To begin with the term ‘Marxist’ ought to send the more ignorant among us into some form of stroke mode…..but this is about culture more than the man…..but your IQ needs to be larger than your shoe size to differentiate.
Before we tackle this subject maybe a little background would help…..
1930s: originally denoting a theory that the oppression of the working class is effected through social and cultural means, developed by the Frankfurt School of social theorists.
(among some right-wing thinkers) a radical political ideology said to be promoted by left-wing activists with the aim of undermining or subverting western social and cultural institutions, ultimately resulting in the imposition of a progressive agenda on society.
Yes it is bullshit but that is what right wingers do best….spread manure.
Now for the meat of this post.
“Not to disparage David Bowie,” Alan Bennett remarked in 2016, “but if even a fraction of the tributes being paid to him and his influence were true, we would never have had a Conservative government.” Not to disparage Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas and the other members of the Frankfurt School, but if they’d been one-millionth as potent as their detractors maintain, we would have had no Margaret Thatcher, no Ronald Reagan, no Liz Truss and no Donald Trump.
Yet, to hear some on the American far-Right tell it, “critical theory” – the Frankfurt School’s mash-up of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche’s proto-existentialism – is responsible for everything that has gone wrong since the Second World War. Spoilt children, promiscuous teenagers, student radicals, transsexuals, rock ’n’ roll – each is the by-product of what the conservative activist Andrew Breitbart described as the Frankfurt ideology’s “adolescent rebellion against all rules and norms”.
What a load of claptrap, says the British historian AJA Woods. In The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, he depicts a cult of wealthy American cranks and crackpots who kid each other that a few highbrow German-Jewish aesthetes managed to wreck Western civilisation. Certainly, the truth is more mundane: critical theory was just a logical extension of the highly moral form of literary criticism invented in Victorian England by Matthew Arnold at Oxford and carried on into the 20th century by F R Leavis at Cambridge.
Like Leavis and Arnold, the Frankfurters abhorred the rise of industrial capitalism. Unlike Leavis and Arnold, the Frankfurters were openly ideological. They were, to be precise, materialist Hegelians: they believed that, by melding their respective skill sets – philosophy, sociology, psychology, aesthetics – they could mint an entirely new and holistic explanation of history and society, premised on empirical grounds.
If you are interested this may be a good piece for you…..
It is all so much smoke screen for mental midgets that flock to the likes of Donny and his brand of fascism…..belittle the opposition…..it works for them.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
Most people who criticise Socialism, Communism, Marxism, and Trotskyism actually know almost nothing about any of it. They just jump on the ‘Commie’ insult bandwagon without bothering to do any research. That is particularly prevalant in the USA, and has been so for my entire adult life.
Best wishes, Pete.
Agreed and I have spent my life dispelling the bullshit on the subject….it has been an uphill journey. chuq
*Prevalent. Typo.
I knew what you meant….but I understand the correction….LOL chuq
What both articles overlooked was that the CIA funded the Frankfurt School during the Cultural Cold War. If these right-wingers want to place blame, they should blame the CIA. 🤭 Thanks for the articles, though. They’ll come in handy for my research on the Cold War and the 1960s counterculture. 😺
I hope they prove useful…..chuq
Excellent post, very informative. The ongoing philosophical war between capitalists and Marxists is not only deliberately ideological, it also obscures from the public inconvenient truths: 1) that Marxism was a direct response to the excesses and abuses of imperialism during the Industrial Revolution; and 2) that capitalism works best for human societies when it is blended with socialism. Today, the world’s most successful democracies have mixed economies. The notion that laissez-faire (i.e. unregulated) capitalism is optimal is a perpetrated myth designed to conceal these truths and to divide the populace along ideological lines.
The myth of a free market makes me ill…..I try to explain when I can about socialism for there is way too much BS. chuq