A number of commenters on a
recent piece questioned my use of the term Cultural Marxism, and so I thought I'd give a little explanation as to why I believe the term to be not just an apt one, but also historically accurate.
I rather got the impression - rightly or wrongly - that the assumption behind the questions was that by using this phrase, I am pinning a label on those who disagree with me on many of the important social questions of the day. Not at all. I am simply using the term
to describe a very real ideology, espoused by a tiny number of people who can quite properly be termed "Cultural Marxists". The fact that they have been hugely successful in promoting their agenda does not in any way mean that those who have accepted it are themselves Cultural Marxists.
Nor is my use of the phrase anything to do with Jordan Peterson, who I have watched only in one or two interviews, and have not read any of his books. It is a phrase that I used long before I had even heard of him.
The soul of Marxism, according to the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
is not to be found in the state ownership of property, but in the concept of Dialectical Materialism.
According to John Laughland:
"...the true core of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was the ideology of dialectical materialism. Derived from Hegel and ultimately Heraclitus, this doctrine - on which Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin all wrote extensively - holds that the world is in a constant state of flux, that nothing is absolutely true or false, and that progress comes from the constant union of opposites. Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav communist intellectual who turned against the system, said in the opening paragraphs of his seminal work on communism, The New Class, that the key to communist ideology was the belief in the primacy of matter and the reality of change."
History, for the Marxist, is defined as a series of social and revolutionary struggles all leading inexorably to the final "truth" and the end of history - a stateless, borderless, globalised world;
a New Earth with a New Man who has been thoroughly cleansed of his need for private property.
Comment: Previously: Argentine football star Emiliano Sala missing presumed dead as plane disappears over English Channel