What is CULTURAL MARXISM?

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.

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