Let's Talk About Cultural Marxism...

[¿Que?]

So, let's have a talk about cultural Marxist, if only because there are reactionary elements in this world that would undoubtedly label a great many of us as such, whether we like it or not.

Maybe I can start off with some questions and we could go from there:

What is Cultural Marxism (Does it really exist)?

Do we (as in do you) consider ourselves Cultural Marxists?

Does anyone consider themselves a cultural Marxist?

What are the root of the idea of Cultural Marxism?

More specifically, aside from the right wing narrative implicating the Frankfurt school, multiculturalism and political correctness as the ideological roots of CM, where did the idea of CM as a global threat to the West originate? Who are the leading designers of the CM hysteria, in other words.

Thanks for participating.

EDIT: After a little bit of sifting through right-wing propaganda, I think I found a decent perspective on the whole Cultural Marxism thing.

http://www.culturalmarxism.info/

Still reading through it, but it seems it focuses mostly on debunking the right-wing assumptions of Marxism on cultural matters and the notion of Cultural Marxism in general.

[Red Commissar]

Cultural Marxism refers to a school of critical theory. They analyze things by looking at the society- its make up, its relations, why is it that way, etc from a Marxist perspective. Much like you would take up literary criticism or a Marxist analysis of history.

For wingnuts though, this some how got twisted as meaning that Marxists should infiltrate schools and media and brainwash people for a backdoor revolution. This is also in part due to misinterpretations of people associated with this way of analysis, like Gramsci, due to misconceptions of what the "Passive Revolution" was referring to. For the wingnuts, Passive Revolution was a call by Gramsci and later others to ok working through existing institutions to make socialism "acceptable" in people's minds, even though Passive Revolution was actually an attempt by Gramsci to explain how and why capitalist societies were able to implement social reforms for long-term benefit (ie preservation of the current order), and thus undercut revolutionary sentiment. This of course makes little sense if you've actually READ the Prison Notebooks or anything else along those lines... but they are expecting people probably have not done that.

Then of course there is the "influence" of the Frankfurt School on some of the New Left that the wingnuts also posit as proof of this. Rudi Dutchske's well-known phrase "Long March through the Institutions" (often attributed to Gramsci...) didn't help much either. As your link points out regarding the Cultural School, it helped tremendously that these people did not jack about what the "Frankfurt School" was beyond some presumably "elitist" professors as they heard in the news and elsewhere. There was no real "look" into it obviously beyond the fact that these people were a cabal to destroy western civilization.

You can't really be a "cultural Marxist" as an ideology, it's more a way that refers to the way you choose to analyze things. In its current propagandized form, it may be traced back to your conservative pundits in the early 90s as a way to try and propagate the fear of socialism even after the Soviet Union stopped existing. They mainly picked something that not many people knew about, it sounded ominous, and tied it up to some people's discontent with the government and education- mainly in their perception of things like "multiculturalism" and the "gay agenda" being taught in the schools.

This lines up with a very popular method for wingnut hysteria- that within the government there has been a devious plan to brainwash people into accepting socialism by a group of elites. Cultural Marxism as described by pundits like William Lind was painted as such. They would brainwash the youth (oh noes Hitler Youth!!11!) to accept what their good, god-fearing parents wouldn't. Here is a description by a critic of Lind on that from wikipedia:


"a convenient target [cultural marxism] that very few people really know anything about.... By grounding their critique in Marxism and using the Frankfurt School, [cultural conservatives] make it seem like it's quite foreign to anything American. It takes on a mysterious cast and translates as an incomprehensible, anti-American, foreign movement that is only interested in undermining the U.S... the idea being transmitted is that we are being infected from the outside."

SPLC also has a decent description of it (http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2002/fall/mainstreaming-hate):


Lind's theory was one that has been pushed since the mid-1990s by the Free Congress Foundation — the idea that a small group of German philosophers, known as the Frankfurt School, had devised a cultural form of "Marxism" that was aimed at subverting Western civilization.

The method, he said, involved manipulating the culture into supporting homosexuality, sex education, egalitarianism, and the like, to the point that traditional institutions and culture are ultimately wrecked.

"Their whole plan," he said, "is the destruction of Western culture."

The "they" to whom Lind referred were a group including Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, all Jews who fled Germany and went to Columbia University in the 1930s.

And this is pretty much what the wingnut thinking is. It's a conspiracy by college educated people to wreck the "Real America" by making people accept certain "socialist values" as described by certain token buzzwords- "multiculturalism", "egalitarianism", or even "internationalism", and play to some of their people's insecurities about their school system. I believe I made a thread long ago about how this hysteria leaked into revisions of the Texas school books. The neo-con David Horowitz also does this a lot too, trying to finger out "radical" professors pushing Marxism in colleges.

It intersects nicely with the usual complaints about "liberal" education and media, and how it brainwashes youth into accepting it.

This "Cultural Marxism" was also invoked a lot by the Norwegian wackjob- he pretty much parroted word for word. Education subversion and what not to accept "multiculturalism". Really, in its current form, the misconception of the term mainly originates from people like Lind in the 1990s to continue the cold war hysteria after it became irrelevant.