Cultural Marxism refers to a school or offshoot of
Marxism that conceives of
culture as central to the legitimation of oppression, in addition to the
economic factors that
Karl Marx emphasized.
[1]An outgrowth of
Western Marxism (especially from
Antonio Gramsci and the
Frankfurt School) and finding popularity in the 1960s as
cultural studies, cultural Marxism argues that what appear as traditional cultural phenomena intrinsic to
Western society, for instance the drive for individual acquisition associated with
capitalism,
nationalism, the
nuclear family,
gender roles,
race and other forms of
cultural identity;
[1] are historically recent developments that help to justify and maintain hierarchy. Cultural Marxists use Marxist methods (historical research, the identification of economic interest, the study of the mutually conditioning relations between parts of a social order) to try to understand the complexity of power in contemporary society and to make it possible to criticise what, cultural Marxists propose, appears natural but is in fact ideological.
Explanation of the "Cultural Marxism" theory[edit]
| “ | We are, in Marx's terms, "an ensemble of social relations" and we live our lives at the core of the intersection of a number of unequal social relations based on hierarchically interrelated structures which, together, define the historical specificity of the capitalist modes of production and reproduction and underlay their observable manifestations. | ” |
| |
— Martha E. Gimenez, Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy [2]
|
Frankfurt School and critical theory[edit]
The
Frankfurt School is the name usually used to refer to a group of scholars who have been associated at one point or another over several decades with the
Institute for Social Research of the
University of Frankfurt, including
Theodor W. Adorno,
Max Horkheimer,
Ernst Bloch,
Walter Benjamin,
Erich Fromm,
Herbert Marcuse,
Wolfgang Fritz Haug and
Jürgen Habermas. In the 1930s the Institute for Social Research was forced out of Germany by the rise of the
Nazi Party. In 1933, the Institute left Germany for
Geneva. It then moved to
New York City in 1934, where it became affiliated with
Columbia University. Its journal
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung was accordingly renamed
Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. It was at that moment that much of its important work began to emerge, having gained a favorable reception within American and English
academia.
Among the key works of the Frankfurt School which applied Marxist categories to the study of culture were Adorno's "On Popular Music," which was written with George Simpson and published in
Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences in 1941. Adorno was worried by signs of conformity in contemporary mass society and also at the conversion of individual artistic expression into the mass production of standardised commodities. He argued that popular music was, by design and promotion, "wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society",
[5] Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", originally a chapter in
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), which argued that culture reinforced "the absolute power of capitalism",
[6] and "Culture Industry Reconsidered", a 1963 radio lecture by Adorno.
[7]
After 1945 a number of these surviving Marxists returned to both
West and
East Germany. Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt in 1953 and reestablished the Institute. In West Germany in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a revived interest in Marxism produced a new generation of Marxists engaged with analyzing matters such as the cultural transformations taking place under
Fordist capitalism, the impact of new types of popular music and art on traditional cultures, and maintaining the political integrity of discourse in the
public sphere.
[8] This renewed interest was exemplified by the
journal Das Argument. The tradition of thought associated with the Frankfurt School is
Critical Theory.
Birmingham School and cultural studies[edit]
The work of the Frankfurt School and of Marxist thinker
Antonio Gramsci was particularly influential in the 1960s, and had a major impact on the development of
cultural studies, especially in Britain. As Douglas Kellner writes:
Cultural Marxism was highly influential throughout Europe and the Western world, especially in the 1960s when Marxian thought was at its most prestigious and procreative. Theorists like
Roland Barthes and
the Tel Quel group in France,
Galvano Della Volpe,
Lucio Colletti, and others in Italy,
Fredric Jameson,
Terry Eagleton, and cohort of 1960s cultural radicals in the English-speaking world, and a large number of theorists throughout the globe used cultural Marxism to develop modes of cultural studies that analyzed the production, interpretation, and reception of cultural artifacts within concrete socio-historical conditions that had contested political and ideological effects and uses. One of the most famous and influential forms of cultural studies, initially under the influence of cultural Marxism, emerged within the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England within a group often referred to as the Birmingham School.
[3]
Use by current Conservatives[edit]
In current politics, the term has also been associated by Conservatives with a set of values that, it is claimed, are in simple contradiction with traditional values of
Western society and
Christian religion.
[9] Undermining these is believed to be the true purpose of
Political correctness and
Multiculturalism, which are then identified with Cultural Marxism.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Jump up to:a b Merquior, J.G. (1986). Western Marxism, University of California Press/Paladin Books, ISBN 0586084541
- Jump up^ Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy, by Martha E. Gimenez, Published (2001) in Race, Gender and Class, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 23-33.
- ^ Jump up to:a b Douglas Kellner, "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies,"http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf, circa 2004.
- Jump up^ Douglas Kellner, "Herbert Marcuse," Illuminations, University of Texas, http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell12.htm.
- Jump up^ "On popular music". Originally published in: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, New York: Institute of Social Research, 1941, IX, 17-48. See Gordon Welty "Theodor Adorno and the Culture Industry" (1984).
- Jump up^ Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer "Enlightment as mass deception" Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979, 120-167 (originally published as: Dialektik der Aufklärung. Amsterdam: Querido, 1947). On-line the University of Groningen website and Marxist Internet Archive. See Gordon Welty "Theodor Adorno and the Culture Industry" (1984).
- Jump up^ Lecture in the International Radio University Program over the Hessian Broadcasting System which was published in German in 1967,English translation in New German Critique, 6, Fall 1975, 12-19 (translated by Anson G. Rabinbach). See Gordon Welty "Theodor Adorno and the Culture Industry" (1984).
- Jump up^ e.g. Jürgen Habermas (1962 trans 1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society, Polity, Cambridge.
- Jump up^ William S. Lind (2008), Who stole our culture?
Further reading[edit]
- Marcuse, Herbert (1955). Eros and civilization; a philosophical inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press.
- Wolff, Robert Paul; Marcuse, Herbert (1964). A critique of pure tolerance. Boston: Beacon Press.
- Leiss, William (1974). "Critical Theory and Its Future". Political Theory 2 (3): 330–349. doi:10.1177/009059177400200306.
- Eidelberg, Paul (1969). "The Temptation of Herbert Marcuse". Review of Politics 31 (4): 442–458.doi:10.1017/S0034670500011785.
- Eidelberg, Paul (1970). "Intellectual and Moral Anarchy in American Society". Review of Politics 32 (1): 32–50.doi:10.1017/S0034670500012560.
- Stokes, Jr., William S. (1980). "Emancipation: The Politics of West German Education". Review of Politics 42 (2): 191–215.doi:10.1017/S0034670500031442.
- Davies, Ioan (1991). "British Cultural Marxism". International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 4 (3): 323–344.doi:10.1007/BF01386507.
- Dworkin, Dennis (1997). Cultural Marxism in Post War Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-1914-4.
- Gottfried, Paul (2005). The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press. ISBN 0-8262-1597-1.
- Luca Corchia, (2010). La logica dei processi culturali. Jürgen Habermas tra filosofia e sociologia, Genova, Edizioni ECIG. ISBN 978-88-7544-195-1.
