‘Cultural Marxism’ is the ideological buttressing of anything that subverts traditional values and cultures, such as globalism; open borders; transgenderism; formlessness in arts, music, architecture; a hellish formlessness in general. The purpose is to deconstruct any vestiges of tradition in the name of ‘progress’, the goal is to establish a nebulous mass humanity devoid of identity in regard to ethnos, land, and even gender, ironically called ‘identity politics’. Dialectically, this push toward universal homogenisation is promoted in the name of being ‘different’. Society becomes so fractured where there is even a ‘sliding scale of gender’, and individuals can change their identity at will, that any really organic identity, requiring a sense of permanence is destroyed. The Left and its globalist sponsors deconstruct in order to reconstruct.
There is a common outlook between the Left and capitalism, which sees the two as part of the same historic process of internationalism. Detachment and rootlessness allow for the unhampered movement of labour, so that people become economic units, as part of a global production process. This is why the Left are useless as opponents of globalisation: when the Left attack any restrictions on immigration as ‘racism’, ‘xenophobia’, and ‘Fascism’, they are following the party-line of international capitalism. This ‘Left’ is funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Rockefeller Foundation, Movements.org and hundreds of other NGOs and foundations.30
As the philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler observed nearly a century ago, leftist movements operate in the interests of money’ (plutocracy); so-called ‘people’s revolts’ have served oligarchic interests since the Gracchus revolt in Rome.31 Bolshevism was funded by oligarchs.32 The situation remains.33
Professor Jerome Jamin of the Political Science Department, University de Liège, Belgium, defines Cultural Marxism as synonymous with Critical Theory:
From a philosophical point of view, Cultural Marxism, as Critical Theory, considers culture as something that needs to be studied within the system and the social relations through which it is produced, and then carried by the people. So, according to Kellner (2013, p. 10),34 the ‘analysis of culture is intimately bound up with the study of society, politics, and economics’. This theory means that the culture does not have an autonomous life next to the daily concrete lives of individuals and their social relations. It also states that, as a consequence, cultures are built to help the dominance of powerful and ruling social groups. Within the Marxist tradition, which sees dominant ideology as the ideology of the bourgeoisie to control the proletariat and the working class, Cultural Marxism considers cultures and ideologies as inextricably linked to the economic, social, and political context: they are tools in the hands of the powerful to control the people.35
The Left, despite the above assumption, is sponsored by ‘powerful and ruling social groups’, the aim being social control, through social engineering. This has been enabled because Marx and others of the Left were responding to bourgeois economic control in a limited sense, and did not detach themselves from the same 19th century Zeitgeist as the bourgeoisie. They were, simply, two sides of one coin. Hence the Marxists and neo-Marxists see traditional bonds as nothing more than bourgeois moral and social institutions, without an organic, perennial character. As the former Critical Theorist Professor Christopher Lasch contended against the Left, these supposedly ‘repressive’ ‘primary ties’ are the organic bonds that predate capitalism, that sustain communities, based around the family and the home, and one’s native land. The Left, in undermining these as ‘repressive bourgeoisie morality’, serve the aims of capitalist globalisation, which also sees these ‘primary ties’ as a hindrance to the global economic process. Between the Left and global capitalism there is a confluence of worldviews because both have the same preoccupation with the ‘laws of social production’ rather than with the organic laws of history and society. As referred to above, Spengler pointed this confluence out a century ago.
Cultural Marxism is the will-to-destroy as it pertains to these traditional cultural and societal bastions. The Communist Manifesto is a handbook for the destruction of whatever remains in this late epoch of the West, of organic bonds such as family, marriage, faith and the pre-capitalist attachment to village, church, and land. Rather than decrying the destruction of these organic bonds by capitalism and industrialism, Marx regarded the passing away of these so-called ‘bourgeois’ institutions as a necessary part of the progress of dialectical history. Those who resisted this dialectic were vehemently denounced in The Communist Manifesto as ‘reactionists’.36
What the orthodox Marxists seek with the destruction of the organic bonds of traditional society, the Cultural Marxists seek by broadening their subversion beyond economic critiques, and working class mobilisations, which have been largely unsuccessful. The proletariat has remained generally conservative and dangerously inclined to ‘populism’. Consider how the media pundits ridiculed the alleged lack of college graduates among Donald Trump’s supporters, while the privileged Hillary Clinton sneered at them as the ‘deplorables’? Such elitist attitudes express the fear and the contempt the leftist intelligentsia and the oligarchy have towards ‘the people’, which they hide behind slogans about ‘social justice’, ‘human rights’ and ‘equality’. A commentator analysed the election of the ‘populist’ Trump, and the demographic studies of voting patterns, finding that
Economic discontent defined this election, and a populist won it. But bare economics do not appear to have played a leading role in how voters cast their ballots. The proportion of people who held a bachelor’s degree or higher was the primary correlate in how a county voted, far more than how much money the average townsperson made, or how many had lost a job.37
Amidst the perplexity and literal tears of the liberal bourgeoisie, intelligentsia, and oligarchy as to how someone such as Trump could have won, with the news media against him, and without money from the usual sources, one explanation could be that the divide was between the plebs who see the world in unencumbered reality, and those who see it through the distorted lenses of the education system. Frankly, what proportion of those going through a tertiary education, where the perimeters of enquiry and thought are strictly confined, are going to have the determination and independence to question established leftist orthodoxy?
Against such dangers from populist reaction, disaffected minorities have to be found or created, so that the social order will split apart under a multiplicity of factions, all seeking their ‘rights’ as separate and alienated identities. Hence, ‘identity politics’ is fractured by ever-increasing, newly-discovered ‘genders’, each with its own rights and grievances, and even its own flags, symbols, and lingua franca.
The aim is to fracture traditional, organic identities that are barriers to globalisation and social control, by creating artificial identities that can be manipulated and subjected to social engineering.
However, to the above quoted Jamin such a definition is part of a widespread ‘right-wing conspiracy theory’ with undertones of ‘racism’. He writes of this ‘right-wing conspiracy theory’ as though it is conspiracy, alluding to ‘confidential journals’:
If Cultural Marxism, as a school of thought, dates from the 1930s, Cultural Marxism, as a conspiracy theory, has appeared in conservative and radical American literature from the beginning of the 1990s. It has been regularly expressed in articles published in confidential journals, some of which have either ceased to exist or are no longer published.38
Jamin reiterates the association between Cultural Marxism and ‘Critical Theory’:
Cultural Marxism, and Critical Theory more generally with which it has a close signification, have both a direct link with the Frankfurt School and its Marxian theorists. Initially called the ‘Institute for Social Research’ during the 1930s, and taking the label the ‘Frankfurt School’ by the 1950s, the designation meant as much an academic environment as a geographical location. …39
The Frankfurt School began as the Institute for Social Research in 1923, founded by members of the German Communist Party at Frankfurt University.40 Influenced by Antonio Gramsci, the theoretician of the Italian Communist Party, they concluded that a radical subversion of the cultural mores and institutions of a society must precede a Communist state.41 The founding endowment for the Frankfurt School was provided by the international grain speculator, Herman Weil, father of one of the Institute’s moving spirits, Felix Weil.42
Max Horkheimer, who became the institute’s director in 1930,43 adopted the Gramscian analysis and strategy that a subtle revolution must be made through the penetration and transformation of cultural traditions and institutions.44 At that time, music critic Theodor Adorno and psychologists Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich joined the Frankfurt School.45 However, in 1933 this largely Jewish group was exiled from Germany with the rise of Hitler. They and other leftist academics left Germany and further afield en masse for the USA. With them came the future guru of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, a graduate student. They re-established the Frankfurt School at Columbia University,46 where Franz Boas and the school of cultural anthropology had long been ensconced.