User:Jobrot/sandbox/Cultural Marxist

Cultural Marxism is The Frankfurt School's critique of The Culture Industry. It is a form of anti-capitalist cultural critique which specifically targets those aspects of culture that are seen as profit driven and mass produced by capitalism. As an area of discourse it has commonly considered the industrialization and mass-production of culture by The Culture Industry as having an overall negative effect on society, an effect - it is claimed - that can reify the audience away from developing a more authentic sense of human values.

Traditional targets of criticism for this school of thought have been forms of mass communication such as the Hollywood cinema industry, radio, news media, and television. Pioneers of this mode of analysis include The Frankfurt School thinkers, The Birmingham School and E.P. Thompson, all of whom have their backgrounds within the Marxist and Neo-Marxist traditions.

Within more recent history Cultural Marxists have critiqued post modernism in favour of 'communicative reason' and identity politics (also known as recognition politics), arguing that redistributive politics should retain prominence within their discourse.

In modern political parlance, Cultural Marxism has been slandered by Cultural Conservatives and mistaken for Cultural liberalism, a separate and more permissive strain of cultural thought. The hyperbole and misinterpretation involved in this Culture War has led to Cultural Marxism being seen as a kind of Conspiracy Theory. Also see the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory section.

History and development
The term "Cultural Marxism" first appeared in Trent Schroyer's 1973 book The Critique of Domination, and has most commonly been applied to the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools of Cultural studies. These two groups both originated within the traditions of Marxist humanism, as well as the anti-fascism found during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, with members of The Frankfurt School fleeing Nazi Germany, and members of The Birmingham School having fought for the Allies of World War II. Rather than being its own category of Soviet or Orthodox Marxism;- "Cultural Marxism", within Cultural Studies, is seen as an attempt at finding a form of post-marxist Cultural Analysis which extends beyond the traditional base and superstructure model. It has been suggested by Frederic Jameson that Cultural Studies be redefined as Cultural Marxism as both seek to interrogate the unexamined ideological constraints placed on Cultural Production under capitalism, and to question their implications for society as a whole. In this sense, Cultural Marxism views The Culture Industry as creating a type of false consciousness. As a form of media literacy "Cultural Marxism" seeks to critique ideology itself.

The Frankfurt School
Antonio Gramsci's theory of Cultural hegemony is seen as a fundamental starting place for the philosophies of The Frankfurt School. However Frankfurt School members cannot be said to have always formed a tightly woven series of complementary projects, as the school was comprised of individual theorists whom often had internal disagreements. The general make up of their cultural Marxism was one which critiqued the ethics and aesthetics that came out of mass-culture's tendency to homogenize more complex or unique forms of high culture.

Adorno particularly lamented this standardization, which can be described as "a concept used to characterize the formulaic products of capitalist-driven mass media and mass culture that appeal to the lowest common denominator in pursuit of maximum profit". Adorno specifically says of standardization that: "'The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organising, and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape' -Theodor W. Adorno, Enlightenment as mass-deception"

Adorno further notes the reifying effects of this process of standardization when it comes to political discourse and media. Putting it thus in Minima Moralia:

"'The Culture Industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.'"

Members of The Frankfurt School wrote at length about the limitations capitalism can place on reason and social development when it remains hidden as an unexamined ideology or hidden curriculum. The resolution of which is known as "the negation of the negation" and has been compared to Marx's idea of false consciousness as it seeks the criticism of ideology itself as a fundamental constraint to free thought. In Horkheimer's words, the aim of The Frankfurt School was "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

In a 1977 television interview with Professor Bryan Magee, Marcuse stated that "The Frankfurt School pointed out to what extend, this apparently perfectly clear progressiveness, this liberating tendency, was at the same time tied up with regressive and repressive tendencies".

The Birmingham School
E.P. Thompson's Marxist humanism as well as the individual philosophies of the founders of The Birmingham School (Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall) provide the influences for their "British Cultural Marxism" (also known as British Cultural Studies) as housed at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies developed later than The Frankfurt School and are seen as providing a parallel response. Accordingly "British Cultural Marxism" focuses on later issues such as Globalization, Americanization, Censorship, and Multiculturalism. Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), Raymond William's Culture and Society (1958) and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working class (1964) form the foundational texts for the school, with Stuart Hall's Encoding/decoding model of communication as well as his writings on multiculturalism in Britain arriving later but carrying equal gravitas.

Hoggart, Williams, and Hall were all Western Marxists and Cultural Theorists from working-class backgrounds, and their British Cultural Marxism "valorized a working classs that the Frankfurt School saw as defeated in Germany and much of Europe during the era of fascism", a working-class which according to UCLA professor Douglas Kellner The Frankfurt School "never saw as a strong resource for emancipatory social change." The Birmingham School however greatly valued and contributed to the class consciousness that is a long standing tradition within The Structure of British Society.

Due to their positions as literary experts, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams were called as witnesses during The Lady Chatterley Affair, a court case concerning censorship in publishing, the outcome of which is widely regarded as defining Britain in the 1960s as a "Permissive society". They argued on the side of freedom of language, and against censorship.

Within Hoggart's major work, The Uses of Literacy, he laments the loss of an authentic working class popular culture in Britain, and denounces the imposition of a mass culture by means of advertising, media and Americanisation. He argues against the concept of 'the masses' which he claims is both condescending and elitist. Later referring to this change in cultural production as "massification" and saying it 'colonized local communities and robbed them of their distinctive features'

Where as the Frankfurt School exhorted the values of high culture, The Birmingham School have attempted to bring high culture back down to real life whilst avoiding moral relativism.

Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory
'Cultural Marxism' in modern political parlance can often refer to a conspiracy theory which sees the Frankfurt School as part of an ongoing attempt to take over and destroy Western society.

The academic meaning of the term differs from this interpretation hugely, and remained relatively unused until the late 1990s when it was re-appropriated by paleoconservatives as part of an ongoing Culture War in which it is claimed that the very same theorists who were analysing and objecting to the "massification" and mass control via commercialization of culture were in fact in control and staging their own attack on Western society, using 1960s counter culture, multiculturalism, progressive politics and political correctness as their methods. This conspiracy theory version of the term is associated with American religious paleoconservatives such as William S. Lind, Pat Buchanan, and Paul Weyrich, but also holds currency among alt-right/white nationalist groups and the neo-reactionary movement.

Weyrich first aired his conception of Cultural Marxism in a 1998 speech to the Civitas Institute's Conservative Leadership Conference, later repeating this usage in his widely 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 it Lind identifies the presence of homosexuals 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. Lind has since published his own depiction of a fictional Cultural Marxist apocalypse. Lind and Weyrich's writings on this subject advocate fighting what they perceive as Cultural Marxism with "a vibrant cultural conservatism" composed of "retroculture" fashions from the past, a return to rail systems as public transport and an agrarian culture of self-reliance modeled after the Amish. Paul Weyrich and his protégé Eric Heubeck later openly advocated for a more direct form of "taking over political structures" by the "New Traditionalist Movement" in his 2001 paper The Integration of Theory and Practice written for Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation.

In 1999 Lind led the creation of an hour-long program entitled "Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School". Some of Lind's content went on to be reproduced by James Jaeger in his YouTube film "CULTURAL MARXISM: The Corruption of America".

The intellectual historian Martin Jay commented on this phenomenon saying that Lind's original documentary:

"'... spawned a number of condensed textual versions, which were reproduced on a number of radical right-wing sites. These in turn led to a welter 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 and gay rights to the decay of traditional education and even environmentalism are ultimately attributable to the insidious influence of the members of the Institute for Social Research who came to America in the 1930's.'"

Dr. Heidi Beirich likewise claims the conspiracy theory is used to demonize various conservative “bêtes noires” including "feminists, homosexuals, secular humanists, multiculturalist, sex educators, environmentalist, immigrants, and black nationalists."

According to Chip Berlet, who specializes in the study of extreme right-wing movements, the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory found fertile ground within the Tea Party movement of 2009, with contributions published in the American Thinker and WorldNetDaily highlighted by some Tea Party websites.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that William S. Lind in 2002 gave a speech to a Holocaust denial conference on the topic of Cultural Marxism. In this speech Lind noted that all the members of The Frankfurt School were "to a man, Jewish", but it is reported that Lind claims not to "question whether the Holocaust occurred" and suggests he was present in an official capacity for the Free Congress Foundation "to work with a wide variety of groups on an issue-by-issue basis".

Adherents of the theory often seem to mean that the existence of things like modern feminism, anti-white racism, and sexualization are dependent on the Frankfurt School, even though these processes and movements predate the 1920s. Although the theory became more widespread in the late 1990s and through the 2000s, the modern iteration of the theory originated in Michael Minnicino's 1992 essay "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'", published in Fidelio Magazine by the Schiller Institute.Jay, Martin (2010), "Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe". Salmagundi (Fall 2010-Winter 2011, 168–169): 30–40. Quote:"On August 18, 2010, Fidel Castro contributed an article to the Cuban Communist Party paper Granma in which he endorsed the bizarre allegations of an obscure Lithuanian-born conspiracy theorist named Daniel Estulin in a 2005 book entitled The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club....what makes his embrace of Estulin's book especially risible is the subordinate argument—and this is the part that most concerns me here—that the inspiration for the subversion of domestic unrest came from Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal and their colleagues at the Institute for Social search in the 1950's. Here we have clearly broken through the looking glass and entered a parallel universe in which normal rules of evidence and plausibility have been suspended. It is a mark of the silliness of these claims that they [were] even subjected to ridicule by Rush Limbaugh on his August 20, 2010 radio show.... Limbaugh, to be sure, ignored the other most blatant absurdity in Estulin's scheme, which was attributing to the Frankfurt School a position precisely opposite to what its members had always taken. That is, when they discussed the "culture industry" it was with the explicit criticism, ironically echoed here by Castro, that it functioned to reconcile people to their misery and dull the pain of their suffering..... But the opening salvo had, in fact, been fired a decade earlier in a lengthy essay by one Michael Minnicino called "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'," published in 1992 in the obscure journal Fidelio.[4] Its provenance is particularly telling: it was an organ of the Lyndon Larouche movement cum cult, one of the less savory curiosities of nightmare fringe politics....What began as a bizarre Lyndon Larouche coinage has become the common currency of a larger and larger public of addled enragés..... The Schiller Institute, a branch of the LaRouche movement, further promoted the idea in 1994. The Minnicino article charges that the Frankfurt School promoted Modernism in the arts as a form of Cultural pessimism, and shaped the Counterculture of the 1960s (such as the British pop band The Beatles) after the Wandervogel of the Ascona commune. The Larouche movement is otherwise mostly known for believing that the British Empire still exists, is trying to take control of the world (mostly, but not exclusively by economical means), and, among other things, also controls the global drug trade.

More recently, the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik included the term in his document "2083: A European Declaration of Independence", which along with The Free Congress Foundation's "Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology" was e-mailed to 1,003 addresses approximately 90 minutes before the 2011 bomb blast in Oslo for which Breivik was responsible. Segments of William S. Lind's writings on Cultural Marxism have been found within Breivik's manifesto.

Philosopher and political science lecturer Jérôme Jamin has stated, "Next to the global dimension of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, there is its innovative and original dimension, which lets its authors avoid racist discourses and pretend to be defenders of democracy". Professor and Oxford Fellow Matthew Feldman has traced the terminology back to the pre-war German concept of Cultural Bolshevism locating it as part of the degeneration theory that aided in Hitler's rise to power. William S. Lind confirms this as his period of interest, claiming that "It [Cultural Marxism] is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I."