And while you might have an intuitive approximation of what these terms mean for\u00a0America<\/a>\u00a0in the 21st century, there\u2019s a good chance that you don\u2019t know much about the deep theory, where the ideology comes from, and what it has planned for America \u2013\u00a0and the world<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n The underlying theory here is a variant of Marxism, pioneered by early-20th-century Italian Marxist politician and linguist\u00a0Antonio Gramsci<\/a>. Gramscian Marxism is a radical departure from Classical Marxism, writes\u00a0historian Sam Jacobs at Ammo,<\/a>\u00a0a regular contributor to The Herland Report. (Feature photo of Odd Nerdrum painting, The Golden Cape.)<\/p>\n One does not need to endorse the Classical Marxism of Marx, Engels and others to appreciate the significant differences between the two. He is easily the most influential thinker that you have never heard of.<\/p>\n Marx\u2019s original idea was that Communism was a historical inevitability, an evolutionary transition that would lead to a bottom-up eruption of revolutionary violence sparked by the Proletariat\u2019s frustration and fury over having been used and abused by the Bourgeoisie for long enough that \u201cthe revolutionary subject\u201d (Marx\u2019s term for the broad working class) would overthrow capitalism and usher in socialism.<\/p>\n Cultural Marxism Origins: How its Disciples Subverted America:<\/strong>\u00a0Gramsci, on the other hand, held that such a revolution was unlikely \u2013 particularly in the West, where\u00a0general prosperity and the lassitude of relative contentment<\/a>\u00a0would tend to dull the working class\u2019 passion for a bloody, bothersome overthrow. In successful Western nations, a Marxist state was far more likely to develop through a slow, patient process of incrementalist takeover of the cultural institutions \u2013 the arts, entertainment, and news media, and most especially the schools and universities.<\/p>\n As such, the weapon to be used for revolution was not the economic might of an organized working class, but a \u201clong march through the institutions\u201d (a phrase actually coined by\u00a0German Marxist Rudi Dutschke<\/a>), whereby every institution in the West would be subverted through penetration and infiltration.<\/p>\n For Gramsci, culture was more important than either economics or politics<\/em>.<\/p>\n Gramsci\u2019s divergence from Classical Marxism was nothing short of brilliant; certainly, the results speak for themselves when one considers the social unrest that is gripping America and the West today. In a sense, we are living through the endgame of a Gramscian revolution.<\/p>\n Throughout this article, we will use the term \u201cCultural Marxism\u201d as a catchall to refer to this phenomenon, because it is the most all-encompassing and does not limit us to discussing any one specific variation (Gramsci, the Frankfurt School or what have you).<\/p>\n Finally, we should briefly echo the words of\u00a0Dr. Jordan Peterson<\/a>\u00a0on \u201cthe bloody postmodern Neo-Marxists,\u201d because he has\u00a0helped raise awareness of the phenomenon<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not obvious by any stretch of the imagination why postmodernism and Neo-Marxism or Marxism proper would be aligned because postmodernism is an anti-grand narrative philosophical movement and Marxism is a grand narrative. The fact that these two things seem to coexist in the same space needs some explanation, because it\u2019s a very tricky thing to get to the bottom of.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Because Cultural Marxism is ideologically distinct from postmodernism and deconstruction, we will not touch on either in this article, though they certainly have been influential on the international left.<\/p>\n Cultural Marxism Origins: How its Disciples Subverted America:\u00a0<\/strong>There is a tiny kernel of Cultural Marxism within Classical Marxism. Namely, that Marx himself was obsessed with the kinds of detailed critiques that later came to characterize Cultural Marxism \u2013 for example,\u00a0The Critique of the Gotha Program<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0Anti-D\u00fchring<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(which is actually by Engels),\u00a0Critique of Hegel\u2019s Philosophy of Right<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n This is perhaps best exemplified by the famous remark in\u00a0Theses on Feuerbach<\/em><\/a>\u00a0that \u201cphilosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.\u201d<\/p>\n Antonio Gramsci, however, seems to be the best place to locate the genesis of Cultural Marxism proper. Gramsci was the son of an Albano-Sardinian low-ranking government official.<\/p>\n Without engaging in too much psychoanalyzing, it is probably not a coincidence that the son of a low-ranking civil servant was able to see the power that low-ranking bureaucrats would have if all of them were guided by the proper ideology.<\/p>\n Gramsci attended the\u00a0University of Turin<\/a>\u00a0where he studied linguistics \u2013 not philosophy or economics. Health and financial problems led him to leave his studies prematurely, shortly after he joined the Italian Socialist Party. In this period, as well as the period immediately following the\u00a0Russian Revolution<\/a>, Gramsci was a fairly standard Communist, though he did occasionally have disagreements with the party line, none of which are relevant to the development of Cultural Marxism.<\/p>\n Beginning in 1924, he was the head of the Italian Communist Party. For this, he was arrested by the Fascist government in 1926, and sentenced to 20 years in\u00a0prison<\/a>\u00a0under newly enacted emergency laws. He died in prison on April 27, 1937, at the age of 46, due to a number of untreated health problems.<\/p>\n It was in prison that Gramsci began formulating the core of his theory, which would later form the core of leftist thought throughout the West. In the\u00a0Prison Notebooks<\/em><\/a>, he broke from Classical Marxism, formulating a new and largely distinct ideology:<\/p>\n Cultural Marxism Origins:\u00a0<\/strong>Later theorists, including the famous Frankfurt School, which introduced elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, antipositivism (the notion that human society cannot be studied using the scientific method) and existentialism, a philosophical movement that posits that \u201cbeing determines consciousness\u201d and sees humanity as necessarily hemmed in by a variety of forces beyond their control.<\/p>\n There has been an attempt to smear the identification of the Frankfurt School and similar currents as Cultural Marxism as an expression of anti-Semitism and (of course) a\u00a0\u201cconspiracy theory.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n While there are certainly anti-Semites who talk about Cultural Marxism, they often do so from the perspective of an obsession with the alleged \u201cJewish\u201d nature of the intellectual tendency.<\/p>\n We reject both the characterization of Cultural Marxism as somehow \u201cJewish\u201d as well as the notion that its existence is a \u201cconspiracy theory.\u201d Nor do we propose that there is some centralized ideological cabal directing the contemporary left from a Cultural Marxist perspective. It is simply that these ideas have become fashionable among the left over the last 50 or so years.<\/p>\n Whatever one seeks to label the modern ideological\u00a0underpinnings of the left,<\/a>\u00a0it is clear that it has its foundation in the ideas articulated by Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and their intellectual descendents such as Rudi Dutschke and others.<\/p>\n Cultural Marxism Origins:\u00a0<\/strong>People often refer to the Frankfurt School as some kind of nebulous ideological current. In fact, it was a discrete group of scholars working together at a specific period of time. While they shared many assumptions and conclusions, they were not entirely homogeneous, mostly in terms of their focus of study.<\/p>\n The Frankfurt School was, in fact, the Institute for Social Research, an adjunct facility of the Goethe University Frankfurt.<\/p>\n It was the first fully Marxist research institution at a German university and it was funded through the generosity of well-to-do scion of an Argentine grain merchant,\u00a0Felix Weil<\/a>. The Frankfurt School is marked by an interdisciplinary approach. Rather than studying art, culture, politics and philosophy, they studied the interplay between them all from a Marxist perspective.<\/p>\n During the interwar period, the Institute was moved first to Vienna and then to New York City, where they joined Columbia University, to avoid the rise of fascism in Europe.<\/p>\n Cultural Marxism Origins:\u00a0<\/strong>The first important figure for our purposes to come out of the Frankfurt School is\u00a0Gy\u00f6rgy Luk\u00e1cs<\/a>, the son of a wealthy Hungarian investment banker. He is frequently published under the name Georg Luk\u00e1cs. Luk\u00e1cs was no armchair theorist: He was a leading light in the Hungarian Revolution of 1917, as well as one of the leading theoreticians of the Hungarian Red Terror during the Hungarian Soviet Republic.<\/p>\n After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he had a falling out with the international leadership of\u00a0Communism<\/a>. He later went to the Soviet Union, where he was detained and internally exiled.<\/p>\n He returned to Hungary in 1945. His relationship with Stalinism is ambiguous and a hotly debated\u00a0topic among historians<\/a>, but he was the primary instrument by which the Hungarian Writers\u2019 Union was purged.<\/p>\n His primary contribution to Cultural Marxism is reification, the notion that everything becomes an object under capitalism and that people under capitalism are more like things than human beings. He also said that Marxism would still be valid if it were proved to be false, because it is a methodology of social transformation above all else.<\/p>\n Cultural Marxism Origins:\u00a0<\/strong>Another important figure in the development of Cultural Marxism is\u00a0Herbert Marcuse<\/a>. He is often referred to as \u201cthe Father of the New Left.\u201d It is potentially worth noting that he worked for the\u00a0Office of Strategic Services<\/a>, which was the forerunner of the\u00a0Central Intelligence Agency<\/a>.<\/p>\n Like Luk\u00e1cs, Marcuse had direct experience in revolutionary movements in postwar Europe. He was a participant in the\u00a0Spartacist Uprising in Germany<\/a>, which was an abortive attempt at forming a Soviet-style government in that country.<\/p>\n Curiously, some of his work in the late 1920s and early 1930s was a collaboration with\u00a0Martin Heidegger<\/a>, who later became the sort of unofficial philosopher of the Nazi regime in Germany. A number of radicals have cited Marcuse as a major influence, including\u00a0Angela Davis<\/a>,\u00a0Abbie Hoffman<\/a>\u00a0and Rudi Dutschke.<\/p>\n Marcuse\u2019s most important contribution as far as we are concerned is the notion of \u201crepressive tolerance.\u201d In his\u00a0A Critique of Pure Tolerance<\/em><\/a>, Marcuse argues for something that will be familiar to readers of this website:\u00a0Tolerance should only be applied to left-wing groups and ideas, while right-wing groups and ideas should be mercilessly suppressed<\/em>.<\/p>\n Specifically, he advocated for \u201cwithdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n Marcuse is perhaps the most influential of the Frankfurt School thinkers in the United States. Anytime you hear a leftist explain why tolerance actually means intolerance, they\u2019re channeling Marcuse.<\/p>\n Cultural Marxism Origins:\u00a0<\/strong>Finally, there is\u00a0Max Horkheimer<\/a>. The son of a wealthy Orthodox Jewish family, Horkheimer\u2019s father owned a series of successful textile mills in Stuttgart. He was drafted at the beginning of the First World War, but was rejected on medical grounds and then enrolled in Munich University. By 1926, he was in Frankfurt, and by 1930, he was a professor of philosophy at Frankfurt University.<\/p>\n When the Institute for Social Research directorship became vacant, Horkheimer was elected to this position thanks to a mysterious endowment made by an anonymous wealthy businessman.<\/p>\n It was under Horkheimer\u2019s watch that the Frankfurt School\u2019s raison d\u2019\u00eatre became fusing the ideas of Karl Marx with those of Sigmund Freud. He was the father of Critical Theory, which is less a \u201ctheory\u201d than it is a rhetorical technique of viewing everything \u2013 except, of course, Critical Theory \u2013 through a critical lens and an eye toward discrediting social institutions.<\/p>\n Horkheiumer curiously (though perhaps not surprisingly) arrived at Critical Theory while appraising his own role as the scion of a bourgeois family who was ostensibly a proponent of proletarian revolution.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most didactically \u201cCritical Theory\u201d work of Horkheimer is\u00a0Dialectic of Enlightenment<\/em><\/a>. Among other things, it argues that popular, mass culture is a sort of mechanized and industrialized means by which authoritarian control is maintained over the broad mass of Westerners.<\/p>\n There are other figures in the Frankfurt School, however to catalog each and every one would make for a much longer text. We present the above three as exemplars of the intellectual tendency and a solid basis for understanding it.<\/p>\n While it is often attributed to Gramsci \u2013 and in a sense, he is the godfather of the notion \u2013 the \u201clong march through the institutions\u201d was, as stated above, a phrase coined by Rudi Dutschke, a German Communist activist. The phrase itself is a nod to the\u00a0\u201cLong March\u201d of the Chinese Communists<\/a>.<\/p>\n The long march represents another significant shift in thought away from Classical Marxism. In Classical Marxist thought, the state is seen as an instrument of class oppression, which can be conquered and used by the proletariat as a weapon against the bourgeoisie. Classical Marxists did not seek to occupy the existing state and leverage it for their own purposes.<\/p>\n Rather, the Classical Marxists believed it was necessary to destroy the instruments of the bourgeois state and construct a proletarian state in its place.<\/p>\n Some key concepts underlying this theory: First, the state is an instrument of\u00a0class domination<\/em>\u00a0and, as such, is fundamentally based on economics or what Marx called the infrastructure. Everything else \u2013 culture, religion, art, politics \u2013 was superstructure or something built on top of the class-based, economic structure.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, \u201cclass\u201d is not defined in relative terms, such as how much income one makes or even how much one owns, but rather on the relationship to production. A poor farmer was probably worse off than an urban worker, but was not a proletarian because he owned the means of production, even if these means were meager.<\/p>\n The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was, in every meaningful sense, a Marxist revolution. A parallel state based on participatory workers\u2019 organizations was led by a self-consciously revolutionary party to topple the existing state and erect a new one in its place.<\/p>\n Indeed, Lenin acted on clear definitions from Marx about what constituted \u201cthe state\u201d: \u201carmed bodies of men,\u201d that is to say, police, courts, prisons and the military. The Bolsheviks did not simply take the existing \u201carmed bodies of men\u201d and use them for their own purposes. Nor did the Communists of Eastern Europe. They destroyed existing institutions and replaced them with their own.<\/p>\n The bottom line of the difference between Classical Marxism and Cultural Marxism is that the latter sees the state as effectively neutral \u2013 something that can be taken over and used for its own purposes \u2013 while the former does not. Cultural Marxism is interested not in revolution in the classical 19th-century sense of throwing up barricades, toppling the monarchy and setting up guillotines.<\/p>\n Its interests lie in cultural transformations, after which other transformations (political and economic) can take place.<\/p>\n The long march through the institutions is in many ways exactly what it sounded like. Proponents of Cultural Marxism were expected to go out there and ingratiate themselves into every aspect of society. Once there, whether this was in bowling leagues or board rooms, they would push their ideology and attempt to transform society.<\/p>\n Cultural Marxism Origins:\u00a0<\/strong>It wasn\u2019t as dramatic or sudden as the revolution espoused by Classical Marxists and their Marxist-Leninist children, but it was considered both more effective and, more to the point,\u00a0necessary<\/em>\u00a0for fundamental transformation of society. Once the cultural institutions had been changed, political and economic transformation could be enacted.<\/p>\n A final note: The change of the \u201crevolutionary subject\u201d is an important topic to consider. Whereas Classical Marxists were quite dogmatic about their belief that it was only the working class who could effect revolution, Cultural Marxists saw the revolutionary subject basically anywhere else, viewing the traditional Western working class as apathetic at best and actively reactionary, bordering on fascistic, at worst.<\/p>\n This was not entirely limited to Cultural Marxists \u2013 the entire Trotskyist movement split after the\u00a0Second World War<\/a>\u00a0over the question of whether or not the Eastern European states were revolutionary and whether or not peasant guerilla warfare was a path to revolution.<\/p>\n Cultural Marxists, however, saw the revolutionary subject virtually\u00a0anywhere but<\/em>\u00a0the working class. Third world peasants, student radicals, the non-aligned movement, racial and ethnic minorities, homosexuals, the mentally ill and transsexuals \u2013 all of these and others have been considered the vanguard of cultural revolution around the world by the Cultural Marxists.<\/p>\n The shift of the revolutionary subject from workers to virtually everyone else is effectively an attempt to create a political-coalition-meets-religious-cult centered around notions of victimhood.<\/p>\n Cultural Marxism Origins:\u00a0<\/strong>The primary weapon of the Cultural Marxists is a constant, neverending critique of Western culture and civilization. It\u2019s not a terrible oversimplification to say that the fundamental premise of the \u201cCritical Theory\u201d arm of Cultural Marxism is \u201cwhen you think about it, isn\u2019t everything kind of problematic?\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, there is nothing \u201cdeep\u201d about this theoretical tack, it is simply a case of \u201cwhen all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.\u201d This rhetorical technique has informed and distorted virtually every aspect of Western culture \u2013 moving far beyond academia and infecting the mass culture.<\/p>\n \u00a0Air conditioning<\/a>\u00a0is sexist.\u00a0Lawns<\/a>\u00a0are racist\u00a0and\u00a0so are\u00a0single<\/a>\u00a0family homes.\u00a0Not wanting to be\u00a0intimate with someo<\/a>ne who is HIV positive contributes to homophobia and the spread of AIDS.\u00a0Physical fitness is a\u00a0fascist impulse<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0trying to lose weight is a\u00a0hateful act.<\/a><\/p>\n All of these might sound silly and marginal, and in a sense they are. However, it is important to note how dramatically the culture in the West has shifted since the 1950s \u2013 and how dramatically it has shifted even in the last ten years, when\u00a0Barack Obama<\/a>\u00a0still opposed gay marriage and no serious person advocated that grown men who \u201cidentify as women\u201d should be allowed to share restrooms and locker rooms with pre-pubescent girls.<\/p>\n The other important takeaway from this is that the proponents of Cultural Marxism can find a way to tie virtually any topic to some imagined \u201csystem of oppression,\u201d then fill in the blanks with the appropriate argument.<\/p>\n In the language of the Cultural Marxists, this is known as analyzing \u201cruling understandings\u201d or the dominant ideology of a culture. Of course, there is a \u201cdominant ideology\u201d underpinning this method \u2013 the notion that every claim or stance requires careful examination from a critical perspective.<\/p>\n Every belief held by Western civilization for the last 100, 200, 500, 2,000 years is subject to a critical analysis, the goal of which is to \u201cexpose\u201d the belief as nothing more than a weapon designed to subjugate and suppress members of the coalition of victims that Cultural Marxism seeks to assemble in its war against Western civilization.<\/em><\/p>\n Far from being a neutral form of analysis, Cultural Marxism starts with the assumption that every aspect of Western civilization is some kind of a conspiracy (conscious or otherwise) to keep a certain group of people in their place. This creates what Victor Davis Hansen has called a \u201csubjective righteousness.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Ammo](\"https:\/\/mk0hannenabintueb0vn.kinstacdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/AMMO.COM-logo-1-300x300.png\"){kind=logo}
How did we end here?\u00a0\u00a0Air conditioning<\/a>\u00a0is sexist.\u00a0Lawns<\/a>\u00a0are racist\u00a0and\u00a0so are\u00a0single<\/a>\u00a0family homes.\u00a0Not wanting to be\u00a0intimate with someo<\/a>ne who is HIV positive contributes to homophobia and the spread of AIDS.\u00a0Physical fitness is a\u00a0fascist impulse<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0trying to lose weight is a\u00a0hateful act.<\/a><\/p>\nThe Origins of Cultural Marxism<\/h3>\n
\n
Gramsci\u2019s Children: The Frankfurt School<\/h3>\n
Gy\u00f6rgy Luk\u00e1cs and Reification<\/h3>\n
Herbert Marcuse and Repressive Tolerance<\/h3>\n
Max Horkheimer and Critical Theory<\/h3>\n
The Long March Through the Institutions<\/h3>\n
The Weaponization of Critique<\/h3>\n