Cultural-Marxist Left Doesn't Like Term 'Cultural Marxism'

Oh, boo-hoo:

The fuss around Jordan Peterson—the aggressive and articulate Canadian psychology professor du jour—has pushed back into common currency a phrase that knocks around occasionally on the right: “Cultural Marxism.” What might that be?

Marxism—and especially the Marxisms that came after Marx—did take an interest in culture. Base was economic relations; superstructure was the cultural set-up that normalised and reproduced them, and their relationship was—of course—“dialectical.” This is a fancy way of saying something rather obvious: that culture affects the material set-up of a society, and vice versa. Most non-Marxists would probably agree. The likes of Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault offered various elaborations on all this.

But “Cultural Marxism,” as a catchphrase of the right, isn’t used just to mean a Marxist approach to the way power operates through culture: it’s used to imply a programmatic undermining of western civilisation by Marxists, who having been beaten in the political/economic arena, have transferred their attentions to the cultural sphere. They are responsible for “political correctness,” “identity politics,” 60s liberalism, and the threats to the established order that these represent.

Is this happening? You’d have to doubt it. Have the relatively obscure and often almost unreadable academics of the Frankfurt School somehow secretly taken over the major institutions of the western world? It’s true that Frankfurt School thought is influential in many university humanities departments. But that’s not the same thing as saying that it represents a menacing consensus that’s out to destroy civilisation.

Needless to say — having written a book on the subject — I beg to differ. Marxism, despite have failed so signally on the economic front, never died, it just molted. In The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, I laid out the Frankfurt School’s profound animus against Western civilization, and how they launched their attack via the medium of “Critical Theory” and its unholy offspring, “political correctness.” But it’s just like contemporary cultural Marxists to take refuge behind the Frankfurt School’s “relative obscurity” and “unreadability” as a way of downplaying the profound influence Marcuse and others have had on the American educational system and thus on several generations of college students.

Here’s another typical line of argumentation:

It’s also unclear how—apart from on the superficial level that identity politics, like Marxism, involves analysing inequalities and oppressions in class categories—PC and Marxism go together. Marxism is rooted in material analysis; PC in matters of language. Trans rights debates, which exercise the alt-right, centre on identity as felt rather than as experienced in social relations. Its ultimate logic is consumer individualism (I identify as who I want to be) rather than the sort of class-identity-as-socially-determined-category thinking you’d associate with Marxism.

But that obscures the real point of Marxism, which is not to create a “dictatorship of the proletariat” but to destroy the existing order of things — a typical mid-19th century fantasy shared by Wagner and Marx, among many others. Communists and Socialists will claim they want to create a “classless society” but what they really want is a pyramid scheme of workers lorded over by a nomenklatura consisting entirely of themselves.