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Comment by thwest | Hacker News Reader

Cultural-Marxist? I thought he was an economist.

Lately "Cultural-Marxist" has become shorthand for anyone holding beliefs even slightly adjacent to "the rich/powerful are evil and they're corrupting the pure and poor/powerless" or "there are two kinds of people: the oppressed and the oppressors".

Whether this characterization of the article is fair or those beliefs about the world are true are both reasonable questions worthy of consideration.

Anyone looking for a little information on the origins of the term "Cultural Marxism" should take a look at the wiki entry for the Frankfurt School, under the subheading "Conspiracy Theory".

I've more commonly found "cultural Marxism" used regarding social issues. People who believe in the theory allege that Marxism has expanded into the cultural realm (rather than focusing on economics and class), as part of a long strategy to undermine western society. For example: immigration is alleged to be a cultural-Marxist strategy to undermine the nation-state, abortion & gay marriage are cultural-Marxist strategies to undermine the family, and focusing on things like slavery and Jim Crow in history textbooks is a cultural-Marxist strategy to undermine patriotism.

A funny thing about the more general critique of oppressor/victim narratives is that Nietzsche had a very similar critique, alleging that the pervasiveness of such narratives (which he called "slave morality") had weakened society. But he didn't blame Marxism for it— he blamed Christianity.

How is class not a part of culture?

This is exactly how we keep intentionally misunderstanding Das Kapital on internet forums.

Class is not a minor outcome of a social moment. It is not a mere symbol that can be quickly turned on or off by a culture, the way a culture might shift from enjoying boxing to preferring mixed martial arts.

Class has arisen as an essential structure in the reproduction of society since the dissolution of European fuedalism. The same business logic that produces all our material wants, from coats to bushels, comes hand in hand with the logic that every business must give the profit (surplus labor) back to capital. Culture is a material basis, but class is the overdetermining superstructure.

Shifting from a class based society to a classless one would require a fundamental shift in the economic relations where workers would own the means of production. This shift would tear apart the material basis of our culture. MTV/Viacom, MSNBC/Fox/CNN, RCA/TicketMaster/C3, WaPo/NYT/WSJ, TWTR/Facebook/Google: all of these cultural production centers would shatter into cultural microcosms if the workers at these firms weren't bound to profit maximization.

On the other hand, it is trivial to manufacture new cultures without a whiff of change to class.

To clarify - you think that I'm intentionally misunderstanding Das Kapital by questioning how someone could believe that class and culture are intermixed? Or do you think that the material conditions of a given society are largely determined by class relations, and acting as if that's not the case is an intentional misreading of Marx?

One of the best explainers of the term is William Lind.

http://www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness...

In fact, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism redirects to that section.

"Brett Scott writes about financial activism and social and environmental finance. He is the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance (2013)."

Without knowing anything else about the author, this byline does give a bit of a left-wing impression.

Marx being the economist in my post. My confusion is why the arguments presented here are being called "cultural". People are trying to frame left economics as a mere happenstance of a cultural moment (hippies or hipsters), in order to exclude it from the scientific register when we debate it.

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