Chris Christie's Bullying, Revisited

[grumbler]

A "cultural" Marxist is just like a real Marxist, only without the Marxism. 

[Jacob]

It had its excesses, but something had to be done.  Meanwhile, your Cultural Marxism never surprises me

What's cultural marxism?

[derspiess]

It had its excesses, but something had to be done.  Meanwhile, your Cultural Marxism never surprises me

What's cultural marxism?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=cultural+marxism

[derspiess]

Something with no tangible positive results that violates the basics of the Bill of Rights

How so?

does not have to be done.

I disagree.  We fell asleep on communism during World War II and even allowed communists, some of them Soviet agents, to infiltrate deep into the federal bureaucracy.  The general population had a right to know about that.

[Jacob]

It had its excesses, but something had to be done.  Meanwhile, your Cultural Marxism never surprises me

What's cultural marxism?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=cultural+marxism

That doesn't sound so bad. Anything in particular in this piece you think applies to me?

Cultural Marxism refers to a school or offshoot of Marxism that conceives of culture as central to the legitimation of oppression, in addition to the economic factors that Karl Marx emphasized. An outgrowth of Western Marxism (especially from Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School) and finding popularity in the 1960s as cultural studies, cultural Marxism argues that what appear as traditional cultural phenomena intrinsic to Western society, for instance the drive for individual acquisition associated with capitalism, nationalism, the nuclear family, gender roles, race and other forms of cultural identity; are historically recent developments that help to justify and maintain hierarchy. Cultural Marxists use Marxist methods (historical research, the identification of economic interest, the study of the mutually conditioning relations between parts of a social order) to try to understand the complexity of power in contemporary society and to make it possible to criticise what, cultural Marxists propose, appears natural but is in fact ideological.

"We are, in Marx's terms, "an ensemble of social relations" and we live our lives at the core of the intersection of a number of unequal social relations based on hierarchically interrelated structures which, together, define the historical specificity of the capitalist modes of production and reproduction and underlay their observable manifestations."
— Martha E. Gimenez, Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy

According to UCLA professor and critical theorist Douglas Kellner, "Many 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life." Scholars have employed various types of Marxist social criticism to analyze cultural artifacts.

Frankfurt School and critical theory

The Frankfurt School is the name usually used to refer to a group of scholars who have been associated at one point or another over several decades with the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt, including Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Wolfgang Fritz Haug and Jürgen Habermas. In the 1930s the Institute for Social Research was forced out of Germany by the rise of the Nazi Party. In 1933, the Institute left Germany for Geneva. It then moved to New York City in 1934, where it became affiliated with Columbia University. Its journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung was accordingly renamed Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. It was at that moment that much of its important work began to emerge, having gained a favorable reception within American and English academia.

Among the key works of the Frankfurt School which applied Marxist categories to the study of culture were Adorno's "On Popular Music," which was written with George Simpson and published in Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences in 1941. Adorno was worried by signs of conformity in contemporary mass society and also at the conversion of individual artistic expression into the mass production of standardised commodities. He argued that popular music was, by design and promotion, "wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society", Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", originally a chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), which argued that culture reinforced "the absolute power of capitalism", and "Culture Industry Reconsidered", a 1963 radio lecture by Adorno.

After 1945 a number of these surviving Marxists returned to both West and East Germany. Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt in 1953 and reestablished the Institute. In West Germany in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a revived interest in Marxism produced a new generation of Marxists engaged with analyzing matters such as the cultural transformations taking place under Fordist capitalism, the impact of new types of popular music and art on traditional cultures, and maintaining the political integrity of discourse in the public sphere. This renewed interest was exemplified by the journal Das Argument. The tradition of thought associated with the Frankfurt School is Critical Theory.

Birmingham School and cultural studies

The work of the Frankfurt School and of Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci was particularly influential in the 1960s, and had a major impact on the development of cultural studies, especially in Britain. As Douglas Kellner writes:

Cultural Marxism was highly influential throughout Europe and the Western world, especially in the 1960s when Marxian thought was at its most prestigious and procreative. Theorists like Roland Barthes and the Tel Quel group in France, Galvano Della Volpe, Lucio Colletti, and others in Italy, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and cohort of 1960s cultural radicals in the English-speaking world, and a large number of theorists throughout the globe used cultural Marxism to develop modes of cultural studies that analyzed the production, interpretation, and reception of cultural artifacts within concrete socio-historical conditions that had contested political and ideological effects and uses. One of the most famous and influential forms of cultural studies, initially under the influence of cultural Marxism, emerged within the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England within a group often referred to as the Birmingham School.

[grumbler]

It had its excesses, but something had to be done.  Meanwhile, your Cultural Marxism never surprises me

What's cultural marxism?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=cultural+marxism

That doesn't help. It gives a wikipedia entry and a bunch of screeds denouncing "cultural marxism' without ever saying what it is.

You should probably rely on something more definitive than wikipedia and some blogs for your terms.  What IS "Cultural Marxism?"

[Malthus]

It had its excesses, but something had to be done.  Meanwhile, your Cultural Marxism never surprises me

What's cultural marxism?

The longer version of my flippant answer is that it is two things:

(1) a somewhat obscure offshoot of Marxist theory, briefly popular in the 1960s, that proposes that culture is part of the legitimation of oppression; or

(2) a vast conspiracy of multi-culturalists, liberals, etc. - indeed, everyone in the "elite" - devoted to tearing down the sacred order of western civilization in the minds of some extreme right-wing types. An example of this sort of thing:

http://www.westernrevival.org/who_stole_our_culture.htm

[Valmy]

I disagree.  We fell asleep on communism during World War II and even allowed communists, some of them Soviet agents, to infiltrate deep into the federal bureaucracy.  The general population had a right to know about that.

We fell asleep on Communism during WWII and during the New Deal era because being a lefty was not just allowed but almost fashionable.  Anyway the letting the general population know part was not the problem.  The problem was acting like they were enemy agents out to undermine the US which was not necessarily true.  No more than guys who thought Mussolini and Hitler were good for Italy and Germany in the 30s were enemies of the US war effort during WWII.

Saying 'there are Soviet Spies in the government, we are going to find them' is different than what was sold to the public.

But, as I said, McCarthy and his allies were targets during WWII of this exact same sort of thing.

[derspiess]

We fell asleep on Communism during WWII and during the New Deal era because being a lefty was not just allowed but almost fashionable. 

Plus the Soviets being our allies & whatnot. 

Anyway the letting the general population know part was not the problem.  The problem was acting like they were enemy agents out to undermine the US which was not necessarily true.  No more than guys who thought Mussolini and Hitler were good for Italy and Germany in the 30s were enemies of the US war effort during WWII.

Okay, agree to disagree then.

Saying 'there are Soviet Spies in the government, we are going to find them' is different than what was sold to the public.

How so?

But, as I said, McCarthy and his allies were targets during WWII of this exact same sort of thing.

I think you're overstating that a bit.

[The Minsky Moment]

Funny derspeiss and his cultural Marxism.
Being against McCarthyism doesn't make you a Marxist.
George Marshall occupied Frankfurt but that didn't make him part of the School.

[alfred russel]

I shouldn't be surprised that derspiess thinks favourably of McCarthyism; but somehow I still am.

I think McCarthy apologism is rather common among historically minded right wing conservatives.

[The Minsky Moment]

The general population had a right to know about that.

McCarthyism was a mechanism for obscuring such knowledge not elucidating it.

[derspiess]

Funny derspeiss and his cultural Marxism.
Being against McCarthyism doesn't make you a Marxist.

I never claimed that.

[Valmy]

Saying 'there are Soviet Spies in the government, we are going to find them' is different than what was sold to the public.

How so?

But, as I said, McCarthy and his allies were targets during WWII of this exact same sort of thing.

I think you're overstating that a bit.

Because that was not what he said.  He said Commies had infiltrated the government and he had a list of them.  But the issue was not Commies and left-wingers but actual spies and he had no clue who they were.

And yes the wartime harassment of right wingers was a lot less public but it was pretty bad.  McCarthy himself had been dragged through the mud for doing things like questioning the treatment of prisoners (obviously because he was pro-Nazi).

[Ed Anger]

I shouldn't be surprised that derspiess thinks favourably of McCarthyism; but somehow I still am.

He isn't the only one.

Oh Joe.