What is Cultural Marxism?

[YugoslavSocialist]

I hear a lot of rightists use the term cultural marxism and how it leads to "white genocide". So
What is Cultural Marxism?

[TheGodlessUtopian]

I do not really know. I have only ever heard it mentioned by fascists as a pejorative to how they believe every liberal and progressive thing is somehow "communist",and that Marxism is infecting Western culture thereby stealing it (or whatever).

[X5N]

Fascist code for "whaaa I don't like this."

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

I think it generally refers to multiculturalism, adding Marxism to a name makes it more terrifying.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

From the rightists' mouth:


"I wont speak for the others but I just want to live among my own people in my own culture and have good realtions with other groups be they mixed or one culture/tribe groups and all of us to live within our boundries free from exploitation in worker states."

I like the way they basically try to sugarcoat racial segregation.

[cantwealljustgetalong]

cultural Marxism is a way for liberal conservatives and fascists to understand the post-Marxian currents of critical theory that extrapolate the systemic oppression of Marxism beyond the proletariat and capitalism. examples include brown folks vs. white supremacy, women vs. patriarchy, and queers vs. heteronormativity. even though the term is used to marginalize oppressed groups, I sort of appreciate their recognition of the Marxist roots of critical theory that liberals bury and dismiss.

[#FF0000]

It's another way to say "I am a fascist nerd don't hang out with me"

[Os Cangaceiros]

If you read what the far-right says about "cultural marxism", it's usually something they associate with the Frankfurt School.

[Hiero]

Cultural Marxism is a predominantly academic Marxist movement that has origins in Antonio Gramsci and futher developed through the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School.

Here are some quotes from Wikipedia:




According to UCLA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCLA) professor and critical theorist Douglas Kellner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Kellner), "Many 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukács (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Luk%C3%A1cs), Antonio Gramsci (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci), Ernst Bloch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Bloch), Walter Benjamin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin), and T.W. Adorno (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Adorno) to Fredric Jameson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Jameson) and Terry Eagleton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Eagleton) employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life."

As Douglas Kellner writes:
Cultural Marxism was highly influential throughout Europe and the Western world, especially in the 1960s when Marxian thought was at its most prestigious and procreative. Theorists like Roland Barthes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Barthes) and the Tel Quel group (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tel_Quel_group) in France, Galvano Della Volpe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvano_Della_Volpe), Lucio Colletti (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucio_Colletti), and others in Italy, Fredric Jameson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Jameson), Terry Eagleton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Eagleton), and cohort of 1960s cultural radicals in the English-speaking world, and a large number of theorists throughout the globe used cultural Marxism to develop modes of cultural studies that analyzed the production, interpretation, and reception of cultural artifacts within concrete socio-historical conditions that had contested political and ideological effects and uses. One of the most famous and influential forms of cultural studies, initially under the influence of cultural Marxism, emerged within the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England within a group often referred to as the Birmingham School.[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism#cite_note-gseis.ucla-2)

Cultural Marxism was highly influential throughout Europe and the Western world, especially in the 1960s when Marxian thought was at its most prestigious and procreative. Theorists like Roland Barthes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Barthes) and the Tel Quel group (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tel_Quel_group) in France, Galvano Della Volpe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvano_Della_Volpe), Lucio Colletti (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucio_Colletti), and others in Italy, Fredric Jameson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Jameson), Terry Eagleton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Eagleton), and cohort of 1960s cultural radicals in the English-speaking world, and a large number of theorists throughout the globe used cultural Marxism to develop modes of cultural studies that analyzed the production, interpretation, and reception of cultural artifacts within concrete socio-historical conditions that had contested political and ideological effects and uses. One of the most famous and influential forms of cultural studies, initially under the influence of cultural Marxism, emerged within the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England within a group often referred to as the Birmingham School

[L.A.P.]

yeah, don't far-right people have some conspiracy shit about the Frankfurt School infecting Western culture or something like that? Aside from that, Cultural Marxism is supposed to basically denote Marxists who work in cultural studies.

[Hiero]

Had to start a new post because the formatting got changed from all the copy and paste.

That post described the basics and origins of cultural Marxism, it spawned schools like 'cultural studies' (the stuff Zizek does). After the war, and especially after Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia, many socialists/communist/Marxist abandoned the prominent Communist Parties and began focusing on other forms of capitalist critique. The academics in the Frankfurt school wanted to revive what Gramsci started beginning with his theory of Cultural Hegemony. They focused on ideology or culture, and wanted to explore how culture reproduces itself and the acceptance of the capitalist system as normal and everlasting. In traditional Marxism-Leninism of the party, culture is mostly ignored because of the strict materialist divide and separation of the structure and superstructure. Culture followed blindly the economic structure, and needed less attention.

It is quite possible that f Frankfurt and later the Birmingham School who focused on racism and sexism as structures (ie structural racism) had influenced a whole generation of students who took up government, policy, teaching, psychologist and other white collar and influential positions. Which means that certain policies (petite-bourgeois, welfare orientated and reformist in nature) that aim at decrease social exclusion and social inequalities were the mutated results of being taught under the influence of those schools. Those policies are like welfare, incorporation of Indigenous cultures into the mainstream and schooling, acknowledging the effects of colonialism and the so called “PC culture”

Soooo, what some rightist claim is that we are living under a ideological cultural Marxist regime. The intent is to change people’s cultures an minds and limit the rights of majority population in favour of minority interests (such as Indigenous or immigrant, Black, women) and the result could be in their minds, actual existing Socialism/Communism.

[Hiero]

yeah, don't far-right people have some conspiracy shit about the Frankfurt School infecting Western culture or something like that? Aside from that, Cultural Marxism is supposed to basically denote Marxists who work in cultural studies.

You just slipped in as I typing. But yes some right wing groups believe that. They use the words Cultural Marxism wrongly to attack what really is moderate and reformist politics. I remember reading ages ago a website that made the claim, it sloppily linked things the big three of the Frankfurt school Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W Adorno said to stuff around "PC culture". Then link "well these guys are communists, so this is the new way the communists have found to overthrow freedom". In many ways those who make the claim are right, I agree with the links. But like I said, it is their mutated form and I doubt there was ever a claim that this was going to be a new strategy to overthrow capitalism. The links would be the same as to how teachers, social workers, psychologists are influenced by Foucault, without actually being Foucauldians. In the sense, they focus on how children, criminals, clients or whoever, have their identities formed by power discourses.

Many things from Marxism have been incorporated into governments of the 20th century in watered down forms (well if you life in Europe or Australia, the USA is a bit different). Like welfare for mothers or government bonuses, paid maternity leave, free or affordable schooling, government housing, unemployment benefits and the old government owned trade schools and business. At the time Communists were fighting for these basic things, what we got were their mutated forms of our original intentions in a social-democratic/welfare state mix. And many right wing people criticise these things as Marxist and are dismantling them or moving those responsibilities onto employers and private business.

[Art Vandelay]

It really doesn't exist.

[Paul Pott]

It's an unsubstantiated political term usually describing any form of challenge to what racists percieve as a pure race or society, be that immigration, women's politics, homosexuals, etc. Occasionally it's even applied to capitalist globalization, though they prefer "globalism" to describe globalization and modern liberalism. Somehow this is equivalent to Marxism, because it's internationalist and egalitarian, or something.

It's used much as liberal academia and media use "totalitarianism". At one time there was a "cultural Marxist" movement within western academia, much as Mussolini called his type of government "totalitarian".

Both are obscurantist, because one denies the nature of the state as an institution of violence, while the other, used by class-collaborationist and nationalist movements, denies the nature of capitalism, attributing the effects of globalization to the liberation of certain groups, immigrant hordes, bankers, secret societies, Jews, etc.

In both cases there is a simple, cleansing answer, bourgeois democracy and nationalism.

[Hiero]

It's an unsubstantiated political term usually describing any form of challenge to what racists percieve as a pure race or society, be that immigration, women's politics, homosexuals, etc. Occasionally it's even applied to capitalist globalization, though they prefer "globalism" to describe globalization and modern liberalism. Somehow this is equivalent to Marxism, because it's internationalist and egalitarian, or something.

It's used much as liberal academia and media use "totalitarianism". At one time there was a "cultural Marxist" movement within western academia, much as Mussolini called his type of government "totalitarian".

Both are obscurantist, because one denies the nature of the state as an institution of violence, while the other, used by class-collaborationist and nationalist movements, denies the nature of capitalism, attributing the effects of globalization to the liberation of certain groups, immigrant hordes, bankers, secret societies, Jews, etc.

In both cases there is a simple, cleansing answer, bourgeois democracy and nationalism.

This whole post is unsubstantiated. Strange that after posting about cultural marxism, naming key figures, two people have responded with "it doesn't exist".

It does exist, but no how right-wing american intellectuals (or Americans in general) understand it.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

It's an analytic mistake that rightwing people make. Previous posters who associated it with critical theory and those who said it doesn't exist are partially correct.

Basically, as others said, a bunch of Marxist academics went on to criticize certain modes of cultural hegemony. Rightwingers then went on to assume that this critique somehow led to liberal multiculturalism, and thus blame problems associated with that model (real and imagined) with Marxist influence and immigrants. In other words, somehow, Marxist academics caused multiculturalism and immigration, which in the eyes of the rightwing is responsible for the decay of western cultural and national traditions. Of course, immigration is the result of labor demand, not the specter of "cultural marxism", and the decay of modern values is likewise the fault of businesses which profit from a hypersexualized and hypercommercialized consumer society. Not that the decay of these values is always a bad thing (on the contrary) but the blame on academic Marxists shows the failure of rightwing discourse to grasp the material realities underpinning the realities which they are critiquing.

In other words, there was a critique of cultural models of hegemony by Marxists, but the theory that there is some body of "cultural marxists" out there destroying people's cultural traditions is the fantasy of the right. Anders Brevik, the nutjob who shot up the Norwegian labor party youth camp and killed 80 recently, blamed "cultural marxists" for the problems which drove him to commit his absurd and pointless violence (hence my name)

[Ostrinski]

I've only seen it used by the right to describe anything anything they don't like about modern society's social trends, specifically on an institutional level such as in universities where any vaguely progressive attitudes on the part of administrators or professors are seen as part of some elaborate far-left conspiracy to enforce the attitudes in question and ram them down the throats of the student-sheeple.

So in my experience it's essentially just a pejorative phrase. Interesting to note that from above posts that there is more nuance to it than I thought, though.

[Poison Frog]

I saw a film on "cultural Marxism" yesterday and basically it was old Republican men saying that American culture promotes things like porn and violence because communism won the cultural war despite losing the political war. Yeah, because porn and violence are incompatible with capital.

[Let's Get Free]

"Cultural Marxism" is so last year. "Political correctness" is the new hot thing.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

yeah, don't far-right people have some conspiracy shit about the Frankfurt School infecting Western culture or something like that?
Try David North of the SEP. Without getting into it too much, I believe he's incorrect and doesn't know what he's talking about.

[Red Commissar]

As we know, the 1980s was a period of growth for neoliberal thought. The backlash against progressive liberalism was profound, reacting against the problems of state welfare programs and civil rights initiatives.

In the US, a part of this was a general development of anger at perceived "liberal" influences in the media and academia. Of course, this still remains- liberal Hollywood and endless complaints about the agendas of teachers and professors is common place among right wingers.

It is my opinion that "Cultural Marxism" in the sense that right-wingers throw around the term was an outgrowth of this. There has often been an attempt by right-wingers in the US to tie the Democrats (or at least their self-professed progressive members) as an offshoot of radical socialist movements, or even simply a front organization for such groups (even today!). Their idea is that basically communists of the past failed to get any meaningful success at the polls or through armed insurrection in the west, so instead resorted to an insidious policy of indoctrinating the next generation through control of media, education, and think tanks for government legislation. By extension they feel this is whittling down "fundamental values" of the United States, with the youth as they say becoming more sympathetic to socialism and more needy rather than hardworking. Basically, the subversion of the what they see as the unique values of western democracy and capitalism, rooted in christian values, being whittled away generation by generation.

There is an allure here that presupposes this comes from the OUTSIDE of America. Harping on Gramsci, an Italian, and the Frankfurt School, mostly Germans, as concocting a plan specifically to undermine the US's values to destroy that country is simply another repackaging of right-wing paranoia of foreign influences destroying their country.

Now it is true that there are Marxists in the Frankfurt School who focus on analysis of culture, power structures, and other related things from a Marxist standpoint. It is also true that there was a smaller amount of people who thought they could have a better chance at changing the system by working within it. "Cultural Marxist" however was never used as an adjective for these people though (much less self-identification), and is only a term that was created in the 80s by conservatives in the US ranting on about this. I can employ a Marxist viewpoint to analyze sociology, but I would not call that Cultural Marxism, and again I don't think anyone has ever described themselves as such.

The term is believe to have been popularized by William Lind, a neocon in the United States. In one of his writings, he explicitly mentions a long running conspiracy, begun by Gramsci in his jail cell, apparently as a re-evaluation of tactics as those pesky Communists acknowledged that the morally upright people of this good Earth would never accept Communism. Instead, they would have to steal the youth, the next generation. This task was initiated by the Frankfurt School, which indoctrinated a large range of academics. An additional note of interest is that the racist shit who went on the shooting spree in Norway, Anders Behring Breivik, pretty much copied Lind's essay word for word in his denunciation of "Cultural Marxism" and its cooperation with Islamists in creating multiculturalist policy in Europe.

AFAIK, Gramsci never uses the term "Cultural Marxism", nor ever promotes a "Long March through the Institutions", a term that is often erroneously attributed to him in people trying to give this legitimacy. The quote comes from Rudi Dutchske, a German radical who justified his activities in the Green Party and German parliamentary politics with that quote. What we call reformism was equated with the vast conspiracy of cultural marxism, that these people were acting with the end goal of a radical transformation of society in mind. We can debate the notions of reformists, but the real issue here is they over-inflate the influence of reformists. They point to examples of changes in education (minorities, LGBT), expansion of civil rights, as well as certain economic policies as having fit in to this agenda, claiming that it could have only passed because of this indoctrination of the youth and is a slippery slope to the collectivist hell of their nightmares. They also freak out when they see the remains of the new left from the 60s and 70s going on to take high positions in academia, think tanks, and government as another example of this.

Honestly it just seems to have been another really shitty way to discredit social movements by tying them into a far reaching communist conspiracy. Some of these groups did have communist involvement, but their end result was cooperation with the system. The conspiracy by these right wingers that we, as the left in the United States, have been successful in the past 75 or so odd years in creating socialism is insane.

It is important to note that these people who throw around cultural marxism are already convinced that economic regulations in themselves constitute socialism, and that the Democratic Party in the US is merely a front for socialist scheming. I used to think this was exclusively a US thing, but I believe it has been gaining traction in Europe as well with the backlash against social democratic policies and multiculturalism. While Breivik can't be seen as representative of the populace, his awareness of Lind's writings on Cultural Marxism as well as association with other right-wingers demonstrates to me that parts of this conspiracy has been adapted by European right-wing populists for their own political terrain. Indeed there is common ground in that even if the European right-wingers aren't going from it as deeply from religion as their American counterparts, they still laud the unique and superior value of their culture compared to outsiders, and they see it in danger from leftists and minorities.

This is a very good summary of Cultural Marxism, albeit from a liberal perspective.

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/summer/reframing-the-enemy

‘Cultural Marxism’ Catching On

By Bill Berkowitz

Television commentator Pat Buchanan says it is being used to "de-Christianize" America. Washington heavyweight William Lind claims it is turning U.S. college campuses into "ivy-covered North Koreas." Retired naval commander Gerald Atkinson fears it has invaded the nation's military academies. Immigration activist John Vinson suggests it aims "to distort and destroy" our country.

"Cultural Marxism," described as a conspiratorial attempt to wreck American culture and morality, is the newest intellectual bugaboo on the radical right. Surprisingly, there are signs that this bizarre theory is catching on in the mainstream.

The phrase refers to a kind of "political correctness" on steroids — a covert assault on the American way of life that allegedly has been developed by the left over the course of the last 70 years. Those who are pushing the "cultural Marxism" scenario aren't merely poking fun at the PC excesses of the "People's Republic of Berkeley," or the couple of American cities whose leaders renamed manholes "person-holes" in a bid to root out sexist thought.

Right-wing ideologues, racists and other extremists have jazzed up political correctness and repackaged it — in its most virulent form, as an anti-Semitic theory that identifies Jews in general and several Jewish intellectuals in particular as nefarious, communistic destroyers. These supposed originators of "cultural Marxism" are seen as conspiratorial plotters intent on making Americans feel guilty and thus subverting their Christian culture.

In a nutshell, the theory posits that a tiny group of Jewish philosophers who fled Germany in the 1930s and set up shop at Columbia University in New York City devised an unorthodox form of "Marxism" that took aim at American society's culture, rather than its economic system.

The theory holds that these self-interested Jews — the so-called "Frankfurt School" of philosophers — planned to try to convince mainstream Americans that white ethnic pride is bad, that sexual liberation is good, and that supposedly traditional American values — Christianity, "family values," and so on — are reactionary and bigoted. With their core values thus subverted, the theory goes, Americans would be quick to sign on to the ideas of the far left.

The very term, "cultural Marxism," is clearly intended to conjure up xenophobic anxieties. But can a theory like this, built on the words of long-dead intellectuals who have little discernible relevance to normal Americans' lives, really fly? As bizarre as it might sound, there is some evidence that it may. Certainly, those who are pushing the theory seem to believe that it is an important one.

"Political correctness looms over American society like a colossus," William Lind, a principal of far-right political strategist Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation and a key popularizer of the idea of cultural Marxism, warned in a 1998 speech. "It has taken over both political parties and is enforced by many laws and government regulations. It almost totally controls the most powerful element in our culture, the entertainment industry. It dominates both public and higher education. ... It has even captured the clergy in many Christian churches."

From PC to Cultural Marxism
The idea of political correctness — the predecessor of the more highly charged concept of cultural Marxism — was popularized by the mass media in the early 1990s, highlighted by a 1991 speech by the first President Bush in which he warned that "free speech [is] under assault throughout the United States." By the end of 1992, feature stories on the phenomenon had appeared in Newsweek, New York magazine, The New Republic, Atlantic Monthly and the New York Review of Books.

The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial writers had recklessly pilloried a University of Pennsylvania academic as the personification of political correctness, said it posed a "far worse ... threat to intellectual freedom" than McCarthyism. In the pages of The Washington Times (see 'Defending Dixie'), Heritage Foundation scholar Laurence Jarvik wrote angrily that "storm troopers" were attacking "Western culture."

Of course, the phrase was basically a politically charged construct that was used to mock the left and even liberals. Challenges to gender bias, efforts to diversify the nation's universities, and similar policies were dismissed as attempts to turn the universities into "gulags" under the thumbs of left-wing thought police. The term was used to attack ideas while avoiding any discussion of their merits.

Although he didn't use the words "cultural Marxism," white nationalist Pat Buchanan (see description of The American Cause), helped frame the debate as a "culture war" in his inflammatory speech in support of the first President Bush's nomination for reelection at the 1992 GOP convention in Houston.

"There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America," Buchanan said in his nationally televised address. "It is a cultural war, as critical to the nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself."

But it may be William Lind, who has long worked at the Free Congress Foundation that his ally Paul Weyrich founded, who has done the most to define the enemies who make up the so-called "cultural Marxists." Ultimately, this enemy has come to embody a whole host of Lind's bête noires — feminists, LGBT people, secular humanists, multiculturalists, sex educators, environmentalists, immigrants, black nationalists, the ACLU and the hated Frankfurt School philosophers.

In July 1998, Lind told a conference of the right-wing watchdog group Accuracy in Academia that political correctness and cultural Marxism were "totalitarian ideologies" that were turning American campuses into "small ivy-covered North Koreas, where the student or faculty member who dares to cross any of the lines set up by the gender feminist or the homosexual-rights activists, or the local black or Hispanic group, or any of the other sainted 'victims' groups that revolves around, quickly find themselves in judicial trouble."

It's the Jews, Stupid
At the core of the far right's concept of cultural Marxism are the Jews. Lind made this plain in June 2002, when he gave a speech on the subject to a Washington Holocaust denial conference hosted by the anti-Semitic journal, Barnes Review.

Although he told his audience that his Free Congress Foundation was "not among those who question whether the Holocaust occurred," he went on to lay out just who the cultural conspirators were: "These guys," he explained, "were all Jewish."

Like Jews in general, the Frankfurt School makes a convenient antagonist — one that is basically seen as antithetical to all things American. The school, says social psychology professor Richard Lichtman of the Berkeley-based Wright Institute, is "a convenient target 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.," he said. "The idea being transmitted is that we are being infected from the outside."

Not everyone who uses the cultural Marxism construct sees Jews in general at the center of the plot. But a 1998 book by California State University-Long Beach evolutionary biologist Kevin MacDonald — one of just two witnesses to testify on behalf of Holocaust denier David Irving in a famous 2000 libel trial — makes plain that Jews in general are implicated in what is seen as an attack on the West.

In The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Social Movements, MacDonald says that while all Jews are not guilty, the movements he attacks are indeed "Jewishly motivated."

In a chapter devoted to the Frankfurt School, MacDonald suggests that Jews criticize non-Jews' desire to form "cohesive, nationalistic, corporate gentile groups based on conformity to group norms" — with Frankfurt School principals painting this desire as a psychopathology — while they hypocritically pursue cohesiveness in their own group.

In other words, Jews foist multiculturalism on other people even as they cynically pursue a group strategy that rejects that ideology for themselves.

The idea, in MacDonald's construction, is that Jews in general are seeking to weaken anti-Semitism by sabotaging Gentiles' natural nationalistic instincts.

Similarly, the Frankfurt School is described as advocating sexual freedom, rebelliousness against family and other radical ideas for Gentiles, even as Jews themselves remain in tightly cohesive families — an idea that is tied tightly to Lind's view of the Frankfurt School as attempting to undermine Christian America.

Ultimately, MacDonald suggests that this kind of devious Jewish behavior is at least partly responsible for anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. "National Socialism developed as a cohesive gentile group strategy in opposition to Judaism," he writes. In a later book, MacDonald suggests that Jewish critiques of Gentile culture are a dangerous strategy that may ultimately produce ethnic conflict in America.

Although Lind rarely mentions the Jews in discussing cultural Marxism, he sounded a similar note in 1995, when he wrote a "futuristic fantasy" in which the United States, after developing "the stench of a Third World country," opts correctly to break up into racial mini-states. In now all-white New England, Lind wrote, "the majority had taken back the culture. Civilization had recovered its nerve."

Behind the Attacks
The most significant institutional support for the theory of cultural Marxism comes from Weyrich, Lind, and their Free Congress Foundation (FCF). Lind writes that the FCF "was the first Washington-based conservative think tank to ... develop a new cultural conservatism ... aimed directly at the causes of America's cultural decline."

In 1987, the foundation's first book was published on the subject: Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda. Next came Cultural Conservatism: Theory and Practice, an anthology of essays. All this culminated in a videotape that attacked the Frankfurt School, "Political Correctness: The Dirty Little Secret."

Weyrich's role is significant. Over the last three decades, he has been instrumental in developing many of the right's most influential institutions. He helped fund the Heritage Foundation, now one of the most powerful think tanks in Washington. He is a founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-sponsored association of hundreds of conservative lawmakers. And he helped establish two key conservative coalitions: The Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in the 1970s, and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition a decade later.

In 1999, Weyrich authored a widely circulated "letter to the conservative movement" in which he lamented the widespread popularity of the "ideology of political correctness" and "the cultural disintegration that is gripping society." Conservatives should separate themselves "from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness," Weyrich argued.

At the same time, Weyrich has had a "habit of flirting with racists and anti-Semites that dates back to his early involvement with George Wallace's America Independent Party," according to New York Observer columnist Joe Conason. As one example, Conason cites a 2001 Easter E-mail sent by Weyrich to thousands of his supporters declaring that "Christ was crucified by the Jews."

A year earlier, Weyrich had blasted Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen for "adhering so slavishly to the line laid down by the Frankfurt School." Cohen's sin? He had criticized Charlton Heston, then the National Rifle Association spokesman.

"Surely [Cohen] must recognize that Political Correctness is an ideology ... that ... demands we all accede to many lies: that men and women are interchangeable, that there are no differences among races or ethnic groups within races (when those groups are taken as wholes, as PC demands), that homosexuality is normal," he wrote. "This is, in fact, the unholy trinity that Political Correctness requires we all bow down and worship: 'racism, sexism, and homophobia.'"

‘Cultural Marxism’ Catching On

By Bill Berkowitz
The Ripple Effect
Over the years, the idea of cultural Marxism has picked up speed. At an October 2000 campaign stop in Denver, Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan accused Native Americans attempting to block a Columbus Day parade of "cultural Marxism."

"America's history and heroes and Western civilization itself are under relentless attack," Buchanan told the Rocky Mountain News. "The violence of this political correctness is nothing less than cultural Marxism."

The following year, in his book The Death of the West, Buchanan described cultural Marxism as a "regime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance."

At around the same time, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens produced a video — most of it a carbon copy of the FCF video on the same topic — called "Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School Story."

"Racism, sexism and chauvinism are powerful weapons in the Marxist psychological warfare against traditional American values," it said. "Political correctness, the product of critical theory, is really treason against the U.S. Constitution and against America."

Some "pro-South" hate groups have adapted the theory for their own purposes. Franklin Sanders, writing recently on the League of the South's Web page, did not use the words "cultural Marxism." But he did say that "Marxists," by calling slavery the worst evil known to man, were twisting reality to attack the South. And, Sanders warned darkly, "If the South goes, civilization goes with it."

By early 2002, F.C. Blahut, a writer for the anti-Semitic American Free Press, wrote that cultural communists, motivated by a "hatred of the West," were wrecking Western civilization. They were, he said, "parasitic Freudian Talmudists."

John Vinson, leader of the Americans for Immigration Control hate group, doesn't reference Jews in his own attacks. But he claims that "Marxists" have for a century "promoted large-scale immigration while sabotaging assimilation."

Whither Cultural Marxism?
Will the far right succeed in using the cultural Marxism label to demonize social movements and people whom it opposes? Despite the tone of underlying anti-Semitism, is this a theory that can bring radical ideas into the mainstream?

There are indications that this is happening already.

Paul Craig Roberts is a syndicated conservative columnist who is connected to several right-wing think tanks. In a recent review of Buchanan's The Death of the West, Roberts makes it clear that he has signed on to the idea. "Cultural Marxists," he says, "assault not only our history but also the family, the chastity of women and Christianity, important pillars of our civilization. Cultural Marxists use education, entertainment and the media to create a new people that shares their values."

David Horowitz, the leftist-turned-right-winger who heads the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture and edits FrontPageMagazine.com, adds that the Frankfurt School "believed only in destroying ... and if you look at today's campuses that type of nihilism is really the dominant theme."

Jim Kibler, a professor of Southern literature at the University of Georgia, joined in recently. Kibler told a reporter this spring that suggesting that those who support the Confederate flag are racists is the "propagandistic, cultural Marxist approach" that is used by newspapers, business and New South proponents.

It's not clear whether this diffusion of the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory into the mainstream will continue. Certainly, the anti-Semitism that underlies much of the scenario suggests that it may be repudiated in the coming years. But for now, the spread of this particular theory is a classic case of concepts that originated on the radical right slowly but surely making their way into the American mind.

Bill Berkowitz, a regular columnist with Working Assets' WorkingForChange.com, is a free-lance writer specializing in right-wing political movements.

[Paul Pott]

This whole post is unsubstantiated. Strange that after posting about cultural marxism, naming key figures, two people have responded with "it doesn't exist".

It does exist, but no how right-wing american intellectuals (or Americans in general) understand it.

Only no one cares.

Rightists use "Cultural Marxism" to attack liberalism as well as anything pro-gay/woman/immigrant by equating them with Marxism and communism. Fascists in the 20s and 30s used similar strawman tactics where everything was Bolshevik in nature.

[Hiero]

Only no one cares.

Cares about what?

[Paul Pott]

Cares about what?

They're not concerned with critical theory, they're attacking bourgeois liberalism by equating it with Marxism, thus lumping all of their enemies into one big (Jewish run?) pile.

[Oswy]

I hear a lot of rightists use the term cultural marxism and how it leads to "white genocide". So
What is Cultural Marxism?

It seems to be a term which people on the far-right use to criticise certain developments under the advance of liberal capitalism (yeah, ironic I know), like multiculturalism and the emergence of certain social fragmentations and variations - much lamented by the conservatively minded.