Cultural Marxism

Original description: Cultural Marxism arose in the West when it became apparent that the working classes were unwilling to rise up in violent revolt as they had in Russian in 1917. Early cultural Marxists realized that to succeed in the West, you needed a Marxism that took into account Western ways of thinking. Their allies were those sympathetic to the French Revolution, and they appealed to the same concepts of liberty, equality, and fraternity that animated the French Revolutionaries.

But rather than an assault from without, the strategy was to subvert the West from within, through the so-called “long march through the institutions.” The West's commitment to progress made it the perfect carrier for a slow-moving transformative programme that began by identifying various opponents to liberty and equality, and anathematizing them.

The final stage of the process was in the work of Herbert Marcuse, who attacked the very tolerance that permitted dissent within the Anglosphere, arguing that this freedom was actually oppressive because it assumed a common ground of humanity (and a shared universe of meaning) between opponents. Whereas for Marcuse, it was this common ground of human nature and the human family that could no longer be tolerated if liberation were to take place. Thus began the Sexual revolution that had already been announced back in the 1930s by Wilhelm Reich.

Original uploader: Dr Scott Masson from YouTube on Feb 29, 2020