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The Free Congress Commentary
Next Conservatism #15: What
is Cultural Marxism?
By William S. Lind
October 25, 2005
In his columns on the next conservatism, Paul Weyrich has
several times referred to "cultural Marxism." He
asked me, as Free Congress Foundation's resident historian, to
write this column explaining what cultural Marxism is and
where it came from. In order to understand what something is,
you have to know its history.
Cultural Marxism is a branch of western Marxism, different
from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union. It is
commonly known as "multiculturalism" or, less
formally, Political Correctness. From its beginning, the
promoters of cultural Marxism have known they could be more
effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of their work,
hence the use of terms such as "multiculturalism."
Cultural Marxism began not in
the 1960s but in 1919, immediately after World War I. Marxist
theory had predicted that in the event of a big European war,
the working class all over Europe would rise up to overthrow
capitalism and create communism. But when war came in 1914,
that did not happen. When it finally did happen in Russia in
1917, workers in other European countries did not support it.
What had gone wrong?
Independently, two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy
and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came to the same answer: Western
culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working
class to its true, Marxist class interest that Communism was
impossible in the West until both could be destroyed. In 1919,
Lukacs asked, "Who will save us from Western
civilization?" That same year, when he became Deputy
Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun
government in Hungary, one of Lukacs's first acts was to
introduce sex education into Hungary's public schools. He knew
that if he
could destroy the West's traditional sexual morals, he would
have taken a giant step toward destroying Western culture
itself.
In 1923, inspired in part by Lukacs, a group of German
Marxists established a think tank at Frankfurt University in
Germany called the Institute for Social Research. This
institute, soon known simply as the Frankfurt School, would
become the creator of cultural Marxism.
To translate Marxism from economic into cultural terms, the
members of the Frankfurt School - - Max Horkheimer, Theodor
Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, to name
the most important - - had to contradict Marx on several
points. They argued that culture was not just part of what
Marx had called society's "superstructure," but an
independent and very important variable. They also said that
the working class would not lead a Marxist revolution, because
it was becoming part of the middle class, the hated
bourgeoisie.
Who would? In the 1950s, Marcuse
answered the question: a coalition of blacks, students,
feminist women and homosexuals.
Fatefully for America, when Hitler came to power in Germany in
1933, the Frankfurt School fled - - and reestablished itself
in New York City. There, it shifted its focus from destroying
traditional Western culture in Germany to destroying it in the
United States. To do so, it invented "Critical
Theory." What is the theory? To criticize every
traditional institution, starting with the family, brutally
and unremittingly, in order to bring them down. It wrote a
series of "studies in prejudice," which said that
anyone who believes in traditional Western culture is
prejudiced, a "racist" or "sexist" or
"fascist" - - and is also mentally ill.
Most importantly, the Frankfurt School crossed Marx with
Freud, taking from psychology the technique of psychological
conditioning. Today, when the cultural Marxists want to do
something like "normalize" homosexuality, they do
not argue the point
philosophically. They just beam television show after
television show into every American home where the only
normal-seeming white male is a homosexual (the Frankfurt
School's key people spent the war years in Hollywood).
After World War II ended, most members of the Frankfurt School
went back to Germany. But Herbert Marcuse stayed in America.
He took the highly abstract works of other Frankfurt School
members and repackaged them in ways college students could
read and understand. In his book "Eros and
Civilization," he argued that by freeing sex from any
restraints, we could elevate the pleasure principle over the
reality principle and create a society with no work, only play
(Marcuse coined the phrase, "Make love, not war").
Marcuse also argued for what he called "liberating
tolerance," which he defined as tolerance for all ideas
coming from the Left and intolerance for any ideas coming from
the Right. In the 1960s, Marcuse became the chief
"guru" of the New Left, and he
injected the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School into the
baby boom generation, to the point where it is now America's
state ideology.
The next conservatism should unmask multiculturalism and
Political Correctness and tell the American people what they
really are: cultural Marxism. Its goal remains what Lukacs and
Gramsci set in 1919: destroying Western culture and the
Christian religion. It has already made vast strides toward
that goal. But if the average American found out that
Political Correctness is a form of Marxism, different from the
Marxism of the Soviet Union but Marxism nonetheless, it would
be in trouble. The next conservatism needs to reveal the man
behind the curtain - - old Karl Marx himself.
William S. Lind is Director for the Center for Cultural
Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation.
(The Free Congress Foundation's website, www.freecongress.org,
includes a short book on the history and nature of cultural
Marxism, edited by William S. Lind. It is formatted so you can
print it out as a book and share it with your family and
friends.)
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The National Debt to the Penny
10/21/2005 $8,009,131,433,464.30
10/20/2005 $8,009,635,518,716.50
10/19/2005 $7,999,843,352,310.27
10/18/2005 $8,003,897,406,911.24
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