This is a question that requires a long answer. This is as good an answer as any.
Abagond and the whole crowd over at his site = Cultural Marxism. Tim Wise, Robert Jensen, that whole crowd, that’s Cultural Marxism. Idiot radical feminists who hate men, that’s Cultural Marxism. Hispanic Aztlan revanchist shitheads are Cultural Marxists. Afrocentrist dumbasses wailing against Whitey, that’s Cultural Marxism. Radical queers pushing extreme pro-gay lunatic politics, that’s Cultural Marxism.
The Cultural Marxists pushed Identity Politics in the 1960’s. The result was the retarded division of White men from White women, White workers from Black and Hispanic workers, straight workers from gay workers, and all sorts of idiotic bullshit. Divide the workers, you know. The game the Right always does.
Except this time it was “Left” retards doing it. It defined Whites and males as the enemy, and Whites and males acted as you might expect: they fled from it like smoke from a burning building. Straight into the arms of the enemy, the Right. But the Left gave them this shove, or kick in the butt, in the first place.
That’s what it is, in a nutshell. Personally, I think it sucks, but that’s just me. It all goes back to Herbert Marcuse in the 1960′s. Originally it was a Left philosophy, so it was sort of ok in a way, but now it’s been taken over by bourgeois characters, mostly Black and Hispanic bourgeois who are not really Left people and often push rightwing economics. They just use it as grudge politics to try to get a bigger share of the loot for their bourgeois ethnic group, and a grudge against the bourgeois Whites supposedly not being nice enough to the Black, Hispanic, etc. bourgeois.
At worst, it is simply bullshit anti-White politics for the bourgeois of any race:
Whites are evil, Whites are evil, Whites are evil, Whites are evil, Whites are evil, Whites need to give up stuff, Whites need to give up stuff, Whites need to give up stuff, Whites need to give up stuff, Whites need to give up stuff.
Combine that with rightwing neoliberal multinational corporate capitalism. Mystery Shit Anti-White Worker Casserole!
There is absolutely nothing whatsoever here for any White worker. It fucks him when he walks in and fucks him again when he walks out. No one wonder it sells to White workers as fast as turd cupcakes. White workers are not as stupid as you think.
There’s nothing progressive about this politics!
Anti-White propaganda + neoliberal corporate multinational, multicultural, invite the world politics does not benefit White workers in any way, shape or form!
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Thank you for this post, Robert.
We’re always talking about Cultural Marxism, but I think it’s about time that we more closely investigated what it actually is.
This is an interesting Marxist critique of Tim Wise, and the use of identity politics to divert attention from class struggle:
http://www.dailybattle.pair.com/2010/latest_chapter_antiracism.shtml
“Cultural Marxism” is not Marxism at all. Marx would have been completely against it, and warned that liberals would attempt to use race issues to obfuscate class issues.
The beginning of the broader use of the term White privilege over class privilege seems to arisen around the time that the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc collapsed.
Why do you think that is?
By the way, interesting discussion between you and Jasmin over at Abagond.
Although it’s interesting. Even Abagond doesn’t completely buy into the whole racism = prejudice plus power definition often employed by anti-racists, which was essentially the logic Jasmin was using.
I think the collapse of the USSR signified the collapse of genuine, Stalinist communism. And essentially this Cultural Marxist garbage became aligned with corporate neoliberal globalization. After all, in 1990, Bush Sr. talked about a “New World Order.”
Interesting interpretation.
Yeah, even going back a few decades, you didn’t really hear the term “white privilege” widely used.
That term is mainly a late 80s, early 90s term that developed from Critical Race Theory.
Jerod Israel’s series about the Weather Underground reports that they talked about “white skin privilege” a lot:
“While we believed white people could overcome racism in common struggle with non-white people, over shared problems, the Weathermen viewed white American working people as being the problem. The Weathermen hid their ideology of contempt behind rhetoric about what they, oblivious to the irony, called “white skin privilege.” I say “oblivious to the irony” because the Weathermen and their allies disproportionately came from upper class backgrounds. In any case, whatever their backgrounds, their ideology was a trendy adaptation of the contempt for supposedly ‘crude’ working people they had absorbed during their upbringings. They were snobs with a license. Self-scrutiny? Please. Self-indulgence and self-glorification were their watchwords, as they demonstrated.”
Israel is a Zionist nut, but these articles are really interesting. Unfortunately, the 5th installment, which was to deal with the connection between a store managed by Dohrn and a series of violent armed robberies in New York, was never published.
Along with the WUO you got all the Maoist Third Worldist bullshitters, including Noel Ignatiev and J. Sakai, who wrote “Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat”. Have you ever seen that? It’s insane. He writes off all white people as hopelessly reactionary settlers. What I don’t understand is how an apparent descendant of Japanese immigrants is exempt from being labeled a “settler” himself.
FUCK the 1980’s. I hate that goddamned decade. The worst decade of the 20th century.
How sad what passes for the left today is all wrapped around Herbert Marcuse’s ideas, which to way is really about trying to bring down society to the lowest common denominator, via disability rights, LGBTiQA rights, radical feminism, multiculturalism,etc. things that may prove somewhat problematic for individual businesses,especially small businesses,though not as much for Fortune 500 Corps., but not really threatening to the Capitalist system as a whole. The real Marxists I know happen to either dismiss it, downplay it, or if they do acknowledge it, denounce it as complete BS! If this is what the western left all stands for, then I what no part of it. That’s why I hate today’s western Left. They don’t seem to worry for about things working or poorer people like myself actually care about,such as better schools, access to decent healthcare, more & better paying jobs opportunities, better housing,etc. I’d take a 3rd world revolutionary such as Hugo Chavez or a Colombian FARC member over Tim Wise or John Kerry any day.
Right on comrade!
The name “cultural marxism” should be dropped and replaced by a fitting term because these people aren’t marxist, they don’t care about class struggle and the poor, they are usually capitalist. These people are the cause of many young white men seeking refugee in the archaic ideology known as the far right.