When setting out to write this, I had been intending to name this piece, Cultural Marxism. What a phrase to start an article with! It’s hard to get more ideologically loaded than an invocation of the Red Menace, especially in combination with the vagaries of culture. That’s grade-A clickbait, which is always useful to any writers who want their articles to be read. That particular combination even has especially eyebrow-raising connotations: If one looks over a Google search of Cultural Marxism, what will quickly become clear is that the two most common interpretations of the term are… divided. It is held to be either:

A: “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. [..] Marxist theorists [asserted that] 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. [Overthrown by] a coalition of blacks, students, feminist women and homosexuals.” – William Lind, “What is Cultural Marxism?”

or

B: a conspiracy theory held by Right-wingers (such as Lind), racists, anti-Semites and misogynists since the ‘90s to rail against multiculturalism or Political Correctness. It is used to discredit people working for greater equality in society, particularly academics studying Culture, as spreading intentionally subversive ideology.

Now, are either of these descriptions correct? Well they’re both rather shaky as they rest on conspiracy theories: in “A” that Leftist academics conspire to destroy Western society; in “B” it’s a compound conspiracy theory – a conspiracy by Right-wing critics of the Left to misrepresent cultural progress as a conspiracy. It appears to be some kind of Russian nesting-conspiracy-doll. As it happens, the Wikipedia article on the subject is up for deletion as of this writing, because many editors believe there is no such thing as Cultural Marxism outside of the aforementioned meta-conspiracy theory labeled “B.”



Source: The Red Phoenix

For purposes of this article however I wish to contend that Cultural Marxism does actually exist, and is a useful term because it can help shed light on some peculiarities of modern politics in the 21st century. For this reason I would like to suggest a third definition of Cultural Marxism – my own:

C: a loosely affiliated stream of cultural philosophy which applies Marxist class analysis to non-economic topics in order to discover and critique injustices in the dominant culture, as Marx did with the then-dominant Capitalist economics.

But I can’t really expect people to accept my definition right off the bat, so the term just feels a little too contentious to work as a title. So, I went looking for alternative terms that could represent what I wanted to talk about:

Cultural Studies – the academic examination of culture (notably the phenomenon of ‘hegemony’) which grew out of the Birmingham School around the middle of the previous century. Its origin is detailed in Dennis Dworkin’s Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain. Elements of Cultural Studies examined ‘cultural artifacts’, and held that those who control the means of producing these essentially control culture.

Critical Theory – another academic examination of culture and power theory out of the Frankfurt School, allied to Cultural Studies and characterized as ‘neo-Marxist’ for applying Marx’s economic critique methods and focus on the conflict between classes to non-economic arenas. Denial of objective truth is a critical component of much Frankfurt School philosophy.

Postmodernism – the critical examination of culture, one of its primary tenets being a denial of objective truth (at least as pertaining to matters of society) and that everyone has a subjective reality which can be analyzed and attributed to the influence of cultural ‘signs’ or symbols. It has many and varied intellectual giants representing it, notably Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault, many of whom were Critical Theorists. This philosophy is not directly Marxist, but a synthesis with other schools of thought.

Unfortunately none of these quite encompass all of what Cultural Marxism entails, as each is but one aspect of that philosophical tradition, which encompasses more and quite different theories besides.

Stepping away from my choice of title for a moment, the above descriptions may seem so outlandish that an example of the thought from these schools may be helpful to explain what is meant by denial of objective truth:

Critical Theorist and Postmodernist Jacques Derrida argued that reasoned speech cannot be applied to find truth, as our reasoning comes out of assumptions about both language and objectivity which are based on language itself and on a belief in the objectivity of reason. As such, any conclusions reached by employing language and reason are inherently circular and flawed. Consequently, objective truth cannot be discerned, nor expressed.

Consider that line of thought, there’s some fairly clever reasoning there; it’s quite hard to refute. And indeed this view has grown to be all but ubiquitous in modern society over the past century: one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees with the statement that most anything is open to interpretation and changes based on point of view. Yet it stumbles up against the problem of relativism: if knowledge, truth and even morality are all dependent on cultural context and other external factors, how can we come to any conclusions about what is real? About whom to believe in situations with conflicting stories? About what is right and what is wrong?

The answer, according to Postmodernism, is consensus, and tolerance of difference. The feelings of individuals and groups can and do outweigh the import of ‘factual’ knowledge, as knowledge is fallible but feelings are absolute subjective truth. If there is disagreement between individuals, those should not be argued, rather, we should all tolerate that others think differently and not try to change their mind. We are to tolerate religious extremist expressions, else we are engaging in ‘Islamophobia’ (a term largely used by those on the Left to chastise those worried about the rising influence of Islam in the West) or ‘militant atheism’ (a term largely used by those on the Right to chastise those worried about the already present influence of Christianity in the West). We must however not tolerate anyone who says they know some kind of objective truth, as this is inherently impossible and will be used as a tool of oppression… as the Fundamentalist interpretation of the truth of the One True God (of whichever religion happens to be in the news today) has – according to critics – been used as a tool of repression for centuries.

If that strikes you as a little self-contradictory, you’re quite right: it is. To figure out how to practically tolerate everything, except intolerance is the great challenge of these Postmodernist philosophies. Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse wrote in Repressive Tolerance that society was wrong to tolerate many things:

“[T]he systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence [..]The authorities in education, morals, and psychology are vociferous against the increase in juvenile delinquency; they are less vociferous against the proud presentation, in word and deed and pictures, of ever more powerful missiles, rockets, bombs – the mature delinquency of a whole civilization.”

He held that a truly tolerant society must cease to tolerate these elements because they support “repression”, and as such even economically liberal democracies are “totalitarian” in a way.

The adherents to these ways of thinking are often not aware that it is an ideological position at all; the basis of this worldview falls in to place quite logically. But it precludes other philosophies without people realizing it: realism, objectivism, positivism and large parts of mathematics and science stand in direct opposition to postmodern thinking. So long as people are not aware of the contradiction this causes few problems, and many rationalists have adopted positions from this philosophy. But just occasionally, Postmodernism and realism clash.

If enough people feel that (for instance) racism is wrong, then racism is wrong. Irrespective of the actual ills of stereotyping, prejudice, unequal treatment or bigotry, the collective judgment is what renders it a societal ill. Indeed, if racism is judged to be wrong in this way, and then differences between ethnicities are found, these (nominally) factual findings are challenged based on the inherent wrongness of racism, rather than the belief in racism’s ‘wrongness’ being tested by potential proof that there is differential between ethnicities (or gender or bodyweight or any other measurable characteristic). When something feels racist, it is wrong a priori. Though such findings might have no connection to any actual racism (or again, other –isms) the concern that a result not in line with socially acceptable reality might be found – and would cause social problems for the researchers – disincentivises potentially beneficial research.

In China, where the prevailing culture is not burdened by this philosophy, research in to fields like genomics has leapt ahead of that in the West, while here arguments raged over whether the drug BiDil (which appeared to work exceptionally well for people of recent African ancestry, but not for Caucasians) should be approved, given its ‘racist’ mechanism of action. Is the BiDil pill racist? In the sense that it appears to discriminate between races, yes; in the sense of being bigoted, or oppressing people of a particular race, no.

It’s not just the confusion over meaning and terminology resulting from Cultural Marxism that harms the scientific capital of our society though; it also directly promotes pseudoscience and anti-intellectual practice. As an example, the damage to intellectual rigor resulting from the adoption of Cultural Marxist thinking was perhaps most adeptly displayed by Alan Sokal, professor of Physics at NYU and UCL who wished to test if “a leading North American journal of Cultural Studies” staffed by a prestigious editorial board steeped in Postmodernism would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions”. Titling the article Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity the text was a nonsensical collection of thrown-together mathematical formulae and absurd ‘intellectual’ jargon; “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense… structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics that he] could find about mathematics and physics.” The article’s thesis was that Quantum Gravity, an advanced field of quantum physics dealing with QM’s application to gravitation was in actuality a social construct, formed by human language, and that this theory had “profound political implications”. It was an obvious parody, with no substance what so ever. The article was published in Social Text without comment or corrections.

Now obviously this is a point of contention for academics and philosophers: those who stridently hold that there is no objective reality and that human characteristics such as race and gender are determined by culture must fight against any assertions that there is a physical, evidence-based reality which underlies the beliefs of their ideological opponents. They are apparently also willing to embrace the idea that the laws of physics are beholden to human linguistics and symbolism. But this philosophical silliness stretches far beyond Academia:

For a culturally relevant example that most people will be aware of let us look at current events – or at least, recent events. In April of 2014 a prominent liberal comedian, Stephen Colbert, made a joke on his show parodying the actions of the owner of the Washington Redskins by making an overtly racist statement about “Orientals.” The phrase was tweeted by a Comedy Central-run Twitter account relaying some material from the program without context.



Source: The Colbert Report

A young Asian-American activist named Suey Park immediately responded to the intentionally racist statement by starting a campaign to #CancelColbert, asserting that Colbert’s joke was actually racist. There are legitimate reasons for concern about the joke in question: Is it acceptable to use slurs when critiquing someone else for doing the same? Is discrimination of Asian-Americans discounted in the focus on African-, Latino- and Native-Americans?

But these were not the reasons Park gave for her feeling of being the victim of discrimination. Indeed, Park said she had not actually seen the segment in question, and was not interested in the context of the joke as it was irrelevant due to the larger, cultural context which explained her feeling: that the joke was part of a culture where “whiteness at large” is oppressive and inherently racist (there’s no indication that this particular irony was noticed); invoking the immediate context was, in her words, a tool used to “humanize the oppressor” rather than, perhaps, a possibility to increase understanding by providing more facts about the case at hand .

Is Colbert a racist bigot? This seems unlikely given his decision to lambast a possibly racist act by comparing it to a definitely racist parody, to show how wrong it was. Was Colbert’s joke racist? Again, not intentionally so, it was pointing out the wrongness of racism. Is Colbert a part of an oppressive regime keeping minorities downtrodden? This may be held to be true if one subscribes to the Cultural Studies theories on Patriarchy and the like. Unfortunately, the realities behind these questions are immaterial to the discourse: Remember: attempting to convince someone of any objective facts is being intolerant of their lived experience, and a sign of arrogance. Tolerate everything except intolerance.

Park and her Twitter followers believed the joke was racist (though perhaps not all agreed with her assertion that ‘whiteness’ is oppression – we can but hope) and so #CancelColbert trended. But why was Park’s reality (the joke is offensive) more important than Colbert’s reality (the joke is not offensive)? It was not, both being subjective, but people will stand up for a victim of oppression, that’s an exceptional trait of human beings. And so the conflict became one of two competing narratives, with whoever’s cultural product had more power and reach winning out. Various media reported on the case, often taking one side or the other; it filled the news-cycle for a few days, though in the end Colbert won. This says absolutely nothing about whether or not the joke was actually offensive.

Do not mistake my meaning by giving these examples: the objection here should not be to Political Correctness or Multiculturalism as critics of the Left like Lind claimed. Though the philosophy of Cultural Marxism had its roots on the left, the Postmodernist thinking that spawned from it and now holds sway over our modern culture is almost entirely independent of economic ideology. To illustrate this, let us look again to Colbert, but this time a decade ago. Colbert has taken aim at just this kind of thinking before, by satirizing it as his extreme Right-wing persona speaking about Truthiness in his very first episode of The Colbert Report in October of 2005:

“We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist” – Stephen Colbert

Truthiness is the concept that something is believed as truth because it ‘feels right’ or comes ‘from the gut’, used to lampoon then-President George W. Bush and the Republican establishment over the supposed ‘facts’ of the Iraq War and other politics. He later stated out character that:

“It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the President because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?…”

Despite Colbert’s belief that this thinking only appealed to “a certain section of the country” in actuality Postmodernism with its inherent trust in subjective feelings over objective facts has influence in all political spheres… and especially in those that are unaware of its existence, or unwilling to acknowledge it. President Bush’s certainty about WMDs in Iraq made him believe that all who did not stand with him in spite of the evidence stood with the terrorists. This is no different from those who found that when they pointed out that the context showed Colbert was actually making a statement against racism they were told that they stood with racists.

Truthiness is perhaps the ideal word to describe the practical outcome of Cultural Marxist thought, if not its most prominent politics (which still reside broadly on the left). Next week, I will continue with a more in-depth examination of the frequently self-contradictory background, application and results of these Cultural Marxist philosophies in media and politics, particularly their greatest and most terrible success: the rise of Identity Politics.

Oh, and I’ll finally get around to explaining why I picked that title.

Richard van Schaik is a non-expert in every field attempting to complete his degree in Developmental Psychology while engaging in procrastination through political writing. He lives, studies, and teaches Psychology in Maastricht, part of that bulbous dangly bit on the Southern end of the Netherlands.

Image sources: usa.streetsblog.org | philosophica.info | videncebasedcryonics.org

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