The blindness of cultural Marxism

Words we are not allowed to use any more now include ‘cultural Marxism’. Suella Braverman, now the Attorney General, used them last year and was immediately upbraided by the organisation Hope Not Hate. Very right-wing people sometimes use it too, you see, so it must never be uttered by anyone else. Banning the use of the phrase ‘cultural Marxism’ is about as culturally Marxist as it is possible to get, but I don’t suppose the cultural Marxists at Hope Not Hate appreciated the irony.

Cultural Marxism is a largely 1960s excrescence in which everything must be seen through the prism of unequal power relations, other than which nothing else matters at all. Especially power relations regarding race and gender, the basis of identity politics. As such, then, cultural Marxism is a dominant paradigm in university courses across the country which deal with what we once knew as history (but now might be better named ‘resentment studies’), geography, sociology and all those non-academic subjects of no use to man nor beast, such as gender studies or urban studies.

Of course, unequal power relations between black and white, male and female, gay and straight are interesting issues, worthy of discussion and debate. But with the cultural Marxist there is no debate or discussion: it is a bovine implacability and authoritarianism which defines the approach. And so if a university professor suggests that while western colonialism was undoubtedly a morally flawed venture, not absolutely everything that came out of it was bad, he will be eviscerated by the cultural Marxists, despite the fact that his statement is incontestable — even if that comparative ‘good’ is only a useful railway bridge, a schoolhouse or, er, democracy. Cultural Marxism is one-dimensional, tautologous, absolutist and intellectually stunted.