Cultural Marxism

Samuel Moyn, in the NYT last week, argues that cultural Marxism,” doesn’t actually exist as anything more than a “crude slander,” a “phantasmagoria of the alt-right.” Talk of cultural Marxism is inseparable, he says, from “the most noxious anti-Semitism".  All it does is to update the old trope of “Judeobolshevism” that imagined a global cabal of Jews conspiring to undermine the West by spreading communist ideology.

Alexander Zubatov disagrees. Yes, "cultural Marxism" is a phrase that's been used as an insult by the alt-right, but that doesn't mean that the writings of the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Marcuse, Edward Said and others - who take much of their political and cultural analysis from the Marxist tradition - are not open to criticism, and haven't wreaked enormous damage on the contemporary scene: 

It is a short step from the Marxist and cultural Marxist premise that ideas are, at their core, expressions of power to rampant, divisive identity politics and the routine judging of people and their cultural contributions based on their race, gender, sexuality and religion — precisely the kinds of judgments that the high ideals of liberal universalism and the foremost thinkers of the Civil Rights Era thought to be foul plays in the game. And it is a short step from this collection of reductive and simplistic conceptions of the “oppressor” and the “oppressed” to public shaming, forced resignations and all manner of institutional and corporate policy dictated by enraged Twitter mobs, the sexual McCarthyism of #MeToo’s excesses, and the incessant, resounding, comically misdirected and increasingly hollow cries of “racist,” “sexist,” “misogynist,” “homophobe,” “Islamophobe,” “transphobe” and more that have yet to be invented to demonize all those with whom the brittle hordes partaking in such calumnies happen to disagree.

I want to linger one moment on this last point, as Moyn, in his New York Times article, in tarring the idea of cultural Marxism with the charge of “anti-Semitism,” has done precisely what I just described. That charge, surely, is deployed for the sole purpose of leaving those who would otherwise dare to speak of cultural Marxism cowed and intimidated into silence lest they be accused of perpetuating an anti-Semitic trope. Moyn’s article, however, offers not a shred of evidence that talk of cultural Marxism is anti-Semitic in any way, shape or form. What we are offered, instead, is slippage from a flat and unsupported declaration that “talk of cultural Marxism is inseparable from” anti-Semitism to a more extended discussion of what is, on its very face, a genuinely anti-Semitic, older charge of “Judeobolshevism.” But, of course, there is no necessary connection between the two...  [...]

Cultural Marxism was no conspiracy, but it is also no mere right-wing “phantasmagoria.” It was and remains a coherent intellectual programme, a constellation of dangerous ideas. Aspects of these ideas, to their credit, brought the West’s dirty laundry into the limelight and inaugurated a period of necessary housecleaning that was, indeed, overdue. But their obsessive focus on our societal dirt — real and perceived “injustice,” “oppression,” “privilege,” “marginalization” and the like — quickly became a pathological compulsion. We started to see dirt everywhere. We cleansed and continue to cleanse ourselves tirelessly but are never satisfied, always eager to uncover more dirty deeds and historical sins and stage more ritualized purges. We end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And all our hard-won collective attainments and achievements, all that is great and good and glorious in our midst, gets swept up, spat on and discarded with the rest of the trash.

Comments

[sheddie]

Loved the last paragraph. It seems to be evidenced in almost all BBC programs: drama, documentaries, childrens tele (horrible histories) and even BBC4 music programs. A program say about blues music quickly homes in on slavery discrimination etc.