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Cultural Marxism is a post-hoc terminology for a select category of analysis found within Cultural Studies. It seeks an authentic life beyond ideology. Cultural Marxism critiques those aspects of culture which are primarily driven by capital and mass production, and views them as inauthentic. For this reason various authors have noted that 'Cultural Marxism' is not innately Marxist, but is instead an attempt at defining the boundaries of an authentic human culture beyond the constraints of Capitalism. This process focuses on the Culture Industry and the mass production of popular culture as part of Marx's theory of alienation, and accordingly is not opposed to using Marxist terms.

The term Cultural Marxism is most often applied to The Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School. These groups originated within the traditions of Marxist humanism, as well as the antifascism found in Weimar Germany. Cultural Marxism shares common terminology and theoretical roots with Western Marxism, Neo-Marxism and the New Left, and for this reason is sometimes mistaken as its own category of Soviet or Orthodox Marxism. As a post-hoc terminology, Cultural Marxism has become the subject of an ongoing cultural debate in which it's claimed by some Paleoconservatives to be part of a widespread movement intending to destroy western culture and society, see also the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory.

Development of the term

"Cultural Marxism" first appeared as a term in Trent Schroyer's 1973 book The Critique of Domination, and has since been posthumously applied to the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools of Cultural studies. Within Cultural Studies, Cultural Marxism is seen as an attempt at finding a form of Post-marxist Cultural Analysis which extends beyond the traditional base and superstructure model as developed by Karl Marx in his 1859 book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. It has been suggested by Frederic Jameson that Cultural Studies be redefined as Cultural Marxism as both seek to interrogate the unexamined ideological constraints placed on Cultural Production under capitalism, and to question their implications for society as a whole.

Influences and Historical Background

Whilst the term Cultural Marxism has at times been applied to theorists who fall "ideologically outside the Cultural Marxism movement"; within Cultural Studies it has most often been applied to the Frankfurt School and Birmingham School of Cultural Analysis.

The Frankfurt School

Antonio Gramsci's theory of Cultural hegemony is seen as a fundamental starting place for the philosophies of the Frankfurt School. However it should be noted that the Frankfurt School did not always form a tightly woven series of complementary projects, and was comprised of individual theorists whom often had internal disagreements. Which "theorists" to include in what is now called the "Frankfurt School" may vary among different scholars, some scholars have therefore limited the Frankfurt School to Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Lowenthal and Pollock.

A large proportion of The Frankfurt School were ethnically Jewish immigrants forced to flee Nazi Germany during Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s. This process greatly informed their Critical and Cultural Analysis, as well as their stance against fascism. Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer of the Frankfurt School all worked for the OSS during World War II, producing dossiers about the political and cultural mindset within Nazi Germany, and ultimately contributing to the development of the protocols used during the Nuremberg trials and in the subsequent Denazification of Germany. Marcuse performed a similar role at the start of the Cold War compiling a book of Criticisms of Soviet Marxism based on dossiers he produced for the U.S. State Department. This wartime experience would later inform his essay Repressive Tolerance, in which he argues against racism, fascism and other genocidal doctrines as tolerable or acceptable social values within a free society.

In the post-war era The Frankfurt School sought to utilize psychology to understand what they called "The Authoritarian Personality Complex", a work undertaken by Theodore Adorno in his book of the same title. Adorno had earlier developed the F-scale (personality test) which sought to find a detectable measure of Fascism in a subject via an unrelated line of questioning.

The Frankfurt School wrote at length about the limitations capitalism can place on reason and social development when it remains hidden as an unexamined ideology or hidden curriculum. The resolution of which is known as "the negation of the negation" and has been compared to Marx's idea of false consciousness as it seeks the criticism of ideology itself as a fundamental constraint to free thought. In Horkheimer's words, the aim of The Frankfurt School was "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib and Agnes Heller are considered intellectual descendants, and the current generation of The Frankfurt School.

Birmingham School

E.P. Thompson's Marxist humanism as well as the individual philosophies of the founders of The Birmingham School (Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall) provide the influences for their "British Cultural Marxism" (also known as British Cultural Studies) as housed at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies developed later than The Frankfurt School and are seen as providing a parallel response. Accordingly "British Cultural Marxism" focuses on later issues such as Globalization, Americanization, Censorship, and Multiculturalism. Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), Raymond William's Culture and Society (1958) and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working class (1964) form the foundational texts for the school, with Stuart Hall's Encoding/decoding model of communication as well as his writings on multiculturalism in Britain arriving later but carrying equal gravitas.

Hoggart, Williams, and Hall were all Western Marxists and Cultural Theorists from working-class backgrounds, and their British Cultural Marxism "valorized a working classs that the Frankfurt School saw as defeated in Germany and much of Europe during the era of fascism", a working-class which according to UCLA professor Douglas Kellner The Frankfurt School "never saw as a strong resource for emancipatory social change." The Birmingham School however greatly valued and contributed to the class consciousness that is a long standing tradition within The Structure of British Society.

Due to their positions as literary experts, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams were called as witnesses during The Lady Chatterley Affair, a court case concerning censorship in publishing, the outcome of which is widely regarded as defining Britain in the 1960s as a "Permissive society". They argued on the side of freedom of language, and against censorship.

Within Hoggart's major work, The Uses of Literacy, he laments the loss of an authentic working class popular culture in Britain, and denounces the imposition of a mass culture by means of advertising, media and Americanisation. He argues against the concept of 'the masses' which he claims is both condescending and elitist. Later referring to this change in cultural production as "massification" and saying it 'colonized local communities and robbed them of their distinctive features'

Hoggart and Williams both served in World War II. Hoggart as an anti-aircraft gunner in North Africa and Italy. Raymond Williams joined the war effort even though it was against the British Communist party line of which he had been a member. He rose to the rank of an officer in the Anti-Tank Regiment of the Guards Armoured Division, and was deployed as part of the 'D-Day' Invasion of Normandy. Going on to command a unit of four tanks at Bocage and fight across the European front, ultimately aiding in the liberation of the Stalag X-B Prisoner-of-war camp near Sandbostel in north-western Germany.

Raymond Williams was a committed Socialist, and greatly interested in the relationships between language, literature, and society. His major works include The Country and the City (1973), Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), Marxism and Literature (1977) and Culture (1981). Marxism and Literature lays out his own approach to cultural studies, which he calls cultural materialism as well as highlights cultural sociology, which he had hoped would become "a new major discipline".

Williams was a strong voice of opposition to Marshall McLuhan's Technological Determinism and emphasized the primacy of Social Relations over technology, stating "Determination is a real social process, but never (as in some theological and some Marxist versions)... a wholly controlling, wholly predicting set of causes. On the contrary, the reality of determination is the setting of limits and the exertion of pressures, within which variable social practices are profoundly affected but never necessarily controlled."

Stuart Hall was the youngest of the three co-founders of the Birmingham School, and part of the Jamaican Windrush Generation. As a later, multicultural member of the Birmingham School he saw profound change within British society which he continued to write about from his multi-ethnic perspective throughout his life. Hall was a Rhodes Scholar who after working on the Universities and Left Review during his time at Oxford, joined E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and others to merge it with the student paper with The New Reasoner, launching the New Left Review in 1960 with Hall named as the founding editor. In 1958, the same group, with Raphael Samuel, launched the Partisan Coffee House in Soho as a meeting-place for left-wingers. Hall's work covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies, taking a post-Gramscian stance, and has noted the central role the media play in the "social production of news" often doing so in order to reap the rewards of lurid crime stories. Whilst Hall has been pivotal to the New Left he's also been critical of it decrying New Labour as operating on "terrain defined by Thatcherism". As one of the few prolific and long lasting black intellectuals in Britain, Hall has been described as "The Godfather of Multiculturalism"

Where as the Frankfurt School exhorted the values of high culture, The Birmingham School have attempted to bring high culture back down to real life whilst avoiding moral relativism.

Relationship to Feminism

Traditionally the Frankfurt School has had a patchy relationship to Feminism. In 1969 female students understood to be part of the Women's liberation movement protested Adorno during a lecture by rushing him at the podium in a planned moment then "baring their breasts while caressing him and throwing rose petals over his body." This protest later came to be known as "Planned Tenderness". Likewise the conservative author and former student of Marcuse; Paul Gottfried recalls in his memoirs 'Encounters: my life with Nixon, Marcuse, and other friends and teachers' Marcuse’s "perplexed reaction to ardent feminists in his class as they expounded their sexual liberationist views." More recently the Frankfurt School theorist and Feminist, Nancy Fraser has attempted to create a distance between herself and identity politics in order to re-examine economic class as a key factor of inequality within society.

Within the Birmingham School feminism has been noted as a force for social change, with Stuart Hall stating that "the intervention of feminism was specific and decisive. It was ruptural... As a thief in the night, it broke in, interrupted, made an unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural studies."

See Also

References

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