a false idea, Cultural Marxism....

[Peter Kropotkin]

as I am running out of time, have to get to work shortly,
I am going to abridge this topic until I can further explain it.....

Immanual Can has suggested that we on the left practice
''Cultural Marxism'' and as is the practice of those on the right,
he didn't define it or offer us some clue as to what ''Cultural
Marxism'' actually is...

So, what is ''Cultural Marxism?"

let us define the two words... ''Culture'' ... so what is Culture?

my handy dandy dictionary says this:

1. the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement
regarded collectively...

2. the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a
particular nation, people, or other social group.....
''Caribbean culture'' is one example of the word culture...

the second word is Marxism.....

Marxism: is a ''political philosophy'' and method of ''socioeconomic''
analysis....

and even this definition is quite wrong... Marxism as defined
by Marx himself is an economic system, not a political system...
and this fact is vital to our understanding of ''Cultural Marxism''....
and how did Marxism as defined by Marx, get twisted into a political
system? You can blame the early Marxists like Lenin and Stalin....
and therein lies the failure of the Soviet Union......it tried to
turn an economic system like Marxism into a political system
like the Monarchy or a representative democracy.... and that doesn't
work.... try this, turn capitalism into a political system?
capitalism isn't meant to be a political system...
it is an economic system and needs to be approached that way.....
try to turn capitalism into a political system and I can guarantee
failure.....just as Marxism as a political system failed....

so, back at the ranch, how does one connect an economic system
like communism into a Cultural system, as defined by the word
culture......

that is the problem..... Cultural Marxism is no more a possibility
then ''Military intelligence'' both are oxymoron statements...
and I am out of time... as work calls me... to my death....

Kropotkin

[Immanuel Can]

Immanual Can has suggested that we on the left practice
''Cultural Marxism'' and as is the practice of those on the right,
he didn't define it or offer us some clue as to what ''Cultural
Marxism'' actually is...

So, what is ''Cultural Marxism?"

Easy. It's Marxism, but with "class" as a category replaced with a wide set of other, cultural categories, such as: race, sex, gender, fatness, disability, aboriginalism, queerism, transism, or any other such group that can be mobilized as a "marginalized" minority, made resentful, made rebellious to the existing order, and can thus provide the "Red Guard" for the next Marxist "revolution."

As Lindsay has said, it's "Maoism with Western characteristics." That's really good.

Want more? Read Lindsay's book Race Marxism (2022).

[Peter Kropotkin]

Immanual Can has suggested that we on the left practice
''Cultural Marxism'' and as is the practice of those on the right,
he didn't define it or offer us some clue as to what ''Cultural
Marxism'' actually is...

So, what is ''Cultural Marxism?"

Easy. It's Marxism, but with "class" as a category replaced with a wide set of other, cultural categories, such as: race, sex, gender, fatness, disability, aboriginalism, queerism, transism, or any other such group that can be mobilized as a "marginalized" minority, made resentful, made rebellious to the existing order, and can thus provide the "Red Guard" for the next Marxist "revolution."

As Lindsay has said, it's "Maoism with Western characteristics." That's really good.

Want more? Read Lindsay's book Race Marxism (2022).

K: and has said nothing... what is Marxism? and how does that connect to
culture? you keep saying Marxism like you actually know what you are talking
about, spoiler alert, you don't...

I have looked at Lindsay book and it was full of mindless drivel..
something I am sure you believe to be profound...it isn't....

you keep tossing out terms like ''Maoism'' as if you have any
understanding of what that means....what is ''Maoism
with western characteristics''... what the hell does that even mean?
once again, let's try defining what we are talking about....
it helps the conversation.....

Kropotkin

[Immanuel Can]

Immanual Can has suggested that we on the left practice
''Cultural Marxism'' and as is the practice of those on the right,
he didn't define it or offer us some clue as to what ''Cultural
Marxism'' actually is...

So, what is ''Cultural Marxism?"

Easy. It's Marxism, but with "class" as a category replaced with a wide set of other, cultural categories, such as: race, sex, gender, fatness, disability, aboriginalism, queerism, transism, or any other such group that can be mobilized as a "marginalized" minority, made resentful, made rebellious to the existing order, and can thus provide the "Red Guard" for the next Marxist "revolution."

As Lindsay has said, it's "Maoism with Western characteristics." That's really good.

Want more? Read Lindsay's book Race Marxism (2022).

... what is Marxism?

Are you pretending not to know? Or are you actually just entirely devoid of information? You need to do some reading, then. Since I have Das Kapital and The Commie Manifesto here, on my desk, and Hegel on my shelf, I know I could explain it to you. But I'm just going to point you again to Lindsay's book, because he's done all that for me.

I have looked at Lindsay book and it was full of mindless drivel..

You didn't even look at it. That's for sure. It's very well documented, articulate, specific and precise. Lindsay's arguably the world expert on this subject, and in fact, was specially invited to speak to the EU on it. Somebody thinks you're wrong about that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVZPYQS1dFA

you keep tossing out terms like ''Maoism''

I mentioned it once. What's the "keeping"?

....what is ''Maoism with western characteristics''...

Cultural Marxism. But here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbPkKSm5tJw

...what the hell does that even mean?

So...you're trying to tell me that you know nothing about Marx, or Mao...but you think you know what Woke is? You're definitely no higher than a level 2 SJW, then. That's pretty much a lock. You're being had.

[Peter Kropotkin]

Easy. It's Marxism, but with "class" as a category replaced with a wide set of other, cultural categories, such as: race, sex, gender, fatness, disability, aboriginalism, queerism, transism, or any other such group that can be mobilized as a "marginalized" minority, made resentful, made rebellious to the existing order, and can thus provide the "Red Guard" for the next Marxist "revolution."

As Lindsay has said, it's "Maoism with Western characteristics." That's really good.

Want more? Read Lindsay's book Race Marxism (2022).

IC: what is Marxism?

IC: Are you pretending not to know? Or are you actually just entirely devoid of information? You need to do some reading, then. Since I have Das Kapital and The Commie Manifesto here, on my desk, and Hegel on my shelf, I know I could explain it to you. But I'm just going to point you again to Lindsay's book, because he's done all that for me.

PK: my point is that YOU don't know what Marxism is or even what Maoism
is.....and what kind of pretentious ass keeps ''Das Kapital'' and ''The Communist
Manifesto'' on their desk? I have one book on my table, and that book is
what I am reading right now, ''Russian Thinkers'' by Isaiah Berlin...
and when I finish that book, I replace it with another book that I will be reading...
all my other books are on the shelf... where books belong...


PK: I have looked at Lindsay book and it was full of mindless drivel..

IC: lol: You didn't even look at it. That's for sure. It's very well documented, articulate, specific and precise. Lindsay's arguably the world expert on this subject, and in fact, was specially invited to speak to the EU on it. Somebody thinks you're wrong about that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVZPYQS1dFA

PK: Actually, I have looked it, skimmed it really and didn't find anything
worth spending time on... if you want to waste your time there,
go for it....

PK: ....what is ''Maoism with western characteristics''...

IC: Cultural Marxism. But here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbPkKSm5tJw

PK: I don't waste my time with crap on YouTube.... Youtube is just made up crap
pretending to be something else....


PK: what the hell does that even mean?

IC: So...you're trying to tell me that you know nothing about Marx, or Mao...but you think you know what Woke is? You're definitely no higher than a level 2 SJW, then. That's pretty much a lock. You're being had.

K: I have studied both Marx and Mao, the problem is that you seem to
lack any sort of information about them.... for example, Marx main source
of income over his lifetime comes from being a reporter... have you read
his newspaper writings? He wrote mostly for the New York Daily Tribune....

and I have no idea what a ''level 2 SJW''.... but I am hoping that you don't tell,
cause I really don't want to know....

Kropotkin

[Immanuel Can]

K: I have studied both Marx and Mao,

I won't call you a liar. But I see no plausibility to that claim. You seem stunningly oblivious to the particulars about both.

Marx main sourceof income over his lifetime comes from being a reporter...

Marx was a sponge. He never did any real work. His 'journalism' is nearly as bad as his poetry. He bankrupted his own family, then sponged off supporters like Engels for the rest of his life. He was a parasite, not a worker.

and I have no idea what a ''level 2 SJW''.

It's in my last message, or two up. It means somebody who's half-informed, and thinks they know what Woke is all about, but is really a pawn of those who actually know.

Just watch Linsday's address to the EU. It's short. But it will make you much wiser. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVZPYQS1dFA

[Peter Kropotkin]

K: I have studied both Marx and Mao,

I won't call you a liar. But I see no plausibility to that claim. You seem stunningly oblivious to the particulars about both.

Marx main sourceof income over his lifetime comes from being a reporter...

Marx was a sponge. He never did any real work. His 'journalism' is nearly as bad as his poetry. He bankrupted his own family, then sponged off supporters like Engels for the rest of his life. He was a parasite, not a worker.

and I have no idea what a ''level 2 SJW''.

It's in my last message, or two up. It means somebody who's half-informed, and thinks they know what Woke is all about, but is really a pawn of those who actually know.

Just watch Linsday's address to the EU. It's short. But it will make you much wiser. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVZPYQS1dFA

K: jeez louise.... another person claiming that what Marx wrote isn't actually
what he meant... he is trying to say, Lindsey, that Marx really wasn't about
economics.. but about something else....Basically Lindsey is rewriting Marx,
to say something other than what Marx wrote...... anyone who
has actually read Marx, knows that Marx wrote and believed in
Man as being Homo Economicus..... economic man... that
economic activity is what separate man from animals... if you miss this,
you miss what Marx was actually about..... Marx once wrote that
there were two concepts, one was the force of production, the
substructure/base and the superstructure which describes all other aspects
of society.....

Now Lindsey is saying that Marx was really talking about the second aspect
and not the first aspect.... the base as it were, refers to production forces
or the materials and resources that generate the goods a society needs....
and Lindsay says, ignore that part of Marx.... and focus on the second part,
which is all other aspects of a society.......

and that is why Lindsay is not just wrong, but is radically wrong...
and Marx may have earlier thought this, but his later writings
are clearly about the base, the substructure of a society, and not
what Lindsey gets so wrong about......

basically, the only way you can get the idea of ''Cultural Marxism''
from Marx is to rewrite everything he wrote... as Lindsey did....
don't take my word for it, or even that idiot Lindsey, but read
Marx himself......he rarely if ever talks about race, because
the thing was class, the class of workers, of which we are either
workers or owners.... and blacks and other minorities are subsumed
into class... as part of the working class... so, to say Marx was about
race is also wrong... just a side note....

Kropotkin

[Immanuel Can]

K: I have studied both Marx and Mao,

I won't call you a liar. But I see no plausibility to that claim. You seem stunningly oblivious to the particulars about both.

Marx main sourceof income over his lifetime comes from being a reporter...

Marx was a sponge. He never did any real work. His 'journalism' is nearly as bad as his poetry. He bankrupted his own family, then sponged off supporters like Engels for the rest of his life. He was a parasite, not a worker.

and I have no idea what a ''level 2 SJW''.

It's in my last message, or two up. It means somebody who's half-informed, and thinks they know what Woke is all about, but is really a pawn of those who actually know.

Just watch Linsday's address to the EU. It's short. But it will make you much wiser. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVZPYQS1dFA

K: jeez louise.... another person claiming that what Marx wrote isn't actually
what he meant...

No, he doesn't claim that.

he is trying to say, Lindsey, that Marx really wasn't about
economics.. but about something else....

No, no...you've got it wrong. Lindsay's not saying Marx himself created Cultural Marxism. He's rightly pointing out that it was created by a group of disappointed Marxists, who were trying to figure out how to save Marxism after Marx's predictions had all failed.

...anyone who
has actually read Marx, knows that Marx wrote and believed in
Man as being Homo Economicus..... economic man... that
economic activity is what separate man from animals...

Yes, Marx said that: and he was wrong. That's just one of the many ways he failed, actually. But you're misrepresenting Lindsay: he's not saying Marx invented Cultural Marxism, as I said.

Now Lindsey is saying that Marx was really talking about the second aspect
and not the first aspect.... the base as it were, refers to production forces
or the materials and resources that generate the goods a society needs....
and Lindsay says, ignore that part of Marx.... and focus on the second part,
which is all other aspects of a society.......

No, Lindsay does not believe that. The "other aspects of society," such as race, sex, sexuality, fatness, etc. were made central stage later, by Marx's own followers and admirers, as ways of trying to "fix" the brokenness of Classical Marxism.

basically, the only way you can get the idea of ''Cultural Marxism''
from Marx is to rewrite everything he wrote...

Not at all.

Most of what Marx wrote is reused by the Cultural Marxists (aka, the elitist 'Woke"). But they did "rewrite" economics out of center stage, and made it secondary, and raise, in its place, the profile of these other "grievance"-provoking matters.

read
Marx himself......

Done. And right here on my desk, any time you want to question.

...to say Marx was about
race is also wrong...

There it is! That's your misrepresentation of Lindsay. He did not say Marx was about race. If you think otherwise, give me the quotation. What Lindsay points out is that "race" has become the new "economics": that what economics was supposed to do for Marx, the Neo-Marxists of today try to get done through things like race, etc.

But it's the newbies that are doing the deed. It's not until after the Frankfurt School that that swapping out is really complete. Marx? What would he have thought? Who cares? The guy was wrong about practically everything, anyway.

[Peter Kropotkin]

K: jeez louise.... another person claiming that what Marx wrote isn't actually
what he meant...

IC: No, he doesn't claim that.

K: he literally says that in the first three minutes of his speech....

AS you are willing to lie about this, I am done.... I am wasting my time
on this topic

Kropotkin

[Immanuel Can]

K: jeez louise.... another person claiming that what Marx wrote isn't actually
what he meant...

IC: No, he doesn't claim that.

K: he literally says that in the first three minutes of his speech....

I went back and double checked, just to see what you had been thinking you heard.

I must assume you mean at about 2:40? No, he's not saying that "what Marx wrote is not what he meant." He says that people misinterpret what Marx said...which is quite true. You're a great example, apparently. Go back, listen to it again, and you'll realize you've got it wrong.

What he does say, later on, is that Marx was a theologian, not an economist. That's obviously true. Marx's "economic" ideas have been a total disaster everywhere they've been applied, without exception. His "economic" ideas are a complete bust. And yes, his primary concern is better termed "theological." His is a utopian load of nonsense precisely designed to replace the vision of God. That is why Marx himself identifies "the critique of religion" as "the first critique," and insists that it's "the opium of the masses" that must be eliminated before his rubbish plan for humanity can have any chance of going forward. Marx's primary focus is speculative, theological and disastrously impractical.

So no, Lindsay does not say what you said he says, or anything like that, I am not a liar, and you aren't listening to what Lindsay actually says.

Or are you just trying to obscure the truth?

[Consul]

Immanual Can has suggested that we on the left practice ''Cultural Marxism'' and as is the practice of those on the right, he didn't define it or offer us some clue as to what ''Cultural Marxism'' actually is...
So, what is ''Cultural Marxism?"

1. There is Cultural Marxism according to the (Alt-/Far-)Right (as a conspiracy theory), which is, as it were, "Cultural Bolshevism 2.0".

Here's how Righties see it:

"In the years immediately following the tumultuous events of 1968, which turned public opinion sharply against the radical Left, the new revolutionaries began implementing the long march through the institutions, carefully following the instructions of Gramsci, Dutschke, and Marcuse. For the most part, they worked slowly. Sometimes they stumbled. In the process, many of the revolutionaries actually became what they were pretending to be, throwing off the ridiculous revolutionary ideas of Marx and becoming genuinely productive members of society.

But enough of these leftists remained committed to the project that it began to succeed. Over the course of several decades, this group of revolutionary professors, journalists, film writers, and others began slowly to change the way Americans thought about culture. They exploited their new avenues of transmission to great effect. Along the way, the original tenets of Marxism—which, in the beginning, applied mostly to economics—began to mutate. The new revolutionaries found that the core idea of Marxism—namely, that the world was a battleground between oppressed people and their oppressors—could be mapped not only onto warring economic classes (what Marx called the “proletariat” and the “bourgeoisie”) but onto races as well.

Today, many Americans are so used to this idea that they don’t wonder where it came from. But its origin is worth investigating. You might wonder why, in the year 2023, with the long shadow of overt racism receding further into the past every day, we constantly hear stories about “racial tension” in the media. Why is it that there is seemingly no news story that the radical Left cannot twist to fit the narrative of racial oppression?

The answer is that the long march through the institutions has finally paid off. Today, ideas that were once peripheral to American life are at the forefront. Notions like White supremacy, class warfare, and internalized racism are now discussed on major news networks as if they have always been with us. Few people stop to wonder how these concepts, which seem to have come straight from a college literature seminar, have ended up ubiquitous throughout American culture.

The term “Cultural Marxism” refers to this transition. Over the past several decades, Marxists took Marx’s communist teachings, which were originally applied to economics and to property, and applied them to culture instead. Using the same Marxist framework—a never-ending struggle between victims and oppressors that can only be corrected through force by the government’s punishing the oppressors and rewarding the victims—they extended the oppression matrix to race, gender, sexual orientation, transgenderism, and disability. And they expanded their weapons to enforce Marxism: no longer is it imposed just through government policy, but now also through education, journalism, Big Tech, Big Business, sports, music, and Hollywood."

(Cruz, Ted. Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America. Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2023.)

For an analysis, see:

* Mirrlees, Tanner. "The Alt-Right’s Discourse of 'Cultural Marxism': A Political Instrument of Intersectional Hate." [PDF] Atlantis Journal 39/1 (2018): 49–69.

*

"Cultural bolshevism: ‘Cultural bolshevism’, a term coined by the Nazis, was used to denounce modernist, non-representational, and avant-garde cultural production, which the Right in Europe saw as eroding political hierarchy and contaminating national cultural traditions. In Nazi Germany an exhibition of modern art was mounted under the title ‘degenerate art’. The idea that culture or society might ‘degenerate’, as if it were a biological organism, had considerable currency in 20th-century social and political thought of the inter-war period – especially, but not exclusively, among conservative sectors. It can be traced in part to the work of 19th-century scientists, including Charles Darwin’s on the evolution of species, which had encouraged the idea that biological laws could be applied to society (social Darwinism)."

(Graham, Helen. The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. p. 60)

2. There is Cultural Marxism according to the Left (as a real political phenomenon).

* Doug Kellner: "Cultural Marxism, British Cultural studies, and the Reconstruction of Education" (2021)

"Abstract: "Many different versions of cultural studies have emerged in the past decades. While during its dramatic period of global expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, cultural studies was often identified with the approach to culture and society developed by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England, their sociological, materialist, and political approaches to culture had predecessors in a number of currents of cultural Marxism. Many 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and 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. Traditions of cultural Marxism are thus important to the trajectory of cultural studies and to understanding its various types and forms in the present age." – Doug Kellner

*

"One of the most far-reaching consequences of the New Left experience was the pivotal role it played in creating cultural Marxism in Britain. British cultural Marxism grew out of the effort to generate a socialist understanding of postwar Britain, to grasp the significance of working-class affluence, consumer capitalism, and the gready expanded role of the mass media in contemporary life. These changes posed a threat to the traditional Marxist assumption that the working class would inevitably usher in a socialist society. They also undermined the traditional Left's exclusive reliance on political and economic categories, for postwar transformations affected “the whole way of life” of working people and were reshaping their identities in new and complex ways. Cultural Marxists attempted to identify the contours of this new terrain and, in doing so, redefine social struggle. In opposition to orthodox Marxists who reduced culture to a secondary status—a reflection of real social relations—and conservatives who saw it as the best that has been thought and written, they viewed culture in anthropological terms, as an expression of everyday life and experience.

The development of a cultural Marxist perspective was critical to the creation of cultural studies and the development of “history from below.” Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall played pioneering roles in conceiving of cultural studies, an interdisciplinary critical approach to contemporary cultural practices that owed much to discussions and debates in and around the New Left. This effort was greatly advanced by the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964. E. P. Thompson played a prominent role in
producing a distinctive cultural Marxist history. His influential The Making of the English Working Class viewed the popular struggle of the common people in cultural terms, providing a New Left inflection to the tradition of Communist historiography. Although writers in both disciplines shared common theoretical and political oppositions and were deeply affected by the New Left context, they did not share a unified approach. Rather, they engaged in a constructive debate and dialogue that reproduced some of the fundamental tensions characteristic of the original New Left as well as creating new ones. Their collective efforts produced a new theoretical terrain."

(Dworkin, Dennis. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. pp. 79-80)

"In response to a complex of problems which the labor movements in advanced industrial societies have not been capable of solving either theoretically or practically, there emerged in the wanderings of social and political theorizing in the 1960s and 1970s a culturally oriented perspective. It picks up on the Marxian theme of praxis: the mediating relation between human beings and nature, and between consciousness and its objects. This perspective—one we can refer to as “cultural Marxism”—puts its emphasis upon consciousness and intentional activity as major elements in constituting, reproducing, or changing a particular form of society. As a result, it raises the issue of class consciousness, as well as the need for a critical theory of consciousness to conceptually comprehend the articulations and potential of social movements in their questioning the power relations and the ideological discourse of the dominant class.

From such culturally oriented Marxist theorizing, we can put together a conceptual framework that confronts the more traditional Marxist critique with the need to deal with questions of consciousness regarding institutions. We can do so in a way that draws upon many of the insights of the academic discipline of political sociology, while at the same time responds to many of that discipline’s limitations. Such a framework can be understood as a capstone in an arch that has been built by others, an arch whose outline and strength our conceptual reconstruction endeavors to make manifest.

Renewing the Practical-Moral Concerns of Marxism

Cultural Marxism—derived from the theorizing of Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School—represents an attempt to remove difficulties in the mechanical Marxism that has arisen since Lenin’s generation, and that precludes the practical-moral concerns of the type that defined classical Marxism. In the process, this theoretical perspective comes to redirect the focus of Marxism from the infrastructure to the superstructure. It confronts the more traditional Marxist critique of political economy with the concept of conscious experience, not in a negating manner, but in a complementary one; and it incorporates the sociocultural dimension neglected by the “passive” and mechanical materialism of the Second International (e.g., Lenin, Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Guesde, Lafargue, Labriola, Mehring and Cunow).

The emergent cultural Marxism was conceived with a practical intent. It starts from the assumption that Marxism is still the theory and practice that could at once explain and transform. The approach is marked by strong moral elements: (1) the idea of an enlightened political will self-conscious of its potential, and (2) the idea of human beings mutually and dialogically recognizing each other in a domination-free (i.e., nonrepressive) communication. Human beings are seen as not simply natural objects. They have a sense of moral integrity and practical capacity. They are understood as having the potential to comprehend epistemic and normative predicaments confronting them.

During the epoch of Joseph Stalin, there came to be a rupturing of theory and practice. And the resultant Marxian dogmatism lacked attractiveness to Western minds. With Stalin, the questions left unanswered by Lenin’s generation were disregarded as Marxism lost its universal character and ceased to be the self-consciousness of the proletariat. As a result, endeavors to construct a formal theory of the historical development of class consciousness were impaired. At best, Marxism as a mechanical materialism was redefined in the Stalin era as an externally valid, objectively given structure, and became an ideological tool for domination.

The cultural Marxism revival of the 1960s and 1970s may actually have taken off in 1956. That was the year of Stalinism’s complete intellectual exposure and political condemnation by Khrushchev at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was also the year of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, following the attempted revolution there against the bureaucratized and militarily enforced domination of the Cominform. It was a revolt to whose causes Lukacs would rally after decades of biting the bullet of Communist Party discipline in his native Hungary. The events in Hungary helped to end the hegemony of Soviet Marxism in the international radical movement. The events led Jean-Paul Sartre in France and E.P. Thompson in England to break with their respective national communist parties.

In the wake of 1956, Thompson and Ralph Miliband led ex-communists and other radicals in England to create the journals Universities and Left Review and The New Reasoner, later to be merged in 1962 as The New Left Review. Mao Tse-Tung exclaimed how appalled he was by the “ravages” that bureaucratized state socialism had produced in Eastern Europe. Also in 1956, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization appeared, followed by his polemical piece Soviet Marxism. Renewed interest in the Frankfurt School was kindled. And finally, between 1956 and 1960 significant social movements having universalizing goals blossomed: the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in England, the civil rights movements in the United States and South Africa, and the anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism struggles in the Third World.

We should note seminal figures in the cultural Marxism that evolved in the past two decades. Most relevant to the project of this book are a number of Western Europeans: Thompson, Miliband, Raymond Williams, and Perry Anderson in England; Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Lefebvre, and Lucien Goldmann in France; Jürgen Habermas, Claus Offe, Albrecht Wellmer, Oskar Negt, Karl-Otto Apel, and Alfred Schmidt in West Germany. Some significant West Europeans with a cultural Marxian slant are now working in American universities, such as Manuel Castells, Claus Mueller, and Michael Burawoy. We need also mention some significant East European theorists who, despite their all too brief mention in this volume, have contributed to this evolving cultural approach: Karel Kosik from Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Bahro in East Germany, Agnes Heller and Gyorgy Markus in Hungary, and Mihailo Markovic in Yugoslavia. Also significant here are the respective social theories of Alain Touraine, Frank Parkin, and Anthony Giddens: each of whom disclaims the appellation Marxist, but still recognizes how their work is decidedly influenced by cultural Marxian as well as Weberian theorizing.

Disenchanted with what Thompson referred to as the “socialism of the heavy industrial base,” these thinkers moved away from the idea of determination by the economic structure, even “in the last instance.” They came to treat the state and ideology as the main determining forces of domination. The focus turned to the media by which collectivities are institutionally—i.e., normatively—structured. The focus turned to values, beliefs, attitudes, role expectancies, and skills that affect a particular people’s political interactions—that is, what political sociologists refer to as a “political culture.”

Culturally oriented Marxist approaches understand the consciousness of creative acting groups and classes as being shaped by a dominant political belief system, as well as the socioeconomic context in which those groups and classes are living. Together these comprise a structure of dominance. Whatever the ultimate sources of action, the immediate causes are understood to be conscious desires, beliefs, and intentions. Humans act in accordance with conscious interpretations, rather than blindly reacting to stimuli.

Most often, these interpretations are offered to us by institutionalized frames of reference. These symbolic frames define the “normal” perception of social reality —the ways in which experiences should be approached and understood. For example, in America we are bound by the sanctity of the marketplace, a nomenclature of “corporateness,” and a well-drilled hostility to all forms of “creeping socialism” that hamper every potential entrepreneur among us. Such institutionalization of norms and practices obscures the fact that the political economy is serving the dominant interests of one class or stratum rather than the interests of society as a whole.

When the power relations of dominant interests enter into commonly shared frames of reference, whole aggregates of social norms are removed from practical questioning and discourse. They become that part of the structure of the “everyday life-world”’ commonly known as the rules of the game. And the very fact of institutionalization preserves the legitimacy of the rules of the game by which one can participate in society and its political process.

Significantly, cultural Marxian thinkers perceive in Marx’s concepts of the relations and the forces of production an inadequate appreciation of the conscious experience involved with regard to institutions. Some of them like Habermas and Williams attempt to correct this perceived discrepancy by employing a notion of institution modeled on language. It is on account of what seems to be missing in Marx’s analysis of institutions that the mode of analysis itself has come to be understood as having been proved too limited in explaining modern capitalist society.

In light of such a perceived inadequacy, these thinkers—especially those associated with The New Reasoner and New Left Review like Miliband, Williams, and Anderson—have come to emphasize the Gramscian notion of the hegemony of a dominant value system and its integrative and assimilative effects. They note that major political, social, and economic institutions and the values they represent result in a dominant culture or a normative order which legitimizes and buttresses the status quo. Within the institutional framework, they perceive the sedimentation of the mediated consequences of class struggle. Such an approach focuses on the compliant acceptance of definitions of political reality as offered by dominant classes and their institutions.

The compliant acceptance of ideological definitions is rooted in and expressed in our everyday practices. Ideology is seen as pervading every level of the social order and acting on an atomized and dispersed people so as to arouse and organize its collective consent. Practices are organized as though they presented real choices, however narrowly confined those choices might be. (In the nineteenth century, when the arena of consent was still small, Marx had no place in his theory for the supplementing of coercion with an elicited willingness on the part of the worker to cooperate in the wage labor process.)

The more traditional and mechanical Marxism assumes that political action, consciousness, ideology and normative issues—such as those of tradition and constitutionalism—are functions of the underlying productive structure. Cultural Marxism instead, inserts a series of qualifications that greatly reduces this dependency relationship and accords them greater autonomy. The latter approach helps in critically raising issues crucial to appreciating how class consciousness is kept latent in the advanced capitalist societies. These would include:

(1) the apparent consensual stabilization of the capitalist state and the staying power of the political culture of bourgeois democratic forms; and
(2) the autonomy and efficacy of cultural superstructures as a political problem.

Now, Volume III of Capital breaks off just as Marx is about to embark on the definition of “class.” But unfortunately this fifty-third and final chapter of the third volume is little more than a page long. From remarks on this theme scattered throughout his work it becomes clear, that for the most part, Marx uses the concept of class in a specific way. While what constitutes a class is the common objective position in relation to the means of production in a commodity-producing society, if a class is to decide over its own fate, then this common social position must be made conscious and people must act in the light of this self-knowledge. It was to this scant treatment of the concept of class consciousness—as well as the inadequate appreciation of the consciousness involved in the institutional realm of the everyday life-world—that the pioneering cultural Marxian studies of Lukacs, Gramsci, and, more recently, E. P. Thompson responded. These studies argued that traditional Marxist analysis has spent more time discussing the “structure of domination” and its institutionalization, than any other stage in Marx’s continuous depiction of the development of the class struggle. The emphasis traditionally had been on how the ideas and culture of the “ruling class” are institutionalized as the normative structure of the society as a whole. What is missing is fuller study of the actual experience of these institutionalized values, and either the compliant acceptance or critical response that those values generate.

The “dominated class” had been regarded as hardly more than a class-in-itself. It had only nascent institutions. Georg Lukacs had recognized this disregard to be the failure to develop an adequate notion of praxis which would help advance Marxian analysis beyond the notion of an idealized “imputed class consciousness.”

Thus, cultural Marxism represents an approach that takes account of normative, indeed ideological, factors as well as cognitive and practical ones concerning acting and symbolizing. It recognizes the need for such factors to take their proper place in the general explanatory model that Marxism was putting forth. And it continues in the search for the ways in which consciousness, in its political form, is necessary for a class if it is to achieve an understanding of its own identity and possibilities. "

(Weiner, Richard R. Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications, 1981. pp. 17-22)

3. There is also a Cultural Socialism (Kultursozialismus) which seeks to create a distinctively socialist culture, a workers' culture (Arbeiterkultur).

"As part of the blossoming of modern associational life within the pillarized social order of nineteenth-century Germany, socialists had formed their own soccer and bicycle clubs, their own choirs, theater companies and libraries. Although some offered socialist content, the cultural forms practiced by the socialist associations were roughly analogous to those found in the Christian milieus. During the Weimar Republic a marked change occurred. New demands were made in the name of Kultur and experiments were launched with the hope of ushering in the coming socialist society. This was the message of the 1924 Leipzig Workers’ Culture Week, sponsored by the SPD. It began with the performance of Ernst Toller’s "Transformation" (Wandlung), a "mass festival drama", in which nearly 1,000 performers took part. Leading socialist politicians and well-known secularists addressed the crowds and a new journal was launched with the Nietzschean title Kulturwille (Will to Culture).

Under the luminous goal of creating an experimental field for a future civilization, the various life reform movements of the Wilhelmine era, such as nudism, vegetarianism and rhythmic gymnastics, were recast. Expressionist playwrights, such as Toller, gave bold accents to novel forms of performance, such as the Sprechchor (speaking choir), in which lay actors declaimed revolutionary texts and engaged in dance movement that was meant to bring to life the revolutionary community. As they formulated plans for emancipation in "the future relationship of people and work, the relationship of the body and health and the democratization of knowledge and education", Weimar-era cultural activists also argued for a specific role of Kultur in revolutionary social transformation. In new journals, intellectuals forged and debated theoretical frameworks for what became known as "cultural socialism" or Kultursozialismus. In an issue of Kulturwille on "workers’ culture", Richard Weimann, the secretary of the National Committee for Socialist Education (Reichsausschusses für sozialistische Bildungsarbeit), issued demands in the name of this new "Kultur movement". He criticized prewar socialist education for being politically marginal and suffering from "spiritual narrowness and doctrinaire one-sidedness". Now that it was recognized that "Socialism has always been viewed by its adherents, even if perhaps unconsciously, as worldview, as a higher ethical idea, yes, as a religion", it was possible "to penetrate everything with new spirit, with new conviction" and to win the masses for the democratic idea and for a "new national community [Volksgemeinschaft]". To achieve this aim, Weimann demanded a "socialist culture and education movement" that was "no longer, as in the past, an appendage or 'institution' of the party or unions" but which stood "on par" with them. The same demand was made at the Leipzig Culture Week by leading SPD politician Heinrich Schulze, who wanted the cultural movement to act as the "third column" of socialism. The active participation of monist intellectuals, the hypertrophic claims made in the name of Kultur, the idea of a "third column" all point to a strong secularist contribution to cultural socialism, yet this has not been investigated in the historical literature."

(Weir, Todd H. Red Secularism: Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany 1890 to 1933. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. pp. 239-40)