Open Manuscript Notes #5
On "Cultural Marxism"
This is an excerpt of my manuscript-in-progress on Woke Ideology. (It is also posted at Another World, the Gods&Radicals Supporters’ journal.)
Very often, leftists are accused of being “cultural Marxists,” a pejorative term used often by far-right and pro-capitalist theorists who detect in social justice movements an attempt to infiltrate cultural, educational, and legal institutions. The goal, as their accusers would have it, is to undermine traditional values and stable societies in order to prepare the way for large-scale revolution.
Cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory. However, as Erica Lagalisse points out in her work The Occult Features of Anarchism, conspiracy theories function so well specifically because they contain an obscured underlying truth which the conspiracists mis-identify. For instance, consider the many antisemitic conspiracy theories proposing a global cabal of Jews who pull the strings of world leaders. These theories are quite dangerous and obviously false, but they are able to hold power because of a kernel of truth within them. Extremely rich individuals, investment banks, multinational corporations, and international governance and non-governmental organisations (the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the World Economic Forum, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Open Societies Foundation) all exert incredible and anti-democratic control and influence over individual nations and their societies.
That is, there is absolutely a global cabal, but it’s not a Jewish cabal.
The conspiracy theories regarding Cultural Marxism likewise contain a kernel of truth. In fact, to be blunt, many leftists indeed do believe that institutions and culture itself must be changed in order to make society more free. The particular conflicts in the United States regarding declarative gender theory and Critical Race Theory (CRT) in early public education, while often rife with hyperbole and extreme reactions, nevertheless derive from actual changes in pedagogy designed to change cultural frameworks.
Regardless of which side one takes on such issues, a few things need to be noted. First of all, social justice movements for cultural change are hardly unified or even co-ordinated, and also often conflict with each other. In other words, there is no global “Woke” cabal, but rather a dispersed and very chaotic set of populist movements attempting to change culture according to their particular ideas of what constitutes an ideal society. Secondly, and more importantly, none of these movements have any real relationship to Marxism in any traditional sense of the idea, since none actually argue for class revolt.
In fact, what conspiracy theorists call “Cultural Marxism” is not Marxist at all, and even often inimical to Marxist class analysis. To understand how this is the case, we need to first look at the historical processes which created the movements falsely identified as Cultural Marxism.