Cultural marxism

With economic Marxists it is relatively clear what they want to achieve - economic equality through the downfall of capitalism.

This may be a misguided and dangerous goal, but at least it is a goal. In contrast for cultural Marxists there is no goal. Behind a few vague, positive sounding slogans such as "diversity" and "inclusion," the only goal is to criticize and undermine western civilization.

I didn’t quite realize this fundamental point until I read a pithy article, The Origins of Political Correctness by Bill Lind.

The essense of the cultural Marxist approach is well summarized in the following passage:

"The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning - the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments - all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, "What is the theory?" The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression - the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression - we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s."

Economic Marxism has had a disasterous impact on an epic scale, but in some ways cultural Marxism is even worse.

Most European communist regimes in the 20th Century, focused on suppressing capitalism and bourgeois traits which were associated with capitalism. Other elements of western culture were only dismantled if they were deemed to be a serious obstacle to this objective. Subsequently, many aspects of traditional European culture, from nationalism and the nuclear family, to empirical science and classical music, were not overtly tampered with. In cultural Marxism all aspects of western civilization are called into question.

As a result, cultural Marxism takes a myriad of forms, which in many cases don’t even have a logically coherent basis. However, they all share one common trait, they are all focused around undermining the very culture which supports them.

Since, cultural Marxists have such a destruction and radical objective, they rarely call themselves Marxists and consider it best to disassociate themselves from anti-western Marxist regimes like Cuba and North Korea. Subsequently, they have been able to avoid the high level criticism, and in some cases persecution, which has been directed at economic Marxists.

For example, when universities in English-speaking countries consider funding cut-backs in the arts it’s usually in departments like foreign languages, history and English literature, while cultural Marxist enclaves like American studies, women’s studies, and sociology survive unscathed.

University administrators, schooled in the principles of market populism, claim this is because such courses are popular, and universities are under pressure to attract the student dollar. However, economic Marxism was very popular in the 1950s, yet back then there were no publicly funded university departments specifically devoted to promoting Marxist theory.

Similarly, since economic Marxists were more honest in their political affiliations, they made easier targets for right-wing liberals and conservatives, who could criticize them for being unpatriotic or divisive.

However, the strength of cultural Marxism today lies in the fact that its would be critics have little knowledge of the history of their own culture and so lack the confidence to attack challenge cultural Marxist propaganda.

Lets hope the latest trend towards ""Quality over quantity" in education turns our to have some substance and goes some way towards addressing this ignorance.