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Cultural Marxism is a school of thought or offshoot of Marxism that conceives of ideology as central to the legitimization of social relations. Whereas what usually passed as "orthodox" Marxism saw class relations as the driving force of social and historical change, younger theorists emerging after World War I, bearing witness to the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in Europe especially, criticized earlier Marxists for their "economism," or needless reduction of social relations to purely economic relations, which in no way helped explain why working class Europeans, rather than uniting against their economic exploiters, were uniting with the wealthy along nationalistic lines. This new emphasis on ideology was not wholly at the expense of economics, but in addition to the economic factors that Karl Marx emphasized. In fact, a major debate that emerged out of Cultural Marxism was the precise relationship between the material and ideological relations within a given society's class structure. Similarly, many of these new Marxist thinkers re-read original manuscripts of Karl Marx and discovered numerous references to the role of ideology (for example, Karl Marx's "The German Ideology"). Cultural Marxism is also called "Western Marxism" in an attempt to distinguish these thinkers from earlier "economistic" thinkers, particularly given that Western Marxists were almost universally at odds with Stalinism and were much more interested in applying Marxist theories concerning ideology and historical materialism more so than they were in applying Marxist politics of working class unity.

It is also important to note that, as these new theories developed and evolved, the terms "ideology," "language" and "culture" grew increasingly synonymous and interchangeable, which has enabled us in hindsight to group this diverse set of theorists into a single school of thought. An outgrowth of Western Marxism (especially from Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School) and finding popularity in the 1960s as cultural studies, cultural Marxism has contributed to a now fairly common argument that our identities -- for example, racial, national, or gender identity -- are cultural constructs, rather than natural condititions. Historical and anthropological data shows these concepts to have changed considerably over time, even within a single culture. Similarly, other conditions or phenomena -- for instance, the drive for individual acquisition of wealth associated with capitalism, nationalism, the nuclear family, gender roles, race and other forms of cultural identity; that were believed to be intrinsic to Western society, are in fact historically recent developments. Rather than natural and static conditions, these are cultural or ideological developments that have evolved as material relations, economies and technologies evolved, helping to rationalize and maintain various hierarchies, such as a small ruling class, patriarchy, and racism. Some Western Marxist analyses aim to deconstruct, meaning to break down these ideologies, by examining the language (or metalanguage), rituals, customs, and other cultural forms particularly as they relate to the material conditions of the social classes involved. Cultural Marxists use Marxist methods (historical research, the identification of economic interest, the study of the mutually conditioning relations between parts of a social order) to try to understand the complexity of power in a given society and to make it possible to criticize what, cultural Marxists propose, appears natural but is in fact ideological.

Explanation of the "Cultural Marxism" theory
"We are, in Marx's terms, "an ensemble of social relations" and we live our lives at the core of the intersection of a number of unequal social relations based on hierarchically interrelated structures which, together, define the historical specificity of the capitalist modes of production and reproduction and underlay their observable manifestations."

- Martha E. Gimenez, Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy

According to UCLA professor and critical theorist Douglas Kellner, "Many 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life." Scholars have employed various types of Marxist social criticism to analyze cultural artifacts, which could include anything from a religious sermon, a parade, a national festival, a film, or a television commercial.

Frankfurt School and critical theory
The Frankfurt School is the name usually used to refer to a group of scholars who have been associated at one point or another over several decades with the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt, including Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Wolfgang Fritz Haug and Jürgen Habermas. In the 1930s the Institute for Social Research was forced out of Germany by the rise of the Nazi Party. In 1933, the Institute left Germany for Geneva. It then moved to New York City in 1934, where it became affiliated with Columbia University. Its journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung was accordingly renamed Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. It was at that moment that much of its important work began to emerge, having gained a favorable reception within American and English academia.

Among the key works of the Frankfurt School which applied Marxist categories to the study of culture were Adorno's "On Popular Music," which was written with George Simpson and published in Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences in 1941. Adorno observed signs of conformity in contemporary mass society and also at the conversion of individual artistic expression into the mass production of standardised commodities. He argued that popular music was, by design and promotion, "wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society", At the core of Adorno's work was a concern that the marketplace had a deleterious influence on individuality and that, under the guise or illusion of freedom of choice, conformity in the marketplace could lead to ideological conditions similar to that of the Nazi Germany that they had escaped. An ironic, contemporary parallel of Adorno's argument might be that, despite his and his (Jewish) colleagues concerns about the destruction of individuality, freedom of thought, and the fine arts, Adorno's Frankfurt School is frequently blamed by Anglo-American fascists for the destruction of their Western tradition of individuality, freedom of thought, and fine arts (for example, Christian paintings and musical compositions). Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", originally a chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), which argued that culture reinforced "the absolute power of capitalism", and "Culture Industry Reconsidered", a 1963 radio lecture by Adorno.

After 1945 a number of these surviving Marxists returned to both West and East Germany. Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt in 1953 and reestablished the Institute. In West Germany in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a revived interest in Marxism produced a new generation of Marxists engaged with analyzing matters such as the cultural transformations taking place under Fordist capitalism, the impact of new types of popular music and art on traditional cultures, and maintaining the political integrity of discourse in the public sphere. This renewed interest was exemplified by the journal Das Argument. The tradition of thought associated with the Frankfurt School is Critical Theory.

Birmingham School and cultural studies
The work of the Frankfurt School and of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci was particularly influential in the 1960s, and had a major impact on the development of cultural studies, especially in Britain. Gramsci's theory of hegemony, meaning the ability for cultural institutions to maintain or adapt ideologies to maintain power relations, proved very influential amongst British scholars focusing on literature, media, and advertising, as well as more traditional historical research. As Douglas Kellner writes:"Cultural Marxism was highly influential throughout Europe and the Western world, especially in the 1960s when Marxian thought was at its most prestigious and procreative. Theorists like Roland Barthes and the Tel Quel group in France, Galvano Della Volpe, Lucio Colletti, and others in Italy, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and cohort of 1960s cultural radicals in the English-speaking world, and a large number of theorists throughout the globe used cultural Marxism to develop modes of cultural studies that analyzed the production, interpretation, and reception of cultural artifacts within concrete socio-historical conditions that had contested political and ideological effects and uses. One of the most famous and influential forms of cultural studies, initially under the influence of cultural Marxism, emerged within the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England within a group often referred to as the Birmingham School." The term "culture" had long been assumed to mean "fine" arts and letters and, as Matthew Arnold once wrote, "the best which has been thought and said." Literary critics T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis had thought similarly of the term culture, and social sciences (including History) were essentially based on this preference for what was properly "high" culture. (In Gramsci's terms, then, even History itself was a form of hegemony, reinforcing elite values through the telling of their past and often generalizing elite customs out to an entire nation-state.) Through the Birmingham School, however, critics such as Raymond Williams asserted that "culture is ordinary," and that the lived experiences, pastimes, and customs of ordinary people constituted "culture" no less than those of social elites. Such a shift would have tremendous influence on the types of datum that historians could use, since the lives of ordinary working people were now valid topics of historical research, rather than the more traditional annals of elections, dynasties, elections, or the lives of artists and composers. This shift would help usher in a new wave of social history, which included E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Perry Anderson, Shiela Rowbotham and E.H. Carr.

Use by 21st century US conservatives
In current political rhetoric, the term has come into use by some social conservatives, such as historian William S. Lind, who associate it with a set of principles that they claim are in simple contradiction with traditional values of Western society and the Christian religion. In this usage, political correctness and multiculturalism, which are identified with cultural Marxism, are argued to have their true origin in a Marxian movement to undermine or abnegate such traditional values.

Critiques
Since the 1990s, the term "cultural Marxism" has been widely used by cultural conservatives. Many conservatives have argued that "Cultural Marxists" and the Frankfurt School helped spark the counterculture social movements of the 1960s as part of a continuing plan of transferring Marxist subversion into cultural terms in the form of Freudo-Marxism.

Since the early 1990s, paleoconservatives such as Patrick Buchanan and William S. Lind have argued that "Cultural Marxism" is a dominant strain of thought within the American left, and associate it with a philosophy to destroy Western civilization. Buchanan has asserted that the Frankfurt School commandeered the American mass media, and used this cartel to infect the minds of Americans.

Lind argues that, "'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. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.'" Lind argues that "Political Correctness" has resulted in American citizens, particularly in academia, being "afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic" and that such changes can be attributed to the influence of cultural Marxists. Similarly, conservative Paul Gottfried's book, The Strange Death of Marxism argues that Marxism survived and evolved since the fall of the Soviet Union in the form of "cultural Marxism": "Neomarxists called themselves Marxists without accepting all of Marx’s historical and economic theories but while upholding socialism against capitalism, as a moral position …. Thereafter socialists would build their conceptual fabrics on Marx’s notion of “alienation,” extracted from his writings of the 1840s …. [they] could therefore dispense with a strictly materialist analysis and shift … focus toward religion, morality, and aesthetics. ..." Lind comments on Gottfried's book: "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."

In a similar vein, in her Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, Elizabeth Kantor says that it is possible to determine what works of literature are valuable, but that "cultural Marxists" since the 1960s have completely changed the criteria so as to reward mediocre books and denounce truly good literature as racist, sexist, homophobic and elitist.

Many of the conservative attacks on "cultural Marxism" have dwelt on an alleged Jewish involvement in the current. Psychology professor Kevin B. MacDonald gives "cultural Marxism" as an example of Jews "pursuing a Jewish agenda in establishing and participating in these movements.

Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik placed this critique of "cultural marxism" as a cornerstone of his ideology.

According to Richard Lichtman, a social psychology professor at the Wright Institute, the Frankfurt School is "a convenient target that very few people really know anything about.... By grounding their critique in Marxism and using the Frankfurt School, [cultural conservatives] make it seem like it's quite foreign to anything American. It takes on a mysterious cast and translates as an incomprehensible, anti-American, foreign movement that is only interested in undermining the U.S." Lichtman says that the "idea being transmitted is that we are being infected from the outside." Lichtman's critique parallels that of rhetorical critic Edwin Black who demonstrated how John Birch Society co-founder Robert Welch used a similar disease metaphor in his writings and speeches during the "Red scare" era of the 1950s and 60s.

The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Lind's theory as "one that has been pushed since the mid-1990s by the Free Congress Foundation — the idea that a small group of German philosophers, known as the Frankfurt School, had devised a cultural form of Marxism that was aimed at subverting Western civilization". The SPLC reports that this theory has been taken up by "a number of hate groups".

More recently, many critiques of Cultural Marxism have appeared on various conservative websites that tend to emphasize racial aspects of Cultural Marxism; these critiques define Cultural Marxism as:

"Cultural Marxism: An offshoot of Marxism that gave birth to political correctness, multiculturalism and “anti-racism.” Unlike traditional Marxism that focuses on economics, Cultural Marxism focuses on culture and maintains that all human behavior is a result of culture (not heredity / race) and thus malleable. Cultural Marxists deny that biological reality of race and argue that race is a “social construct”. Nonetheless, Cultural Marxists support the race-based identity politics of non-whites. Cultural Marxists typically support race-based affirmative action, the proposition state (as opposed to a nation rooted in common ancestry), elevating non-Western religions above Western religions, speech codes and censorship, multiculturalism, diversity training, anti-Western education curricula, maladaptive sexual norms and anti-male feminism, the dispossession of white people, and mass Third World immigration into Western countries. Cultural Marxists have promoted idea that white people, instead of birthing white babies, should interracially marry or adopt non-white children. Samuel P. Huntington maintained that Cultural Marxism is an anti-white ideology."