Good memory. I did coin that phrase.
And building upon that, my mind is really spinning. Sometimes it all really does come together. I'll elaborate with you in private about that.
If you want a Google GMail account, FReepmail me.
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.
actually, they'd be Nietzscheo-Marxists. these dipwads STILL believe in the communist Utopia, and are anti-meritocratic - both rather divergent from Nietzschean philosophy
AMEN! I call her a Marxist every chance I get, because she is, as is her "husband."
this is important
carry-okie has some links downthread (from #1, not this ping) to supplemental historical analyses which are quite disturbing.
Moral Absolutes Ping.
I am too tired to read this - just sneaking on to FR for a minute - but I know this is a good read and relevant to the purpose of this pinglist! Will read it tomorrow and I hope to also read your comments!
Freepmail me if you want on/off this pinglist.
Don't forget the Fabian Society.
who?
(remember: if it happened after 1450 or so, I didn't study it)
I should have pung you in the general ping a moment ago. sorry.
I remember reading this in a pro-gun book published by the NRA that was written in the late 1960's on the fallicies of gun control and how gun control falls into the communist's plots. In 1919, British intelligence found their plans in a cell in occupied Germany and it went from there.
BTW, a lot of people misunderstand Marx's dictum on religion. It was one of the vestiges of society that he would have torn down almost regretfully albeit in his opinion necessarily. What he wrote in whole was: "Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right)
My personal guess is that Marx would have considered the members of the Frankfurt School to be heretics and major obstructions to the eventual victory of socialism, as in fact they may be. But they were right about the proletariat - it did turn into the bourgeoisie, a thing neo-Marxists have never really forgiven it for. They're stuck finding oppressed classes through which to project a revolution that will never happen. That doesn't mean they can't hurt people in the meantime.
Z-z-z-z-z
It's the spelling that gets me. I do it different every time.
The Frankfurt School did not settle in the US but fled Germany in the mid 1930's because they were on Hitlers hit list.
Max Horkheimer the leader of the Frankfurt School was the first to leave and went to New York and was employed by OSS army intelligence where he gave the US govt valuable intelligence on prominent Nazis and German Stalinist operatives.
The FS was equally under the sights of Hitler and Stalin because they were Hegelian Marxists.
Georg Lucacs is an example of the suspicion that Stalin had of the FS school in the mid thirties. Lucacs was ordered to Moscow to account on a charge of Revisionism for some of his ideas published in the Theory of the Novel and the Historical Novel.
He barely talked his way out of a firing squad.
As far as their present influence the FS ceased to fashionable among the western left in the early eighties. They are most definitely not responsible for the emergence of multiculturalism which is a product of French Post Modernist epistemological scepticism.
Read the History of the Frankfurt School
http://home.cwru.edu/~ngb2/Pages/Back_Hist.html
ah. from the name, I figured it was a buggery appreciation group.
seems i was not far wrong.
ROFLMAO.
If you had bothered to consider the links I posted you would know that I am well aware of that. Their influence on the Spartakusbund had riled not a few Germans for having turned Berlin into the equivalent of modern San Francisco. It scared the hell out of German conservatives, many of whom fell into Hitler's arms in the election of 1932.
As far as their present influence the FS ceased to fashionable among the western left in the early eighties.
The standards they set as adopted widely in the '60s and '70 live on. Marcuse is still called the "Father of the New Left."
They are most definitely not responsible for the emergence of multiculturalism which is a product of French Post Modernist epistemological scepticism.
I believe it was someone else who said that they were responsible for multiculturalism.
Good memory. I did coin that phrase.
And building upon that, my mind is really spinning. Sometimes it all really does come together. I'll elaborate with you in private about that.
If you want a Google GMail account, FReepmail me.
It's what I like to call, "indentured constituency."
Crime has its coiterie of unionized counselors, prison guards, and LEOs. Social Security did the same thing to yet another segment. Environmentalism breeds dependent bureaucrats. So it goes.
Nah, I say we're way beyond that. Multiculturalism is to Marxist thought as the debris inside the sarcophagus is to Chernobyl.
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