Re: <nettime> Was cultural Marxism the leading force behind the new worl

The extreme right is just not educated enough to properly spot its enemies. Parts of Adorno's theory, for example, could be easily hijacked for conservative and right-wing ends: his resistance against mass culture, early writings against jazz music, fondness of Spengler and cultural pessimism, even his larger issue of commodification resistance (which is a left-wing as well as a right-wing topic), to name only a few. Much of Adorno's philosophy was in line with the reservations and resentments of the German "Bildungsbürgertum" (the English translation "educated middle class" doesn't really cut it, because the German word describes a particular social milieu that grew out of Lutheran-protestant values, anti-materialism, academic education and fondness of canonic high culture). Those resentments found their way into both left-wing and right-wing thinking, including thinkers who crossed those lines (such as Peter Sloterdijk).

If the political right and its protagonists would be better educated and not argue on the level of college freshmen when it comes to cultural theory, they would know that they shouldn't blame Adorno, Foucault and Derrida, with the latter being even more easily interpretable as revisionists and anti-progressives than Adorno. (Which is what parts of so-called "German media theory" actually did in the 1980s and 1990s.) The right-wingers should better refocus their attention to British Cultural Studies which actually happen to be "Cultural Marxism" with no strings attached. I'm almost afraid to drop the names of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School here (not to even mention Marxist post-colonialists such as Gayatri Spivak), since they could be the "Alt-Right"'s perfect enemy and scapegoat; much more so than Adorno and the Frankfurt School...

-F

blog: https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561
bio: http://floriancramer.nl

On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 10:47 PM Flick Harrison <flick@flickharrison.com> wrote:

I always thought Cultural Marxism was a fine term and it doesn't hit me as a right-biased word in itself, though it gets used since its origin that way. I mean the first law teacher I had in University was a Marxist-Feminist, who completely believed this radical notion that righties hate: there's a superstructure that constructs the social narrative, and the social narrative is the source for all concepts of right, wrong, law, etc, which are not absolutes but socially determined; and that as we live in a patriarchy, the narrative is all about what men need, want, love and desire. Thus the patriarchal power structure and the narrative reinforce and reproduce one another.

The objective of the Marxist-Feminist is seizing the means of production of this narrative (culturally, in the workplace, in the control of capital whether for industry or communications, in politics, in the home etc).

Now if you extrapolate to include intersectional politics, you get Cultural Marxism, or maybe Identity Marxism. What's not to like about this term? What's incompatible with our ideals?

By using the word Marxist you're already implying socialism and internationalism, it would be hard to be a Marxist-Feminist who isn't a radical socialist too.

So for all the awfulness of Anders Breivik, this nomenclature dispute isn't the angle from which I'd critique him. The problem is his (perhaps mental-health or socially-conditioned) fear of the other, leading to violent outburst. The problem is his fear of dialogue and engagement. The problem is the amplifying echo-chamber of violent, unhinged narcissists with nothing but contempt for any difference of opinion, where bad-faith actors team up with honest ignoramuses and budding lunatics.

Now a term I really suspect is the bogeyman term "Anarcho-Capitalism:" this seems to be almost an alt-right Trojan Horse, meant to lure beginner Left thinkers of the "Bernie-or-Trump" variety. To me Libertarian Capitalism seems like a term that more readily describes people like Trump, Paul Ryan, Margaret Thatcher, Andrew Scheer, Sarkozy etc. "Capital is born free, yet everywhere it is in chains!" Oh crap, there's Rousseau again, but I swear I know nothing about him.

By using "Anarcho-" that way, it sounds to me like an attempt to muddy our image of the villains: "Anarchism" evokes the left, whereas the most radical white supremacist kleptocrats are more likely Libertarian. Why try to make Anarchism sound bad by tying it to Capitalism?? Because the alt-right talking points assert that "globalism" and "identity politics" and "socialism" are something that "elites" do, i.e. the big bad "oligarchs." Lump these elites (Hillary! Oprah! Michelle Obama!) together with capitalists ((Soros!)) and you get "Anarcho-Capitalists??"

Libertarian Capitalism, on the other hand, gets away scot-free because Crypto nerds think libertarianism is cool and they want Undermine the Elites!! They get to avoid Paying Taxes for the Globalist Wars! Libertarian Capitalism is for rebels and futurists and you just want to suck up to the Government!!

Maybe I'm stretching it. But the more I dive in, this decision - whether to villainize "Anarcho-Capitalism" or "Libertarian Capitalism" seems more and more important.

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