Cultural Marxism

Antonio Gramsci

Cultural Marxism is a branch of Marxist ideology formulated by the Frankfurt School, which had its origins the early part of the twentieth century. Cultural Marxism comprises much of the foundation of political correctness. It emerged as a response of European Marxist intellectuals disillusioned by the early political failures of conventional economic Marxist ideology.

The central idea of Cultural Marxism is to soften up and prepare Western Civilization for economic Marxism after a gradual, relentless, sustained attack on every institution of Western culture, including schools, literature, art, film, the Judeo-Christian worldview tradition, the family, sexual mores, national sovereignty, etc. The attacks are usually framed in Marxist terms as a class struggle between oppressors and oppressed; the members of the latter class allegedly include women, minorities, homosexuals, and adherents of non-Western ideologies such as Islam. Cultural Marxism has been described as "the cultural branch of globalism."

While Marx's Communist Manifesto focused on the alleged class struggle between bourgeois (owners of the means of production) and proletariat (workers), Marx did address culture, which he intimated would change after his economic vision was implemented. Patrick Buchanan argues that Cultural Marxism succeeded where Marx failed.

Among cultural Marxists, the book Dialectic of Enlightenment is considered to be a central text.

An effective way for cultural Marxists to influence the culture is to infiltrate schools and indoctrinate students, which the Democratic Socialists of America explicitly endorsed in 2018.

History

Andrew Breitbart

Andrew Breitbart gives a great if not brief crash course discussion about Cultural Marxism with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institute for Uncommon Knowledge, and, in part, this is what he said:

Think about this: These guys left, THESE GUYS LEFT NAZI GERMANY and Mussolini's Italy to come to California in the 1940's and they lived by the beach, and they were depressed by the relentless cheery-ness - the productivity; and the capitalism that they witnessed around them. And they came up with, at the end of the day; We can call it Cultural Marxism, but at the end of the day, we experience it on a day to day basis, by that I mean a minute by minute, second by second basis. It’s political correctness and it’s multiculturalism.

In the video, Breitbart discusses the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, and others of the German School, many which emigrated to America. He further wrote about Cultural Marxism more in-depth in his book Righteous Indignation.

Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was a lieutenant of Joseph Stalin who headed the Italian branch of the International Communist movement (Comintern). After several failed assassination attempts on Mussolini, Gramsci was imprisoned in 1926 until his death in 1937. While in prison Gramsci wrote his Prison Notebooks, speculating on the failure of violent revolution to materialize in Western Europe as Karl Marx had predicted. Gramsci's works are considered by Socialists to be foundational to modern public education and Cultural Marxism.

Gramsci's theory of "cultural hegemony" states that the ruling capitalist "oppressor" class uses cultural institutions, such as "traditional marriage," to maintain power. The "oppressors" develop a "hegemonic culture" using ideology unlike Socialists who use violence, economic force, and coercion. "Hegemonic culture" propagates its own values and norms so that they become "common sense" values and thus maintain the status quo. According to Wikipedia, this "Hegemonic power is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than coercive power using force" as Marxism does "to maintain order. This cultural hegemony is produced and reproduced" by the dominant Christian oppressor class "through the institutions that form the superstructure."

Joseph A. Buttigieg, Pete Buttigieg's father, was a founding member of the International Gramsci Societyand served as the executive secretary."

Dutschke

See also: Long march through the institutions

The Long march through the institutions is a Marxist concept formulated in 1967 by the West German student movement leader Rudi Dutschke. Dutschke reformulated Antonio Gramsci's philosophy of cultural Marxism with the phrase the long march through the institutions (German: Marsch durch die Institutionen) to identify the political war of position or incrementalism, an allusion to the Long March (1934–35) of the Communist Chinese People's Liberation Army, by means of which, the working class or "oppressed" would produce their own intellectuals, civil servants, and culture (dominant ideology) to replace those imposed by the bourgeoisie or "oppressor class."

Karl Marx spoke of a sudden revolution, where everything changes in a moment. Gramsci, the head of the Italian Communist party, was thrown in prison by Benito Mussolini, where he speculated on the failure of Marxist revolution in his Prison Notebooks, and attributed the failure to the cultural hegemony of the bourgeois oppressor class. Dutschke built on Gramsci's writings by proposing a long march through the cultural institutions of society - the church, entertainment, civil service, educational faculties, family institutions and marriage - to replace the dominant culture and replace it with revolutionary godless cultural Marxism.

Dutschke said,

"Revolution is not a short act when something happens once and then everything is different. Revolution is a long, complicated process, where one [der Mensch] must become different...the process goes along this way, which I have once named ‘The Long March through the Established Institutions’, in which [institutions], through clarification [Aufklärung], systematic clarification and direct actions, awareness is brought [Bewusstwerdung] to further minorities in and outside the university, in schools, in trade schools, in engineer schools, also technical universities and finally in factories, where workers are currently worrying about their jobs. The process has begun, and that is a long story, which right now has been set on its course by us."

Gramsci theorized that if Communism achieved "mastery of human consciousness," then concentration camps and mass murder would be unnecessary. Mastery over the consciousness of the great mass of people could be attained if Communists or their sympathizers gained control of the organs of culture — churches, education, newspapers, magazines, the electronic media, literature, music, the visual arts, and so on. By winning "cultural hegemony," Communism would control the deepest wellsprings of human thought and imagination. One need not control all information itself if one can gain control over the minds that assimilate that information. Under such conditions, opposition would disappear since men are no longer capable of grasping the arguments of Marxism's opponents.

Criticism

According to Wikipedia, cultural Marxism' has become a focal topic for many conspiracy theorist websites which seek to cloak their anti-Semitic, anti-Jew messages behind a legitimate topic. It is true that many of the members of the Frankfurt School were Jewish, but their big problem was that they were Marxists. Other sources seek to treat the entire topic as a "conspiracy" itself, by casting Cultural Marxism as a "myth" or a "hoax". Wikipedia has entire section titled Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory within its page for the Frankfurt School.

See also

• Liberal values
• Anthropological Revolution
• Critical theory
• Destroying the family
• Dialectical unity of self-contradictions
• Cultural Revolution
• Frankfurt School
• Antifa
• Nimrodian aspirations
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

External links

• Cultural Marxism Explained in 7 Minutes, by Joseph T. Salerno at the Mises Institute
• What is cultural Marxism?, at GotQuestions
• Political Correctness / Cultural Marxism, Discover the Networks
• The Roots of Political Correctness, by William S. Lind
• Cultural Marxism Is Destroying America, by Moses Apostaticus, September 29, 2016, The Daily Caller
• Cultural Marxism Is the Enemy: Review of Michael Walsh’s Book ‘The Devil’s Pleasure Palace’, by Austin Ruse, Breitbart News, November 19, 2015.
• Cultural Marxism: The Corruption of America, 99 min. documentary film.
• How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World. The Epoch Times.
• The Sacred Mission To Destroy Normality, by Rod Dreher
• Duke, Selwyn (July 18, 2019). The Left Is Following Communism’s Playbook for Revolution. The New American.