There obviously is such a thing as Cultural Marxism.
As most who study this know, it has two main sources, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, but also Franz Fanon.
You may be confused because Cultural Marxism is not Marxism, it’s a derivative of Marxism that dismisses the working class — that's not Marxism.
In the ‘60s, the far left turned against the working class to side with the “marginalized.” Marx called them the “lumpenproletariat”—workers in rags, and so did Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Minister of Information:
. . . . “The Working Class, particularly the American Working Class, is a parasite upon the heritage of mankind, of which the Lumpen has been totally robbed by the rigged system of Capitalism. ... O.K. We are Lumpen. Right on.” —Cleaver, 1967
He credits Fanon, but it’s easier to see why the F. School and Gramsci turned against them. The working class turned against the Marxists and Socialists in Italy and Germany and jailed and killed them. So, a new theory was invented based on Marxism.
If you don’t believe Cultural Marxism is real, check out this paper by Douglas Kellner, who published the collected works of Marcuse: “Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies.”
Marcuse was the very woke Ms Angela Davis's mentor, the new left's guru, and part of the Frankfurt school. Judith Butler pictures the two of them together on her Critical Theory Institute site at UC Berkeley. Butler is the godmother of Queer theory.
Robin Diangelo claims to have learned her politics from the Frankfurt school.
Alicia Garza of BLM credits Gramsci.
The Frankfurt School invented the concept of the culture industry, and Gramsci is credited with cultural hegemony.
Crenshaw, the founder of Critical race Theory in 1989, claims in two places that she named it after Critical Theory. That's the F. School's name for their cultural Marxism.
Read the founding document, Traditional and Critical Theory, Horkheimer, 1937. You will find that it hands the responsibility for the revolution to the marginalized and basically recommends that they must overthrow capitalist culture to reach an unspecified utopia.
Lindsay knows all this and talks flamboyantly about Marxism to get attention from a mass audience. He also exaggerates. But he knows a lot of history that you miss.
Hi Steve: thanks for taking the time to comment. The part of my piece relevant to your point is the third footnote, which perhaps I shouldn't have relegated to a footnote. I completely agree that there is a genealogy which stretches back to Marx and passes through the Frankfurt School and early critical theory, through to the late-20th century and deconstruction and critical race theory etc. - and that eventually, some of these ideas would influence today's social justice activism.
My point is that this is a very long chain indeed. You mention Horkheimer's "Traditional and Critical Theory" – the striking thing to me about that essay is the degree to which Horkheimer still relies on Marxian categories such as modes of production and the economic base. Horkheimer basically says that the entire point of critical theory is to critique society using Marxian economic concepts.
But a number of decades later I think critical theory abandoned these concepts altogether. It got mixed up with a bunch of Lacanian theory and semiotics, deconstruction etc.... schools of thought which are all about the symbolic realm with little or no grounding in material reality (and in my opinion these schools of thought are fairly incoherent, which is the critique that people like Chomsky level against capital-t Theory). Then CRT and queer theory, particularly as they're articulated in the activist sphere (as opposed to the academic sphere), seem to be grounded in various identity categories that again are not grounded in conceptions of production or labor. And insofar as social justice activists talk about economics, they tend to subscribe to a fairly bog standard Bernie Sanders-esque view of the economy which just isn't particularly Marxist (I mention that in my fourth footnote.)
My point is that most of the overlap social justice activism has with actual Marxism is superficial and cosmetic, to do with rhetoric or vibes. But if a theory isn't grounded in materialism it can't be Marxist, just like a monotheistic religion without a belief in Jesus can't be a branch of Christianity. (On the other hand, a lot of postliberal theory on the right these days does seem to be grounded in economic/Marxian categories -- fulfilling the promise of Horkheimer's Traditional and Critical Theory, in my opinion)
Hi Luke, Thanks for engaging. You say, “My point is” (1) this is a very long chain indeed [fm Marx to Social Justice], and (2) the overlap social justice activism has with actual Marxism is superficial and cosmetic.
So, I guess you did not read my first two sentences: (1) explains Marx is not in the chain. (2) “Cultural Marxism is not Marxism; it dismisses the working class.” So, I’m saying social justice is NOT Marxism.
You spend a lot of time saying, “ it can't be Marxist” —like, if you take Jesus out of Christianity, it’s not Christianity. Again, you missed my sentence #2: If you take the workers out of Marxism, it’s not Marxism.
You are not seeing cultural Marxism because you believe it’s some kind of Marxism. It Is Not Marxism. “Cultural Marxism” (CM) is just a name designed to sell a non-Marxist concept to a bunch of Marxists. Here’s how I know you’re not seeing it.
You never mention Marcuse. He was the #1 proponent of CM in the US, part of the F. School’s inner circle, Time Magazine’s “New Left Guru”, Angela Davis’s mentor, in Judith Butler’s (Gender Trouble) prized Marcuse-Davis photo on her UC Berkeley Critical Theory Institute for years, mentioned on 9 Persuasion pages, and the guy whose book I was arrested with for protesting Vietnam (didn’t read it).
Robin DiAngelo (#2 Social Justice author) says, “Our analysis of social justice is based on a school of thought known as Critical Theory. … Frankfurt … Horkheimer… Adorno, … Herberter Marcuse.” Angela Davis actually studied critical theory with Adorno.
Kellner, Marcuse’s #1 proponent and the collector of his work, wrote “Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies.” Obviously, he thinks CM exists.
if you missed all that, you’ve just never seen cultural Marxism (which is not Marxism). Also, your chronology is wrong in the typical way; it puts in a lot of Postmodernism and leaves out Black Power.
You go from “Lacanian theory and semiotics, deconstruction” to critical race theory. Derrick Bell was its godfather, and that postmodern stuff didn’t touch him. He was installed at Harvard by Black Power and given his two central CRT ideas by Stokely Carmichael on Face the Nation 3 days after Stokely launched Black Power (June 19, 1966).
Explaining the CRT name, Crenshaw says: “We discovered ourselves to be critical theorists who did race, and we were racial justice advocates who did critical theory.”
As to your idea that Horkheimer's 1937 paper “Traditional and Critical Theory” was promoting real Marxism because it “still relies on Marxian categories such as modes of production and the economic base.” First, I can’t find “economic base.” Second, the paper’s first third is a critique of traditional theory, including social science, which includes Marx’s “scientific socialism.” That’s where he speaks of “modes of production” — to criticize Marxism. Quoting phrases totally out of context proves nothing.
So, how do Black Power and Cultural Marxism fit together to help form Wokeism? Black Power made culture central (black is beautiful, etc) and introduced canceling—They canceled LBJ’s most significant civil rights initiative (1965), and Carmichael canceled John Lewis to take over SNCC. Finally, they canceled the whole Civil Rights movement as “a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy” — repeated ad nauseam on Stokely’s speaking tour. They also introduce victimhood, ~ Oct 1965 (soon to become the slogan “blaming the victim’) to cancel LBJ via Moynihan. They sold whites on feeling guilty.
Critical theory provided CRT with a broader framework — use all oppressed groups to destroy the dominant culture which will open the way to a utopia, the beloved community. Horkheimer (1937) states explicitly that this cannot yet be imagined (ie it’s probably not socialism, more like communism or whatever). This imaginary dynamic provides a lot of power for the movement.
Crenshaw’s intersectionality harnesses all the oppressed groups and demands they become allies and attack the oppressors (on “the floor above”). Postmodern anti-essentialism gives her a bit of trouble, but she easily handles it. This is a brilliant construction of a particular (lowercase) critical theory that falls within Horkheimer’s (now capitalized) Critical Theory framework.
Appendix: Here’s What T&CT actually says:
Horkheimer mentions “modes of production” twice.
Mention #1: As man [observes] reality, he [sees it in a distorted way]. This process is [as true] of the modern Mode of Production, as of a … primitive hunters and fishers.
Horkheimer is talking about workers seeing reality subjectively. How do you read that as Marxist?
Mention #2: The “structures of industrial production” … and “intellectual operations emerge from the mode of production practiced in particular forms of society.” Again, he is not even talking about capitalism in particular but a far more general principle. Then, he says that the seeming freedom of workers is determined by “the working of an incalculable social mechanism.”
The latter point may be where the woke get that everything is socially determined.
When it comes to “critical theory,” he describes “the theoretician,” who is obviously the revolutionary agent and nothing like Marx’s workers:
“The theoretician is also at times an enemy and criminal, at times a solitary Utopian.”
[The theoretician] “exercises an aggressive critique not only against the conscious defenders of the status quo but also against distracting, conformist.”
Those conformists who he says to critique are now anyone who is not an active “ally” of one of the 50 or so intersectional identity groups.
[If the theoretician forms] “a dynamic unity with the oppressed class” and becomes “a force within it to stimulate change, then his real function emerges.” Note: the oppressed class, not the working class.
[Critical activity] “is suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as these are understood” … “about which one can do nothing.” So, the revolution is fought by discrediting the most fundamental cultural categories: “better,” “useful,” etc.
Probably the worst article I’ve read on Persuasion. Lindsay’s argument is far stronger than what is shared here. Doesn’t the Identity Trap discuss the intellectual history of how critical studies derived from the failures of Marxism?
Actually no. Yascha similarly misses the cultural Marxism boat. He does not seem to know any of the facts I listed above. Still, The Identity Trap is a great book, and apart from the historical analysis, it does a brilliant job (simply the best) of identifying and diagnosing ID politics problems.
"Many critics of so-called wokeness have argued that it is a form of “cultural Marxism.” But the true history of the identity synthesis turns out to be ... postmodern thinkers" —p.19
Postmodernists had an influence, but many of them were Maoists, and they seem to have picked up their most influential point, the denial of objectivity, from Trad & Crit Theory, 1937. Its very title implies this -- "traditional theory," both science and social science, is worthless for social and political analysis, it explains, because it tries to be objective.
"I try to debunk some of the most sensationalist claims that are now being made about the nature of the left’s identitarian turn—such as the idea that it is simply a form of “cultural Marxism”—p.26
He's right that it's not pure cultural Marxism. That is one of its two main roots. The other is the Black Power movement, which he completely misses. Derrick Bell (Mr. CRT) got his two main ideas from Stockley Carmichael; these are even in his Face the Nation appearance on June 19, 1966.
"the postmodernist tradition of critical legal studies." —p.58 This is his only mention of critical studies.
His Appendix: "Why the Identity Synthesis Isn’t Marxist," gives his full argument.
"Many critics of so-called wokeness contend that the identity synthesis is a form of “cultural Marxism.” ... if you take class and economics out of Marxism, [you get identity politcs]." —p.287 He's right; that's too simple. That's not where CT comes from, but it's a useful partial view of it. Yascha just does not seem aware of the Frankfurt School's development and dissemination of CT or even that CRT was named after CT by Crenshaw, who kicked off the identity politics craze, which perfectly implements CT's path to revolution.
"But for all of these similarities, the differences between the identity synthesis and Marxism weigh just as heavily. .... As I showed in part I, it simply isn’t true that the main intellectual roots for the identity synthesis are Marxist. On the contrary, its original impetus stems from postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard" —p.288
The trouble is he never showed this. He only showed specific PoMo ideas correlate with identity politics but never traces how ideas got from one person to another.
I don’t believe anyone argued that critical theory is exclusively Marxist. To your point, postmodern intellectuals (especially French) built their theories in reaction to the failures of Marxism, in addition to other influences, and therefore should be deemed a derivative of Marxism, as you argue above. But to say, as the author here does, that cultural Marxism doesn’t exist, seems dubious at best, a point you seem to accept above.
I agree. I have not seen anyone argue the CT is exclusively Marxist. However, both Hallam and Mounk seem to believe that debunking "Woke is Marxist" is equivalent to debunking "Woke is cultural Marxism (Critical Theory)." That would only be true if CT were exclusively Marxist.
> Lindsay must know that “woke” ideas have little grounding in materialism.
Indeed wokeness is more comparable to Gnosticism -- we can have a secret unexplainable Knowledge that our immaterial soul is really of the opposite sex. Yes, wokies and Marxists share the 'oppressor/oppressed' dichotomy but little else. Marx was attempting to make politics and economics into sciences, the woke denounce science as a system of oppression. Marx would piss on the wokies. Lenin would have them sent to Siberia. Stalin would just shoot them.
I'm not entirely convinced that this argument is worth having. Hallam and Yascha are both quite anxious to say that wokeism is definitely not Marxist. I agree with their particulars, and I defer to their far greater expertise on Marxism proper and intellectual history generally, but, as Hallam acknowledges, the comparison is hardly crazy.
Empirically, Marxism, however bastardized, has influenced at least some people who don the critical mantle.
Theoretically, the two seem to share a blinkered, monocausal "analysis" of history whereby events are explained and understood not by the stated intentions of the actors involved, seen as a superficial smokescreen, nor by the messy myriad contingencies that do in fact produce history, but rather by an ostensibly deeper, in some sense fundamental, source of social conflict and social imperatives, one that unschooled people, chained as they are in Plato's cave, glimpse only dimly if at all.
Thus, religion, for example -- something a great many people actually take seriously -- is not merely a set of superstitions humans naturally rely on to get along and make sense of the world, as they have since forever, but rather an "opiate," a numbing agent that, almost conspiratorially, is tailor-made to distract people, like the consumerism both Marxists and Catholic anti-liberal critics decry, from the human outrages under their noses. People are thus babies shrewdly pacified by the powers that be with tremendous quantities of bullshit, and their authentic thoughts and feelings hardly matter, subsumed as they are in, to use a very woke phrase, "systems of oppression."
Such condescending ideas of "false consciousness" are after all core Marxist ideas. These ideas are implicit in the very word "woke," as in, "Wake up, can't you see what's *really* going on?"
The difference, a big one to be sure, is in the two groups' identification of what is in fact really going on. For Marx, it's class. For the wokesters, it's other identities, most importantly race. In this, the wokesters share prominent aspects of the Marxist method of analysis of history and social relations. To the extent Foucault rejected grand narratives, I'd humbly suggest that the wokesters are perhaps a touch more Marxian than Foucaldian, notwithstanding the latter's influence. They are critical, like Foucault, but not as thorough-going about it, as few could be and remain coherent.
Thus, the great Charles Beard's deflationary Marxist analysis of the U.S. Constitution as a tool of the middle class elite to advance their economic interests finds a *methodological* echo in Derrick Bell's deflationary analysis of Brown v. Board of Education, whereby the Justices were not finally finding the courage to right a wrong and vindicate an important principle of racial equality enshrined in the 14th Amendment as you might suppose and as they themselves thought, but rather countering Communist propaganda decrying the hypocrisy of the West at the height of the Cold War. The white power only helps the marginalized minority when it's in its interest. Brown was thus just another pacifier in, for Bell, the all-encompassing racial struggle.
I suppose that the reason for this "Stop saying it's Marxist!" line of argument is perhaps a sense that Marxism actually has a point or two, more so than the self-defeatingly cynical Foucault and today's wokesters. Marx, they might want to say, was more right. For many of us, however, we see in Marx and the wokester more fundamental errors -- a glibness that ominously denies the authenticity of individual human experience and expression that doesn't fit the agenda, an "analysis" of social relations masquerading as tough-minded and objective and empirical that is heroically allergic to actual evidence that doesn't fit the agenda, in short, a terrific flattening of civilization into nothing more than an oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.
Yes! What Lindsay calls "cultural Marxists" (and the "woke right") have in common with "real" Marxists isn't necessarily related to Marx's materialism -- but they share Marx's method of analysis (of history and social relations) -- with its implicit refusal to acknowledge the sort of personal agency at the heart of liberal individualism.
"Combat liberalism" is the watchword they all have in common -- and this derives from a shared sensibility regarding the human condition (particularly, their deprecation of individual uniqueness and personal autonomy) -- however disparate might be their respective views of the implications.
Woke ideology is not canonical Marxism. But was there ever such a thing as canonical Marxism? Lenin revised Marxism to suit his goal of building socialism in a single country. The Frankfurt School shifted Marxism into cultural analysis. The entire edifice of Critical Theory rests upon the work of the Frankfurt School, crossed with postcolonialism, seasoned with a dash of Foucault, and spiced up with queer studies and some (not too much) feminism. Woke ideology exists. It is powerful. It is damaging. Whether you call it cultural Marxism or not is irrelevant.
I can't finish reading things Lindsay has written because he loses me a few paragraphs in as I'm neither philosopher, intellectual, nor expert. However, I do like to analyze and living in Seattle with the dominant neoprogressivism that is suffocating from my perspective as a classical liberal induces me to analyze and to better understand the politics of the left wing and the right wing in relationship to classical liberalism.
From that, I have identified many similarities between the two extremist wings. I do note however that the right wing is reacting to the left wing and the left wing is reacting to classical liberalism.
For one, they're both radical and fundamentalist driven by emotion, not reason. I don't call the right wing "Christian Nationalist", but instead call it paleoconservatism within which religionism reigns and Christian Nationalism exists. The reason I don't use the word Christian is because it could be another religion, like Islamism. Whenever my conservative friends talk about religion associated with government, I remind them it may not be their religion that's in charge of the system they're advocating for. It could, for instance, be the Muslim Brotherhood's religion. I don't use Nationalist either because nationalism exists for classically liberal patriotic citizens. I use paternalism and isolationism as descriptors. Interestingly, only 30% of neoprogressivists like America and most will not fly our flag. Personally, I think that's baked in to destabilize our country just like I believe that asking us to not be Islamophobic has opened the doors for Islamism.
Secondly, the left-wing and the right-wing are both tribal and antisocial. I've noted that the reason for that could be radicalization as a result of being susceptible to cults and single-minded group-think pursuits attributable to a neurological condition they may have in common. The desire to subject us all to their ideas of utopia/dystopia never made sense to me as they can go about their collectivism or isolationist pursuits with the freedom we have in America without making governmental dictates that we read their bibles so to speak. It's authoritarian. They want power and control.
I can also see how Marxism is integrated into neoprogressivism as a preparation for Communism. Big Governement, Big Labor, and Big Business all in on control, and censorship. All the talk of economic inequality (and the achievement gap) really does harken back to 1814 and the shaming of Capitalism as if the pie is a finite size and individuals have no agency.
Equity is a communist concept. (The Chinese don't want parents to get their kids tutors.) When I look at the several grade levels of dumbing down of public school classrooms and eliminating academically challenging coursework I think of communism, and in turn I think of Marxism as a preparation for that.
International central planning by elites to the extent of globalism today that hollowed out our industrially fueled middle class really has been the road to serfdom (and fentanyl). It's a recurring theme with communism.
The line between classical liberalism and the left wing and right wing is the Constitution and of course the extreme wings are looking to modify it. Egads. Woke is progressivism at this point and progressivism is the road to communism via Marxism, social, economic, or otherwise.
The line spoken by Queen Gertrude in Hamlet springs to mind, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." I rather tend to think Lindsay strikes too close to the truth about both Marxism and Wokism.
This is an ill-conceived essay -- poorly focused and wrongly skewed -- but it's proved to be great work, for the responses and counter-analyses it's provoked! :-)
I might add that Marxian materialism fades in significance when the object (and subject) of "production" is information.
These days (putting aside the wokesters), we can learn more from Norbert Wiener (or from his popularizers [e.g., McLuhan]) -- or from Ibn Khaldun -- than from Marx.
Cultural Marxism is very, very real. Another name for it is 'woke'. Clearly it is not traditional economic Marxism. Indeed, CM goes to great pains to reject economic Marxism and replace it with race, sexual orientation, 'trans' status, etc. Some folks don't like the phrase, because it taints (quite deliberately) 'woke' with the (well-earned) label, Marxist. I wrote the following earlier.
I don't disagree with your analysis. I too tend toward the view that 'woke' is a clever way for the beneficiaries of globalization to deflect class resentment (which might otherwise arise). The problem with this theory is that the ‘woke’ don’t agree. Indeed, they vehemently disagree. Try convincing Hannah Jones that she is an agent of the economic elite.
I would offer that following analysis
Cultural Marxism goes back to at least the 1920s. Of course, CM has (vastly) proliferated of late. At least four reasons come to mind.
1. The rise of Cultural Marxism is too some degree, a consequence of the fall of conventional Marxism. Conventional Marxism was (slowly) dying by the 1950s. The Soviet invasion of Hungary and later Czechoslovakia alienated (or worse) a vast number of people who might have otherwise supported the Communist system. The economic failure of Eastern Europe combined with the great success of the “Little China’s” (Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan) and South Korea was a great blow to the credibility of conventional Marxism. The Cambodian genocide must be mentioned in this context as well. Of course, the fall of the USSR and China’s switch to Capitalism (and subsequent success) were the final nails in the coffin.
My sense of it is that failure of the Soviet system (and Eastern Europe) was a bigger deal than China’s switch to capitalism. The numbers make the converse case. However, I still think the failure of Soviet system (and Eastern Europe) was/is more important. I don’t agree, but that doesn’t matter.
Of course, these were monumental blows to the traditional Left. However, the Left wasn’t about to fold its tent and disappear. For better or worse, a huge section of society will never embrace bourgeois values and will be (highly) motivated to reject them. Since conventional Marxism was “the god that failed”, the Left embraced Cultural Marxism as a substitute. Of course, Cultural Marxism is just as crazy as conventional Marxism (perhaps considerably crazier). However, we don’t have easy country comparisons to show how nuts it is (i.e. no North Korea vs. South Korea).
Blank Slate ideology is arguably nuttier than old-style Marxism. However, we don’t (yet) have a Stalin or Mao to attack as the leader of it (Cultural Marxism).
2. As long at the Left was committed to traditional Socialism/Marxism, the right would move heaven and earth to oppose it. Big corporations, rich people, religious people, some union people, etc. all had powerful incentives to oppose traditional Socialism/Marxism. That meant that anti-communist movements, ideas, intellectuals, etc. were assuredly substantial support as long the enemy was “Real Socialism”.
By contrast, CM provokes no comparable opposition (from big corporations, rich people, religious people, etc.). Actually the reverse is true. Party-line adherence to CM is notoriously profitable for some companies. For example, most Tech firms (Apple is a bad example) would be crucified by Democrats/Liberals/Leftists/etc. for their exploitation of the tax system. In real life, the level of criticism is near nil. By declaring their commitment to CM, they gain de facto immunity from criticism from the Left (the Right wouldn’t criticize them anyway).
At least the indulgences sold by church cost real money. Now you just need to pay lip service to CM.
3. There is also (predictably) a class element to this. Old-style Marxism was inherently (too some degree) a blue-collar worldview. Of course, that was never entirely true. Marx was an intellectual. The cliché that “Marxism is the Opiate of the Intellectuals” existed for a reason. However, conventional Marxism was never going to appeal to white, upper-middle class (UMC), liberals for all sorts of reasons, of which class was definitely an issue.
However, Cultural Marxism has no such problem. White, UMC, liberals can espouse and advocate Cultural Marxism without any contradictions (as they see them) and without restraint. Indeed, they do. Studies (Yascha Mounk) have shown that “woke” progressives are one of the least diverse (in many senses of the word) groups out there. Cultural Marxism gives UMC liberals free reign to denounce “deplorables” to their hearts content. Conventional Marxism would have been much more circumspect. Of course, upscale folks have always wanted to attack (rhetorically and otherwise) the working class. However, conventional Marxism constrained the left (but not the right) from doing so.
Cultural Marxism imposes no such limitations.
4. In my opinion, the failure of liberalism was/is a substantial factor in the rise of CM. In the 1960s (and earlier decades and later decades) it was widely believed that liberalism would work. In other words, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society would produce a (much) better American where poverty and race would not be intertwined and poverty itself would more or less disappear. That didn’t happen of course. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was roughly as successful as his war in Vietnam.
At this point it is obvious that liberalism has failed (in attaining the goals of the 1960s). Some folks have responded to this failure by basically giving up. However, the most motivated have moved to the left (far left). Note that we hear far more about “systematic racism” now (when it doesn’t exist) than we did when Jim Crow was a daily reality.
Johnson's most ambitious attempt at the Great Society was, “To Fulfill These Rights” -- We seek not just legal equity ... but equality as a fact, and equality as a result. —President Lyndon Johnson, June 4, 1965.
It was derailed entirely by the nascent woke, Black Power movement, even while LBJ was at the height of his power, just off his 1964, pro-civil rights landslide, still the Dems all-time high point. So, I would not blame his failure on liberalism, except in the sense that it could not withstand woke, BP/CRT intimidation. (This was the grandest cancellation ever.)
But I did find your comment most interesting and "liked" it.
See Joel Kotkin on "the Clerisy" and its relationship with oligarchy and the crushing of the middle class. To some degree, Michael Lind also addresses this.
Wait, please. (I wish I'd had a chance to say that before you went to the trouble of writing this piece.) The whole problem with referring to the cultural Left as Marxist can be resolved by replacing the word "Marxist" with "Marxian" or, as I've written somewhere, "Marxianesque".
The cultural Left imitates Marxism in its insistence on lumping people together in classes and then rhetorically manipulating the lumps. The classes in question are biological ones rather than economic ones, but the political behavior is the same -- perhaps not the same as Marx's, but the same as Marxists'. That's it. The charge of cultural Marxism refers to the Left's exhortation to a form of class struggle. It's not about the conceptual essence of Marxism, but the political strategy.
However, a better solution may be for the people who speak of "cultural Marxism" to speak of "cultural Leninism" instead. That would cut to the heart, not only of social-justice politics, but of modern leftist politics generally. Please note this excerpt from a pamphlet by the late John H. Kautsky, political scientist and grandson of Karl Kautsky, entitled "Marxism and Leninism, Not Marxism-Leninism" (1994):
"Thus, Lenin thought of his modernizing revolution as a proletarian revolution and of workers playing the leading role in the revolutionary movement. They do so, however, as represented by intellectuals or, as Lenin put it more often, by his Party or simply by 'us.' The Introduction of 'the Party' is generally seen as Lenin's major modification of or contribution to Marxism, but it does not merely add an organizational element that was absent in Marx's Marxism. Marx's social-democratic successors had added such an element long before Lenin did, but it continued to express Marx's concern with the working class. The introduction of Lenin's 'party of a new type' involves a change of the ideology from a laborite ideology to one of intellectuals. The Party is, and 'we' are, in Lenin's mind clearly distinct from the working class and must lead that class where it would otherwise not go. In short, it is intellectuals, not workers, who give direction to and lead the revolutionary movement."
This change "from a laborite ideology to one of intellectuals" is the element of Marxism qua Leninism that survives most vigorously in the American Left. The phrase "cultural Marxism" is a rough-and-ready shorthand for that and "class"-based political agitation, combined.
Thanks for this piece. As an old Marxist born in 1945, me and my comrades railed against the pseudo-Marxism of SDS (and the Beatles! and the Yippies and Timothy Leary, etc) with their decidedly "petty bourgeois" take on social revolution as a matter of "freeing your mind instead" (from white skin privilege, sexism, and various other "super structure" ills) but essentially remaining silent about an economic system that needed a fundamental overall. And so the great institutions of capitalist hegemony have had no difficulties declaring support for DEI, Gay Rights, and the whole "woke" framework for it contains no fundamental challenge to the the "base" relationships and their economic hegemony. In fact wokeism is a kind of gift to the captains of the economic order as it tends to divert, divide and discourage the very forces that need to unite to deposit these captains "into the dustbin of history."
Agreed, regarding the oligarchs' exploitation of identity politics to divide-and-conquer -- but I'd maintain that it's the hard left's contempt (perhaps derived from Engels) that drives "mom and pop" -- the "petty bourgeoisie" -- into the arms of fascism (as the hard left shares fascism's contempt for liberal individualism).
The hard left and fascists thus use each other as mutual enforcers in running their respective protection rackets -- mimicking the oligarchs in playing both ends against the middle.
There's an argument to be made that woke (with apologies to Darwin) descended with modification from Marxism. But just as humans are not our ancestral species, woke is its own belief system.
If I am understanding the argument correctly, Cultural Marxism cannot exist because Marxism is a materialist ideology. Of course it is, but the means by which Marx sought his ends was through the destruction of cultural institutions. Marx states in my 1998 Verso edition of the Manifesto that he sought the « abolition of the family, » which he found to be « disgusting. » Indeed, it is difficult to find subtle differences between Wokism and an apparently non-existent Cultural Marxism when Marx himself is so broad in his aims. Yes, his end goal was the abolition of private property, but his process goal was « the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. » Academic arguments that seek to parce the differences between movements confront the challenge that « the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. » Marx is not subtle.
Nobody likes using Wokism or Cultural Marxism as terms but they are the best shorthand descriptions that we have. Of course, many who embrace Critical Theory proudly use versions of terminology from,the Manifesto, particularly when objecting to the nuclear family and to capitalism. One needs nothing more than to read the biographies of professors in any English literature program.
In the end, we « know them by their fruits, » but we don’t need to do that since many prominent members of social movements are self-declared Marxists. My copy of the Manifesto has an introduction by Eric Hobsbawm. Some founders of BLM are similarly self-declared. Marx ended his polemic by declaring that « the Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. » I take him at his word.
A very though provoking article whose content and readers comments are way above my humble pay grade. From hoi polloi ranks of the electorate, all one can offer is a personal observation that this Woke ideology smacks of Marxism, in its portrayal of harnessing the people to elevate those "leaders" of DIE, racism, victimology, identity politics, and intersectionality. In this manner those woke seek to thrust their ideology into the limelight of the political discourse of the present, by the continual use of propaganda through a compliant MSM, to forward their woke dogma that accepts no dissent nor debate and censors all who are in opposition, not with death as in Stalin's time but with "cancellation" and shaming. This is the modern-day equivalent that was what Stalin, Moa the like employed to supress who were the foot soldiers of this ideology, that had elevated them to the ruling class. Some may say that this is just "authoritarianism" but it isn't because this woke ideology has spread so deep and far into all our western democratic institutions, as to be front and centre in our MSM who support those who try and portray this dogma as the answer to all the ills that capitalism and modern western societies obsession with meritocracy, which up to the time of the woke was the key to to advance individuals in our democratic societies. So call woke what you like in academic circles, but in reality this is what the woke ideology is all about. The destroying of all epistemologies of western culture, the use of different language -the pronouns - the rejection of meritocracy and replacing this bedrock of western culture, with inferior intellects either in fact or because of lack of academic training. The semantics about whether Wokism is cultural Marxism is superfluous.
Wait, so many right-wingers misunderstand what "woke" is and often have collectivist and authoritarian positions regarding sociocultural topics as through transgenderphobia, religious bigotry and hateful culturalism resulting in that anti-woke people often are as "woke right" while "woke left" is not even so materialistic as original Marxism since woke is about focusing on sociocultural topics?
There obviously is such a thing as Cultural Marxism.
As most who study this know, it has two main sources, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, but also Franz Fanon.
You may be confused because Cultural Marxism is not Marxism, it’s a derivative of Marxism that dismisses the working class — that's not Marxism.
In the ‘60s, the far left turned against the working class to side with the “marginalized.” Marx called them the “lumpenproletariat”—workers in rags, and so did Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Minister of Information:
. . . . “The Working Class, particularly the American Working Class, is a parasite upon the heritage of mankind, of which the Lumpen has been totally robbed by the rigged system of Capitalism. ... O.K. We are Lumpen. Right on.” —Cleaver, 1967
He credits Fanon, but it’s easier to see why the F. School and Gramsci turned against them. The working class turned against the Marxists and Socialists in Italy and Germany and jailed and killed them. So, a new theory was invented based on Marxism.
If you don’t believe Cultural Marxism is real, check out this paper by Douglas Kellner, who published the collected works of Marcuse: “Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies.”
Marcuse was the very woke Ms Angela Davis's mentor, the new left's guru, and part of the Frankfurt school. Judith Butler pictures the two of them together on her Critical Theory Institute site at UC Berkeley. Butler is the godmother of Queer theory.
Robin Diangelo claims to have learned her politics from the Frankfurt school.
Alicia Garza of BLM credits Gramsci.
The Frankfurt School invented the concept of the culture industry, and Gramsci is credited with cultural hegemony.
Crenshaw, the founder of Critical race Theory in 1989, claims in two places that she named it after Critical Theory. That's the F. School's name for their cultural Marxism.
Read the founding document, Traditional and Critical Theory, Horkheimer, 1937. You will find that it hands the responsibility for the revolution to the marginalized and basically recommends that they must overthrow capitalist culture to reach an unspecified utopia.
Lindsay knows all this and talks flamboyantly about Marxism to get attention from a mass audience. He also exaggerates. But he knows a lot of history that you miss.
Hi Steve: thanks for taking the time to comment. The part of my piece relevant to your point is the third footnote, which perhaps I shouldn't have relegated to a footnote. I completely agree that there is a genealogy which stretches back to Marx and passes through the Frankfurt School and early critical theory, through to the late-20th century and deconstruction and critical race theory etc. - and that eventually, some of these ideas would influence today's social justice activism.
My point is that this is a very long chain indeed. You mention Horkheimer's "Traditional and Critical Theory" – the striking thing to me about that essay is the degree to which Horkheimer still relies on Marxian categories such as modes of production and the economic base. Horkheimer basically says that the entire point of critical theory is to critique society using Marxian economic concepts.
But a number of decades later I think critical theory abandoned these concepts altogether. It got mixed up with a bunch of Lacanian theory and semiotics, deconstruction etc.... schools of thought which are all about the symbolic realm with little or no grounding in material reality (and in my opinion these schools of thought are fairly incoherent, which is the critique that people like Chomsky level against capital-t Theory). Then CRT and queer theory, particularly as they're articulated in the activist sphere (as opposed to the academic sphere), seem to be grounded in various identity categories that again are not grounded in conceptions of production or labor. And insofar as social justice activists talk about economics, they tend to subscribe to a fairly bog standard Bernie Sanders-esque view of the economy which just isn't particularly Marxist (I mention that in my fourth footnote.)
My point is that most of the overlap social justice activism has with actual Marxism is superficial and cosmetic, to do with rhetoric or vibes. But if a theory isn't grounded in materialism it can't be Marxist, just like a monotheistic religion without a belief in Jesus can't be a branch of Christianity. (On the other hand, a lot of postliberal theory on the right these days does seem to be grounded in economic/Marxian categories -- fulfilling the promise of Horkheimer's Traditional and Critical Theory, in my opinion)
Bravo, Steve! You just saved me a lot of typing, and hit all the right notes.
First rate analysis Steve.
Hi Luke, Thanks for engaging. You say, “My point is” (1) this is a very long chain indeed [fm Marx to Social Justice], and (2) the overlap social justice activism has with actual Marxism is superficial and cosmetic.
So, I guess you did not read my first two sentences: (1) explains Marx is not in the chain. (2) “Cultural Marxism is not Marxism; it dismisses the working class.” So, I’m saying social justice is NOT Marxism.
You spend a lot of time saying, “ it can't be Marxist” —like, if you take Jesus out of Christianity, it’s not Christianity. Again, you missed my sentence #2: If you take the workers out of Marxism, it’s not Marxism.
You are not seeing cultural Marxism because you believe it’s some kind of Marxism. It Is Not Marxism. “Cultural Marxism” (CM) is just a name designed to sell a non-Marxist concept to a bunch of Marxists. Here’s how I know you’re not seeing it.
You never mention Marcuse. He was the #1 proponent of CM in the US, part of the F. School’s inner circle, Time Magazine’s “New Left Guru”, Angela Davis’s mentor, in Judith Butler’s (Gender Trouble) prized Marcuse-Davis photo on her UC Berkeley Critical Theory Institute for years, mentioned on 9 Persuasion pages, and the guy whose book I was arrested with for protesting Vietnam (didn’t read it).
Robin DiAngelo (#2 Social Justice author) says, “Our analysis of social justice is based on a school of thought known as Critical Theory. … Frankfurt … Horkheimer… Adorno, … Herberter Marcuse.” Angela Davis actually studied critical theory with Adorno.
Kellner, Marcuse’s #1 proponent and the collector of his work, wrote “Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies.” Obviously, he thinks CM exists.
if you missed all that, you’ve just never seen cultural Marxism (which is not Marxism). Also, your chronology is wrong in the typical way; it puts in a lot of Postmodernism and leaves out Black Power.
You go from “Lacanian theory and semiotics, deconstruction” to critical race theory. Derrick Bell was its godfather, and that postmodern stuff didn’t touch him. He was installed at Harvard by Black Power and given his two central CRT ideas by Stokely Carmichael on Face the Nation 3 days after Stokely launched Black Power (June 19, 1966).
Explaining the CRT name, Crenshaw says: “We discovered ourselves to be critical theorists who did race, and we were racial justice advocates who did critical theory.”
As to your idea that Horkheimer's 1937 paper “Traditional and Critical Theory” was promoting real Marxism because it “still relies on Marxian categories such as modes of production and the economic base.” First, I can’t find “economic base.” Second, the paper’s first third is a critique of traditional theory, including social science, which includes Marx’s “scientific socialism.” That’s where he speaks of “modes of production” — to criticize Marxism. Quoting phrases totally out of context proves nothing.
So, how do Black Power and Cultural Marxism fit together to help form Wokeism? Black Power made culture central (black is beautiful, etc) and introduced canceling—They canceled LBJ’s most significant civil rights initiative (1965), and Carmichael canceled John Lewis to take over SNCC. Finally, they canceled the whole Civil Rights movement as “a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy” — repeated ad nauseam on Stokely’s speaking tour. They also introduce victimhood, ~ Oct 1965 (soon to become the slogan “blaming the victim’) to cancel LBJ via Moynihan. They sold whites on feeling guilty.
Critical theory provided CRT with a broader framework — use all oppressed groups to destroy the dominant culture which will open the way to a utopia, the beloved community. Horkheimer (1937) states explicitly that this cannot yet be imagined (ie it’s probably not socialism, more like communism or whatever). This imaginary dynamic provides a lot of power for the movement.
Crenshaw’s intersectionality harnesses all the oppressed groups and demands they become allies and attack the oppressors (on “the floor above”). Postmodern anti-essentialism gives her a bit of trouble, but she easily handles it. This is a brilliant construction of a particular (lowercase) critical theory that falls within Horkheimer’s (now capitalized) Critical Theory framework.
Appendix: Here’s What T&CT actually says:
Horkheimer mentions “modes of production” twice.
Mention #1: As man [observes] reality, he [sees it in a distorted way]. This process is [as true] of the modern Mode of Production, as of a … primitive hunters and fishers.
Horkheimer is talking about workers seeing reality subjectively. How do you read that as Marxist?
Mention #2: The “structures of industrial production” … and “intellectual operations emerge from the mode of production practiced in particular forms of society.” Again, he is not even talking about capitalism in particular but a far more general principle. Then, he says that the seeming freedom of workers is determined by “the working of an incalculable social mechanism.”
The latter point may be where the woke get that everything is socially determined.
When it comes to “critical theory,” he describes “the theoretician,” who is obviously the revolutionary agent and nothing like Marx’s workers:
“The theoretician is also at times an enemy and criminal, at times a solitary Utopian.”
[The theoretician] “exercises an aggressive critique not only against the conscious defenders of the status quo but also against distracting, conformist.”
Those conformists who he says to critique are now anyone who is not an active “ally” of one of the 50 or so intersectional identity groups.
[If the theoretician forms] “a dynamic unity with the oppressed class” and becomes “a force within it to stimulate change, then his real function emerges.” Note: the oppressed class, not the working class.
[Critical activity] “is suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as these are understood” … “about which one can do nothing.” So, the revolution is fought by discrediting the most fundamental cultural categories: “better,” “useful,” etc.
Probably the worst article I’ve read on Persuasion. Lindsay’s argument is far stronger than what is shared here. Doesn’t the Identity Trap discuss the intellectual history of how critical studies derived from the failures of Marxism?
Actually no. Yascha similarly misses the cultural Marxism boat. He does not seem to know any of the facts I listed above. Still, The Identity Trap is a great book, and apart from the historical analysis, it does a brilliant job (simply the best) of identifying and diagnosing ID politics problems.
"Many critics of so-called wokeness have argued that it is a form of “cultural Marxism.” But the true history of the identity synthesis turns out to be ... postmodern thinkers" —p.19
Postmodernists had an influence, but many of them were Maoists, and they seem to have picked up their most influential point, the denial of objectivity, from Trad & Crit Theory, 1937. Its very title implies this -- "traditional theory," both science and social science, is worthless for social and political analysis, it explains, because it tries to be objective.
"I try to debunk some of the most sensationalist claims that are now being made about the nature of the left’s identitarian turn—such as the idea that it is simply a form of “cultural Marxism”—p.26
He's right that it's not pure cultural Marxism. That is one of its two main roots. The other is the Black Power movement, which he completely misses. Derrick Bell (Mr. CRT) got his two main ideas from Stockley Carmichael; these are even in his Face the Nation appearance on June 19, 1966.
"the postmodernist tradition of critical legal studies." —p.58 This is his only mention of critical studies.
His Appendix: "Why the Identity Synthesis Isn’t Marxist," gives his full argument.
"Many critics of so-called wokeness contend that the identity synthesis is a form of “cultural Marxism.” ... if you take class and economics out of Marxism, [you get identity politcs]." —p.287 He's right; that's too simple. That's not where CT comes from, but it's a useful partial view of it. Yascha just does not seem aware of the Frankfurt School's development and dissemination of CT or even that CRT was named after CT by Crenshaw, who kicked off the identity politics craze, which perfectly implements CT's path to revolution.
"But for all of these similarities, the differences between the identity synthesis and Marxism weigh just as heavily. .... As I showed in part I, it simply isn’t true that the main intellectual roots for the identity synthesis are Marxist. On the contrary, its original impetus stems from postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard" —p.288
The trouble is he never showed this. He only showed specific PoMo ideas correlate with identity politics but never traces how ideas got from one person to another.
I don’t believe anyone argued that critical theory is exclusively Marxist. To your point, postmodern intellectuals (especially French) built their theories in reaction to the failures of Marxism, in addition to other influences, and therefore should be deemed a derivative of Marxism, as you argue above. But to say, as the author here does, that cultural Marxism doesn’t exist, seems dubious at best, a point you seem to accept above.
I agree. I have not seen anyone argue the CT is exclusively Marxist. However, both Hallam and Mounk seem to believe that debunking "Woke is Marxist" is equivalent to debunking "Woke is cultural Marxism (Critical Theory)." That would only be true if CT were exclusively Marxist.
Very finely argued.
> Lindsay must know that “woke” ideas have little grounding in materialism.
Indeed wokeness is more comparable to Gnosticism -- we can have a secret unexplainable Knowledge that our immaterial soul is really of the opposite sex. Yes, wokies and Marxists share the 'oppressor/oppressed' dichotomy but little else. Marx was attempting to make politics and economics into sciences, the woke denounce science as a system of oppression. Marx would piss on the wokies. Lenin would have them sent to Siberia. Stalin would just shoot them.
I'm not entirely convinced that this argument is worth having. Hallam and Yascha are both quite anxious to say that wokeism is definitely not Marxist. I agree with their particulars, and I defer to their far greater expertise on Marxism proper and intellectual history generally, but, as Hallam acknowledges, the comparison is hardly crazy.
Empirically, Marxism, however bastardized, has influenced at least some people who don the critical mantle.
Theoretically, the two seem to share a blinkered, monocausal "analysis" of history whereby events are explained and understood not by the stated intentions of the actors involved, seen as a superficial smokescreen, nor by the messy myriad contingencies that do in fact produce history, but rather by an ostensibly deeper, in some sense fundamental, source of social conflict and social imperatives, one that unschooled people, chained as they are in Plato's cave, glimpse only dimly if at all.
Thus, religion, for example -- something a great many people actually take seriously -- is not merely a set of superstitions humans naturally rely on to get along and make sense of the world, as they have since forever, but rather an "opiate," a numbing agent that, almost conspiratorially, is tailor-made to distract people, like the consumerism both Marxists and Catholic anti-liberal critics decry, from the human outrages under their noses. People are thus babies shrewdly pacified by the powers that be with tremendous quantities of bullshit, and their authentic thoughts and feelings hardly matter, subsumed as they are in, to use a very woke phrase, "systems of oppression."
Such condescending ideas of "false consciousness" are after all core Marxist ideas. These ideas are implicit in the very word "woke," as in, "Wake up, can't you see what's *really* going on?"
The difference, a big one to be sure, is in the two groups' identification of what is in fact really going on. For Marx, it's class. For the wokesters, it's other identities, most importantly race. In this, the wokesters share prominent aspects of the Marxist method of analysis of history and social relations. To the extent Foucault rejected grand narratives, I'd humbly suggest that the wokesters are perhaps a touch more Marxian than Foucaldian, notwithstanding the latter's influence. They are critical, like Foucault, but not as thorough-going about it, as few could be and remain coherent.
Thus, the great Charles Beard's deflationary Marxist analysis of the U.S. Constitution as a tool of the middle class elite to advance their economic interests finds a *methodological* echo in Derrick Bell's deflationary analysis of Brown v. Board of Education, whereby the Justices were not finally finding the courage to right a wrong and vindicate an important principle of racial equality enshrined in the 14th Amendment as you might suppose and as they themselves thought, but rather countering Communist propaganda decrying the hypocrisy of the West at the height of the Cold War. The white power only helps the marginalized minority when it's in its interest. Brown was thus just another pacifier in, for Bell, the all-encompassing racial struggle.
I suppose that the reason for this "Stop saying it's Marxist!" line of argument is perhaps a sense that Marxism actually has a point or two, more so than the self-defeatingly cynical Foucault and today's wokesters. Marx, they might want to say, was more right. For many of us, however, we see in Marx and the wokester more fundamental errors -- a glibness that ominously denies the authenticity of individual human experience and expression that doesn't fit the agenda, an "analysis" of social relations masquerading as tough-minded and objective and empirical that is heroically allergic to actual evidence that doesn't fit the agenda, in short, a terrific flattening of civilization into nothing more than an oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.
Yes! What Lindsay calls "cultural Marxists" (and the "woke right") have in common with "real" Marxists isn't necessarily related to Marx's materialism -- but they share Marx's method of analysis (of history and social relations) -- with its implicit refusal to acknowledge the sort of personal agency at the heart of liberal individualism.
"Combat liberalism" is the watchword they all have in common -- and this derives from a shared sensibility regarding the human condition (particularly, their deprecation of individual uniqueness and personal autonomy) -- however disparate might be their respective views of the implications.
Woke ideology is not canonical Marxism. But was there ever such a thing as canonical Marxism? Lenin revised Marxism to suit his goal of building socialism in a single country. The Frankfurt School shifted Marxism into cultural analysis. The entire edifice of Critical Theory rests upon the work of the Frankfurt School, crossed with postcolonialism, seasoned with a dash of Foucault, and spiced up with queer studies and some (not too much) feminism. Woke ideology exists. It is powerful. It is damaging. Whether you call it cultural Marxism or not is irrelevant.
I can't finish reading things Lindsay has written because he loses me a few paragraphs in as I'm neither philosopher, intellectual, nor expert. However, I do like to analyze and living in Seattle with the dominant neoprogressivism that is suffocating from my perspective as a classical liberal induces me to analyze and to better understand the politics of the left wing and the right wing in relationship to classical liberalism.
From that, I have identified many similarities between the two extremist wings. I do note however that the right wing is reacting to the left wing and the left wing is reacting to classical liberalism.
For one, they're both radical and fundamentalist driven by emotion, not reason. I don't call the right wing "Christian Nationalist", but instead call it paleoconservatism within which religionism reigns and Christian Nationalism exists. The reason I don't use the word Christian is because it could be another religion, like Islamism. Whenever my conservative friends talk about religion associated with government, I remind them it may not be their religion that's in charge of the system they're advocating for. It could, for instance, be the Muslim Brotherhood's religion. I don't use Nationalist either because nationalism exists for classically liberal patriotic citizens. I use paternalism and isolationism as descriptors. Interestingly, only 30% of neoprogressivists like America and most will not fly our flag. Personally, I think that's baked in to destabilize our country just like I believe that asking us to not be Islamophobic has opened the doors for Islamism.
Secondly, the left-wing and the right-wing are both tribal and antisocial. I've noted that the reason for that could be radicalization as a result of being susceptible to cults and single-minded group-think pursuits attributable to a neurological condition they may have in common. The desire to subject us all to their ideas of utopia/dystopia never made sense to me as they can go about their collectivism or isolationist pursuits with the freedom we have in America without making governmental dictates that we read their bibles so to speak. It's authoritarian. They want power and control.
I can also see how Marxism is integrated into neoprogressivism as a preparation for Communism. Big Governement, Big Labor, and Big Business all in on control, and censorship. All the talk of economic inequality (and the achievement gap) really does harken back to 1814 and the shaming of Capitalism as if the pie is a finite size and individuals have no agency.
Equity is a communist concept. (The Chinese don't want parents to get their kids tutors.) When I look at the several grade levels of dumbing down of public school classrooms and eliminating academically challenging coursework I think of communism, and in turn I think of Marxism as a preparation for that.
International central planning by elites to the extent of globalism today that hollowed out our industrially fueled middle class really has been the road to serfdom (and fentanyl). It's a recurring theme with communism.
The line between classical liberalism and the left wing and right wing is the Constitution and of course the extreme wings are looking to modify it. Egads. Woke is progressivism at this point and progressivism is the road to communism via Marxism, social, economic, or otherwise.
The line spoken by Queen Gertrude in Hamlet springs to mind, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." I rather tend to think Lindsay strikes too close to the truth about both Marxism and Wokism.
This is an ill-conceived essay -- poorly focused and wrongly skewed -- but it's proved to be great work, for the responses and counter-analyses it's provoked! :-)
I might add that Marxian materialism fades in significance when the object (and subject) of "production" is information.
These days (putting aside the wokesters), we can learn more from Norbert Wiener (or from his popularizers [e.g., McLuhan]) -- or from Ibn Khaldun -- than from Marx.
Cultural Marxism is very, very real. Another name for it is 'woke'. Clearly it is not traditional economic Marxism. Indeed, CM goes to great pains to reject economic Marxism and replace it with race, sexual orientation, 'trans' status, etc. Some folks don't like the phrase, because it taints (quite deliberately) 'woke' with the (well-earned) label, Marxist. I wrote the following earlier.
I don't disagree with your analysis. I too tend toward the view that 'woke' is a clever way for the beneficiaries of globalization to deflect class resentment (which might otherwise arise). The problem with this theory is that the ‘woke’ don’t agree. Indeed, they vehemently disagree. Try convincing Hannah Jones that she is an agent of the economic elite.
I would offer that following analysis
Cultural Marxism goes back to at least the 1920s. Of course, CM has (vastly) proliferated of late. At least four reasons come to mind.
1. The rise of Cultural Marxism is too some degree, a consequence of the fall of conventional Marxism. Conventional Marxism was (slowly) dying by the 1950s. The Soviet invasion of Hungary and later Czechoslovakia alienated (or worse) a vast number of people who might have otherwise supported the Communist system. The economic failure of Eastern Europe combined with the great success of the “Little China’s” (Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan) and South Korea was a great blow to the credibility of conventional Marxism. The Cambodian genocide must be mentioned in this context as well. Of course, the fall of the USSR and China’s switch to Capitalism (and subsequent success) were the final nails in the coffin.
My sense of it is that failure of the Soviet system (and Eastern Europe) was a bigger deal than China’s switch to capitalism. The numbers make the converse case. However, I still think the failure of Soviet system (and Eastern Europe) was/is more important. I don’t agree, but that doesn’t matter.
Of course, these were monumental blows to the traditional Left. However, the Left wasn’t about to fold its tent and disappear. For better or worse, a huge section of society will never embrace bourgeois values and will be (highly) motivated to reject them. Since conventional Marxism was “the god that failed”, the Left embraced Cultural Marxism as a substitute. Of course, Cultural Marxism is just as crazy as conventional Marxism (perhaps considerably crazier). However, we don’t have easy country comparisons to show how nuts it is (i.e. no North Korea vs. South Korea).
Blank Slate ideology is arguably nuttier than old-style Marxism. However, we don’t (yet) have a Stalin or Mao to attack as the leader of it (Cultural Marxism).
2. As long at the Left was committed to traditional Socialism/Marxism, the right would move heaven and earth to oppose it. Big corporations, rich people, religious people, some union people, etc. all had powerful incentives to oppose traditional Socialism/Marxism. That meant that anti-communist movements, ideas, intellectuals, etc. were assuredly substantial support as long the enemy was “Real Socialism”.
By contrast, CM provokes no comparable opposition (from big corporations, rich people, religious people, etc.). Actually the reverse is true. Party-line adherence to CM is notoriously profitable for some companies. For example, most Tech firms (Apple is a bad example) would be crucified by Democrats/Liberals/Leftists/etc. for their exploitation of the tax system. In real life, the level of criticism is near nil. By declaring their commitment to CM, they gain de facto immunity from criticism from the Left (the Right wouldn’t criticize them anyway).
At least the indulgences sold by church cost real money. Now you just need to pay lip service to CM.
3. There is also (predictably) a class element to this. Old-style Marxism was inherently (too some degree) a blue-collar worldview. Of course, that was never entirely true. Marx was an intellectual. The cliché that “Marxism is the Opiate of the Intellectuals” existed for a reason. However, conventional Marxism was never going to appeal to white, upper-middle class (UMC), liberals for all sorts of reasons, of which class was definitely an issue.
However, Cultural Marxism has no such problem. White, UMC, liberals can espouse and advocate Cultural Marxism without any contradictions (as they see them) and without restraint. Indeed, they do. Studies (Yascha Mounk) have shown that “woke” progressives are one of the least diverse (in many senses of the word) groups out there. Cultural Marxism gives UMC liberals free reign to denounce “deplorables” to their hearts content. Conventional Marxism would have been much more circumspect. Of course, upscale folks have always wanted to attack (rhetorically and otherwise) the working class. However, conventional Marxism constrained the left (but not the right) from doing so.
Cultural Marxism imposes no such limitations.
4. In my opinion, the failure of liberalism was/is a substantial factor in the rise of CM. In the 1960s (and earlier decades and later decades) it was widely believed that liberalism would work. In other words, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society would produce a (much) better American where poverty and race would not be intertwined and poverty itself would more or less disappear. That didn’t happen of course. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was roughly as successful as his war in Vietnam.
At this point it is obvious that liberalism has failed (in attaining the goals of the 1960s). Some folks have responded to this failure by basically giving up. However, the most motivated have moved to the left (far left). Note that we hear far more about “systematic racism” now (when it doesn’t exist) than we did when Jim Crow was a daily reality.
Johnson's most ambitious attempt at the Great Society was, “To Fulfill These Rights” -- We seek not just legal equity ... but equality as a fact, and equality as a result. —President Lyndon Johnson, June 4, 1965.
It was derailed entirely by the nascent woke, Black Power movement, even while LBJ was at the height of his power, just off his 1964, pro-civil rights landslide, still the Dems all-time high point. So, I would not blame his failure on liberalism, except in the sense that it could not withstand woke, BP/CRT intimidation. (This was the grandest cancellation ever.)
But I did find your comment most interesting and "liked" it.
See Joel Kotkin on "the Clerisy" and its relationship with oligarchy and the crushing of the middle class. To some degree, Michael Lind also addresses this.
Wait, please. (I wish I'd had a chance to say that before you went to the trouble of writing this piece.) The whole problem with referring to the cultural Left as Marxist can be resolved by replacing the word "Marxist" with "Marxian" or, as I've written somewhere, "Marxianesque".
The cultural Left imitates Marxism in its insistence on lumping people together in classes and then rhetorically manipulating the lumps. The classes in question are biological ones rather than economic ones, but the political behavior is the same -- perhaps not the same as Marx's, but the same as Marxists'. That's it. The charge of cultural Marxism refers to the Left's exhortation to a form of class struggle. It's not about the conceptual essence of Marxism, but the political strategy.
However, a better solution may be for the people who speak of "cultural Marxism" to speak of "cultural Leninism" instead. That would cut to the heart, not only of social-justice politics, but of modern leftist politics generally. Please note this excerpt from a pamphlet by the late John H. Kautsky, political scientist and grandson of Karl Kautsky, entitled "Marxism and Leninism, Not Marxism-Leninism" (1994):
"Thus, Lenin thought of his modernizing revolution as a proletarian revolution and of workers playing the leading role in the revolutionary movement. They do so, however, as represented by intellectuals or, as Lenin put it more often, by his Party or simply by 'us.' The Introduction of 'the Party' is generally seen as Lenin's major modification of or contribution to Marxism, but it does not merely add an organizational element that was absent in Marx's Marxism. Marx's social-democratic successors had added such an element long before Lenin did, but it continued to express Marx's concern with the working class. The introduction of Lenin's 'party of a new type' involves a change of the ideology from a laborite ideology to one of intellectuals. The Party is, and 'we' are, in Lenin's mind clearly distinct from the working class and must lead that class where it would otherwise not go. In short, it is intellectuals, not workers, who give direction to and lead the revolutionary movement."
This change "from a laborite ideology to one of intellectuals" is the element of Marxism qua Leninism that survives most vigorously in the American Left. The phrase "cultural Marxism" is a rough-and-ready shorthand for that and "class"-based political agitation, combined.
https://thefamilyproperty.blogspot.com/2024/06/quite-contrarian.html
In that context, it's hardly surprising that Steve Bannon is an admirer of Lenin!
Thanks for this piece. As an old Marxist born in 1945, me and my comrades railed against the pseudo-Marxism of SDS (and the Beatles! and the Yippies and Timothy Leary, etc) with their decidedly "petty bourgeois" take on social revolution as a matter of "freeing your mind instead" (from white skin privilege, sexism, and various other "super structure" ills) but essentially remaining silent about an economic system that needed a fundamental overall. And so the great institutions of capitalist hegemony have had no difficulties declaring support for DEI, Gay Rights, and the whole "woke" framework for it contains no fundamental challenge to the the "base" relationships and their economic hegemony. In fact wokeism is a kind of gift to the captains of the economic order as it tends to divert, divide and discourage the very forces that need to unite to deposit these captains "into the dustbin of history."
Agreed, regarding the oligarchs' exploitation of identity politics to divide-and-conquer -- but I'd maintain that it's the hard left's contempt (perhaps derived from Engels) that drives "mom and pop" -- the "petty bourgeoisie" -- into the arms of fascism (as the hard left shares fascism's contempt for liberal individualism).
The hard left and fascists thus use each other as mutual enforcers in running their respective protection rackets -- mimicking the oligarchs in playing both ends against the middle.
There's an argument to be made that woke (with apologies to Darwin) descended with modification from Marxism. But just as humans are not our ancestral species, woke is its own belief system.
If I am understanding the argument correctly, Cultural Marxism cannot exist because Marxism is a materialist ideology. Of course it is, but the means by which Marx sought his ends was through the destruction of cultural institutions. Marx states in my 1998 Verso edition of the Manifesto that he sought the « abolition of the family, » which he found to be « disgusting. » Indeed, it is difficult to find subtle differences between Wokism and an apparently non-existent Cultural Marxism when Marx himself is so broad in his aims. Yes, his end goal was the abolition of private property, but his process goal was « the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. » Academic arguments that seek to parce the differences between movements confront the challenge that « the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. » Marx is not subtle.
Nobody likes using Wokism or Cultural Marxism as terms but they are the best shorthand descriptions that we have. Of course, many who embrace Critical Theory proudly use versions of terminology from,the Manifesto, particularly when objecting to the nuclear family and to capitalism. One needs nothing more than to read the biographies of professors in any English literature program.
In the end, we « know them by their fruits, » but we don’t need to do that since many prominent members of social movements are self-declared Marxists. My copy of the Manifesto has an introduction by Eric Hobsbawm. Some founders of BLM are similarly self-declared. Marx ended his polemic by declaring that « the Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. » I take him at his word.
A very though provoking article whose content and readers comments are way above my humble pay grade. From hoi polloi ranks of the electorate, all one can offer is a personal observation that this Woke ideology smacks of Marxism, in its portrayal of harnessing the people to elevate those "leaders" of DIE, racism, victimology, identity politics, and intersectionality. In this manner those woke seek to thrust their ideology into the limelight of the political discourse of the present, by the continual use of propaganda through a compliant MSM, to forward their woke dogma that accepts no dissent nor debate and censors all who are in opposition, not with death as in Stalin's time but with "cancellation" and shaming. This is the modern-day equivalent that was what Stalin, Moa the like employed to supress who were the foot soldiers of this ideology, that had elevated them to the ruling class. Some may say that this is just "authoritarianism" but it isn't because this woke ideology has spread so deep and far into all our western democratic institutions, as to be front and centre in our MSM who support those who try and portray this dogma as the answer to all the ills that capitalism and modern western societies obsession with meritocracy, which up to the time of the woke was the key to to advance individuals in our democratic societies. So call woke what you like in academic circles, but in reality this is what the woke ideology is all about. The destroying of all epistemologies of western culture, the use of different language -the pronouns - the rejection of meritocracy and replacing this bedrock of western culture, with inferior intellects either in fact or because of lack of academic training. The semantics about whether Wokism is cultural Marxism is superfluous.
Thanks for the academic correctness regarding ideas and ideologies
Wait, so many right-wingers misunderstand what "woke" is and often have collectivist and authoritarian positions regarding sociocultural topics as through transgenderphobia, religious bigotry and hateful culturalism resulting in that anti-woke people often are as "woke right" while "woke left" is not even so materialistic as original Marxism since woke is about focusing on sociocultural topics?