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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   29108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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DEI is just Applied Cultural Marxism. And I'm allowed to say this because I learned about it in university in those terms before its activists started to pretend that correctly identifying their ideology is a conspiracy theory.

I’ve heard this term bandied about for years but never directly encountered someone who uses it. Can you explain what on earth it means?

Some potential meanings I’ve considered and discarded:

  • dividing the world into oppressor and oppressed
  • some sort of natural outgrowth of Marx from the Frankfurt school
  • Marxist analysis somehow applied to culture?
  • centered on critique of capitalism
  • use race or sex instead of class

Most of the “applied cultural marxists” and postmodernists seem to outright reject Marx and any similarities in their thinking (e.g., oppressor and oppressed) seem to pre-date Marx.

So I’m left not understanding what people mean by it precisely. It seems to me at this point the phrase is meant to just tar by association, but I’d really like to hear if there’s something more meaningful to it.

This was my resource on Critical Race Theory, and seems relatively even-handed. It covers some of the inspiration from Marx and Critical Theory.

Link

I’ve heard this term bandied about for years but never directly encountered someone who uses it.

Because people were using it back in the 80's and maybe late 70's, and when the term started attracting too much negative attention, they promptly started pretending it's a conspiracy theory.

Also, "never met someone who uses the term directly" is an argument that's applied extremely selectively.

Most of the “applied cultural marxists” and postmodernists seem to outright reject Marx and any similarities in their thinking (e.g., oppressor and oppressed) seem to pre-date Marx.

Critical Theory proudly takes inspiration from both Marx and postmodernism.

Some potential meanings I’ve considered and discarded:

Those are fairly decent nutshell descriptions, and there's no reason to reject them.

Can you point me to some instances of people self describing in that way from the 70s and 80s? That is the most compelling argument I think—that they described themselves this way until it became a liability.

I didn’t mean it as an argument, my point was I haven’t had to chance to ask someone what they mean so I’m eager to seize the opportunity.

If those are decent nutshell descriptions then let’s take “oppressor/oppressed analysis” for instance. What’s the justification for calling that Marxist specifically? Is the claim that he invented or pioneered it in the form of his class war analysis? It just seems incredibly vague making the tie to Marx specifically tenuous to me.

Can you point me to some instances of people self describing in that way from the 70s and 80s?

Emily Hicks, Richard R. Weiner, Douglas Kellner.

If those are decent nutshell descriptions then let’s take “oppressor/oppressed analysis” for instance. What’s the justification for calling that Marxist specifically?

That Cultural Marxists themselves thought that they are taking inspiration from Marx:

We are, in Marx's terms, "an ensemble of social relations" and we live our lives at the core of the intersection of a number of unequal social relations based on hierarchically interrelated structures which, together, define the historical specificity of the capitalist modes of production and reproduction and underlay their observable manifestations. ”

— Martha E. Gimenez, Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy

This is extremely helpful and exactly what I’ve been looking for—thanks!

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