Cultural marxism

The blindness of cultural Marxism

From our UK edition

Words we are not allowed to use any more now include ‘cultural Marxism’. Suella Braverman, now the Attorney General, used them last year and was immediately upbraided by the organisation Hope Not Hate. Very right-wing people sometimes use it too, you see, so it must never be uttered by anyone else. Banning the use of the phrase ‘cultural Marxism’ is about as culturally Marxist as it is possible to get, but I don’t suppose the cultural Marxists at Hope Not Hate appreciated the irony. Cultural Marxism is a largely 1960s excrescence in which everything must be seen through the prism of unequal power relations, other than which nothing else matters at all. Especially power relations regarding race and gender, the basis of identity politics.

What’s wrong with ‘cultural Marxism’?

It’s cultural Marxism week at Spectator USA. The dialectic of Enlightenment, prodded by the Angel of History, has forced us to confront the false consciousness of late capitalism and to choose between Eros and Civilization, socialism and fascism. Yay! If that sounds like drivel, it’s because it is. The meaningless bits in the previous paragraph are meaningful phrases in the mad Marxist dreamland of laugh-a-minute lefties Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Theodore Adorno, and that other one that Adorno wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment with.

cultural marxism jordan peterson