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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27930 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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OG Marxism says that the key to true freedom is for the proletariat to seize the means of industrial production because they are materially oppressed. Cultural Marxism says they need to seize the means of cultural production (art, universities, etc) because they are socially oppressed. Replace "economic status" with "cultural status." Hence "cultural Marxism."

Genuinely asking, who is the "they" in "they need to seize the means of cultural production"

Who are the cultural Marxists? Because the people Lobster Daddy hates have been in control of art, universities, etc for the back half of the 20th century and all of the 21st

  • -25

We are generally lax about modding when it comes to insulting public figures, but "Lobster Daddy" doesn't really express much but your contempt and seems meant only to provoke people. Don't use whatever cute nickname some person's enemies use for him on Twitter.

I'll defend @fmac and say myself and other friends who like Peterson also call him Lobster Daddy. It's a bit of an affectionate nickname ime.

I actually enjoy his writing/ideas/most of his arguments and use the term because I find it absolutely hilarious and slightly endearing, although I see how that isn't intuitive given the context

Because the people Lobster Daddy hates have been in control of art, universities, etc for the back half of the 20th century and all of the 21st

And are we arguing that that has yielded no fruit? All of the things people blame on Tumblr started in the academy.

Or is that they clearly aren't trying because they otherwise would have succeeded given their hegemony in those spaces?

I don't see why "they did try. They were just wrong, like their Marxist forebears" isn't an answer in this framework. There may just be limits on what you can do sometimes using those tools.

And are we arguing that that has yielded no fruit?

No I'm just saying I don't understand the explanation

"They" is the disadvantaged. And if "they" won't seize the means of cultural production, then a cultural Lenin or Lenins has to do it for them. When the welfare state (mid-20th century, which explains your timeline) solved economic problems but none of the attendant social problems in marginalized communities, it seemed like maybe the problem was cultural power. If no one lacks anything material, but you still don't have the equality you were looking for, maybe you need a black little mermaid.

So you're saying cultural Marxists think black people need to be in charge of art, universities, etc?

Yes, and that is why the people we are calling Cultural Marxists have engaged in a protracted and highly public campaign to, among many other things, put black people in charge of art, universities, and "etc". Surely you are aware of this campaign, the explicit arguments forwarded for its necessity and its many notable and expensive foibles?

What is your actual argument here? You appear to be quoting newspaper headlines as examples of ridiculous things that obviously haven't happened.

I was legitimately just trying to clarify what he was saying

Obviously that is happening, I have eyes and I'm not a shitlib

My argument is simply that the phrase "cultural Marxism" is pretty devoid of meaning and when used in common parlance has essentially nothing to do with Marxism at all.

It's basically the right-wing equivalent of the very common leftist trope of "everything I hate is neoliberalism, the more I hate it, the more neoliberal it is"

Just in this case it's "everything I hate is Marxism, the more I hate it, the more Marxist it is"

  • -10

My argument is simply that the phrase "cultural Marxism" is pretty devoid of meaning and when used in common parlance has essentially nothing to do with Marxism at all.

There is a lot of meaning, but most of that meaning is indeed in the meta: these people blame entire groups for the alleged oppression of other groups, based on a very poor analysis, and see the solution in giving power to these supposedly oppressed groups with the assumption that this will solve the alleged oppression (and not create new oppression). As people have explained to you, the initiators of this movement actually saw cultural Marxism as a meaningful name, that they chose for themselves, where they shifted their Marxist reasoning and methodologies to a new field.

Imagine that there is a group in Indonesia who wrote the Protocols of Sino, blaming Indonesian problems on a secret cabal of Chinese elites and think that the solution to Indonesian problems is to kill the Chinese. And imagine that they initially called themselves 'anti-Chinese Nazi's', but ran into the issue that Nazi has a rather negative connotation outside of their own little bubble, so they rebranded with a different name. Not because their beliefs fundamentally changed, but just to get more acceptance.

Then it makes perfect sense for the critics to use the original name. Not because it falsely links the ideology to another ideology with a negative connotation, but because that link actually exists and is strong.

They want whomever they believe to be low-status in the culture to have more status. They believe everything is a social construct, and so they conclude that status is not earned, but granted by authorities to preferred classes of people, and stigma to disfavoured classes. Cultural marxists want to become the status/stigma-granting authority, and for them this means controlling art and education. In the US they’re primarily concerned with black people. In Canada they’re concerned about indigenous people. In Europe they’re concerned about migrants or something. You can question whether status actually works this way, but you can’t dispute that this attitude toward status is widespread all across the political spectrum.

I mean yeah agree with all of this

My thesis isn't that these people don't exist, they do.

My thesis is just that the phrase "cultural Marxism" has been beaten and twisted to the point it's basically just an out-group signifier that has nothing to do with Marx

I don't think Marx would like DEI departments. I'm actually pretty confident he'd see all the DEI stuff as the bourgeoisie using a wedge issue to keep workers fighting each other.

He probably wouldn't like it because his era was obsessed with industrialization, yeah, but that doesn't mean that the people doing it are not transplanting his ideas from the factory to the movie studio.

who is the "they" in "they need to seize the means of cultural production"

Realistlcally, a small vanguard party of dedicated ideologues.

Who are the cultural Marxists?

Initially there was Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, Benjamin, Pollock, and Lowenthal. Of those, Columbia, Brandeis, and a few west coast public universities (Marcuse wound up at UC San Diego) saw the most influence in political science and theory. Fromm had a large impact on feminist theory.

Second generation figures include Habermas, Frederic Jameson, Stuart Hall, and generally the New School for Social Research and the UC system more broadly (which also played a big part in bringing in and fusing French post-structuralist analysis into it).

Then you have the full efflorescence through Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Duncan Kennedy, Kimberle Crenshaw, Nancy Fraser, Donna Haraway, Wendy Brown, Cedric Robinson, Walter Mignolo, Andreas Malm, Shoshanna Zuboff, etc.

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