Marxism and the Cultural Revolution

It will not have escaped many people’s attention that one of the main strategies in America’s “reckoning on race and Southern identity” involves depicting the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of racial oppression. Against this, Patrick J. Buchanan argued that:

What the flag symbolizes for the millions who revere, cherish, or love it, however, is the heroism of those who fought and died under it….

Vilification of that battle flag and the Confederacy is part of the cultural revolution in America that flowered half a century ago. Among its goals was the demoralization of the American people by demonizing their past and poisoning their belief in their own history.

This cultural revolution—in which historical events are wielded as weapons in a contemporary culture war—has been described as a form of cultural Marxism. But progressives sneer at the very label, denying that there is an ongoing culture war. They argue that the destruction of Confederate monuments, desecration of Confederate graves, and banning of the Confederate battle flag are motivated purely by a belief in racial equality and a desire to promote what they often describe as “accurate, nuanced, and complete” history. They insist that there is no political or ideological agenda behind their interpretation of history. The New York Times published an opinion piece describing the notion of cultural Marxism as “the phantasmagoria of the alt-right” brewed in “global sewers of hatred,” insisting that it is all a figment of a “delirious” and “paranoid” right-wing imagination.

Responding to such claims, Allan Mendenhall explains the origins of cultural Marxism. He “shows not only that cultural Marxism is a nameable, describable phenomenon, but also that it proliferates beyond the academy.” He adds that:

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Frankfurt School popularized the type of work usually labeled as “cultural Marxism”.…

Dissatisfied with economic determinism and the illusory coherence of historical materialism—and jaded by the failures of socialist and communist governments—these thinkers retooled Marxist tactics and premises in their own ways without entirely repudiating Marxist designs or ambitions.

The British journalist Janet Daley also identifies the central role played by Marxist ideology and tactics in the culture wars, arguing that although European socialism failed, “the dream itself did not disappear, it took another shape. It was in the business of transforming itself from an economic revolution into a cultural one even before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of communist governments.” Daley also explains how the cultural revolution unfolded, as socialists modified the methods of revolution from economic to cultural. The left realized that,

…instead of revolutionary takeover by an armed mob seizing the levers of government, there would have to be a gradual usurpation making use of the existing institutions which the Left rightly understood to be the true sources of power in society.

Herbert Marcuse’s “long march through the institutions” was well underway before the fall of the Soviet empire but its technique of activist infiltration has since taken off in ways that are truly breathtaking. […]

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