Blog Archives

What is CULTURAL MARXISM?

7/27/2018

What is Cultural Marxism?
Why is It Important to Understand What it Means for Us?

Since I began this MY CORNER series, and before that in my CONSERVATIVE CRACK-UP columns, I have employed the term “cultural Marxism” as a moniker, a descriptive term, collectively to indicate basically a wide-ranging, multi-level assault on Western Christian and traditional culture. In that usage my intended meaning was very similar to and paralleled the meaning that author and friend Patrick Buchanan has explored in several books and graphically painted twenty-six years ago in his famous speech at the Republican National Convention, August 17, 1992.

In that speech he described a momentous conflict that was “about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”

At the time, that speech was roundly criticized as “extreme” and “inflammatory” for its imagery of a dawning sharp cultural and religious divide that would, if left unchecked and unaddressed, destroy the nation and transform it into something unrecognizable to even our immediate ancestors.

Pat’s clarion call—his warning about what was occurring in Western society and to our culture—found resonance and immense erudition in a significant trilogy by international scholar, Paul Gottfried, in three titles that continue to be fundamental if we are to truly understand what has happened to our country and Western Europe in recent decades. Beginning with his volume, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (2001), followed by Multicuralism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy (2002), and finally, The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millenium (2005), and continuing with dozens of essays, Gottfried has deepened and provided important context to the culture wars in which we find ourselves.

Those “culture wars” we witness occurring in our (and Western European) society are not just restricted to debate about political issues, although political change and its advocacy are important by-products, but rather are a complex manifestation of theories and ideas advanced that would, in effect, completely transform what we have known as Western civilization. Although inspired to some degree by traditional Marxist theory, “cultural Marxism” differs from what customarily was once identified as “Marxism” or Communism, especially in how it looks at the economy, its emphasis on radical institutional change, and its usage of narratives on race and gender as socially and culturally transformative.

In a recent essay (“The Death of Marxism Revisited,” The American Thinker, February 9, 2017) Professor Gottfried offers a precise but comprehensive description of what we are talking about:

…the present Left is not Marxist, but post-Marxist. Unlike traditional Marxists and European democratic socialists, the type of Left that has gained ground since and even before the fall of the Soviet Empire is culturally radical but only secondarily interested in economic change. Our present Left makes its peace with private enterprise and even large corporations, providing it can impose its idea of social and cultural transformation on increasingly powerless citizens and their increasingly indoctrinated children. Not that this Left is particularly friendly to anything that is private, including economic transactions. But it treats the economy as something that it can influence without having to nationalize, thereby avoiding those disastrous policies that socialist governments of the past tried to enact. Our own master class has sensibly concluded that it’s better to allow market forces to operate while making sure that public administration can dip, when it advances a pretext, into the profits. Further, the master class endlessly bullies the public into going along with increasingly complicated behavioral guidelines, supposedly intended to fight “discrimination.” It is the culture and only instrumentally the government that the post-Marxist Left seeks to dominate; and the type of administrative state that has expanded explosively in every Western country since the 1960s is an effective instrument by which social engineers and sensitivity commissars can do their work. [Italics added]

This summation contains all the elements of a definition…and is an excellent invitation to investigate further Gottfried’s very important and detailed studies if we are to fully comprehend what has happened—and what is happening—to our culture.

On several occasions in my columns I have mentioned Marxist theoreticians Italian Antonio Gramsci and Hungarian Georg Lukacs, both of whom wrote critically of the successes and failures of world Communist revolution immediately prior to and after World War I. Uniting the workers of the world in highly industrialized countries like Germany, Communism was supposed to have overthrown the old capitalist order. But that was not what happened. Instead, on the outbreak of war workers rallied to their own national governments, patriotically, and even religiously. And after the war, with the triumph of Communism in Russia (often opposed strongly by the Russian peasantry), Communist revolutions failed in every other European state (e.g., Hungary, Germany, etc.). “War Communism” was stopped cold in the famous “Battle of the Vistula” (August 1920) by valiant forces of a newly independent and Christian Poland, and Europe was saved from military conquest by Trotsky’s legions.

What had happened? Why had it failed, and what could be done to make it palatable and insure its future success in “the West”? These were questions that Gramsci and Lukacs addressed. And, historically, these questions are extremely important for us to examine as well, and not just for the bold ideas that those ideologues offered, but for the eventual permutations and transformation of orthodox Marxist thought that emerged in the decades that followed.

And they also assist us to explain why in 2018 we can state with certitude that post-Soviet Russia, with its dramatic return since August 1991 to its pre-Communist traditions, religious belief, and “blood-and-soil” patriotism, is, ironically, in many ways less “Marxist” today than the United States. Pat Buchanan, a few years back, raised the same point, by declaring: “On whose side is God now on?” not to say that there aren’t millions of God-fearing traditionalists who hang on (precariously) to the heritage and beliefs that once dominated in the American nation, but that formally, led by both political parties and abetted by both the Left AND much of the established “conservative movement,” America has gradually accepted the template of cultural Marxism in nearly every sphere of American life, while Russia seems intent on rejecting its Soviet Communist past.

Recently, long time Old Right conservative theorist and writer, William S. Lind, authored a piece for the Lew Rockwell web site. Lind has been associated with the late Paul Weyrich and the Free Congress Foundation for years, and his observations on cultural Marxism and its history are a succinct and very accessible summary of the history and development of that ideology and what it means for us. Certainly, additional points could be added or discussed, but Lind’s essay is still quite useful.

I pass it on, in addition to Paul Gottfried’s important essay (linked above) updating his volume, The Strange Death of Marxism. I urge you strongly to read—and save—both of them.

Trump-Putin Summit Brouhaha Continues

7/22/2018

And It Comes On A Nearly Missed But Extremely Significant Anniversary...

Literally thousands of items have shown up in recent days regarding American foreign policy, and specifically Russo-American relations, the just completed Helsinki Summit, and the narrative that continues unabated like the Energizer Bunny. Even after President Trump’s latest press statement of yesterday, the far Left crazies are doubling down on their completely insane accusations: Trump committed treason (quoth former CIA director John Brennan), he is worse than the Nazis (maybe he IS one?), his actions are worse than the Holocaust, etc. etc.

My earnest wish for them? May they all receive their just reward and eventually dwell in Dante’s lowest circle of Inferno, where treachery, betrayal, and pure evil are punished for all eternity. They richly merit it.

And the Neocons are now breathing a breath of relief, because, it seems, some of president’s advisors twisted his arm, persuaded him, as it were, to “clarify” his statement about our national intelligence agencies and to affirm that he believes their assessment about Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

I am not going back and reconsider that question, as I have written about it previously and at length in earlier installments in this series. I will say that: (1) I understand why the president, under such severe pressure from his own Neocon advisors, would have been compelled to make that “correction,” but (2) I also believe that, given what he said and how he said it, fundamentally he still, rightly, harbors some doubts, and even in his clarification he continued to suggest that “others” might also have been involved.

While I strongly disagree with his apparent about-face as it represents a kind of retreat in the face of the unrelenting, anti-Trump opposition from the Deep State-controlled Intel community, and while I am disappointed, given the nature of the political and cultural war we find ourselves in, I also believe that the president’s underlying sentiments and his strategy of rapprochement with Russia will continue. Of course, the frenzied lunatic Russophobia of the far Left will continue apace, and the Neocons will continue to worry and sweat about the next time that President Trump will venture off the assigned reservation that they have attempted to map out for him. And that, as I see it, is still a reason for hope…and not a reason to excommunicate him. Criticize intelligently, encourage what we believe to be his more profound views (as he expressed them in the 2016) campaign, continue to illustrate in a convincing manner the basic incompatibility between the essential vision of Donald Trump as we understood it and the poisonous efforts by the Neocons to alter and pervert it for their own ideological purposes –this is where I come down.

At the end of this installment of My CORNER I will give a list of links to some excellent articles on this topics. Rather than trying to re-invent the wheel or repeat what I’ve written, I urge you, at your leisure, to check out these essays and their research, which, I believe, support the points I have been attempting to make.

But today, I wish to make a 180 degree change in emphasis (although perhaps it is not that extreme a change in emphasis?).

Let me ask: how many of you know what happened 100 years ago yesterday…July 17, 1918? And how fundamentally it affected the subsequent history of the world?

On that date Communist partisans in the city of Ekaterinburg, Russia, led by former Talmud student Yakov Yurovsky, brutally murdered and mutilated Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, his children, and his household, in one of the most outrageous acts of regicide ever committed in human history. But it was not just that act, per se, that is so significant, but what it represented. For its actuality and symbolism unleashed over seventy years of direct Communist revolution, and even after the demise of Soviet Russia finally with the failed KGB coup of August 1991 (which, it must be pointed out again, Vladimir Putin, then vice-mayor of Leningrad, suppressed), the bastardized Marxist children of Lenin and Leon Trotsky still seem on the verge of accomplishing what their Soviet half-brothers were unable to achieve after the murder of the tsar.

Yet, in Russia today the citizens have turned a momentous corner—Tsar Nicholas and his family have been canonized as martyrs to the faith by the Orthodox Church and Vladimir Putin, that former KGB agent stationed in Dresden (and let me emphasize the word “former” for he has returned to the Orthodox Christian faith), now pays his respects to and honors not only the tsars and pre-revolutionary Russia, but charts a course for the Russian future which is decided nationalist, pro-Christian, and anti-Communist. No wonder that the American Left and our cultural Marxists despise him and post-1991 Russia…and no wonder the Neoconservatives whose genealogy is largely Russo-Jewish (from the Pale of Settlement) fear him and what they imagine might well be the recrudescence of anti-semitism (after all, for them ANY Russian nationalism is equated with anti-semitism and the bad old days of pogroms under the tsars).

But for those not completely inundated in such ideological infections, the fact that Russia is now formally and officially commemorating its older and non-Communist history and past, and making reparations spiritually for that incredibly and indelibly criminal act committed 100 years ago—an act that cries to Heaven, “clamor ad caelum”— that so signaled the tenor and theme of the 20th century, is indeed remarkable and a sign both of contradiction and of hope.

Thus it is that while here in the United States the leaders of the Democratic Party and GOP leaders rush to condemn the anti-democratic and anti-liberal course of Russia and its “violations” of “human rights” (you know, no same sex marriage, increasing restrictions of abortion, forbidding gay proselytization in Russian schools, support for traditional Orthodoxy and the opening of over 28,000 new Christian churches, etc.), the former Communist state and its people, having seen what the Communist “future” held and was all about, and having suffered under it for over seventy years, attempt to chart a new course. And all the while, the John McCains (good-bye, John—Dante has a place for you), Lindsey Grahams, The Weekly Standards, National Reviews, practically all the Democrats, most of the Fox punditry—in fact, just about all establishment opinion in the USA, far left or “(Neo)conservative movement incorporated,” seem bound and determined to eagerly accept the failed template.

Recall the words of I Peter 5:8: (Vulgate text) “Sobrii estote vigilate quia adversarius vester diabolus tamquam leo rugiens circuit quaerens quem devoret -- Be sober and vigilant, because your adversary the devil, like a roaring lion, walks about, seeking whom he may devour.”

It is always easier, it seems, to see the devil far from us and not recognize the one within, closer to home, whether named paganism, “the Revolution,” liberalism, Socialism, Communism, or cultural Marxism. Malevolence is like the Greek Hydra, many headed and fatal—but the final results are always the same.

This piece originally appeared in Boyd Cathey's blog on July 18th, 2018.

Author

Boyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European history from the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in intellectual history from the University of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to conservative author and philosopher the late Russell Kirk. In more recent years he served as State Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. He has published in French, Spanish, and English, on historical subjects as well as classical music and opera. He is active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and various historical, archival, and genealogical organizations.

Read more by Boyd Cathey at his blog My Corner.

Boyd Cathey

What is CULTURAL MARXISM?

What is Cultural Marxism?​Why is It Important to Understand What it Means for Us?

Trump-Putin Summit Brouhaha Continues

Author

Archives

What is Cultural Marxism?
Why is It Important to Understand What it Means for Us?