.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/indigenous-voice-to-parliament-how-pro...

Nearly 90 years after Antonio Gramsci began writing his letters from Benito Mussolini’s prison, Marxism’s long march through Western institutions was reaching its end.

From his cell Gramsci wrestled with why workers in the West weren’t rising up to cast out the ruling class, as Marx predicted they would.

Gramsci pitied them because, he deduced, they were victims of false consciousness.

They had been brainwashed by a vast array of religious, intellectual and cultural institutions into believing their interests and the state’s coalesced.

“The state is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules,” he wrote.

It seems never to have occurred to Gramsci that the workers recognised Marxism for what it was: a prescription for a tyranny so profound it sought to colonise people’s minds.

But if the people wouldn’t buy a bad idea, there was one eager market: Europe’s intellectuals. Gramsci proposed they begin a grinding “war of position” to take the commanding heights of the bureaucracy, universities and the media. Once there they would scrub the landscape clean of Western values.

“Cultural policy will above all be negative, a critique of the past; it will be aimed at erasing from the memory and at destroying,” he wrote.

As social projects go, this wasteland was a tough sell, but neo-Marxists are nothing if not dogged. They built critical theory as a vehicle for change and began the deconstruction of the West.

Frankfurt School academics fleeing Adolf Hitler’s Germany transmitted the intellectual virus to the US and set about systematically destroying the culture of the society that gave them sanctuary.

America’s freedom of speech was its achilles heel. Critical theorists were given university pulpits and a constitutionally ordained right to preach, grinding its foundation stones to dust. Since 1933 they have been hellbent on destroying the village to save it.

When Herbert Marcuse wrote Repressive Tolerance 50 years ago, the hope that his ideas would become mainstream was a distant dream. But, if they did, he had developed a plan for reversing the polarity of freedom.

Marcuse cautioned his disciples not to be so foolish as to afford the courtesy of free speech to their opponents.

“Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behaviour cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude,” he wrote.

Tolerance is the totem of our age, a bumper sticker of virtue. Yet hidden in its many meanings is the doublespeak of defining what will be taboo. It is now considered tolerant to demand silence from nonconformists.

When the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commission says the Catholic Church has a case to answer for robustly defending its views on marriage and the family, then we have seen a glimpse of the Marcusian future. And it is just one gust of the gale buffeting a society hollowed out by its intellectuals.

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Don't be ridiculous.

Bobby. wrote on Sep 30^th, 2023 at 1:36pm:


How often do I have to keep telling you, I'm NOT interested in the politics of gender, religion, culture and race.

I am interested in Marx's significant contribution to economic theory and practice. 

Frank wrote on Oct 1^st, 2023 at 9:08am:


Er...workers in the West had their hands full, unionizing to fight greedy capitalist bosses. (Even today, Musk is spending $billions on space enterprises, on the backs of his low-paid workforce. Not surprisingly, the US is in hyperpartisan chaos).

And any nascent 'Marxist' revolutions in Europe  in the 19th century were put down by the vicious state security apparatus.

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Yes...how else do you overcome the state's (ruling class's) 'security' forces?

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Meanwhile, the poverty of the working class was endemic (except for a brief period in the West after WW2). 

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Interestingly, in the Great Depression, some US workers moved to the USSR seeking work.....what were you saying about a "virus"? 

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...at about that time, Ford (the richest man in the world) employed thugs to murder his own striking workers ....what were you saying about "destroying the village to save it"? (google: 'Ford massacre')

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50 years ago? By that time, the '1st world rust belt' was developing apace; with Detroit turning into a vast urban slum, as Toyota out-competed Detroit in global vehicle
manufacture.

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It's a pity he apparently had no knowledge of the economic trends of his time..

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Yes...isn't freedom of thought a bummer for the ruling class ....

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You an 'anti-intellectual' now,  Frank?   

"Deplorable".....