Posted on 10/24/2005 7:59:14 PM PDT by smoothsailing
Next Conservatism: What Is Cultural Marxism
By William S. Lind
October 25, 2005
In his columns on the next conservatism, Paul Weyrich has several times referred to "cultural Marxism." He asked me, as Free Congress Foundation's resident historian, to write this column explaining what cultural Marxism is and where it came from. In order to understand what something is, you have to know its history.
Cultural Marxism is a branch of western Marxism, different from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union. It is commonly known as "multiculturalism" or, less formally, Political Correctness. From its beginning, the promoters of cultural Marxism have known they could be more effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of their work, hence the use of terms such as "multiculturalism."
Cultural Marxism began not in the 1960s but in 1919, immediately after World War I. Marxist theory had predicted that in the event of a big European war, the working class all over Europe would rise up to overthrow capitalism and create communism. But when war came in 1914, that did not happen. When it finally did happen in Russia in 1917, workers in other European countries did not support it. What had gone wrong?
Independently, two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came to the same answer: Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true, Marxist class interest that Communism was impossible in the West until both could be destroyed. In 1919, Lukacs asked, "Who will save us from Western civilization?" That same year, when he became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary, one of Lukacs's first acts was to introduce sex education into Hungary's public schools. He knew that if he could destroy the West's traditional sexual morals, he would have taken a giant step toward destroying Western culture itself.
In 1923, inspired in part by Lukacs, a group of German Marxists established a think tank at Frankfurt University in Germany called the Institute for Social Research. This institute, soon known simply as the Frankfurt School, would become the creator of cultural Marxism.
To translate Marxism from economic into cultural terms, the members of the Frankfurt School - - Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, to name the most important - - had to contradict Marx on several points. They argued that culture was not just part of what Marx had called society's "superstructure," but an independent and very important variable. They also said that the working class would not lead a Marxist revolution, because it was becoming part of the middle class, the hated bourgeoisie.
Who would? In the 1950s, Marcuse answered the question: a coalition of blacks, students, feminist women and homosexuals.
Fatefully for America, when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the Frankfurt School fled - - and reestablished itself in New York City. There, it shifted its focus from destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to destroying it in the United States. To do so, it invented "Critical Theory." What is the theory? To criticize every traditional institution, starting with the family, brutally and unremittingly, in order to bring them down. It wrote a series of "studies in prejudice," which said that anyone who believes in traditional Western culture is prejudiced, a "racist" or "sexist" of "fascist" - - and is also mentally ill.
Most importantly, the Frankfurt School crossed Marx with Freud, taking from psychology the technique of psychological conditioning. Today, when the cultural Marxists want to do something like "normalize" homosexuality, they do not argue the point philosophically. They just beam television show after television show into every American home where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual (the Frankfurt School's key people spent the war years in Hollywood).
After World War II ended, most members of the Frankfurt School went back to Germany. But Herbert Marcuse stayed in America. He took the highly abstract works of other Frankfurt School members and repackaged them in ways college students could read and understand.
In his book "Eros and Civilization," he argued that by freeing sex from any restraints, we could elevate the pleasure principle over the reality principle and create a society with no work, only play (Marcuse coined the phrase, "Make love, not war"). Marcuse also argued for what he called "liberating tolerance," which he defined as tolerance for all ideas coming from the Left and intolerance for any ideas coming from the Right. In the 1960s, Marcuse became the chief "guru" of the New Left, and he injected the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School into the baby boom generation, to the point where it is now America's state ideology.
The next conservatism should unmask multiculturalism and Political Correctness and tell the American people what they really are: cultural Marxism. Its goal remains what Lukacs and Gramsci set in 1919: destroying Western culture and the Christian religion. It has already made vast strides toward that goal. But if the average American found out that Political Correctness is a form of Marxism, different from the Marxism of the Soviet Union but Marxism nonetheless, it would be in trouble. The next conservatism needs to reveal the man behind the curtain - - old Karl Marx himself.
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William S. Lind is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation.
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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.
An excellent question. (Forgive grammatical and spelling errors please.) Off the top of my head now, here are some ways they push porn. 1) Most significantly, they say it's age discrimination to keep children from any material no matter how inappropriate, AND they say this despite the US v. ALA SCOTUS case that says there is a compelling reason why children should be separated from inappropriate material. This is obviously stating the obvious but the ALA, because it is pushing porn on children, advises libraries and the general public on how to minimalize US v. ALA. Do you think you or I could get away with similar behavior? 2) They have web sites for kids and teens that contain links to sites entirely inappropriate for children. 3) They change the language to pull off their sexualization tricks. For example, they call "young adults" children as young as 12. So you don't even have to be a teenager before you are called a young adult by the ALA, thereby entitling you to the rich wealth of sexual information they want 12 year olds to read. 4) They award books that include things like oral sex instruction with their highest honors, the "academy awards" of books, and the books are intended for 12 years old and up. Do you want your 12 year old to be instructed in the fine points of Lewinskys? 4b) They justify this by saying they can learn about oral sex from a safe distance and your mother reads romance novels and no one complains. 5) They make ridiculous statements like parents who care give their children Playboy magazine. 6) Where communities do remove the influence of the ALA, like Overland Park, Kansas, the ALA goes on the blitz attack ensuring community standards are stamped out and the "anything goes to sexualize children" standard is restored to prominence. 7) They advise librarians on how to change their lanuage to make their propaganda more palatable to the public. 8) They make CYA statements like with a book about a father who rapes his daughter then has a threesome with his daughter and his daughter's daughter while the baby is still in Pampers and when the mother finds out the girl is forced to do something equally crude to her -- in one place they say this is for 11th grade and up but in another place they say it's great for all ages. 9) They put out top ten lists that contain porno selections for children. 10) They put out lists of books for different age/grade levels that contain porno selections. 11) They ostracize libarians who do not go along with this agenda to the point that many are literally frightened of the ALA of ALA-influenced management. 12) They publicly laugh at efforts of local officials trying to assert community standards over ALA standards. Oh I guess I could go on for a while about this. This is sort of the tip of the iceberg. All statements are based of facts documented on my site -- they is no need for me to exaggerate even one iota -- I could not possibly even make up the full disgustingness of the ALA's efforts to push porn on children. By the way, porn is just a shortcut I use to mean something like material inappropriate for children. But I don't need to get into that definitional issue because it has already been asked and answered by SCOTUS.
More. 14) Using propaganda and the big lie -- like calling people "censors" and calling keeping sexually inappropriate books from children "censorship." 15) Creating Banned Books Week as a very, honestly, very effective, very slick propaganda effort. There's more. Maybe I'll post more soonish.
You know, banned book week lists the most frequently challenged books and you are right that its effective tactically. That list that includes everything from Harry Potter to the Color Purple to Steinbeck's Mice and Men and it becomes very hard to defend.
It sounds like all your objections are to books available to kids and that discussable - its keeping books away from adults that bothers me. I'd have no problem with requiring parental approval before a minor can check out adult books.
Bingo. The problem is the ALA pushes on kids, sometimes literally into their hands, inappropriate books and other material. Almost always sexually inappropriate, but not always. And by sexually inappropriate I mean what's been defined legally in the context of kids, not how I would define it. Books like Harry Potter and Of Mice and Men are not what I'm talking about -- but the ALA talks about it to throw peopleoff the scent. Books about homosexuality is not what I'm talking about either. The issue is the inappropriateness of the material, not witchcraft, religion, homosexuality, morality or the like. The ALA loves to group people like me in with those fighting, say, homosexuality in books, so as to attempt to marginalize me by tying me in with them. But that is not my interest. The ALA loves to say I and others like me are trying to impose our world view on others. No, it is the other way around. It imposes its world view on us, legislatures and courts have acted to stop them, it is openly defying those institutions, and my role is in making this defiance in the face of the law and the resultant continued dangers to children understandable to the public, the same public swaggering under the weight of the ALA propaganda cloud that makes people think it violates a child's First Amendment right to take inappropriate material away from a child. Now the question is, will you and others reading this please help us in our original request in this thread?
Exactly, my friend.
I will need specific references to appropriate resources. Personal opinions may be useful in explaining things to me but may not carry weight to the public. I want bullet proof sources to prove the ALA’s interests in pushing porn on children is related in any way to the theories of Gramsci and the like, if that is the case at all.
Jeepers. Forgive me for saying so, but that this is the very case ought to be obvious to any reasonably well-educated, rational adult. But “specific references to appropriate sources” may not be of much help to you in dealing with this “disease.” And that’s exactly what it is: a disease afflicting the body politic. Like a cancer.
info@plan2succeed.org, I know you said that personal opinions would not be of much help to you in your quest for the restoration of basic sanity in public life. But I will give you mine anyway, and share a recent personal experience with you that seems to illuminate this problem.
The first thing you have to realize is that these people in the ALA, ACLU, et al., do not live in the same world that you and I do. They detest Western civilization and all that it stands for. In particular, they detest all the cultural sources on which Western civilization has historically rested, including the culture of reason that we inherit from the ancient Greek world; and especially Christianity, with its eternal moral law. I even think they detest themselves, when you boil it all down: They revile the culture of Life, together with all its supports (such as family, sexual temperance, personal self-restraint, accountability, and responsibility, etc.). We have to realize that the roots of Western culture are to be found in the cultures of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. Gramsci and his followers (who inherit from Nietzsche, Hegel, and Marx — i.e., German intellectuals) are deliberately set on a project of constructing a “second reality” expressly designed to eclipse and finally supplant “first reality,” that historic legacy that has been so spectacularly successful in the flourishing of reason, of the arts and sciences, and of the widespread material prosperity of the West.
What we are speaking about here is — as the ancient Greeks and Romans realized a long time ago — a widespread pneumopathological disorder, or “spiritual disease” that is intimately related to psychopathic disorder. Plato called the disease nosos; Aristotle’s term for it was nosemos; Cicero put his finger on it by calling it the aspernatio rationes, or “contempt for reason.” It is a suicide mission when you boil it all down: It wants to “end history,” and start all over from scratch, on the theory that Man (or at least, “some” men, our would-be self-appointed “saviors”) can do a better job of creating a “just order” than God Himself can. And so the new construction — the second reality — can be built only when reason, God, and history are all “dead.”
So if you’re wondering what the ACLU and ALA, et al., are up to, I’d suggest the above remarks describe precisely the project in which they are constantly, faithfully engaged: The object of their game is to construct a utopian system “so perfect that no one will need to be good,” and then to socialize the inevitable costs of bad behavior. The human person is to be relieved of all responsibility: that is the Endgame. Society at large will thereafter bear all the costs of human failure.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, ’til I’m blue in the face if necessary: When one takes a shot at God, it is always man who must take the bullet. For God is Truth, and the only source of Truth. And the man who does not live in Truth is not truthfully a man.
The key point is: Once reason has been “killed,” then there is no basis for rational argument. So you can look for all the sources, all the facts, all the proofs you want to; but it really won’t do you any good in the end. Dealing with doctrinaire ideologues, you must always be prepared for the situation in which the “goalpost” will be constantly moved. Marx made it very clear: Inconvenient facts are always to be disregarded; and all questioning of “the system” is strictly prohibited.
Maybe these remarks from Eric Voeglin can help to clarify the situation I’m trying to address:
In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we all have had occasion at one time or another to engage in debate with ideologists — whether communists or intellectuals of a persuasion closer to home. And we have all discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even an honest disagreement, could be reached, because their exchange of argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence — with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his relation to God. Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that Robert Musil has called a Second Reality. The argument could not achieve results, it had to falter and peter out, as it became increasingly clear that not argument was pitched against argument, but that behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurked the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared.Now for a concrete example from my recent experience. A good friend, a gracious person who is not in any way “evil,” with whom I’ve had a long-standing argument of several years — i.e., the typical evo-crevo “debate” for which FR is famous — took strong umbrage to a remark I made, that Karl Marx was heavily influenced by his understanding of Darwin’s theory of evolution. He told me I was definitely out to lunch on that supposition, since The Communist Manifesto was published well before On the Origin of Species. So I just blithely replied, I’ll bet I can find a cite to Darwin in Marx’s Das Kapital, which was published later. So my friend very kindly provided me a link to Das Kapital, and I agreed to read it and report back. (Not fun reading at all.) Sure enough, I found a direct cite to Darwin, in Chapter 14, footnote 6. So I did report back with my finding; and he left in a great huff. Haven’t heard from him since. End of our “debate.”
But earlier he had told me that if I could back up my statement that Marx was influenced by Darwin, he’d reconsider his own view of the matter. Obviously, he didn’t really mean what he said.
At the end of the day, what I sought to show him was not that Darwin was a Marxist; but that Marx was a Darwinist. And that is what I actually showed. Apparently, this was just too much for him. End of the “debate.”
Which is why I say: You cannot argue with an “ideologist.” There is no shared basis in reason that can bring the “two sides” together so that the search for Truth can proceed with profit to both parties. The “integrity” of the doctrine is more important than the truth of reality.
To give my friend his due, it may be he is just a more or less innocent victim of the Kultursmog, that reeking, stinking flatulence emitted by Left-Progressive intellectuals which is the very air we breathe these days, owing to the increasing dominance of contemporary American culture by “ivory-tower” academia, Hollywood, and the main-stream media. Reason is the only defense against it; but reason is “on the way out,” you see…. Certainly the public schools no longer emphasize its cultivation in young people. They’re too busy teaching sex-ed and indoctrinating pupils in the fashionable causes preferred by the Gramscis and Marxists of this world, plus “socialization skills,” such as the celebration of multiculturalism. That is to say, the celebration of any “culture” at all, just so long as it isn’t the traditional American one.
If you’re looking for an answer to this problem, the only one I can think of is this: One must learn how effectively to wield the sword of Truth, while at the same time loving and honoring one’s “opponent” — who is also one’s neighbor. That’s a tough challenge, but not an impossible one.
Only Truth and Love can defeat the spreading sickness embedded in our culture. There is no other way.
Well, my two-cents-worth, FWIW. Thank you so very much, info@plan2succeed.org, for pinging me to this thread. Best of luck in all your future endeavors. Please do let me know if I can help out in any way, going forward.
p.s.: You might find a read of Eric Voegelin's A New Science of Politics eminently worthwhile. He performs an excellent "autopsy" of the subjects we have been discussing here.
Tell me, BB, what do I have to do/post to get you to stop pinging me to such meaningless drivel as this? Or anything else for that matter ...
I wish you well in all things my friend, and Godspeed. From my heart.
Bump for later reading.
I see nothing wrong with multiculturalism if the definition of the term is learning as much about other people's cultures and history as possible.
Where I have a problem with the concept is when it serves to demonize OTHER cultures and peoples-Caucasian and Western-in the same way that the Europhiles and racialists of the Nineteenth Century did to"people of color"to justify imperial designs on their lands and resources.
The irony in the multicultural envirnments of the public schools today is that it seems the more the system tries to promote the multicultural concept,the LESS able the studetns are to get along.
And I'm not talking about WHITE kids, since there are virtually none in my school system but black,Mexican and Asian who seem to be more and more isolated and suspicious of each other.
"American blacks are in the Marxist laboratory"!
Great one,partner.Yet from my observations,many of the"rats"-to use your lab analogy-are saying,in their vernacular"F them fools,punk.We out to get PAID,fool".
Most of the white liberal elite go into fits of panic when they encounter the "everyday young brother or sister"today.These kids don't care about Huey Newton or Malcolm X. And they see Sharpton and Jackson as hustlers who are out for theirs and theirs alone.
I peronally think this black generation has great promise.They are not going to march blindly to the tune of the Democratic Party piper.But conservatives shouldn't get too complacent either.These kids can see right through you if they think you are running a game on them as well!
I think Camus said it best when it comes to Marxist ideology-"Maxism is absolutely false because it claims to be absolutely true"
I recall responding a few times after you found that reference, politely as I always do when conversing with you, and each time I presented what I thought were substantive points -- here, and here, and here. My last response was here, when I said we were in disagreement, and "I like you too much to persist." If that's huffy, you've led a sheltered life.
Lovely display.. in #106...(then is my paraphrasing)
The line above attracted me more than the rest of the display .. and crosses many lines of thought.. Man has always loved a good story(like evolution or other religion).. that sometimes generate doctrines and doctrinal cultures.. which adjusts the "truth of reality"..
Little wonder the Judeo-Christian Bible was needed.. Mans need for a good story is satisfied.. and the "truth of reality" was hidden in metaphor.. Pure genius.. The God of the Bible is a genius.. The Bible + the Holy Spirit(paraclete) for good measure is transcendant of dogma or even doctrine.. indeed, The Spirit of Truth..
For the most part, they succeeded.
Gramsci wanted to infiltrate all of the cultural institution in the west: schools, church, the press, government, etc.
Good historical data! I knew some of this, some I didn't.
I posted the article back in Oct. and it amazes me that freepers are still running across it!
Glad you found it! :)
Thank you.
This is all news to me, dear Patrick. Nobody responded to me after that post, but you alone. And according to my recollection, you corresponded with me only once, after that particular post. If the truth of this story is different from that which I now recall, then please, kindly do provide the corroborating links that i must have overlooked, according to you, that I might correct my understanding of the truth of the matter in this dispute.
Jeepers, PH -- what is your real problem???
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