“Cultural Marxism”, better called neo-Marxism, refers to a left wing reinterpretation of Marxism (especially the Frankfurt School ) as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness. The theory involves an ongoing and intentional academic and intellectual effort to subvert Western society via an assault on western culture that aims at undermining the Christian values of traditionalist conservatism and seeks to replace them with culturally liberal values.
Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. Though it seeks to disguise its real nature and goals, which are the destruction of Western culture and religion, it is in fact a full-blown ideology understands it best through its history. I am continually astonished that anyone with a brain can still find anything attractive about the discredited theories and terrible history of Marxism. Yet so it goes, from that old dinosaur Bernie Sanders to neo-Marxist Thomas Piketty. Perhaps critic Edmund Wilson put it succinctly: “Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals”.
Early 20th century Marxism said that if another big war broke out in Europe, the working class would join hands across national frontiers, he proclaimed a programme of “cultural terrorism.” He asked, “Who will save us from Western civilization?”
Georg Lukacs, one of the founders of the Frankfort School, went on to influence a Marxist think tank established at Frankfurt University in Germany in 1923, the Institute for Social Research. When a brilliant young Marxist intellectual named Max Horkheimer took over the institute (today usually known as the Frankfurt School ) in 1930, he picked up Lukacs’s work and expanded it into a new version of Marxism, very different from Moscow’s.
That new version, cultural Marxism, is what we now know as “political correctness.” Horkheimer said that, on the contrary, culture was an independent and highly important variable. To assist in developing this new Marxism, Horkheimer brought in some additional Marxists who thought as he did. The most important was Theodor Adorno, whose influence remains vast today. Adorno argued that because capitalism is alienating, all art, to be “true,” also had to be alienating. That is why, all around us, we hear and see alienating music, art, and architecture. Adorno further said that anyone who defended traditional culture was both a “fascist” and mentally ill. His book, Authoritarian Personality is still a basic text for the left. It is also the source of much of the nonsense in education theory that has wrecked colleges and state schools. Two other Marxist thinkers, Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, helped the institute cross Marx with Freud, another challenging task.
They argued that in Western culture, everyone lived in a state of repression from which they must be “liberated.” The results began to become apparent in the 1960s. Those results were in large part due to a young graduate student at the Frankfurt School shortly before he left Germany for the United States in 1933, after Hitler came to power. His name was Herbert Marcuse. In the 1950s and ’60s, Marcuse translated the highly abstruse work of the other Frankfurt School thinkers into books college students could easily read and understand, including Eros and Civilization, and One Dimensional Man which became the New Left’s bibles.
The former book said that by replacing repression with “non-procreative eros” and substituting the “pleasure principle” for the “reality principle,” we could create a society of all play and no work.
Marcuse also argued that the revolution would not come from the working class but from a coalition of blacks, gays, feminists, young people, etc, the sacred “victims’ groups” of political correctness. These are the ideas that now dominate university campuses across around the English speaking world.
But how did those universities become so intolerant of any other viewpoint? Again, we have Marcuse to thank. In the 1960s he wrote a famous essay on what he called “epressive tolerance.” He defined it as tolerance for all ideas and movements coming from the left, and intolerance for all ideas and movement coming from the right. When the apostles of political correctness call for “tolerance,” Marcuse’s is the “tolerance” they are talking about.
Marcuse injected cultural Marxism into the Baby Boom generation when the Boomers were in college, and it remains their ideology today. Anyone who defies it becomes an “unperson.” It is propagated by much of the media.
To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke, following the ideas of Antonio Gramsci proposed a slow but steady march through the institutions — churches, universities, the media and the arts working against the established institutions while working within them. The slow but steady permeation of culture, a rewriting of Marx to read “seizing the means of cultural production.”
And today, we live with results.
Barnaby ffrench
