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The Man Who Made Cultural Marxism
Chronicles Magazine ^ | 05/01/2024 | Roger McGrath

Posted on 03/12/2025 5:12:32 AM PDT by Jan_Sobieski

I first became aware of cultural Marxism as an undergraduate student at UCLA during the 1960s. There were several professors and teaching assistants with whom I came into contact who were fans of Herbert Marcuse and his two most recent books, One-Dimensional Man and A Critique of Pure Tolerance.

Marcuse had once been an orthodox, revolutionary, class-struggle Marxist but during the post-World War II era had moved towards achieving the same communist goals through transforming the culture—education, art, literature, language, religion, family, even one’s own consciousness.

I recall that one of the teaching assistants—I’ll call him Bill—announced to us lowly undergrads in his section that he was a Marxist. I suppose that was a bold admission to make at the time, but I could see he took delight in projecting himself as a revolutionary. He was our own campus Che, and like Che, he had come from an upper-middle-class family and had attended private schools.

Nonetheless, he saw class struggle everywhere and was on a mission to destroy capitalism. While he praised the work of Marcuse, he seemed to have missed Marcuse’s essential message of insidiously changing the culture first. Bill’s approach was to take some of his comrades to the docks in San Pedro to pass out leaflets to longshoremen.

In Bill’s twisted mind, he thought the longshoremen were the perfect proletariat. Of course, he had never met a longshoreman. I don’t know if he had ever even been to San Pedro. The waterfront there was not what it had been during the 1940s and ’50s, but it was still a rugged stretch full of hardened merchant marines, commercial fishermen, and shipyard workers…

(Excerpt) Read more at chroniclesmagazine.org ...


TOPICS: Education; History
KEYWORDS: culturalmarxism; herbert; herbertmarcuse; marcuse

1 posted on 03/12/2025 5:12:32 AM PDT by Jan_Sobieski
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To: Jan_Sobieski
Anything 60s UCLA is going to be commie degenerate. That's when kali was flooded with America's degenerates from back east. The UC system just fell in line with that commie invasion. Dopers. Whores and whoremongers. Yeah, what could go wrong?

Californians should have sealed their border and forced marched the invaders south. As it was, they allowed the most beautiful state in the nation to be destroyed by mongrels.

2 posted on 03/12/2025 5:19:30 AM PDT by LouAvul (1 John 2:22: He that denies that Jesus is the Christ is a liar and antichrist. )
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To: Jan_Sobieski

They say that the high from the drug Ecstasy brings an exaggerated sense of empathy for everything from your friends and neighbors to the trees, plants, grizzly bears and ants. If you think swatting a fly on your kitchen table is murder then maybe you’ve taken too much Ecstasy. My instincts tell me that it was developed with that sort of effect in mind. It makes loving your enemies seem that much more ‘appropriate’ to those who are so inclined, however stoned.


3 posted on 03/12/2025 5:32:37 AM PDT by equaviator (If 60 is the new 40 then 35 must be the new 15.)
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To: Jan_Sobieski

He was also employed by the CIA.


4 posted on 03/12/2025 5:48:25 AM PDT by R0CK3T
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To: Jan_Sobieski

Handing out Marxist pamphlets to UNION members.

That’s when you really find out how back your history education has been.


5 posted on 03/12/2025 5:52:23 AM PDT by larrytown (A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do. Then they graduate...)
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To: Jan_Sobieski

Excellent! Catching up on my “ manufactured consent “ and Axlerods “permission structures”. The Left is really good at making destruction attractive.


6 posted on 03/12/2025 6:16:28 AM PDT by griswold3 (Truth Beauty and Goodness)
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To: LouAvul
Anything 60s UCLA is going to be commie degenerate. That's when kali was flooded with America's degenerates from back east. The UC system just fell in line with that commie invasion. Dopers. Whores and whoremongers.

\/

you forgot what i think was the #1 promoter of insanity among the progs

LSD

Acid heads

( i think some took so much for so long they never and haven't yet come down to sobriety. )

7 posted on 03/12/2025 6:57:33 AM PDT by cuz1961
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To: Jan_Sobieski
Marcuse and His Criticism of the Modern Industrial Society Is Wrong
8 posted on 03/12/2025 6:58:01 AM PDT by mjp (pro-freedom & pro-wealth $)
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To: LouAvul

well, lsd is dope, so you are right.


9 posted on 03/12/2025 7:00:13 AM PDT by cuz1961
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To: Jan_Sobieski

James Comedy, Hillary!, Brennan, and Obama are fans or Marcuse.

Gramsci led to Marcus.

We really ARE fighting against communists! They’ve just adapted to a more “Slow march through the Institutions.”


10 posted on 03/12/2025 7:23:12 AM PDT by Basket_of_Deplorables (MAGA!!!!)
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To: Jan_Sobieski

Very good piece. Thanks for posting.

Frankfurt School (Comumbia—make sense now?), Angela Davis, and Critical Theory (which purposefully replaced Critical Thinking in academia—notice how similar they sound?) all from Marcus.

“According to Critical Theory, we white folk are supposed to have something called “white privilege.”

Sound familiar???

When you scratch your head and ask, “ Where did all this Cultural Marxism come from? How didn’t here here???” You now know the answer.

Marcus infected the entire US via universities. Trickled down to kindergarten. And they are now legion. It will take decades to uproot completely, and then the ground must be salted.

No other guy was responsible for the giant decline of the US since the 1950’s, although Gramsci planted the seeds, too.

All of Obama’s cabinet, and philosophies, were accolytes.


11 posted on 03/12/2025 7:39:39 AM PDT by Basket_of_Deplorables (MAGA!!!!)
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To: Jan_Sobieski

And hear in lies the problem. We surrendered without a fight.

“After earning a master’s degree under Marcuse at UC San Diego, (Angela) Davis was hired in 1969 as an assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA. She didn’t have a Ph.D., a book published, or any real teaching experience but she was black, a woman, a member of the Communist Party, and a student of Marcuse.”


12 posted on 03/12/2025 8:09:04 AM PDT by redangus ( )
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To: Jan_Sobieski
Surprising that such rank libertinism could have such genuine popularity with supposedly educated people.

I am referring to both Marxism and Marcuse's version, Critical Theory.

Anyone with a good high school diploma from the 1960s and a year of Sunday school as a teenager ought to have been able to see through and refute the complete fallacy of Marxism/CT.

Why did this not happen at the university level?

Because the agents of Marxism/CT know it is false, but they foist it on people because it is such an easy sell: Appeals to every undignified, shameful, sinful aspect of the dark human side: Envy, atheism, licentiousness, pride, gluttony, greed, anger, laziness.

Marxism and CT would have been a nonstarter had mankind just maintained a modicum of intact education about Western Civilization and about the Almighty.

But lacking that environment, Marx/CT grew like a weed from 1880 to the present time.

2024 is the first real reversal of its ascendancy, IMHO. The election of 47 and the Fifth Great Awakening, the recent demise of Woke, Political Correctness, Cancel Culture, WEF dominance, and the Rat Party are NOT small things; they are monumental things in the history of the world since our Civil War.

13 posted on 03/12/2025 9:20:05 AM PDT by caddie (We all need to become Trump and become Captain Obvious too.)
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To: Basket_of_Deplorables
They’ve just adapted to a more “Slow march through the Institutions.”

Back in the 60s, radical commies thought the could organize a revolution on the streets. They tried hard and they failed miserably. The American people were having none of it.

The radicals then went back to the drawing board and came up with a new plan. It was to infiltrate and subvert every vital institution in America. Education…. Kindergarten through post graduate. Charitable institutions from the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie funds down to local homeless shelters. Government… especially the massive bureaucracies of the Federal government. Churches. Entertainment. Arts.. Sports. You name it, hard left radicals took charge all with the same goal… take power by subverting society, punishing success and rewarding disfunction. Take fathers out of homes. Encourage out of wedlock births. Sex, drugs and rock n roll mentality. Anything to make life mean and cruel.

14 posted on 03/12/2025 9:32:29 AM PDT by Ditto
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To: caddie
Why did this not happen at the university level?

Most of the universities see themselves (errantly) as refuges from gritty reality. The last thing they would do is come to terms with the fact there are intrinsically evil ideas out there and act on it. They think themselves to be above such considerations.

15 posted on 03/12/2025 12:48:01 PM PDT by ClarityGuy
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To: Jan_Sobieski

bump


16 posted on 03/12/2025 1:32:51 PM PDT by Albion Wilde (“Did you ever meet a woke person that’s happy? There’s no such thing.” —Donald J. Trump)
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To: LouAvul
Anything 60s UCLA is going to be commie degenerate. That's when kali was flooded with America's degenerates from back east.

As the article brings out, it was not east-coast American Yankees, but rather Germans from the Frankfort School in Germany who migrated to the U.S. and then radicalized UCLA and many other universities. UCLA particularly embraced such leftism, to the extent that California institutions and its court system became the leaders in a radicalism that eventually destabilized the rest of the U.S.

17 posted on 03/14/2025 3:56:11 PM PDT by Albion Wilde (“Did you ever meet a woke person that’s happy? There’s no such thing.” —Donald J. Trump)
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