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Gottfried: Strange Death of Marxism

Is the critical observation about the Frankfurt School therefore correct, that it exemplifies ‘Cultural Bolshevism,’ which pushes Marxist-Leninist revolution under a sociological-Freudian label? To the extent its practitioners and despisers would both answer to this characterization, it may in fact be valid … but if Marxism under the Frankfurt School has undergone [these] alterations, then there may be little Marxism left in it. The appeal of the Critical Theorists to Marx has become increasingly ritualistic and what there is in the theory of Marxist sources is now intermingled with identifiably non-Marxist ones …. In a nutshell, they had moved beyond Marxism … into a militantly antibourgeois stance that operates independently of Marxist economic assumptions.


 * My top quote for adding, since it was from the old page and is a decent summary of Gottfried's position.

A response to this query has come from critics of “cultural Marxism,” and most explicitly, from Pat Buchanan in The Death of the West, a work that depicts the attack on “bourgeois morality,” launched by German émigrés of the Frankfurt School, as a new and dangerous phase of the Marxist war against Western Christian society. According to Buchanan, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Eric Fromm were all German social radicals who rebuilt Marxism from an economic doctrine into a morally subversive force.15 Buchanan focuses on The Authoritarian Personality, a collection of critical essays edited by Adorno and Horkheimer that came out in 1950. In this ponderous indictment of “bourgeois Christian” society, traditional bourgeois values are made to seem “pathological” and “pre-fascist.” Through its “critical theory” applied to the established culture, the Frankfurt School, which moved to the United States from Germany in the 1930s, laid the base for its reconstructed Marxist revolution. In this new formulation, socialists would be concerned less with economic exploitation than with vicious prejudice and its seemingly respectable bearers. Unless removed from power, the dominant class would go on engendering racial hatred, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia. Cataclysmic change was essential to get rid of bourgeois society, which the Frankfurt School maintained was a source of social pathology.


 * Gottfried's summary of Buchanan, so probably not a good one to add, but here it is for what it's worth.

The presentation of cultural Marxism as the post-Communist Left may be the most plausible attempt to find a doubtful Marxist continuity. It takes seriously the claim that Frankfurt School theorists make for themselves as “Marxist cultural critics.” As a former student of Herbert Marcuse, I can personally testify that this cultural Marxist never doubted that he was vindicating Marxist- Leninist tenets. Marcuse found nothing dissimilar thematically between his observations in One-Dimensional Man, about the erotic restrictions of bourgeois culture, and Marx’s dialectical materialism. Both were attempts to highlight the “irrational” nature of capitalist society reflected in its incapacity to satisfy human wants. Moreover, Marcuse had praise for Soviet Russian socialism and, like another Frankfurt School groupie, Georg Lukacs, went out of his way to defend the Soviet “assault on fascism,” when Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian “socialist” uprising in 1956.


 * Immediately after the previous quote. Clarifies Gottfried's thesis that the School had moved beyond Marx into non-economic areas while maintaing that they were merely expanding on his core ideas.

Nothing intrinsically Marxist, that is to say, defines “cultural Marxism,” save for the evocation or hope of a postbourgeois society. Those who advocate this new Marxism, however, are driven not by historical materialism but by revulsion for bourgeois Christian civilization.


 * Expands on last quote.

If “cultural Marxism” was an import into American life, it was, like Christmas trees and hot dogs, one that flourished in its new environment.


 * All American Marxism

The attempt to treat it as alien ignores certain facts. By the time The Authoritarian Personality was brought to Europe, its themes had assumed American New Left and Cold War liberal forms.What made its psychological understanding of reactionary attitudes so thoroughly American was the consolidation of an American centralized administrative state, coming simultaneously with the influx of different nationalities.The festering presence of a “race problem” also contributed to the acceptance in the American polity of benign, scientific administration, which was supposed to solve intergroup relations by giving them a new foundation. It was the growing diversity of a changing American society, which lacked the firm ethnic character of European states, that made administered democracy, and its child, social engineering, essential to the new political landscape.The plan to secularize and sensitize Americans that radical émigrés were advancing fitted, with some modification, into what Americans were doing to and for themselves. It also in no way contradicted what mainline Protestant denominations were by then preaching about pluralism and social justice.


 * Expands above


 * There are better quotes, but Gottfried prefers the phrase "post-Marxism" (at least in this book. He has since, in several articles, embraced it and went to some lengths to define it.


 * I think my e-reader version of this is a little off as far as page numbers go, so I didn't include them. We can fill that in after we decide on the quotes.

Links

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc1pi4

https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf

http://www.drstevebest.org/TheCulturalTurnInMarxist.htm

https://www.traditionalright.com/cultural-marxism-takes-the-offensive/