Continued from above...
If you Google “critical theory,” the first thing that pops up is a boxed definition that states: “crit-i-cal the-o-ry, noun, a philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it. The term is applied particularly to the work of the Frankfurt School.”
Precisely. Whoever posted that one nailed it. Hooray for accuracy! Note the words “culture” and “Frankfurt School.” Again, cultural Marxists — or, if you don’t like that, Marxists in culture.
As I noted in a piece here last year, People’s World, the successor to the Daily Worker, in the “About” section of its website, calls out and rallies what it calls “cultural workers” for the Marxist cause. These are Marxists operating on the cultural front. They are cultural Marxists.
This ain’t rocket science, boys and girls. And it ain’t anti-Semitism either.
Go back to that original Google box defining cultural Marxism as anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Ironically, if you click the provided link to the Frankfurt School reference at Wikipedia, it indeed explains: “The works of the Frankfurt School are understood in the context of the intellectual and practical objectives of critical theory…. In the praxis of cultural hegemony, the dominant ideology is a ruling-class narrative story, which explains that what is occurring in society is the norm.”
Again, note the words “cultural” and “Frankfurt School.”
There, it links (correctly) to Antonio Gramsci, the non-German, non-Jew, Italian. In fact, the Wikipedia page on Gramsci is pretty good, and includes 32 references to “culture” or “cultural.” The third paragraph of the Gramsci entry states:
Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class — the bourgeoisie — use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci’s view, develops a hegemonic culture using ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the “common sense” values of all and thus maintain the status quo. Hegemonic power is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than coercive power using force to maintain order. This cultural hegemony is produced and reproduced by the dominant class through the institutions that form the superstructure.
That’s correct. And there, at the page on Gramsci, are (rightly) no references to “conspiracy.” Apparently, that’s because certain different anonymous contributors (better informed) contributed to the Gramsci page — obviously not the same ignorant individuals who generated the shameless little box on cultural Marxism; that is, the nasty name-callers alleging anti-Semitism.
For the record, where does the charge of anti-Semitism come from? It, too, comes from laziness, nastiness, or a lack of charity and desire to smear opponents rather than get at the truth. The Wikipedia entry quotes (accurately or inaccurately) one of the individuals it accuses of anti-Semitism stating that all the members of the Frankfurt School were Jews (“to a man, Jewish”). I cannot vouch for that. I’ve never endeavored to tabulate a scorecard of Jews in the Frankfurt School. I have no desire. I don’t do that. Don’t ask me. Do your owned damned scorecard.
It’s crucial to understand, however, that those who write on the Frankfurt School, including its staunch advocates, always note that many to most of the members were Jewish. You can’t read a history that doesn’t note this. Why is that? For this reason: Any historian offering even a brief narrative account of the Frankfurt School, including the salient fact of its sudden mass migration to the United States, unavoidably notes that most members were Jews because it’s a crucial explanatory factor in their move to America — namely, they relocated because of Hitler’s madness. As Jews, they would be targeted by Hitler for genocide. That’s why they moved.
Truth be told, the only sympathy I’ve ever had for the Frankfurt School is that the poor guys could have been murdered by the Nazis. It’s my only soft spot for them. Otherwise, their writings are nonsense, useless, fruitless.
But again, historians writing histories of the school can’t avoid this fact. To cite just one example of numerous that could be referenced, probably the top academic work on the Frankfurt School (aside from Martin Jay’s research) is Rolf Wiggershaus’s The Frankfurt School, published in 1994 by MIT Press. It’s a seminal scholarly work, nearly 800 pages in length, with translations of German writings that no other scholar in English has published. This is a fully sympathetic tome. My sense is that Wiggershaus likely aligns ideologically with — and is at least favorable to — the school. He writes in his opening pages: “The first generation of the Frankfurt School consisted wholly of Jews.”
Wiggershaus certainly didn’t mean that as a negative. He proceeded to further note how they were persecuted as Jews. Heck, Wiggershaus might even be Jewish himself. (I don’t know, I haven’t checked.)
Again, it’s part of the history.
The first time I wrote about the Frankfurt School in a book, my editor added this query amid the editing process: “Paul, why in the world did they all suddenly leave Germany to come to the United States?” My editor wanted to know if this was some sort of Comintern-inspired conspiracy or the work of a communist cabal at Columbia University. No, no, I explained. The answer was because they were Jews fleeing Hitler. My editor answered: “Oh! You need to include that!”
Of course. And historians of the Frankfurt School need the freedom to include that key fact without nameless hacks vilifying them online as anti-Semites for doing so.
Even then, assume for a moment, for the sake of argument, that the vast majority of cultural Marxists in the Frankfurt School were Jewish, as its historians have asserted. Well, the vast majority of cultural Marxists today — writing at People’s World, joining the International Gramsci Society, penning tracts on “queer theory” — are certainly not Jews. Today’s cultural Marxism isn’t a Jewish thing. That’s stupid.
Now, all of that said, could certain agitators on the “alt-right” exploit the fact that so many Frankfurters were Jews to try to create an “anti-Semitic trope” of the Frankfurt School? Of course, they could. That needs to be condemned and countered. But simply noting that many were Jewish, or, more important, simply noting that today there’s such a thing as a cultural form of Marxism, should absolutely not be permitted to be labeled an “anti-Semitic trope.”
Ironically, these faceless online contributors also threaten leftist academic allies. When I last week checked the website for Occidental College’s Department of Critical Theory and Social Justice, which, for years, boasted about instructing its pupils in “Marxism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School,” there was no longer any mention of Marxism, nor certainly cultural Marxism. Those leftists at Occidental must have yanked the language, no doubt fearful of being accused of anti-Semitism.
Above all, this is as much a lesson in the power of an enormously influential source like Wikipedia (and the Internet generally) to be abused and to spread bad information that ends up hurting people. Unfortunately, millions if not billions rely on Wikipedia, and what you thus have online is, ironically, the creation of a conspiracy theory about the “conspiracy theory” of cultural Marxism.
Again, if some are guilty of creating a fake conspiracy of a very real ideology or literal theory, then we should condemn that. That does not, however, mean that, say, critical theory, or the application of Marxism to culture, à la cultural Marxism, doesn’t exist.
Alas, let’s also be on guard for those who want to create a conspiracy theory out of term that, properly applied, isn’t a conspiracy theory.
https://spectator.org/cultural-marxi...-conspirators/