Tuesday, 18 August 2015

The Myth of "Cultural Marxism"

The great John sets you straight.
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4 comments:

  1. Anonymous18 August 2015 at 14:45

    I've read the original by Michael Acuna and it's unfortunately nonsense.

    The fact that, as others have already pointed out, capitalism has found a way to work with the ideas of the New Left doesn't in any way change the origin or intended purpose of those ideas.

    As Peter Hitchens once put it: "If Leftism pays, that's fine".

    If you examine the origins of everything from affirmative action and the Equality Act to 'hate-speech laws' and the "check your privelege" social media craze, you will see the same leftwing ideas with the same origins.

    The Soviet Union was the first government in Europe to legalise abortion.

    Universal childcare-in Labour's 2015 manifesto and already available in Sweden-was first pioneered in the Soviet Union in the former East Germany (it was abolished when the Berlin Wall fell).

    Comprehensive schools were imposed on East Germany for 40 years by the Soviet regime as Peter Hitchens ceaselessly points out.

    Sex education was first introduced to schools when Marxist intellectual Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary; one of Lukacs’s first acts was to introduce sex education into Hungary’s state schools.

    The Marxist New Left icon Herbert Marcuse-author of the phrase "make love, not war", and his theory of “liberating tolerance"-that expressing conservative opinions should be outlawed-was the origin of the hate-speech codes adopted across American University campuses in the 1960's (and affirmative action on behalf of sexual, racial and cultural minorities) that became part of hate-speech laws and the Equality Act 2010.

    "Cultural studies", affirmative action and modernist art all have intellectual roots among the same thinkers.

    Labour's Marxist Equality Act 2010-which forces public servants (including teachers) and businesses to actively promote groups with 'protected characteristics'-effectively making Christian morality illegal in the workplace-puts Cultural Marxism on the statute book.

    Very few people realise what's going on when they see a totalitarian state with Christian bakeries legally forced to promote homosexuality or Christian B&B's closed down for refusing to adhere to Political Correctness.

    "Liberating tolerance" indeed.




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  2. Anonymous18 August 2015 at 14:47

    The origin of hate-speech laws in one essay.

    http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm

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  3. Anonymous19 August 2015 at 17:14

    @Anon,

    You overstate the importance of Marxism in the West. Most of the theories that have been used to support the legalization of abortion, gay marriage, and sexual libertinism have more in common with liberalism than Marxism, that is, ideas like self-ownership, the right to contract, and utilitarianism. That there is some overlap with Marxism is inevitable because liberalism and Marxism have the same root in Enlightenment thought.

    This is what Fanfani meant when he described capitalism and communism as having the same goal: the total rationalization of life based on economics. Christianity, because it supports non-economistic values, has to be restricted to the realm of the private, which is progressively shrinking as capitalism needs to continually expel religion from the public sphere to advance. Thus we can see why conservatives are so uncomfortable with Pope Francis. He is spelling out very clearly the Church's ancient position on social and economic policy and they don't like it because it clashes with their brand of economic liberalism. Of course, social liberals dislike the Pope's stances on marriage and abortion. The problem is liberalism in its entirety!

    Also, I would point out that Cultural Marxism must have failed both in the Eastern Bloc and in the West. It failed in the East because Eastern Europe, after say the 1960s, was probably more socially conservative than the West. Russia, where the communist experience was deepest, seems to be the most immune to social liberalism. Also, remember that the massive explosion of pornography and prostitution happened in the East after capitalism was restored.

    As for the West, if the purpose of Cultural Marxism was to prepare the West for socialism, then it is not working very well as the power of the Western working class has been eroded significantly since the 1970s and the capitalist class has gone from victory to victory, lowering taxes on corporations and the wealthy, destroying unions, privatizing publically-owned enterprises, and imposing austerity.

    I don't think anyone denies that the Frankfurt School existed or had followers in academia, its just that the Right magnifies its influence to an absurd degree while ignoring that their own favored economic system is causing all of the social and cultural changes it does not like.

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  4. Anonymous21 August 2015 at 12:59

    John. Thanks for your reply-I've only just seen it.

    Yes, as I said, capitalism has found a way to amalgamate Marxist ideas. But these ideas have their roots in radical left-wing thought.

    Conservatives are uncomfortable with Pope Francis because he has embraced the rival religion of Man-Made Global Warming (which suppresses any dissent with abuse; see what happened to dissenting scientists like Pat Michaels or Richard Lindzen) and because he appears to have a socially-liberal agenda, as epitomised by his bizarre "who am I to judge?" comment about homosexual acts (what an extraordinary thing for the Pope to say about sin!)

    Cultural Marxism is most certainly not liberalism; it is profoundly totalitarian (so libertarians are united with conservatives in opposing it).

    Like economic Marxism, Cultural Marxism exhibits the following characteristics; state expropriation from the dominant class or group-affirmative action programs expropriate job opportunities and University places from the dominant group; censorship of dissenting speech, via "hate-speech" and 'anti-discrimination' laws; a 'single-factor' explanation of history as determined by which groups (defined in terms of race, sexuality etc) have power over which other groups.

    Lastly, of course, both seek to impose a 'truth' which runs counter to human nature and reality; (see the desperate, failed attempts to erase the 'gender pay gap' because it reveals that men and women are actually different).

    Or look at history teachers attempts to replace white, Christian, conservative Florence Nightingale with Mary Seacole ( a historical nonentity who notoriously got her patients drunk, and is literally only in our school history curriculum because of her skin colour').

    Cultural Marxism is much larger than the Frankfurt School-its ideas derive from earlier communists like Antonio Gramsci and George Lukacs (famously said "who will save us from Western civilisation?").

    For its influence, look at how the canon has been transformed in Western Universities, from "women's studies" and cultural studies" courses to anti-patriotic history-and examine how many US Universities have adopted bitterly repressive "hate-speech" codes, and pioneered affirmative action before the Government introduced it.

    New Labour-filled with New Left Euro-communists and ex-Marxists-introduced many of these ideas into British legislation through the horrible Macpherson Report which branded our entire police force 'institutionally racist', the Racial and Religious Hatred Act and the Equality Act 2010 which introduced 'positive' action' into British law, as well as a duty on public servants to "promote" equality and diversity.

    Prostitution and pornography are, as you say, market phenomena and are not really connected to this.

    But other things which are connected to it-like universal state childcare, state-funded abortion, and state sex education-were all first pioneered by Communist regimes, as I point out in my last post.

    Marcuse's theory of "repressive tolerance" now shapes almost the entire modern Left, and it's bitter accusations of "homophobia", "sexism", 'transphobia' and "xenophobia" directed at anyone still legally allowed to disagree with any part of their revolutionary agenda.

    To their credit, Nick Cohen-and some other leftists-have now begun to dissent against this.

    See below.

    http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/5981/full





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