Cultural Marxism and political sociology

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1. skissaneMay 2024
   > There is no such a thing as cultural Marxism. That's a conspiracy theory the nazis first created.

   There is such a thing as "cultural Marxism", and it is not a conspiracy theory invented by the Nazis or anyone else.

   Consider for example the 1981 book by academic Richard Weiner, "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" [0] – it discusses "cultural Marxism" as a real thing, in a positive light, and it is a real academic book, not some conspiracy theory hoax. Or similarly consider Dennis L. Dworkin's 1997 book "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies" [1] – not some conspiratorial tome, it was published by Duke University Press. Or American philosopher Frederic Jameson's 2007 book "Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism" [2] – also published by Duke University Press, and not a conspiratorial work either

   Cultural Marxism is a real movement in post-war Marxism and academia. To what extent it influenced movements such as BLM is a question about which reasonable people can disagree. But its existence is not a conspiracy theory.

   No doubt some of the more extreme claims uninformed people have made about it do venture into the realms of conspiracy theory. But it would be wrong to assume that everyone who makes a claim like "cultural Marxism influenced BLM" is using the phrase "cultural Marxism" in such a sense. You'd have to investigate what they actually mean by it.

   [0] https://books.google.com/books?id=4G0XAAAAIAAJ

   [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=dY1Cgg8NV64C

   [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=pY69yJnmEAYC

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2. barry-cotterOct 2018
   > For all their flaws, Wikipedia is one of the few web information sources that are globally accepted as more or less correct.

   Only for things that aren’t politically fraught enough for one person, anywhere on the internet to decide to camp on the article. Look at what you get if you look up “Cultural Marxism”.

   It redirects to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory article, with the subheading “Cultural Marxism Conspiracy Theory”. This when there was an excellent article on the academic movement of that name.

   Very introductory reddit thread on the history of the academic movement

   https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8q8p6n/cult...

   Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology

   https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-...

   Talk page for the Cultural Marxism Wikipedia article, which now redirects to Frankfurt School Conspiracy Theory

   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cultural_Marxism

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3. barry-cotterOct 2018
   As you might have noticed if you had clicked on either the reddit thread or the amazon link that’s not so.

   Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology was published in 1981. It’s been cited 40 times. That’s not a seminal work but it’s not marginal either. Cultural Marxism was a self-description before it was ever used as a slur.

   Product Description A thorough examination and analysis of the tensions between political sociology and the culturally oriented Marxism that emerged in the 60s and 70s is presented in this volume. In order to create a strikingly original synthesis, Weiner considers the work of theorists as diverse as Jurgen Habermas, Claus Offe, Alain Touraine, Anthony Giddens and Alvin Gouldner, many of whom fall ideologically outside the cultural Marxism movement.

   Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture has the following review

   https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Marx...

   ... If this collection is long and complicated, that is because Marxist theory has a long and complicated history: no simple summary or static model will suffice for a genuinely dialectical theory, one that works with the essential concepts of contradiction between the emergent and the persistent, mediation, and overdetermination. ...

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