Antonio Gramsci
“The Revolution won't happen with guns; it will happen
incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually
infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices,
transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal
egalitarianism.”
Max Horkheimer
Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings,
without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine wheel. I believe the
cause lies in the fact that, for the most part, when people write, they forget
to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the full import and truth of what
they are writing.
Rosa Luxemburg
As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S., Marxism will
come into its own as a great popular study.
C. L. R. James
The premise of Andrew Woods' new book is that “Cultural
Marxism” has been weaponised both in the past and in current political
struggles. Right‑wing forces use it to explain social change as the work
of intellectual conspiracies rather than class struggle.
The use of the term by right-wing and outright fascists is a
reactionary falsification that treats social change (civil rights, feminism,
LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism, critical race and gender studies) as the result
of a coordinated, sinister plot by intellectuals, universities and cultural
elites to “destroy” Western civilisation. This usage is politically motivated,
ahistorical and often antisemitic in its modern forms.
The phrase, as treated in conspiracy literature and included
in polemical works such as A. J. A. Woods’s book, is not an accurate
description of Marxism as a scientific theory. It is a politicised and
ahistorical label that collapses a range of very different intellectual
currents into a single bogeyman, used to discredit working-class politics and divert
attention from capitalism’s material contradictions.
“Cultural Marxism” circulates as a catch‑all
conspiracy theory on the right: an alleged plot by the Frankfurt School and the
Left to undermine Western civilisation, attack family values, and “replace” traditional culture. This
is not an argument grounded in evidence or history; it is a political weapon. Woods
is correct in drawing attention to the right-wing attack on Marxism, but what
is more important is an orthodox Marxist understanding of the “Cultural
Marxism” conspiracy, something that Woods is incapable of.
The Frankfurt
School
The intellectual currents often lumped together as “cultural
Marxism” had distinct social origins and political trajectories. The Institute
for Social Research (the Frankfurt School) developed in a period of
catastrophic defeats for the European working class and the emergence of middle‑class
strata.
Woods' book devotes a significant amount of space to
defending the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and others.
These anti-Marxists developed “critical theory” in the 1920s–50s to understand
the collapse of mass working‑class revolutionary movements, the
rise of fascism, and the cultural forms of modern capitalism. Their outlook was
pessimistic and often abstract; it flowed from defeats of the international
working class and the ideological disarray of the interwar period—not from any secret plan to
subvert society.
As the Marxist David North explains, “The post-modernists
and the adherents of the Frankfurt School advance an absurd politics not
because their philosophy is absurd. Rather, the crass absurdities of their
philosophy arise from their reactionary petty-bourgeois politics. One cannot
understand either the Frankfurt School or postmodernism without recognising
that the rejection of Marxism and the perspective of a socialist revolution
based on the working class constitute the underlying political impulse behind
their theories. Postmodernist theory arose quite specifically as a repudiation
of Marxism and the perspective of proletarian revolution.
The foundational role of Jean-François Lyotard in its
emergence is well known. He is the author of the sentence: “Simplifying to the
extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” The
“metanarratives” to be discarded were those that advanced the Marxist
perspective of socialist revolution. Thus, what is known in academic circles as
“postmodernism” would be more accurately defined as “academic post-Marxism.”[1]
North goes on to explain that the Frankfurt School did not
represent the revolutionary Marxist tradition embodied in the Fourth
International. Its diagnosis—cultural regression, the “self‑destruction
of enlightenment”—tended
to attribute reaction to abstract cultural processes rather than to concrete
class forces and the dynamics of capitalist crisis.
One of the hallmarks of the Frankfurt School was its
opposition to the working class's revolutionary capacity. Wood cites all manner
of radicals in the 1960’s that attacked the Fourth International’s “heavy emphasis”
on the political independence of the working class and its nature as a
revolutionary agent for change.
One of the leading players amongst the radical fraternity
who led the attack on the revolutionary nature of the working class was C.
Wright Mills. His "Letter to the New Left", written in 1960, is one
of the founding documents of post-war petty-bourgeois radicalism. It is
historically significant not for being correct, but for being symptomatic — it
gave theoretical expression to a set of demoralizations and class prejudices
that would define the New Left and, ultimately, the entire pseudo-left
tradition that continues to mislead radical politics to this day.
The core of Mills' letter is a direct attack on what he
called the "labour metaphysic" — the Marxist insistence that the
industrial working class is the central revolutionary force in modern society.
Mills argued that this was a tired dogma, an outdated faith clinging to mid-19th-century
conditions. In its place, he looked to intellectuals and students — the
"cultural apparatus" — as the new agents of historical change.
He writes, “What I do not quite understand about some
New-Left writers is why they cling so mightily to 'the working class' of the
advanced capitalist societies as the historic agency, or even as the most
important agency, in the face of the really impressive historical evidence that
now stands against this expectation.”[2]
Wright -Mill’s letter opened the floodgates for a slew of
radicals to jump on the bandwagon. One such radical was Max Elbaum, whose Revolution
in the Air memoir-cum-history of the "New Communist Movement" — the
cluster of Maoist, Marxist-Leninist, and Third-Worldist formations that arose
from the radicalisation of the 1960s in the United States.
Elbaum writes, “This book has been written partly to
identify the markers on that slippery slope to sectarian irrelevance in hopes
of better equipping a new generation to take a different path. But an equally
important goal has been to call attention to how dedication to constructing a
revolutionary apparatus can act as a potent positive force, unleashing
individual creativity, building solidarity across socially imposed barriers,
stimulating theoretical exploration, and strengthening activists’ commitment to
peace and freedom.”[3]
While it was warmly received in pseudo-left circles as a
rehabilitation of that era's left wing, reading it from the standpoint of classical
Marxism reveals it as a deeply misleading document — a celebration of precisely
the political tendencies that led a generation of workers and youth into a dead
end, and whose legacy helped give rise to today's identity-politics
pseudo-left.
The central problem with Elbaum's book — and with the New
Communist Movement itself — is what it left out: the working class. The radicalisation
of the 1960s was real and reflected genuine social contradictions: the Vietnam
War, the civil rights struggle, and the crisis of American capitalism. But the
New Communist Movement channelled that energy away from the independent
political mobilisation of the working class and into the orbit of
petty-bourgeois nationalism. The heroes of Elbaum's book — Mao, Che, Ho Chi
Minh, the Black Panthers — represent not the Marxist tradition but its
systematic falsification.
Identity politics vs
Marxism
In chapter four, Woods spends a significant amount of time
defending critical race theories and “identity politics”. Critical race theory is
sometimes conflated with Marxism by critics on both right and left. The central
theme of these theories replaces class analysis with competing forms of
sectional politics that can be absorbed into capitalist institutions and the
Democratic/centre‑left political apparatus. While racism, sexism and
other oppressions are real and must be fought, their proper resolution requires
a unifying working‑class strategy rooted in socialist politics—not a fragmentation into
rival identities.
As Tom Carter, in his Introduction to Marxism vs Critical
Race Theory, writes, “Critical race theory is a broad current, with many
tributaries flowing into it and many offshoots flowing out of it. One can go to
a library and walk down aisle upon aisle of shelves of this material, which at
a surface level comprises many diverse and even internally contradictory trends
that have emerged and shifted over time. In characterising this current, it is
therefore useful to begin at the most basic level with its fundamental
philosophical conceptions, the heritage of which can be traced to postmodernism
and to the conceptions advanced by the Frankfurt School. This is the “critical
theory” from which “critical race theory” emerges.
In the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two leaders of the Frankfurt School, concluded that
the Enlightenment was to blame for all the authoritarianism and barbarism that characterised
the first half of the 20th century, because it was all the inevitable result of
a misguided attempt to exert control over nature through science and reason.
Adorno would go on in Negative Dialectics (1966) to claim that all systemic
thought is inherently authoritarian.”[4]
Stuart Hall
Another favourite radical of Wood’s is Stuart Hall
(1932–2014). Like many radicals mentioned in the book, Hall’s central theme was
the repudiation of the class struggle as the axis of social development, as
this assumes that the working class is the decisive agent of political change.
Instead, he argued for a turn to the cultural sphere. This was not a Marxist
appraisal or critique of culture, but the elevation of “culture” as an arena
contested by different “agencies”.
Hall was the founding intellectual of Cultural Studies, the
academic discipline centred at the University of Birmingham's Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) from the 1960s onward. He has been lionised
in the liberal-left press as a pioneering theorist of race, identity, and
culture. Hall's career represents a politically coherent, decades-long effort
to displace Marxism — specifically the Trotskyist current within it — and
substitute identity politics and bourgeois reformism in its place.
In Paul Bond’s excellent obituary of Hall, he makes the
following analysis: “Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on
revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary expression,
Trotskyism. The academic field sought to shift the focus of social criticism
away from class and onto other social formations, thus promoting the
development of identity politics. Its establishment, in the final analysis, was
a hostile response to the gains made by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from
the 1950s onwards.
Various media commentators have enthused about Hall’s
ability to “identify key questions of the age”. History will judge him more
harshly: his answers to these questions were confused, misleading and often
supine. Despite his supposedly independent “Marxist” stance, Hall’s political
outlook throughout his academic and political career aligned him closely with
the Euro-communist wing of the old Stalinist Communist Party, and he eventually
became a prominent writer for the magazine Marxism Today. The latter served as
the ideological godfather of New Labour.[5]
Antonio Gramsci
Wood’s book is full of mentions of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci
never used the term “Cultural Marxism. Gramsci's concept of hegemony — the idea
that bourgeois class rule is maintained not just through coercion but through
ideological and cultural domination, through the "common sense" of
everyday life — is a real and important contribution. The bourgeoisie rules not
merely through the police and the army but because subordinate classes
internalise its values, assumptions, and worldview. The struggle for socialism,
therefore, requires a struggle for ideological and cultural leadership.
Gramsci is an attractive figure for Woods not merely for his
cultural writings—many of which were produced during solitary confinement under
the Mussolini fascist regime—but also for his attacks on economic determinism,
his explicit rejection of the theory of Permanent Revolution and his justification
of the nationalist orientation of Stalinism: As Gramsci declared, “To be sure,
the line of development is toward internationalism, but the point of departure
is ‘national’—and it is from this point of departure that one must begin”.
Woods is not the only intellectual to use Gramsci for a defence
of their own politics. Over the decades, his work has been used by the likes of
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 1985) and
by a whole generation of "post-Marxist" academics. Gramsci's work was
turned into a rationale for abandoning the working class as the revolutionary
subject.
The pseudo-left currents that claim Gramsci's mantle have
produced, in practice, exactly what their theory predicts: subordination of the
working class to bourgeois politics. Syriza in Greece is the paradigm case, the
most "prominent example of a pseudo-left organisation" that came to
power, spouting empty populist phrases, and then carried out "a criminal
betrayal" of Greek workers, imposing austerity more effectively than the
right could have.
Wood’s book is useful only because it forces the reader to
study a Marxist alternative to “Cultural Marxism”. The answer to both the
right-wing "cultural Marxism" hysteria and the pseudo-left's cultural
politics is the same: a return to genuine Marxism
Notes
Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao
and Che by Max Elbaum, London and New York: Verso, 2002, 370 pages.
The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the
Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique- David North Mehring Books
[1]
Philosophy and Politics in an Age of War and Revolution-
www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/25/lect-o25.html
[2]
"Letter to the New Left" www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/mills-c-wright/letter-new-left.htm
[3]
Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max
Elbaum, London and New York: Verso, 2002, 370 pages.
[4]
Marxism Versus Critical Race Theory-Tom Carter Mehring Books 2023
[5]
Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to
opposing Marxism- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html
