Episode 354 - What is Cultural Marxism

I don't know about you, but I've been hearing and seeing in the mainstream media lots of references to Cultural Marxism. And when I see this expression, it always seems to be used in a derogatory sense. The people who use it are often trying to dismiss an idea or a movement by calling it Cultural Marxism. They say it without defining Cultural Marxism and without explaining how the circumstances they are observing somehow fit into their definition and they seem to me to be resorting to the expression Cultural Marxism as a way of shutting down debate. If they can paint something as Cultural Marxism then it's something to do with Karl Marx which is therefore something to do with the gulags in communist Russia and therefore must be bad.

So I spent some time looking at what Marx actually said which in summary was about the class war between the workers and the people who own the means of production and it was about economic issues and the way capitalism works and how ultimately it must fail when the workers revolt.

As you will hear in this podcast, Cultural Marxism really has nothing to do with that. In the podcast I'll try to explain what Cultural Marxism is and where it is derived from so that when you next hear it you will be better informed and have more information so that you can properly assess the merits of the argument that proposes to use the term Cultural Marxism.