Name it and it will exist. Cultural Marxism as modern bogeyman.
Unlike the many films that used the moniker ‘Frankenstein’ to sell the bogeyman back to the public as an eerily familiar, yet scary monster, Mary Shelley’s original novel never bestows upon the reanimated corpse the privilege of a name. Not so with the modern day creation of Prometheus, ‘Cultural Marxism’. We should be careful in the rush to ascribe great power to something we do not understand, that we are not inadvertently creating our own lurching cadaver, or worse still being led by Victor Frankenstein ourselves.
It is the assertion of many that Cultural Marxism is a real and growing threat to western values and society as a whole. Cultural Marxism, they often claim, has an international globalist agenda, and is all pervasive in reach, infecting academia, media and politics, and run by a smaller group of all powerful megalomaniacs that want to install enforced socialism. This campaign, it is claimed, will involve everything from forced land grabs , to the genocide of the white race. The Cultural Marxists are intent on the destruction of traditional family values, the removal of the rule of law, the breakdown of order, and the dismissal of accepted norms of morality.
This, we are warned will lead everybody into a cascading downward spiral, which will spin and drag everyone within it’s path into an inevitable life of chaotic debauchery. The agenda of Cultural Marxists we are told, is the destruction of the Western World as we know it.
Cultural Marxism for some is responsible for an even more specific and targeted international operation. A plan which seeks to flood western countries with immigrants from Africa and encourage turning a blind eye to the gradual Islamification and feminisation of the West. Feminists, anti-fascists, academics, hollywood and social justice warriors ,are all colluding in an attempt to stretch the moral acceptability not just of homosexuality, but the also the natural/unnatural progression from that to anal sex,bestiality, incest and paedophilia.
Change seems to be the common opponent, with the term progressive used to signify an abnormality in the make-up of an individual. It is presented as though stasis and the maintenance of what is perceived as the natural order of things, from patriarchal systems, to the forced expansion of capitalism,democracies, republics,(and christian values modeled around the template set by America), is a non-negotiable ideal, toward which all nations should strive.
It is very difficult to debate and discuss such an illusory bogeyman. The problems start when the proponents of such a theory are sustained by the fuel of conspiracies that justify their own confusion and victimhood. This transforms even the mere suggestion that the mythical enemy might not actually exist, into a personal attack by which one defines oneself.
I am not looking to attack those individuals that believe in such an obvious and convoluted scapegoat. There are many reasons for their fears, though misplaced, but many more reasons why subscribing to and canvassing such a widely believed theory is dangerous. It must then, be confronted. It isn’t going away and it is an age old monster that can metamorphose to fit whichever era in which it breeds its poisonous offspring. I am not going to apologise if those who believe it’s premise find it offensive. Not only are their own views often quite repulsive, but it would be cowardly to not point out that the ideological dogma that is being used to manipulate them, is being utilised in the very same way they fear Cultural Marxists are shaping the Western world.
This is not the positive argument I am presenting, as an alternative to the easy answer that blaming Cultural Marxism has become. It is essential though that one understands how flawed, pernicious and clever that device has become in shutting down debate itself, if we are ever to really even begin having a discussion about how we got here, and how we can progress.
The bigger the bogeyman the easier he is to believe in
For those who believe conspiracy theories, they can seem much more feasible if their reach is universal . It is no good being small scale or local, it must be an overarching theory that can explain why everything is not how they imagine it should be. So when you ask about Cultural Marxism you will be told that it dominates public life. LGBT rights are said to be an expression of the Cultural Marxist agenda, the European Union and the United Nations are Cultural Marxist tools, the Islamification of the west..of course Cultural Marxism. Unchecked immigration? Cultural Marxism . Language, you will be assured, and the idea that it should be modified or changed in any way, is not just a politically correct movement, it is again rooted in Cultural Marxism.
All of these, really? Wow this really is an international globalist enterprise then. So naturally, global warming is something else that was invented by Cultural Marxists. In fact communities that people live,work and play within everyday are just imagined constructs for those who subscribe to the idea of Cultural Marxism. And boy do they subscribe. They subscribe to InfoWars, Paul Joseph Watson, Jordan Peterson, Breitbart, The Rebel Media, etc because the MSM (Mainstream Media)and even the internet itself is looked upon as the (666/WWW) numbered beast upon which the harlot rides in the book of Revelation. It is the mouthpiece of Cultural Marxism and political correctness. It is repeated like a mantra that only the chosen few, clued up on subscribed channels that dare speak against the biggest threat Western Civilisation faces, will be saved.
Karl and why he is the Antichrist
Before we look at Cultural Marxism and it’s roots, lets look at Marx and Marxism. This is where I think many conservatives on the right, do not declare the real reason for their opposition to him.
It is rooted in the tradition of the Christian materialist. That is, not only interpreting both scripture and the world in a rather literal and physical way, but being concerned with the accumulation of material wealth and physical goods.Much more so than the person they claim to follow, Jesus, ever was. Often curiously aspiritual, many see no contradiction in this, because their version of Christianity puts a literal physical human man up on the cross, and that becomes the centre of their ideology. Capitalism then (or their version of it) like Christianity itself, is seen as a perfect template that cannot be improved, and naturally the systemic problems within it are ignored.
In contrast Marx is an idealist. Dialectical materialism is in essence the belief in ideas. These it says, are the greatest achievement of human kind. These shape the real world. To understand the material world you must understand the ideas that made it. However ideas don’t just come from brains that shape physical reality, but also the physical world, genes, traditions and bodies that shape our thinking.
For Marx the Jewish tradition of being able to question God it/himself ,meant that yes, of course you could examine and question capitalism.
Christian capitalists though often innately bulk at this basic tenet of Marxism. Internal contradictions are built into capitalism just as they are found throughout the Bible. The trouble begins when as a Christian capitalist, you also believe the Bible to be the literal word of God. If it really is that, then any contradictions would expose the author’s fallibility and their claims of his omnipotence. For many Capitalism has this same unquestionable crusading quality.
So you may ask, very reasonably in a western society in which most of us grow up never questioning the version of capitalism we live under, where are it’s inherent contradictions? Let us look at one example.
In order to preserve and increase profit margins capitalists must cut labour costs. This can be done by sacking workers, or employing migrants at a lower cost. They can also do this by replacing people with machines and/or computers. But then those same workers, who are now without a job, are unable to spend as much as they previously could, and help sustain and grow the capitalist economy. This is a very familiar contradiction and one that Marx himself talked about.
How is this everlasting profit conundrum solved? Credit. Much like an account with God you can buy stuff on a promise to pay when you have money in the future. This is like beseeching God for forgiveness for your latest sin, because in the future you will be holy and rolling in spiritual wealth. It means when wages are low, credit is there to prop up the system.
Sound far-fetched? Think of it like delayed satisfaction. A seemingly laudable and responsible aim. One though that in Politics, can be exploited by capitalism to sustain a corrupt and broken system. How many politicians around the world, when retiring from their jobs, end up on executive boards, or with a large amount of shares in companies they dealt with when in office? Not all of this is reverse bribery, but golden handshakes are rife, and keep those at the top exactly where they are.
What happens though when over production in non western countries (China, India, Brazil etc) fails to keep profits up? One key option is to manufacture an enemy to keep the Military Industrial Complex going. The war machine needs feeding, and at it’s heart it is an idealogical capitalist monster. Cultural Marxism is constructed to play a part, just like the enemy, to distract from these flaws. They become a scapegoat. If the sin, the pollution, the dye and ink that makes pure capitalism impure is exposed, it threatens the very theologically influenced idea of everlasting profit.
It is no big secret that the Western Capitalist Empires have been sustained by never ending wars whilst alternately sustaining tyrannies, in order to have others overthrown. Capitalism after all, evolved out of feudalism in Europe. But feudalism is not dead. It lives inside the clothes of capitalism.
It is not that people have literally given control to the 1% because they do not want to think for themselves. It goes much deeper than that. We have grown up as descendants of those who did not question God. They were told what to do. This means that despite living in a democracy, people are willing to accept organised religion as an interface between them and God .
Western capitalism is built in a way that must be at odds with, and sustain a natural opposition towards Marx and Marxism, to justify it’s feudal template
This is as true with religious as it is with political and economic power. It is rarely challenged, in any meaningful fundamental way. So feudalism the great grandparent of western capitalism lives on. Even in America people are reliant on a President that represents the 1% while boasting about being quite happy to sending those not like him, those not born into great wealth, back down into the coal mines. Rich though he is with inherited/feudal wealth, he is explicit in his hunt for new enemies to sustain the hungry capitalist machine that keeps him plump. Enemies to blame if the top down theological model of capitalism he preaches is sufficiently challenged.
The means of production is controlled, like it always has been, by those at the top of the pyramid. It should be no surprise then that the current system of capitalism is built to serve these moneyed kings. It is a system older than capitalism that we all recognize. A top down system.
This is why working class people on council estates in the UK will often vote Tory, in the mistaken belief that they will by osmosis, be more like those at the top for whom they are voting, and Americans in abandoned projects and regions will cast their vote for someone whom they think embodies success, and the American dream. Even if they got there by exploiting people like them, or through a random accident of birth. It rings true and seems almost fatalistic. If there is no real reason why the corporations owners , board members , and the political aristocrats seem to be there in power it must be good and beneficial to be a ruthless, selfish bastard. Why vote for anyone else?
And more than that if you can ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ why can’t everyone else? Otherwise it would indicate some moral deficiency and straying from traditional Christian capitalist values.Many corporate companies run in the opposite way to how democracies are supposedly structured. At the same time they are protected by governments, at the expense of the same voters who voluntarily gave them the power that should regulate corporations.
So it is clear how much of western capitalism is built in a way that must be at odds with and sustain a natural opposition towards Marx and Marxism, to justify it’s feudal template, but what about Cultural Marxism?
How has this become the sociological, and cultural enemy of a growing number of politicians, corporate bosses, mainstream academics, social commentators, and their followers across the world?
Name it and it will exist
To give a fantasy flesh, to clothe the ghost in skin, one must start by naming the spectre, and only then will it start to take shape or be given form. Historically existential threats have been a brilliant means of rallying support against often invisible, and sometimes non-existent foes.
The idea proposed by those who believe that Cultural Marxism is a real threat to Western Values, is that a group of Jews from the Goethe University in Frankfurt, fled Nazi persecution to America, and this group of theorists (philosophers, sociologists,musicologists,psychoanalysts etc) brought with them a Marxist ideology with which they infected all aspects of Western life starting with the Universities.
The Frankfurt School though, were not even Marxists. They quite openly criticised and questioned traditional orthodox Marxist theory, in fact their ambiguity was often criticised in that unlike Marx they did not promise a better future. The term ‘cultural Marxism’ (little c big M) is an academic term within cultural studies, that describes a small part of the Frankfurt Schools discourse, bearing little relation to the all powerful monster it is portrayed as now, by those dog whistling to warn of it’s evil presence.
The actual theories of ‘cultural Marxism’ target the industrialized mass produced profit driven commercial bastardization of culture. It critiques adversing,the tabloid newspaper and Hollywood, as being responsible for leading people away from local cultures and values. It is an examination of the micro rather than the macro. It is not, as is often claimed, Cultural studies.
Cultural studies can include a study of it, but then it can also include the examination and discussion of everything from semiotics to political theory, philosophy, literary theory, art history /criticism etc. According to the alt-right and others who use the concept of Cultural Marxism to degenerate people, the end game of modern Cultural Marxists, is the overthrow of Christian values and free enterprise. Cultural Marxism is presented as a thinly veiled reference to a Jewish Fifth Column, the Illuminati, and The Elders of Zion.
The Jew is by nature international, and so always a foreigner, easy to portray as part of some shadowy elite. Now the USSR has gone it is a convenient foe. Civil rights protesters, journalists, academics, these are easy targets for conservatives to blame for issues with family,crime, education and morality and this is whom the disciples of the Cultural Marxist theory are referring to when they talk about Cultural Marxism. Hence, the idea of cultural marxists as the bogeyman emerges as a substitute for the errors of capitalism and an excuse for the worse kind of bigotry and xenophobia.
A Frankenstein’s monster to raise in a time of crisis. A time in which the dirty deeds of what was once considered perfectly normal expressions of masculinity, are esposed as monstorous. The conservation of unchallenged patriarchal systems and the abuse of power by some white people in structures, entrenched with a dogmatic idealogical insistence on preserving this at all costs, has led many on the right to seek a cover all bases enemy to blame. Cultural Marxism is a perfect fit for anything that challenges existing power structures and traditions but ignores the elephant in the room. Internal Contradictions.
A belief in Cultural Marxism as a dangerous monster, is only possible if you believe that there are no internal contradictions within capitalism. This may seem ludicrous, but no more far fetched than the idea that the left, at it’s heart springing from an opposition to feudal power structures like the monarchy (the anti-monarchists in France sat on the left of the presiding members chair in parliament)is inevitably dictatorial in nature, and has fascist similarities. This trope of the ‘Nazis were Socialists’ is only neccesary as a gross distortion and over-simplification, if you simply refuse to entertian the idea of internal contradictions within capitalism.
It is the extreme right , the capitalists at all costs, who want to preserve feudal power structures and with it the close ties between religion and state. There is nothing democratic or Marxist about faceless corporations rewarding an elite select board with hundreds of millions, while destroying the small towns and the environments in which they were built. Hollywood itself, the target of cultural Marxism is the most unashamedly capitalist of enterprises. Just like the tabloid media that cultural Marxism clearly foretold would pit groups within communities against each other. It is capitalist to the core. Look at the few figures at the top of the pyramids controlling these modern Empires and they are the very definition of capitalist man gods. The most useful of internal contradictions to blame on Cultural Marxism is the very globalisation that has happened, in order to maintain profit at all costs for Western Capitalism. These are the internal contradictions that the one percent who are at the top will seek to bury.
It suits those at the top if everyday workers, civil rights protestors, academics, and feminists are presented as the enemy. This weaponized narrative forces those that subscribe to the Cultural Marxist bogeyman theory to become fractured themselves. It insists on them divorcing their emotional instinctual intelligence from their ability to reason for themselves. It is this appealing reliance on the negative emotion of fear and what feels safe, with the actual rational reasoning being left to those in authority, that allows tyranny to flourish.
In a fast changing world it is calming for an authority figure to have the difficult challenges worked out for you. It removes the need for personal responsibility and moves the need for creating your own moral compass and role in society to an elite few who will gladly take that responsibility, in exchange for the power and material gain they can get in such a transaction. The deliberate conflagration of Marxism and cultural (suggesting cultural studies) is a brilliant way to trigger hysterical and irrational fear. Add in the now popular narrative of dismissing things like people’s uneasy feelings as being something chaotic,weak and feminine to be dismissed, and you have constructed a fantastic tool to shut down debate and push as much fake news as you need to stoke fear, resentment and an insatiable appetite for conflict.
Economic uncertainty, terrorism and the rapidly evolving cultural changes around the globe are real issues that people will naturally be concerned with. That does not mean there is one single source for all of these and that the sickness/sinfulness creating this confusion and danger can be cured simply by disabusing people of a false perception of reality. Cultural Marxism is not the real threat. In fact a crusade toward a very narrow view of what is rational and moral is not a democratic ideal but instead part of the belief of extreme Islamists and far right terrorists.
No easy answersThe world is not like a Hollywood movie in which philosophy and politics can be distilled into a red and blue pill from which one merely has to make the right choice to wake up. Those warning you about Cultural Marxism will insist it is though. It is a complex and evolving entity in which unique individuals will need unique answers at different points in their life. Any attempt at offering you one truth should make you sceptical of an answer in which your own powers of reasoning are traded for feeling of certainty and safety. Even if you believe in God, then rationally that should not stop you using the powers of reasoning he chose to endow you with ,and not make Gods anew out of men who would take his place.
So successful has the cult of Cultural Marxism as bogeyman been, that words like progressive are framed as ciphers for debauchery, great serious works of art like Picasso’s antifascist masterpiece ‘Guernica’ are dismissed as being communist, post modern rubbish, by people who do not even realise that Marxists themselves denounced it. The subscribers to the great Cultural Marxism conspiracy are recreating history, so that things like Neo-Nazis are refereed to as illusions, and women choosing to wear make up at work are simply asking to be sexually harassed. Protest is re-framed as both anarchy and conformity, and the idea of questioning anything is presented as a invitation to encourage moral and societal collapse.
The supreme irony with a slogan like ‘cultural Marxism is taking over the world’ , is that in it’s original form, it critiques exactly what those who supposedly subscribe to Cultural Marxism are doing themselves. They are passively consuming the propaganda of a capitalist cultural industry. That is not conservatism, tradition or a return to the values of the enlightenment, it is an argument against progression and for regression.
As Nietzsche warned
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Those who subscribe to the Marxenstein cultural Marxist bogeyman theory, would do well to remember this, but it is also a fitting reminder for those of us often accused of being ‘Cultural Marxists’.
It is relevant because the cynicism that is the abyss today, can easily swallow up the participants on both sides of the debate. In an effort to get to the bottom of why people think like they do, it may be much easier to pretend that your opponent is some monstrous, inhuman compassionless foe, but do so and you risk becoming an artless lumbering thug yourself.
