Cultural Marxism, Debunked (by Marxists)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.ย. 2024
- Professors Jeremy Cohan and Benjamin Serby explain the bizarre right-wing preoccupation with "cultural Marxism" and why conservatives lose their minds over the Frankfurt School.
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Nothing was debunked here
...Hmm. the working class CAN be bought off, in that we can be kept comfortable and relatively happy.
If the rich overlords were wise, they would keep the working class relatively comfortable and happy. That would keep the vast majority of us unwilling to make changes.
Instead, they've decided to put short-term profit before long term societal good, and even _the long term growth of their own market,_ that market being mostly Americans with money to freely spend.
(Oversimplifying here, but in general)
If we haven't got much money, their ability to make money off of us becomes severely curtailed.
...I doubt they think that far ahead.
This is exactly the case, as I see it. Those who vote are certainly brought off enough by what capitalism has afforded in countries like the U.S.. Working class people can see that they too, in this 21'st century especially, can live a taste of the life of the so-called petite bourgeoisie or bourgeoisie, whichever one is aspired to. They too, can see the world and eat good food, etc., at least on occasion, and that is enough for them. As wrong and ungodly as capitalism is/has been, it has gotten much of the world to a point, where the standard of living has risen considerably over decades. We see this in the Chinese - if you can't beat them join them attitude and strategy, of China. Any country that gets their people educated to modern standards, it seems, may have won half the battle. Marxist would do well IMO, to forget about the old class emphasis, and focus on economic fairness/justice. Spending power is the main point, and housing is the area where the greatest disparity in spending power can be seen. In fact the disparate percentage of the overall economic monetary wealth, is concentrated in this one area. It is the Achilles Heel of the economy. These are the areas where economic justice needs to be applied. All the rhetoric , is equivalent to the race hustling that both the Left and Right are heavily engaged in. Talk of socialism, Marxism, and class, is all just bandied about rhetoric, that produces nothing but a cottage industry of its own.
they are betting on a future fully automated luxury economy. The economy will just be them buying robot servants, yachts, mansions etc. from each other, all made in their fully automated factories.
@@stillwaitingforblackmetalr2503 They're developing robot consumers as we speak.
The planet's biosphere can no longer support an ever burgeoning middle class. This is why the oligarchs are consolidating the wealth of the planet, while they destroy the fiat currencies and impoverish the masses.
You will own nothing. But don't worry... supposedly you'll be happy.
“We’ve analyzed ourselves and concluded we’re doing nothing wrong”
Internet Marxists
I enjoyed this conversation, although clearly there is no debunking of anything here - you just explained how and why the "conspiracy" came about. Still, this is very useful for understanding the current intellectual landscape in this area. I came of age in USSR, and am well trained in Marxist Leninist theory - anyone who wanted to get higher education in USSR was supposed to study the foundations of the theory for years, but I never thought that after the collapse of USSR I would ever need to flex my marxist intellectual muscle. But, here we are, in 2021 - I find the Jacobin channel very useful and... refreshing. Although I disagree with many of the ideas or conclusions - given that I am a "victim of Communism", but you seem to be honest and sincere. Unlike the most of the political spectrum no matter on the left or on the right.
Thank you!
Cuba dropped the 'marxism-leninism' combination, as even they realized it means something other than Marx and Lenin. It's a code word for reformist stalinism.
No. Thank you. You are a credible voice cutting through the people speaking out their behinds.
In the 70s there was pressure from the very existence of the USSR. That's the reason for further programs towards socializing the economy in Sweden. As soon as the USSR collapsed social democracy declined even in Sweden. Doesn't mean that the USSR was good, but it means something about power relations between classes in Sweden and around the world and the concessions that the ruling class is willing to make in front of an existing worst case scenario confronting them.
No.
Because it didn't work.
That's the reason they stopped.
@@dwwolf4636 if they didn't have that political pressure they wouldn't have even started
It's funny and sad.. Marx's Dialectical Materialism is really useful for debunking conspiracy theories, but a lot of people won't ever read Marx because they think it's part of a conspiracy...
so true
Marxism, the opium of the masses.
@@novinceinhosic3531 if you want to know if something is true, ask yourself "what would things look like if this was true?"
Maybe the Nordstream pipeline sabotage is a good example: ask yourself "who would benefit?" and "how would they act if they were involved?" and you can narrow down the candidates.
Gabe Rockhill of Villanova does a superb job explaining the reality of the Frankfurt School, its ideas, and its exponents. It’s a useful reference for analyzing this silly right wing caricature that is gaining traction in popular discourse.
THANK YOU for this discussion/clip -
People, your thoughts on Critical Discourse Analysis?
One thing not often mentioned is that the Frankfurters are more appropriately called "Neo-Marxists" as what they advocated and wrote about departed from "classical Marxism" in significant ways. The most obvious is the substitution of disaffected minorities, student radicals, gender confused individuals, feminists, for the proletariat. The concept of alienation is the same but it is based as the term indicates, on cultural factors not economic ones.
Thus of course these Marxists aren’t going to claim it, they likely are as hostile to its precepts as normal human beings (anyone still a Marxist after the mass death caused in its name cannot be called normal).
There definitely needs to be a reckoning with the Frankfurt school (IMO the fact that the foundation of those texts is Marxism makes it so easy to ignore Marx’s influence) - but Marcuse’s criticism of social democrats was good - they will turn their backs on popular movements and integrate themselves with the state
I always thought that reforms just kept capitalism alive, but I didn’t realize until recently that this is a particular interpretation/assumption. Re-thinking things with the help of Jacobin.
Accusations debunked by the accused
I would tend to agree with Cohan... small, incremental progress is still progress... But it stops (& even moves backwards) whenever complacency sets in..
Much to be said regarding the panel's analysis; on the whole, rather simplistic. Their views ('theories') are constructed AFTER the event, so to speak; post-priori stance. And thus their 'theory' appears hollow. I wont say 'vulgar marxism', but close to it.
What dogma in universities is even pseudo radical? Its straight liberal with no chaser. Cultural Marxism essentially means liberal views on race and culture. Why even discuss such a foolish concept.
Define liberal in this context and those views s.v.p.
Precise Terminology is important across divides.
This is great! Many academics in critical theory (specifically those that have oxymoronically abandoned abandoned marxist analysis, that you mention) are set on using research as a form of self-congratulation and evidence of their association with the working class rather than rigorous, merited inquiry of the material conditions the working class is subjected to. Some are incredible people with good ideas, but are inherently ideologically committed to civility with the capitalist class they are a part of, or ultimately ascending to. Needless to say… they are being well rewarded for it by universities. Really enjoyed this video!
Excellent response. I believe that the USA intellectual community is structurally uncapable of understanding that the root of all the "woke" progressiveness and right wing "cultural marxism "narratives, is the same.
This doesn't really address what people call "cultural Marxism," i.e. transideology, radical sexual-liberation, state severance of the parent/child relationship, etc. I was hoping to see a video addressing how that misnomer came about and what, if anything, Marx said on those topics.
I know, completely embarrassing they totally missed the mark in 'debunking'. Nobody cares about the people studying Marxism or theologians. The implementation of 'wokeness' and it's ideologies might even be not based upon Marxism at all, but it's framework makes it possible to understand how it's getting traction and what is possible end game is. There's absolutely no criticism of how any of the woke ideologies tie into Marxism at all.
Bleating on about the 'working class' when it has nothing to do with 'cultural Marxism' at all. Any clown with brains should be able Economic Marxism/Communism doesn't work. Just because Capitalism/Democracy as we know it in the West right now is not working to serve everyone to is best ability, it does not mean we need to totally abandon it for ideas that have been proven to be absolutely terrible in comparison to what we have now. This is fairly irrelevant to the topic you are trying to debunk anyway.
What was debunked?
Cultural marxism? Dude just say "Jeeeewwwwwws" , like it used to be , the good old days, Nsdap and the russian tsar before them.
i have more respect for an honest neo-nazi that openly admits that he hates jews than for these "modern antisemites" that hide behind phrases and codes because they don't want to be called an antisemite. not because they have a problem with antisemitism but because they know open antisemitism isn't "cool" anymore, at least in most parts of the western world. i know, like most people, to stay away from the "honest neo-nazi" because they don't fuck around. slimy academic fucks though, they are more dangerous and evil to me, in a sense. because they have more followers and influence and are accepted by a lot of decent, harmless people who don't understand these dogwhistling tactics because they are totally uninformed about political theory.
i mean, there are exeptions to the rule. a guy like peterson for example also uses (or used to use it) terms like "cultural marxism" or even "postmodern cultural marxism" but obviously has no problem with jewish people or even real communists like zizek. he is just a fool who should have stayed in his field (which is clinical psychology). but most right-wing politicians actually know what they are doing when they are talking about ((cultural marxism)) which is just the modern version of the fight against the "jewish-bolshevik conspiracy" which were literally nazi politics.
Hear! Hear!
@@yoshikatsumi What the hell does Cultural Marxism have to do with Neo-Nazism? Like the name suggests it is about cultural change rather than the racial change Hitler spoke of.
@@ObiJohnKenobi67Cultural Marxism is an attempt to identify the cause of the lack of succesfull Marxist revolutions after the OG russian one.
Which they identified as being the successfull "control" of the cultural/social means of production (i.e. schools, universities, entertainment industry, churches) and the like by the Bourgeouis class stopping the workers gaining Consciousness of their victim status and Rising up as the Proletariat.
Whome this ought be undone for is ultimately what Marcuse determined ( forget about the workers, we need other "marginalized" classes of people and new Bourgeouis classes to critique ).
After that you get to how it ought to be done and that's Identity politics/intersectionality as the Critque Vector coupled with Freire's work in how to operate in the school system.
And on a side note, I agree that If any critique of any system of thought is racist because some of the systems thinkers were jewish or otherwisr marginalised...well that would mean that by reverse implication that Marxism is racist as well, he was an avowed anti-semetic.
But I'm sure that Marx's true Believers will never think of themselves as such.... they're much too virtuous to ever have such thoughts afterall.
It’s sort of like the Saul Alinsky thing all over again.
Great Interview
Cohan uses "like" every other sentence as if he is a 14-year old girl, it undermines his credibility and is quite grating.
This discussion is focused on Marcuse's comments in ODM on the revolutionary agency of the working class. It misses the point that its importance in the early 60s was due primarily to the analysis it offers as to the false radicality of postwar, petty-bourgeois non-conformity - aka the counterculture. The notion of repressive desublimation, for example, is not the same as false consciousness. It's also worth considering that the RD he sees in culture exists today in politics, which makes revolutionary politics, in whatever form it could take today, anathema to some. The discussion is informed but slightly anti-intellectual and out of context, I'm sorry to say, and not very generous towards Marcuse. A less winner-take-all attitude towards socialist solidarity could do the left some good.
Holy unknown and convoluted terminologies batman!
For real tho interesting video. Also idk who any of the people discussed were and still don't after watching honestly but I think the central theme of the video was expressed pretty well here
17:05 yeah that's my exact fear when it comes to Social Democracy. On the other hand, what if it's really the best we can hope for in the near to intermediate term? Excellent discussion.
When you take out all the “you know” this video is only 4 minutes long.
Moralism VS Materialism
"Social Democrats is the Left Wing of Fascism."
- Joseph Stalin
I learned nothing watching this chat
Define woke as Marcuse would
Well, that did age well did it. lmao
19:00
So you're saying that if American leftists think social democracy is bound to fail, it's not because of our own recent history of betrayal, but rather because we've been reading too much of some out of date European we never heard of?
Like, you know
The "Cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory was premiered at a Holocaust Denial conference put on by Willis Carto at The Barnes Review (an antisemitic magazine). The talk given was paid for by The Free Congress Foundation - who also feature Laszlo Pasztor (an "Arrow Cross Party" collaborator for the Nazis, who was stations in Berlin during WW2).
Also, if you read Adorno's essay "On The Problem of Family" it's very clear The Frankfurt School never attacked the family, nor did they attack Religion (they were after all, Jewish).
So there's a lot of conservative clap trap people get sucked into.
That's nice and all but the Frankfurt school was only the first rung in the ladder.
Other people expanded upon their work.
Where is the "debunked" part of all this blablabla?
Not enough was said to debunk the reactionary conspiracy theories surrounding the legacy of the Frankfurt School. I get that these theories are so unhinged and detached from reality; but a right-winger stumbling across this video wouldn't get the counter narrative/education they so sorely need.
Martin Jay's recent book had a similar problem.
It might be worthwhile to develop that more, for a very small subset of people. But people who are sucked in by Fox, Sinclair, et al, are mostly not looking for a source of intellectual reasoning about the world. So what's needed for them is something more akin to emotional counselling than rational or historical arguments.
BTW: If you have any concrete ideas to pitch (ie, on offering detours out of the reactionary rabbit hole for viewers who are soft targets for far right propaganda), I recommend hitting up the folks at Gravel Institute! That sort of thing is exactly their bailiwick, but not so much Jacobin's.
if by "education" you mean re-education interment camps.
This American habit of inserting the word "like" in every sentence, is irritating as well as distracting. Same for "you know".
It's AnTiSeMeTiSm guys. Speaking as a jew of course
They're pant shitting Jewish Supremacists.
vanageim 👁
So I guise Jordon "clean your room" Peterson has a coloring book for you, so y'all can learn how to talk to your friends and family about the great one'$ society changing ideas;) funny ad placement on this video thought I'd share.
Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Dennis Prager are all Jewish.
Yeah, Jewish, not Zionists. Jewish people are good, Zionists who wear the jewish label, are the ones you need to watch out for.
limbaugh and beck are not jewish. glenn beck grew up catholic (he has german roots if you couldn't tell) and converted to mormonism. limbaugh believed in jesus christ and also grew up catholic.
@@newyorkfan16 prager is both, a practicing jew and a zionist. zionism is a political movement that supports the idea of a jewish national state (there are secular and religious zionists, both are represented in the knesset), judaism is a religion with various different factions/strings (orthodox judaism, conservative judaism, reform judaism ect.). the thing which jews is just that there are an ethnoreligous group (similar to the yazidis) and you're typically regarded as jewish if you have a jewish mother. that's why "secular jews" or "atheist jews" exist. to name two famous american examples: sam harris and bill maher are both "ethnically jewish" but outspoken atheists. that's pretty common in the us and also in very secular cities like tel aviv.
@@yoshikatsumiJewish is the subscription to the religion of Judaism, Judaism is not a race it's a religion, Zionists say otherwise to get the most sympathy and thus money power and influence from via identity politics, charging anyone with a social crime i.e., "Anti-Semtism"
@@yoshikatsumi Notice how they NEVER accuse anyone of being Anti-Jew?
You guys are so crazy that you are undermining your whole argument.
Why do these people always adopt Upspeak? They love to say Like.. every other word.. and the upspeak just creeps into every other sentence. So smug and condescending too. This doesn't even make sense other than baseless criticism.
It might be the case that reformist tactics are more radical in fact now than they once were, because now the system can no longer afford a welfare state in the face of falling rates of profit. What could be granted to workers before as a way to keep them quiet is no longer seen as something the capital system can afford, so that fighting even just to hold on to the remnants of social democracy has become a more revolutionary act. I am certainly hoping that is the case in any event.
Rates of profit for capitalists are higher than ever in known history. Also, money is not a tangible object. This is how money gets "created" to buy weaponry for billions of dollars every year, no problem. The same thing can happen with anything, certainly climate and infrastructure, as easy examples.
@@closethockeyfan5284 Wrong pn both counts. Rates of profit for non-financial corporations have steadily declined since the Sixties, and the whole free.money thing is a figment of MMT's imagination.
MMT?
@@matthewpeterson1784 Modern Monetary Theory. Sorry for being abstruse!
Even the smartest person in the world says Communism is a bunch of crap.
Chris langan
7:00 - 7:20 people resent this.