I’ve been seeing complaints from people that they don’t understand the term Cultural Marxism. Often this lack of understanding is communicated by labeling the term “meaningless”. I know what it means, and it’s a very appropriate term. Here’s a quick explanation.
Karl Marx was attempting to create a Workers Revolution. He intuited that there are a lot more workers than there are owners, and understood that if he could give the workers moral license to attack the owners, that they could take their stuff without having to produce it themselves. It was a simple plan and it worked well enough to kill hundreds of millions of people.
After the Workers Revolution failed to materialize in the US, a group of Marxists known as the Frankfurt School were theorizing on how to complete the revolution. They took Marx’s economic mechanism of dividing Labor (workers, proletariat) and Capital (bourgeoisie) and abstracted the economic model to a generalized Oppressed and Oppressors model, which is not economic but ideological. This is generally known as Critical Theory.
The Critical Theorists then realized that they could apply this method to any cultural/ideological space. Where Marx thought in economic terms (labor/capital), the Frankfurt school could divide any cultural space:
| Social Space | Oppressed | Oppressor |
|---|---|---|
| Gender | female | male |
| Sexual Orientation | gay | straight |
| Race | non-white | white |
Thus we see the Marxist divide-and-incite technique applied to culture : Cultural Marxism.
Once you have divided the space, the next step is to critique the ideology of the ‘oppressors’ as being self-serving and parasitic (Rule #3: SJWs Always Project). This is the ‘critical’ as in ‘critique’ part of Critical Theory. In essence, it boils down to chimping out while using scientific sounding terms like ‘marginalization’.
Bonus points for politicians if they can then herd all of the oppressed groups into a Big Tent Rainbow Coalition of Aggrieved Victims. The only problem is that you’ll have to be careful to work out a victim-status hierarchy, including intersectional victim status, which turns out to be a lot more complex than one might think, as we see with Political Correctness.
Poseidon Awoke: Realist 