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Cultural Marxism is a social theory and movement derived from Marxist historiography that seeks to examine and judge all ideas and culture based on their relation to power, believing that cultural artifacts/productions (e.g., books, institutions, etc.) and ideas are representations of fundamental power structures. In essence, it follows the theoretical framework that culture (e.g., ideas, religious beliefs, values, etc.) is fundamentally determined by one’s position in a social or class hierarchy. In other words, per the traditional Marxist sense, the superstructure (i.e., culture) is, in some way, a mere expression of the base (i.e., relations and means of production)."

In practice, cultural Marxism developed through Marxist historians who gradually became less orthodox from Karl Marx’s theory of history, or dialectical materialism. While rejecting Marxist history, these historians would retain Marx's class analysis, which would come to define, through various alterations, the essence of cultural Marxism. According to Watts (2018): "In their own ways, these thinkers challenged the orthodox Marxist unidimensional emphasis on economics at the expense of the capitalist society’s superstructure."

Perhaps the most significant element in Marxian class theory is Marx’s notion of exploitation: According to Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, the orthodox Marxist perspective believed that class and class conflict were present "whenever society was divided between exploiters and exploited," thus political organization was required to "channel such conflict into an emancipatory class consciousness." Moving away from the orthodox notion, however, Marxist historian E. P. Thompson would reshape it by emphasizing the cultural elements of the working class, instead of purely economic forces as Marx contended. More specifically, Thompson argued that, not only is class consciousness coerced by economic factors, it is dictated by cultural and religious factors just as well: "Class consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms."

Though its meaning remains somewhat unclear and contested by many, the term has had various—scholarly and ideological—uses, including as a far-right conspiracy theory. Associated with American religious fundamentalists and paleoconservatives, this right-wing theory of cultural marxism attributes the "ills" of contemporary American culture—"from feminism, affirmative action, sexual liberation, racial equality, multiculturalism and gay rights to the decay of traditional education"—to the 1930s' Frankfurt School of social theory and critical philosophy. While it has been accused of such, the concept of cultural Marxism is, by and large, a much more substantive concept than the conspiracy contended by right-wing ideologues.

History
Philosopher and literary critic Russell Blackford attributes the first use of the term to a book by scholar Trent Schoyer, "who was sympathetic to the theories he characterized as cultural Marxism."

Frankfurt School
In 1930s Germany, a school of neo-Marxist thinkers developed critical theory, which they held as a necessary tool in liberating humans from the binds of capitalism. Known as the Frankfurt School, this group involved the writings of such theorists as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, György Lukács, and Herbert Marcuse, among others. The first two—Adorno and Horkheimer—gained prominence for their critique of the Culture Industry, which they used to describe the use of popular culture in order to "manipulate Westerners into acquiescing to the dictates and norms of a capitalist society."

Gramsci and Althusser
In the 1930s, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, a key figure in the canon of cultural Marxism, developed a more elaborate concept he called hegemony. For Gramsci, a war of ideas necessarily precedes any actual war against the capitalist ruling class. Hegemony is the use of mass culture by the ruling class in order to dominate the masses and defend the core interests of elites. To Gramsci, the culture of the ruling class was "not coercively imposed upon the lower classes." Rather, they were "assented to, voluntarily."

As such, revolution can only occur after a long battle of position against these cultural and ideological defenses. According to Gramsci, every revolution is preceded by an intense period of criticism, a culture war. A key role in this process of counter-hegemony is played by organic intellectuals—Gramsci's term for those born into an oppressed, or subaltern, class. Such intellectuals refine the 'common sense' of the masses into good sense, "thereby planting the seeds of a more widespread revolutionary consciousness."

Just as Gramsci, French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser argued that culture plays a pivotal role in the reproduction of capitalism. Althusser is recognized for contending that "Institutional State Apparatuses," such as the education system, the church, and the family, work to propagate and perpetuate capitalist ideology.

Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory
Though its meaning remains somewhat unclear and contested by many, the term has had various—scholarly and ideological. One of the specific uses of the term Cultural Marxism has been by a far-right, antisemitic conspiracy theory from the late 1990s, in which the Frankfurt School is argued to be the origin of an ongoing academic and intellectual movement that intends to undermine and destroy Western culture and values.

According to this theory, the Frankfurt School and other Marxist theorists were part of a conspiracy to attack Western society by undermining traditionalist conservatism and Christianity using the 1960s counterculture, multiculturalism, progressive politics and political correctness. Associated with American religious fundamentalists and paleoconservatives, such as William S. Lind, Pat Buchanan, and Paul Weyrich, the theory also holds currency among the alt-right, white nationalists, Neo-Nazi organizations, and the neo-reactionary movement.

In 1998, Weyrich presented his version of the conspiracy theory in a speech to the Conservative Leadership Conference of the Civitas Institute, which was then published the speech in his syndicated Culture war letter. At Weyrich's request, William S. Lind wrote a short history of his conception of Cultural Marxism for the Free Congress Foundation, in which he identifies the presence of openly gay people on television as proof of Cultural Marxist control over the mass media and claims that Herbert Marcuse considered a coalition of "blacks, students, feminist women, and homosexuals" as a vanguard of cultural revolution.

In the Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe (2011), historian Martin Jay says that Lind's documentary of conservative counterculture, Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School (1999), was effective propaganda, because: "'[It] spawned a number of condensed textual versions, which were reproduced on a number of radical, right-wing sites. These, in turn, led to a plethora of new videos, now available on YouTube, which feature an odd cast of pseudo-experts regurgitating exactly the same line. The message is numbingly simplistic: All the 'ills' of modern American culture, from feminism, affirmative action, sexual liberation, racial equality, multiculturalism and gay rights to the decay of traditional education, and even environmentalism, are ultimately attributable to the insidious intellectual influence of the members of the Institute for Social Research who came to America in the 1930s."

Cultural pessimism
In his essay "New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'" (1992), Michael Minnicino presented a precursor of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory on behalf of the Schiller Institute of the LaRouche political movement. Minnicino said the "Jewish intellectuals" of the Frankfurt School promoted modern art to make cultural pessimism the spirit of the counter-culture of the 1960s, based upon the counter-culture of the Wandervogel, the socially liberal German youth movement whose Swiss Monte Verità commune was the 19th-century predecessor of Western counter-culture.

In Fascism: Fascism and Culture (2003), professor and Oxford fellow Matthew Feldman traced the etymology of the term "Cultural Marxism" back to the anti-Semitic term Kulturbolschewismus (Cultural Bolshevism), which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party used to assert that Jewish cultural influence was the source of German social degeneration under the liberal régime of the Weimar Republic (1918–1939), and also the cause of social degeneration in the West.

Othering of political opponents
In the article titled Hate Crimes, Vol. 5, Heidi Beirich stated that the conspiracy theory is used to demonize various conservative "bêtes noires" including feminists, homosexuals, secular humanists, multiculturalists, sex educators, environmentalists, immigrants, and black nationalists.

In Europe, the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik quoted Lind's usage of the term "Cultural Marxism" in his political manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, writing that the "sexually transmitted disease (STD) epidemic in Western Europe is a result of cultural Marxism", that "Cultural Marxism defines Muslims, feminist women, homosexuals, and some additional minority groups, as virtuous, and they view ethnic Christian European men as evil", and that "The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg is a cultural-Marxist-controlled political entity." About 90 minutes before killing 77 people in his terrorist attacks in Norway on July 22nd, 2001, Breivik e-mailed 1003 people a copy of his 1500-page manifesto and a copy of Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology, which was edited by Lind and published by the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation.

In the article titled Collectivists, Communists, Labor Bosses, and Treason: The Tea Parties as Right-wing, Populist Counter-subversion Panic, Chip Berlet identifies the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory as an ideological basis of the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party. The Tea Party identifies as a right-wing populist movement; its claims of social subversion echo earlier white-nationalist claims of racial, social, and cultural subversion. The economic elites use populist rhetoric to encourage counter-subversion panics. Thus, a large, middle-class white constituency is politically deceived into siding with the ruling-class social and economic elites to defend their relative and precarious socioeconomic position in the middle class. Cultural scapegoats, such as mythical conspiracies claiming that collectivists, communists, labor bosses, and nonwhite citizens and immigrants are to blame for the economic, political, and social failures of free-market capitalism. In that manner, under the guise of patriotism, economic libertarianism, traditional Christian values, and nativism, right-wing accusations of Cultural Marxism defended the racist and sexist social hierarchies specifically opposed to the "big government" policies of the Obama administration.

In the essay Cultural Marxism and the Radical Right, the political scientist Jérôme Jamin said that "next to the global dimension of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, there is its innovative and original dimension, which lets its racist authors avoid racist discourses, and pretend to be defenders of democracy in their respective countries". The essay titled How Trump's Paranoid White House Sees 'Deep State' Enemies on all Sides reported that an employee within the Trump administration by the name of Richard Higgins was dismissed from the U.S. National Security Council because he published a memorandum called POTUS & Political Warfare, wherein Higgins claimed the existence of an alleged left-wing conspiracy to destroy the Trump presidency and that "American public intellectuals of Cultural Marxism, foreign Islamicists, and globalist bankers, the news media, and politicians from the Republican and the Democrat parties were attacking Trump because he represents an existential threat to the cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative in the U.S."

"Political Correctness" and anti-Semitic Canards
In the speech titled "The Origins of Political Correctness" (2000), William S. Lind established the ideological and etymological lineage of Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory:

"If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political correctness is Cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the Hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I, to Kulturbolshewismus. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with the basic tenets of classical Marxism, the parallels are very obvious."

Lind's history of the term and its meanings were described in "The Alt-right’s Favorite Meme is 100 Years Old" (2018), in which professor of law Samuel Moyn reported that social fear of Cultural Marxism is "an American contribution to the phantasmagoria of the alt-right"; while the conspiracy theory, itself, is "a crude slander, referring to Judeo-Bolshevism, something that does not exist."