Cultural Marxism

January 26, 2012

The state of the world today is not pretty. It is timely to revisit the works of Antonio Gramsci and his fellow intellectuals on cultural Marxism. Whatever is happening has been foretold, long before bailouts and censorship became a staple in our vocabulary.

So what is cultural marxism?

It includes the disarmament of the public, the invalidation of self-defence and the incitement of fear.

It includes not only censorship of various kinds, but also the erosion of privacy, the debasement of the schools.

It includes the dogmatisation of the universities. It includes the concentration of wealth, the concentration of ownership of corporations and the concentration of control of the media.

It includes the promotion of immaturity and the reduction of society to a mob of narcissistic adult children to further the interests of the ruling class.

I am certain that without having to mention specific events, many have already come to your mind. Perhaps the most chilling prediction of cultural Marxism is how people today believe that they are privileged, simply because they have not been visibly marginalised.

Classical Marxism drives those at Foxconn’s iPad factory lines into jumping off buildings; Cultural Marxism drives people to the line at the Apple Store into a culture of commodity fetishism.

John Fonte’s “Why There is a Culture War” serves as a good introduction for anyone who wish to dig deeper.

Power, in Gramsci’s observation, is exercised by privileged groups or classes in two ways: through domination, force, or coercion; and through something called “hegemony,” which means the ideological supremacy of a system of values that supports the class or group interests of the predominant classes or groups. Subordinate groups, he argued, are influenced to internalize the value systems and world views of the privileged groups and, thus, to consent to their own marginalization.

5:21pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZuwNYyFPxitm

(Notes: 24)

Filed under: Gramsci