Peter Kropotkin wrote: ↑Mon May 27, 2024 8:33 pm
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)
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.
