Is cultural marxism just a myth or conspiracy theory created by right wing conservatives?

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You know I looked up “Cultural Marxism” on wiki and it redirected me to the Frankfurt School, with a long complex history.
I just wanted a simpler definition I could get my head around.
 
Thing is, I don’t see the concept of cultural Marxism weaponized to no meaning like calling someone a Nazi, racist, white supremacist, fascist and to a lesser degree communist/socialist.

It’s been the subject of stable, steady debate.
 
It’s an interesting question which has been on my mind for a few months.

I only first heard of Cultural Marxism about six months ago, and when I heard of it it resonated with my observations of recent history - particularly of political thought and action within the “elites”, who are, I think, an identifiable class.

However, I reserve judgement on whether “Cultural Marxism” is a conscious, organised, movement with long term goals, and identifiable individual “members”, or whether it’s just a loose philosopy which is agreed by large numbers of people, who pursue it opportunistically. Be “opportunistically” I mean they simply create jobs, mostly with government funding, which they then occupy for their own short term interest. They occupy the media and give generous space to their “causes”, and try to shut out opposition.

However, I don’t see any “Cultural Marxists” creating guerilla armies and risking death, as did the real Marxists (Castro, Che Guevara etc.), and especially I don’t see them with any goal beyond their own lifetime or even working lives. This has relevance to the so call “Long March” through the universities, bureaucracies, etc. To me, it’s certainly happening, but it’s happening by accident rather than design. If that is the case, then it can be opposed by denying the funding. Without money, they’ll simply take other jobs and the movement will whither and die. They are not genuine “idealists”.

I’m reluctant to see Cultural Marxism as a genuine opponent of, say, Christianity, in the way Marxism was, and it’s not the same kind of battle.

2c

I highly regard Jordan Peterson on these matters. Here’s a 40 minute commentary, which I don’t have time to watch at the moment. Postmodernism and Cultural Marxism | Jordan B Peterson - YouTube
 
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goodcatholic said:
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.
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Given that Marxism is all about economics and about how everything boils down to economics, a “Cultural Marxism” that isn’t economic is like chocolate spaghetti without the spaghetti part.
 
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Xantippe said:
Given that Marxism is all about economics and about how everything boils down to economics, a “Cultural Marxism” that isn’t economic is like chocolate spaghetti without the spaghetti part.
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Haha! Good way of putting it. 😄

However, it’s not as simple as that. “Cultural Marxism” as a philosophy, rather than movement (which I question), is, I think, as defined in the second post:
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.
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It would seem to be an “offshoot of Marxism” in the sense that the people who slowly abandoned Marxism in the 70’s and 80’s became the proponents of Cultural Marxism. It’s strongly present in feminism, when feminism insists that all inequalities of outcome between men and women, particularly in earnings and high status positions, are the result of “sexism”, while denying that these inequalities may be due to genuine sexual differences. It’s also present in LGBT activism when they insist that “gender” itself is a social construct and that people can choose their own “gender”. And so forth…

As to whether it’s a “conspiracy”, the following seems an apt description of the theory:
This conspiracy theory hinges on the idea that the Frankfurt School wasn’t just an arcane strain of academic criticism.[note 1] Instead, the Frankfurt School was behind an ongoing Marxist plot to destroy the capitalist West from within, spreading its tentacles throughout academia and indoctrinating students to hate patriotism & freedom. Thus, rock’n’roll, Sixties counterculture, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, homosexuality,[1] modern feminism, and in general all the “decay” in the West since the 1950s are allegedly products of the Frankfurt school.[2] It’s also the work of the Jews.[3][4]
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[RationalWiki]. This source does seem biased (against the right), but I agree with it to the extent of this definition of the conspiracy theory.

The conspiracy theory has supporting evidence in the pervasive and intolerant presence of the ideas labelled as “Cultural Marxism”. What it lacks is evidence of the conspiracy.
 
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On the contrary, it uses similar “reasoning” but it sees the world in terms of gender, race, sexuality, as well as class. So the moniker is quite accurate. The goal is still the same, the route has been changed slightly. Economic oppression was a no-sell for most of the 20th century in Western countries which were far more prosperous than their commie counterparts.
 
starshiptrooper said:
On the contrary, it uses similar “reasoning” but it sees the world in terms of gender, race, sexuality, as well as class. So the moniker is quite accurate. The goal is still the same, the route has been changed slightly. Economic oppression was a no-sell for most of the 20th century in Western countries which were far more prosperous than their commie counterparts.
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However, the various other “oppressions” which the cultural Marxists invented were a much easier sell, mainly because they can be recast to take from the government and from white men without lifting a hand in “revolution”, and because they appeal to virtue signalling. 50% of the population, or more, fell for the notion of “Patriarchal” oppression.
 
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The problem with a lot of these labels is that you’re shoving like 20 things under one definition, and then counting anything that fits.

For example, I think if I said “differences in behavior between races are a result of cultural and historic factors, not innate racial tendencies,” few people on here would disagree with me.
 
Edmundus1581 said:
virtue signalling.
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that’s another one I need to make sure I fully understand. Indicating to a person who agrees with me like a “thumbs up” sign of solidarity, to make the ones who disagree with me feel outnumbered or excluded?
 
starshiptrooper said:
Economic oppression was a no-sell for most of the 20th century in Western countries which were far more prosperous than their commie counterparts.
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Not at all–Marxism was a live option right up until 1989, when all sorts of embarrassing things started happening.
 
goodcatholic said:
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Edmundus1581:
virtue signalling.
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that’s another one I need to make sure I fully understand. Indicating to a person who agrees with me like a “thumbs up” sign of solidarity, to make the ones who disagree with me feel outnumbered or excluded?
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I’ll admit that I used “virtue signalling” in a slightly lazy way.

I’ll keep it to a very specific case - feminism. Rather than saying “feminism” appeals to “virtue signalling”, I could say that “feminism” appeals to human’s evolutionary tendency to prefer women to men. Both men and women will rally to believe a woman’s cry for help, and to find a man to punish. When men do so, they particularly look around for approval, mainly from women.

BTW, I agree with your general description of “virtue signalling”, but the behaviour is embedded in human nature. Any group of people will do it, so it’s not really a mark of Cultural Marxism.
 
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Edmundus1581 said:
I’ll keep it to a very specific case - feminism. Rather than saying “feminism” appeals to “virtue signalling”, I could say that “feminism” appeals to human’s evolutionary tendency to prefer women to men. Both men and women will rally to believe a woman’s cry for help, and to find a man to punish. When men do so, they particularly look around for approval, mainly from women.
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Tsk tsk–you don’t say “white knighting”?

Check your manual.
 
Not really, kinda hard to sell people on economic oppression when your countries set the standards of living that everyone else envies.
 
Keep in mind Marxism isn’t about only economics. This is something many people err. The term is useful for pointing that out to an extent. If you want a good account of how cultural Marxism works, The Abolition of Britain by Peter Hitchens is a good book to read.
Or this:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co...is-alive-and-well-in-your-childs-school-.html
However, for Peter Hitchens, he despises the term ‘cultural Marxism’. Marxism is just Marxism. What most associate cultural Marxism with, it happened under ‘old-school’ Marxism too.
 
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It’s very well established that after economic communism was a hot potato, the academics and elites who pushed that idea reset with all of this SJW cultural nonsense.e

It’s actually been around for some time and is rooted in the Frankfurt School.
 
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