Worried about “cultural Marxism”? We’re more worried about you. The Guardian, March 27:
A leading Jewish group (in Britain) has criticised a Conservative former minister for using the term “cultural Marxism” in a speech, a reference to a conspiracy theory often associated with the far right and anti-Semitism … Cultural Marxism centres around a conspiracy theory that Marxist scholars of the Frankfurt school (mostly secular Jews) in inter-war Germany devised a manipulative programme of progressive politics intended to undermine Western democracies.
For authority, the Grauniad links to one of its Australian scribes, Jason Wilson, January 19, 2015:
What do The Australian’s columnist Nick Cater, video game hate group #Gamergate, Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik and random blokes on YouTube have in common? Apart from anything else, they have all invoked the spectre of “cultural Marxism” to account for things they disapprove of … The theory of cultural Marxism is also blatantly antisemitic, drawing on the idea of Jews as a fifth column bringing down western civilisation from within, a racist trope that has a longer history than Marxism.
Really? Let’s hear from an admirer of cultural Marxist pioneer Antonio Gramsci. George Eaton, The New Statesman, February 5 last year:
Gramsci was preoccupied by the question of why the 1917 Russian revolution had not been followed by others in western Europe. He located the answer in the persistence of capitalist ideas among civil society institutions (political parties, trade unions, churches, the media). As he wrote: “The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses.” It was insufficient, Gramsci argued, for revolutionaries to merely wage a “war of movement” (as the Bolsheviks did with their seizure of the Russian state), they had to fight a “war of position”: a long struggle on the terrain of civil society with the aim of changing what (he) called “common sense” …
Read the article in The Australian.