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Cultural Marxism
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Cultural Marxism is a form of Marxism that adds an analysis of the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. As a form of political analysis, cultural marxism gained strength in the 1920s, and was the model used by a group of intellectuals in Germany known as the Frankfurt School; and later by another group of intellectuals at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The fields of Cultural Studies and Critical theory are rooted in (and remain influenced by) cultural Marxism.
Frankfurt School is the school of thought associated with the members and allies of the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt, including Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse.
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Encyclopedia
Cultural Marxism is a form of Marxism that adds an analysis of the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. As a form of political analysis, cultural marxism gained strength in the 1920s, and was the model used by a group of intellectuals in Germany known as the Frankfurt School; and later by another group of intellectuals at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The fields of Cultural Studies and Critical theory are rooted in (and remain influenced by) cultural Marxism.
Background
The Frankfurt School is the school of thought associated with the members and allies of the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt, including Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. In the 1930s the Institute for Social Research was forced out of Germany by the rise of the Nazi Party and moved to New York. After 1945 a number of these surviving Marxists returned to both West and East Germany. Then Institute thus allowed for the hibernation of cultural Marxism throughout the early years of the Cold War. In West Germany in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a revived interest in Marxism produced a new generation of Marxists engaging with the cultural transformations taking place in Fordist capitalism, such as the philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug.
According to UCLA professor and critical theorist Douglas Kellner, "Many 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, 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.",
Kellner explains:
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.
Critique of cultural Marxism
Criticism of Marcuse
Marcuse, in his 1954 book Eros and Civilization, argued for a politics based on the striving towards pleasure. This striving for pleasure would unite individualism, hedonism and absolute egalitarianism, because each individual would equally be able to determine their own needs and desires; thus everyone would be able to satisfy their true desires. Marcuse argues that the moral and cultural relativism of contemporary Western society impedes this egalitarian politics, because it provides no way of distinguishing between an individual's true needs, and false needs manufactured by capitalism. Paul Eidelberg, however, argues that Marcuse himself is a relativist or "nihilist", because Marcuse rejects any transcendent law or morality, and believes that all desires are morally equal. Eidelberg goes on to argue that Marcuse's nihilism leads him to call for a politicized, explicitly left-wing, academy.
Recent criticism from the political right
Post-World War II, conservatives remained suspicious of socialism and what was called "social engineering", and some 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.
Paul Gottfried in his book, The Strange Death of Marxism, states 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. ...
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.
Response to criticisms of cultural Marxism
Since the early 1990s, paleoconservatives such as Patrick Buchanan and William S. Lind have argued that "cultural marxism" is a dominant strain in the American left, and associate with it a philosophy to 'destroy Western civilization.' Much of the critique is based on Buchanan's assertion that the Frankfurt School commandeered the American mass media, and used this cartel to infect the minds of Americans.
According to Bill Berkowitz, "It's not clear whether this diffusion of the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory into the mainstream will continue. Certainly, the anti-Semitism that underlies much of the scenario suggests that it may be repudiated in the coming years. But for now, the spread of this particular theory is a classic case of concepts that originated on the radical right slowly but surely making their way into the American mind."
The Southern Poverty Law Center states that "Lind's theory was 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":
At a major Holocaust denial conference put on by veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto in Washington, D.C., Lind gave a well-received speech before some 120 "historical revisionists", conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites, in which he identified a small group of people who he said had poisoned American culture. On this point, Lind made a powerful connection with his listeners. 'These guys,' he explained, 'were all Jewish.'
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."
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