CULTURAL MARXISM, CRITICAL THEORY, & THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

 

This section of DiscoverTheNetworks explores the concept of cultural Marxism, more commonly known as “political correctness.” The publication titled “Political Correctness”: A Short History of an Ideology (produced by the Free Congress Foundation and edited by William Lind) provides an outstanding introduction to this topic:
(NOTE: The Founder and former National Chairman of The Free Congress Foundation, Paul M. Weyrich, also founded the Heritage FoundationAmerica is today dominated by an alien system of beliefs, attitudes and values that we have come to know as “Political Correctness.” Political Correctness seeks to impose a uniformity of thought and behavior on all Americans and is therefore totalitarian in nature. Its roots lie in a version of Marxism which seeks a radical inversion of the traditional culture in order to create a social revolution….

In the twentieth century, the success of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia set off a wave of optimistic expectation among the Marxist forces in Europe and America that the new proletarian world of equality was finally coming into being. Russia, as the first communist nation in the world, would lead the revolutionary forces to victory…. Under Marxist economic theory, the oppressed workers were supposed to be the beneficiaries of a social revolution that would place them on top of the power structure. When these revolutionary opportunities presented themselves, however, the workers did not respond. The Marxist revolutionaries did not blame their theory for these failures. They blamed the workers.One group of Marxist intellectuals resolved their quandary by an analysis that focused on society’s cultural “superstructure” rather than on the economic substructures as Marx did. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs contributed the most to this new cultural Marxism….

Among Marxists, Gramsci is noted for his theory of cultural hegemony as the means to class dominance. In his view, a new “Communist man” had to be created before any political revolution was possible. This led to a focus on the efforts of intellectuals in the fields of education and culture. Gramsci envisioned a long march through the society’s institutions, including the government, the judiciary, the military, the schools and the media. He also concluded that so long as the workers had a Christian soul, they would not respond to revolutionary appeals.Georg Lukacs … believed that for a new Marxist culture to emerge, the existing culture must be destroyed. He said, “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch,” and, “Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.”When he became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary in 1919, Lukacs launched what became known as “Cultural Terrorism.” As part of this terrorism he instituted a radical sex education program in Hungarian schools. Hungarian children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the out-datedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures. Women, too, were called to rebel against the sexual mores of the time. Lukacs’s campaign of “Cultural Terrorism” was a precursor to what Political Correctness would later bring to American schools.
In 1923, Lukacs and other Marxist intellectuals associated with the Communist Party of Germany founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany. The Institute, which became known as the Frankfurt School, was modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. In 1933, when Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled. Most came to the United States. The members of the Frankfurt School conducted numerous studies on the beliefs, attitudes and values they believed lay behind the rise of National Socialism in Germany. The Frankfurt School’s studies combined Marxist analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis to form the basis of what became known as “Critical Theory.”Critical Theory was essentially destructive criticism of the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and conservatism…. This campaign, in turn, provided a basis for Political Correctness … to overthrow the prevailing social order and usher in social revolution based on cultural Marxism.To achieve this, the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School recognized that traditional beliefs and the existing social structure would have to be destroyed and then replaced. The patriarchal social structure would be replaced with matriarchy; the belief that men and women are different and properly have different roles would be replaced with androgyny; and the belief that heterosexuality is normal would be replaced with the belief that homosexuality is “normal.”
As a grand scheme intended to deny the intrinsic worth of white, heterosexual males, the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School opened the door to the racial and sexual antagonisms of the Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky believed that oppressed blacks could be the vanguard of a communist revolution in North America. He denounced white workers who were prejudiced against blacks and instructed them to unite with the blacks in revolution. Trotsky’s ideas were adopted by many of the student leaders of the 1960s counterculture movement, who attempted to elevate the black revolutionaries to positions of leadership in their movement.The student revolutionaries were also strongly influenced by the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, another member of the Frankfurt School. Marcuse preached the “Great Refusal,” a rejection of all basic Western concepts, sexual liberation and the merits of feminist and black revolutions. His primary thesis was that university students, ghetto blacks, the alienated, the asocial, and the Third World could take the place of the proletariat in the Communist revolution. In his book, An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse proclaimed his goals of a radical transvaluation of values; the relaxation of taboos, cultural subversion; Critical Theory; and a linguistic rebellion that would amount to a methodical reversal of meaning. As for racial conflict, Marcuse wrote that white men are guilty and that blacks are the most natural force of rebellion.Marcuse may be the most important member of the Frankfurt School in terms of the origins of Political Correctness, because he was the critical link to the counterculture of the 1960s. His objective was clear: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including morality of existing society…” His means was liberating the powerful, primeval force of sex from its civilized restraints, a message preached in his book, Eros and Civilization, published in 1955. Marcuse became one of the main gurus of the 1960s adolescent sexual rebellion; he himself coined the expression, “make love, not war.” With that role, the chain of Marxist influence via the Frankfurt School was completed: from Lukacs’s service as Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Hungarian government in 1919 to American students burning the flag and taking over college administration buildings in the 1960s….When addressing the general public, advocates of Political Correctness – or cultural Marxism, to give it its true name – present their beliefs attractively. It’s all just a matter of being “sensitive” to other people, they say. They use words such as “tolerance” and “diversity,” asking, “Why can’t we all just get along?”The reality is different. Political Correctness is not at all about “being nice,” unless one thinks gulags are nice places. Political Correctness is Marxism, with all that implies: loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the traditional social order and, ultimately, a totalitarian state….In his August 1, 1999 article titled “What is the Frankfurt School?” (published by NewTotalitarians.com), Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson elaborates on what a particularly influential group of intellectuals sought to achieve: … [H]istory identifies a small group of German intellectuals who devised concepts, processes, and action plans which conform very closely to what Americans presently observe every day in their culture…. They were members of the Frankfurt School, formed in Germany in 1923. They were the forebears of what some proclaim as ‘cultural Marxism,’ a radical social movement that has transformed American culture. It is more commonly known today as ‘political correctness.”Cultural Marxism’ and ‘critical theory’ are concepts developed by a group of German intellectuals, who, in 1923 in Germany, founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University. The Institute, modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, became known as the Frankfurt School. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled to the United States….By promoting the dialectic of ‘negative’ criticism, that is, pointing out the rational contradictions in a society’s belief system, the Frankfurt School ‘revolutionaries’ dreamed of a utopia where their rules governed….The Frankfurt school studied the ‘authoritarian personality’ which became synonymous with the male, the patriarchal head of the American family. A modern utopia would be constructed by these idealistic intellectuals by ‘turning Western civilization’ upside down. This utopia would be a product of their imagination, a product not susceptible to criticism on the basis of the examination of evidence. This ‘revolution’ would be accomplished by fomenting a very quiet, subtle and slowly spreading ‘cultural Marxism’ which would apply to culture the principles of Karl Marx bolstered by the modern psychological tools of Sigmund Freud. Thus, ‘cultural Marxism’ became a marriage of Marx and Freud aimed at producing a ‘quiet’ revolution in the United States of America….They [an intellectual elite] introduced ‘cultural Marxism’ into the mainstream of American life over a period of thirty years, while our attention was diverted elsewhere. The vehicle for this introduction was the idealistic Boomer elite … They are the current ‘foot soldiers’ of the original Frankfurt School gurus. The counter-culture revolution of the 1960s was set in motion and guided intellectually by the ‘cultural Marxists’ of the Frankfurt School — Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Wilhelm Reich, and others. Its influence is now felt in nearly every institution in the United States. The elite Boomers, throwbacks to the dangerous idealist Transcendental generation of the mid-1800s, are the ‘agents of change,’ who have introduced ‘cultural Marxism’ into American life.William S. Lind relates that ‘cultural Marxism’ is an ideology with deep roots. It did not begin with the counter-culture revolution in the mid-1960s. Its roots go back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci … [who] conjured up the notion of a ‘quiet’ revolution that could be diffused throughout a culture — over a period of time — to destroy it from within. He was the first to suggest that the application of psychology to break the traditions, beliefs, morals, and will of a people could be accomplished quietly and without the possibility of resistance. He deduced that “The civilized world had been thoroughly saturated with Christianity for 2,000 years…” and a culture based on this religion could only be captured from within.Gramsci insisted that alliances with non-Communist leftist groups would be essential to Communist victory. In our time, these would include radical feminist groups, extremist environmental organizations, so-called civil rights movements, anti-police associations, internationalist-minded groups, liberal church denominations, and others. Working together, these groups could create a united front working for the destructive transformation of the old Judeo-Christian culture of the West.By winning ‘cultural hegemony,’ Gramsci pointed out that they could control the deepest wellsprings of human thought — through the medium of mass psychology. Indeed, men could be made to ‘love their servitude.’ In terms of the gospel of the Frankfurt School, resistance to ‘cultural Marxism’ could be completely negated by placing the resister in a psychic ‘iron cage.’ The tools of mass psychology could be applied to produce this result….The Frankfurt School theorized that the ‘authoritarian personality’ is a product of the patriarchal family. This idea is in turn directly connected to Frederich Engels’ The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, which promotes matriarchy. Furthermore, it was Karl Marx who wrote about the radical notion of a ‘community of women’ in the Communist manifesto. And it was Karl Marx who wrote disparagingly about the idea that the family was the basic unit of society in The German Ideology of 1845.’The Authoritarian personality,’ studied by the Frankfurt School in the 1940s and 1950s in America, prepared the way for the subsequent warfare against the masculine gender promoted by Herbert Marcuse and his band of social revolutionaries under the guise of ‘women’s liberation’ and the New Left movement in the 1960s. The evidence that psychological techniques for changing personality is intended to mean emasculation of the American male is provided by Abraham Maslow, founder of Third Force Humanist Psychology and a promoter of the psychotherapeutic classroom, who wrote that, ‘…the next step in personal evolution is a transcendence of both masculinity and femininity to general humanness.’ The Marxist revolutionaries knew exactly what they wanted to do and how to do it. They have succeeded in accomplishing much of their agenda….It is important to realize that … these ‘cultural Marxists’ aimed to destroy, slowly but surely from the bottom up, the entire fabric of American Civilization…. Since the 1940s, subtle changes appeared in the Frankfurt School’s descriptions of their work. For example, the opposite of the ‘authoritarian personality’ was no longer the ‘revolutionary,’ as it had been in previous studies aimed at Europeans. In America, it was now the ‘democratic’ who opposed the ‘authoritarian personality.’ Thus, their language matched more closely the liberal “… New Deal rather than Marxist or radical …” language. Education for tolerance, rather than praxis for revolutionary change, was the ostensible goal of their research. They were cleverly merging their language with the mainstream of liberal left thought in America while maintaining their ‘cultural Marxist’ objectives.Toleration had never been an end in itself for the Frankfurt School, and yet the non-authoritarian (utopian) personality, insofar as it was defined, was posited as a person with a non-dogmatic tolerance for diversity. This thought is dominant in today’s power elite of the Boomer generation, the New Totalitarians.One of the basic tenets of Critical Theory was the necessity to break down the contemporary family. The Institute scholars preached that “…Even a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family might tend to increase the readiness of a coming generation to accept social change.” The ‘generation gap’ of the 1960s and the ‘gender gap’ of the 1990s are two aspects of the attempt by the elite Boomers (taking a page out of ‘cultural Marxism’) to transform American culture into their ‘Marxist’ utopia.The transformation of American culture envisioned by the ‘cultural Marxists’ is based on matriarchal theory. That is, they propose transforming American culture into a female-dominated one. This is a direct throwback to Wilhelm Reich, a Frankfurt School member who considered matriarchal theory in psychoanalytic terms. In 1933, he wrote in The Mass Psychology of Fascism that matriarchy was the only genuine family type of ‘natural society.’ …Critical Theory, as applied mass psychology, brought forth a ‘quiet’ psychic revolution which facilitated an actual physical revolution that has become visible everywhere in the United States of America. It was the destructive criticism of the primary elements of American culture that inspired the 1960s counter-culture revolution. As the name implies, this false ‘spiritual awakening’ by the idealist Boomers in their coming-of-age years was an effort to transform the prevailing culture into an inverted or opposite kind of culture that is a necessary prelude to social revolution. Now that these elite Boomers are in positions of power in the United States, they are completing their work of destroying every institution that has been built up over 200 years of American history. Their aim is to destroy any vestige of the Anglo-American path taken by Western Civilization in forming the unique American culture.Most Americans do not yet realize that they are being led by social revolutionaries who think in terms of the destruction of the existing social order in order to create a new social order in the world. These revolutionaries are the New Age elite Boomers, the New Totalitarians. They now control every public institution in the United States of America. Their ‘quiet’ revolution, beginning with the counter-culture revolution of their youth, is nearly complete….