A Word on "Cultural Marxism"

Sean Gabb is right below to see that the heavily oppressive version of political correctness that has emerged in recent years is not well described as "Cultural Marxism". It has in fact very little to do with Marxism, except insofar as both bodies of thought are heavily oppressive.

The fact that Marxist regimes do have oppressive speech codes is a link between the two but exactly what speech is forbidden today has only a passing kinship with what Marxist regimes forbad. In fact it was criticism of the existing order that Marxist regimes most heavily forbad whereas the current movement is heavily in favour of criticizing the existing order.

The practitioners of the current obsession usually describe themselves as "woke" and the term "woke movement" seems an adequate descriptor to me. As far as I can tell, the term "woke" first arose among South African blacks who saw even black rule as oppressive towards blacks -- which it undoubtedly is. So it was simply another critique of the exiting order. It mainly manifested itself in a desire to tear down colonial-era statues, for whatever good that was supposed to do.

The term was however gladly adopted by enemies of historic statuary in Britain and the USA. It was hard to see what good the iconoclasm did but it became the vanguard of a movement that aimed to tear down conventional vocabulary. As such it mainly has nuisance value only. By adopting new words for old one can usually escape its attacks and all sorts of people are doing just that. As long as we can get on with whatever we normally do, let the vocabulary critics expend their energies on trivia.

It seems that Conservative politicians are now forbidden to use the term Cultural Marxism. The alleged reason is that it describes a Jewish conspiracy theory. The Cultural Marxist hypothesis traces the rise of political correctness and the growing use, both formal and informal, of political censorship to a group of neo-Marxists collectively known as the Frankfurt School. Since these neo-Marxists were mainly Jewish, the claim is that anyone using the term has to be anti-semitic. I accept that some who use the term have ethnic origins uppermost in their minds. Most, however, do not, but are trying to understand the connection between ideas and political action. Melanie Phillips, indeed, one of the most liberal users of the term, is herself Jewish. Whether she must now be defined as an anti-semite I leave to others. What cannot be doubted is that, wherever it started, there is an increasing censorship of political opinion, and that both Britain and America are sliding into a strange sort of outsourced totalitarianism – a totalitarianism that has no basis in written law, but proceeds by way of omnipresent propaganda and the sacking of anyone who refuses to agree with what the propaganda claims.

This being so, I am disturbed that any term of analysis for what is happening has itself become a victim of informal censorship. I am equally disturbed, though hardly surprised, that the Conservatives have so little interest in winning a battle of ideas that they are willing to let their opponents set the terms of debate. On the other hand, I do not think that Cultural Marxism is the right term of analysis. Though I have used it myself, and may even have helped introduce it into this country, I have long since come to what I think a more accurate analysis. I do not now use the term Cultural Marxism, and I do not recommend its use, because I do not believe that the present attack on liberal civilisation is in any meaningful sense Marxist.

So far as I understand him – and I write as an outsider to any school of Marxist ideology – Marx made five essential points. First, there have been, since the French Revolution, two classes – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Second, the bourgeoisie owns the means of production and exploits the proletariat through the extraction of surplus value. Third, this is an unstable parasitism, as the reinvestment of surplus value leads to periodic crises of over-production. Fourth, these crises concentrate wealth in fewer hands and expand and immiserise the proletariat. Fifth, there will be an inevitable revolution, in which the expropriators will be expropriated and a communist society will emerge. A further and perhaps optional sixth point is that the inevitable revolution can be hurried by the defection of informed bourgeois intellectuals to radicalise and form a vanguard for the proletariat.

Now, where is any of this in the present mix of climate alarmism and obsession with the alleged oppression of racial and sexual minorities? How is capitalism supposed to be overthrown by getting Sainsbury to fill its advertisements with pictures of black people eating Christmas dinner? Ditto boycotts of Israeli pharmaceuticals? Ditto arguing with or against radical feminists over the exact status of men who change sex?

The answer, of course, is the Cultural Marxist hypothesis – that the present culture wars are a product of the writings of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. These men took the Marxian concept of “false consciousness” – that the bourgeoisie keeps the workers quiet by making them believe that all is for the best – and enlarged it into a project for achieving a counter-hegemony by taking over the means of cultural reproduction.

There is some truth in this answer, so far as these writings are prescribed in most university humanities departments, and many advocates of the new totalitarianism have at some time called themselves Marxists. It is, even, so a weak answer. Before about 60 AD, most Christians were Jews, and Christianity ever since has retained some Jewish religious writings among its core texts. But nothing is achieved by describing Christianity as “Gentile Judaism.” The differences between the two faiths are too essential to define either by reference to the other. In the same way, the present totalitarianism has nothing to do with the essential claims of Marxism. It lacks any interest in the analysis of surplus value, and its belief in the instability of unregulated markets derives mainly from a reading of Keynes and the welfare economists of the Cambridge School.

I prefer the term “cultural leftism.” I prefer this because the present totalitarianism is based on belief in an appearance of equality mediated by the State. It therefore has elements of socialism as reasonably defined. But it is in no sense Marxist. Its revealed preference is for a ruling class that is a coalition of politicians, administrators, policemen, lawyers, educators, plus media and business interests. So far as individuals move freely between them, these groups are mutually permeable. If they disagree over incidentals, they preside collectively over a mass of the ruled who are mostly well-nourished, but who are too atomised and intimidated by often meaningless words to combine in opposition.

Indeed, if I prefer my chosen term, I see little point in arguing against what it describes. Undoubtedly, this must be explained and opposed. But too much analysis of particulars can risk an overlooking of the much more important generality. This is that, in every time and place, there have been those who want to get on with their lives and those who want to control others. These latter will take up whatever body of ideas is most likely within the prevailing assumptions of their age to legitimise their urges.

I have written about this already – here and here. I will therefore only summarise my opinion. This is that, during the religious controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the will to power was dressed in the clothing of radical Protestantism. My own reading of The New Testament shows no condemnation of any rational enjoyment, and certainly no call for censorship or the regulation of lifestyle. As refashioned by those who took it up, radical Protestantism became a doctrine of guilt and gloomy thoughts, and an excuse for controlling others. Though often shown to be ill-made, this particular clothing was only abandoned once it had become threadbare with the passing of time and the rise of new concerns. In the early twentieth century, Marxism was the main preferred legitimising ideology. It was to little effect that the predictions of monopoly and immiserisation were falsified, and to none that the Austrian School showed how the analysis of surplus value was based on a misunderstanding of price formation, and how economic activity could not be coordinated without market prices. Orthodox Marxism was progressively abandoned in the West after about 1950 by everyone who mattered, only because the mass-murders had given it too bad a name, and because the workers plainly wanted more and nicer consumer goods than a planned economy could deliver.

The significance of the neo-Marxists is that they were at first the intellectual equivalent of Pethidine for the more effective advocates of total control. They were an exit from the apparent dead end of Marxism. They were then incorporated into a new legitimising ideology that, with its fanaticism and guilt-laden puritanism, might not have been recognised by Gramci and Adorno and Marcuse. This movement was driven by a need to explain why predictions of working class impoverishment had been falsified, and why the workers were happy after the Great War to support non-leftist authoritarian governments. It was a thing of its own age. It is not substantially to blame for my present fear that I shall be sacked for thinking it a good idea to leave the European Union without a deal, or my scepticism about the existence of a Great Plastic Patch – or for believing in freedom of speech and association.

On this analysis, the new totalitarians are only contingently cultural leftists – just as their predecessors were only contingently Marxists or eugenicists or Calvinists. Given a change in prevailing assumptions, their successors might easily be Moslems or white supremacists. Ideas come and go. The will to power is always there.

The problem, therefore, is not to be solved by proving that men like Adorno were wrong, or perhaps saying that they were Jewish. The problem is the existence of a State that is able to enforce the whims of people inherently inclined to totalitarian control and who are permanently in search of the most appropriate ideology to legitimise their inclinations. Now that I am growing old enough to be wise, and now it is plain there can be no conservative reaction, I see more clearly than ever that there is only one permanent solution to these waves of fanaticism that were destroying lives long before Marx was born. This is to withdraw sanction from the powers that be and to work for the destruction of the State and its replacement by a mass of autonomous communities too small and too easily escaped to oppress those living in them. This is not to be achieved by political activism, but by a process of individual defection.

I return to the term Cultural Marxism. It emerged for historical reasons. Libertarians and conservatives spent much of the twentieth century arguing against Marxism. It was comforting after about 1990 to see the new threat to freedom as a variant of something they could believe they had already defeated. But, if it really worries Jews – and many libertarians are Jewish – let it go. If using it can get you sacked from your job, let it go. It is, after all, a bad term of analysis. And whatever other terms may or may not be allowed, the facts analysed remain facts. We face a ruling class that is more than usually trying to get its way by censorship and intimidation and the ruining of careers. Make it law that we must call these people “devoted friends of humanity” – they would still be the sworn and obvious enemies of the liberal civilisation that emerged in the Enlightenment.

https://www.seangabb.co.uk/a-word-on-cultural-marxism-2020-by-sean-gabb/

Potential Biden Appointee Shuts Down Hobby Lobby

A week before Thanksgiving, shoppers in Albuquerque, New Mexico strolled the aisles of Hobby Lobby, some perhaps shopping for glue guns and glitter to help with holiday decorating. Their shopping ended abruptly after an alarming announcement came over the store’s intercom.

“Attention shoppers. Attention shoppers. We regret to inform you that the sheriff’s department has decided to close us down. We need to close down immediately.”

According to local news reports, shoppers were escorted out of the store by sheriff’s deputies who were called to the store to enforce Governor Michelle Lujan-Grisham’s new Covid lockdowns. Lujan-Grisham is one of several Democrat governors who in recent weeks has reimposed heavy-handed Covid lockdowns on her state.

It is unclear if shoppers were able to make their purchases, or if that posed too great a risk for Covid spread.

Albuquerque shopper Leslie Butikofer is a frequent shopper at that Hobby Lobby. She was outraged when she heard of the governor’s draconian edict.

“It’s out of control!” she said. “If Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, Costco, and Sam’s can stay open, what difference does it make if Hobby Lobby is open?”

Butikofer said she had planned to buy red holiday bows to decorate her home for Christmas, but says it was easier to just order them online from Amazon than to try and do a curbside pickup from Hobby Lobby.

“Money is still being spent,” she said. “People are still shopping, but just not at the local stores. Everyone is shopping online.”

Butikofer said the governor’s lockdown is an attempt to slow the spread of Covid, as cases spike in the state. “New Mexico is a Covid hot spot right now, but so is the rest of the country.”

According to Politico, Lujan-Grisham is under consideration in a potential Biden administration for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Politico reports, “The next secretary will play a key role in managing the Covid-19 response and convincing a fatigued and distrustful public to buy into the tough public health measures needed to suppress the virus.”

Don Berwick, a former Obama administration Medicare and Medicaid Chief told Politico, “It’s Covid 24/7 now. It’s got to be dealt with.”

Presumably, someone in the Biden camp thinks Lujan-Grisham’s handling of Covid in her state has been a model for the rest of the country.

Butikofer said she’s watched the governor’s weekly Covid news briefings and has seen nothing that instills any confidence in her ability to handle the pandemic at a national level.

“We have been under some of the tightest restrictions in the country since spring and it hasn’t made a difference,” she said. “Closing schools, wearing masks, closing gyms, nail salons and everything else hasn’t made a difference.”

Which makes one wonder if Gov. Lujan-Grisham’s headline-grabbing lockdowns are part of a PR campaign to gain the national spotlight to extend her career once she’s out of office. She’s been a disaster for her state and it’s hard to imagine New Mexico voters electing her to a second term.

The statewide unemployment rate was 8.1% in October, well above the 6.9% national rate. New Mexico depleted its unemployment insurance fund in September and has begun borrowing money from the federal government to fulfill claims to residents who have lost their jobs.

If that is the kind of leadership we’ll get from a Biden administration, our economy will flatline by spring. We’ll be hearing from the White House, “Attention shoppers. Attention shoppers. We regret to inform you that our country is closing down.” RIP America.

https://dailytorch.com/2020/11/potential-biden-appointee-targets-hobby-lobby/

A Major Legal Victory Against LGBTQ Tyranny

With all the focus on the aftermath of the presidential elections, you might have missed an important victory in the courts last week. As reported November 20 by Liberty Counsel, which litigated the case successfully, “A three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals struck down laws that ban counselors from providing minor clients with help to reduce or eliminate unwanted same-sex attractions, behaviors, or gender confusion.”

This was a victory for freedom, for tolerance, for individual rights, and for therapist-client privilege. Above all, it was a victory for minors.

Liberty Counsel, led by Mat Staver, represented “Dr. Robert Otto, LMFT and Dr. Julie Hamilton, LMFT and their minor clients who challenged the constitutionality of ordinances enacted by the City of Boca Raton and Palm Beach County which prohibit minors from voluntary counseling from licensed professionals.”

These local, Florida ordinances were part of a disturbing national trend that prohibits minors with unwanted same-sex attraction or gender confusion from seeking professional help.

Of course, under these same ordinances, had these minors wanted help to reinforce their same-sex attraction or gender confusion, that would have been allowed. By all means, let professionals help minors embrace their homosexual desires or their transgender identity.

But God forbid that a 15-year-old male should not want to be attracted to another male. Or an 8-year-old should not want to feel like a boy trapped in the wrong body. No professional help could be offered to them. This is how LGBTQ activists have turned our society upside down.

Let’s say, then, that this 15-year-old male had been raped repeatedly by an older, male neighbor from the ages of 7 to 9, unbeknownst to his parents. As he came into puberty, he felt confused about his sexuality, ultimately realizing he was attracted to males, not females.

He had always dreamed about getting married (meaning, to a woman!) and having children, and he was repulsed by his same-sex attraction, now sharing everything with his parents.

They say to him, “We will get you all the help you need,” and they find a highly-recommended family therapist. But when they share their situation with the therapist, the therapist replies, “Oh, I would love to help you, but it’s against the law. However, I’d be glad to help your son embrace his same-sex attractions. That is perfectly legal.”

What a perversion of fairness, of freedom, and of personal dignity. What an unrighteous and oppressive imposition of the state. Really now, what on earth gives them the right to make rulings like this?

Or consider the case of the 8-year-old girl who is troubled by feelings that she’s actually a boy in a girl’s body. This makes her very uncomfortable, causing confusion for her and her siblings. So her parents reach out to a well-trained professional, feeling they are at their wits end and unable to provide adequate help.

But when they sit down with the family counselor, the counselor says to them, “I would love to help your daughter embrace her girlhood, but I’m strictly prohibited by the law. However, here’s how I can help.

“We’ll work with your daughter to embrace the fact that she’s really a boy, sending her back to school with a new name and dressed like a boy. The school will allow her – actually him – to use the boy’s bathroom. Then, in two years, we’ll start him on hormone blockers to stop the onset of puberty, then have his breasts removed when he’s 18, then schedule him for full-scale gender confirmation surgery at 20, supplemented by male hormones for life. Isn’t that a wonderful option?”

And remember: under these oppressive ordinances, to sit and talk with the child was forbidden by law if that child wanted to feel at home in her own body. But to put her on puberty-blocking hormones as a child, then remove total healthy parts of her body, then put her on hormones for life, was allowed by the law.

To call this perverse is an understatement. Child abuse would be more accurate.

Outrageously, 20 states now ban such counseling, which they label “conversion therapy,” alleging that such therapy is harmful to minors. And last year, California almost passed a ban on such counseling for people of all ages. It would have even prohibited religious leaders from offering such counseling.

Yet this is where things are going unless believers, in particular, joined by all freedom-loving people, push back.

The LGBTQ tyranny must be challenged. The assault on individual rights must be resisted.

No one has the right to tell a young person (or any person), “You must be gay” or “You must be trans.”

Absolutely, categorically not. And that’s why this Florida victory is so important.

As to the notion that sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) are harmful, Peter Sprigg and the FRC just released a 37-page report titled, “No Proof of Harm. 79 Key Studies Provide No Scientific Proof That Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (SOCE) Are Usually Harmful.”

In short, “While these 79 studies do provide anecdotal evidence that some SOCE clients report the experience was harmful, they do not provide scientific proof that SOCE is more harmful than other forms of therapy, more harmful than other courses of action for those with SSA, or more likely to be harmful than helpful for the average client. If alleged ‘critical health risks’ of SOCE cannot be found in these 79 studies, then it is safe to conclude that they cannot be found anywhere.”

Old lies die hard, but for those seeking the truth, the data is undeniable.

Last year, in New York City, an Orthodox Jewish therapist challenged the city’s prohibition of SOCE counseling for people of any age “for violating his freedom of speech and infringing on his religious faith and that of his patients.”

With the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the city quickly reversed course, leading to this exuberant announcement from Tony Perkins and the FRC in September, 2019: “The last place anyone would expect liberals to rethink their extremism is New York City. But, thanks to a new lawsuit, even the Big Apple seems to understand when it's vulnerable. ‘Pinch yourself,’ FRC's Cathy Ruse says. One of the most radical cities on earth is about to walk back its LGBT counseling ban. All because one courageous psychotherapist fought back.”

In Florida, in the 2-1 opinion, Judge Britt C. Grant wrote that, “We hold that the challenged ordinances violate the First Amendment because they are content-based regulations of speech that cannot survive strict scrutiny.”

Precisely. These ordinances represent a fundamental assault on freedom of speech, among other things. May this be the beginning of a national trend.

In fact, as Liberty Counsel noted, “The 11th Circuit decision was foreshadowed by comments in a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision, NIFLA v. Becerra, dealing with California's efforts to regulate speech by pro-life pregnancy centers. In the course of rejecting the argument that governments can regulate ‘professional speech’ without offending the First Amendment, the Supreme Court directly criticized earlier appeals court decisions that had made the same argument in upholding state therapy bans. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that ‘this Court has not recognized “professional speech” as a separate category of speech. Speech is not unprotected merely because it is uttered by “professionals.”’”

There is reason for real hope. May the righteous pushback continue unless freedom of self-determination is restored for minors across America.

https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbrown/2020/11/26/a-major-legal-victory-against-lgbtq-tyranny-n2580643

Trump ‘truth tellers’ need a refresher course in history

The ABC chairwoman [Ita Buttrose] said some leaders did not need much encouragement to oppress the media. She added: “Outgoing US President Donald Trump declared journalists to be the enemy of the people. Dare I say, Mr Trump — that’s fake news. Journalists are truth tellers.”

It so happened that Buttrose’s declaration that journalists are truth tellers coincided with the apology issued by CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour for comparing Trump’s term in office with Nazi Germany.

On November 12, Amanpour said on CNN: “This week, 82 years ago, Kristallnacht happened. It was the Nazis’ warning shot across the bow of our human civilisation that led to genocide against a whole identity and, in that tower of burning books, it led to an attack on fact, knowledge, history and proof. After four years of a modern-day assault on those same values by Donald Trump, the Biden-Harris team pledges a return to normal.”

Amanpour is an intelligent, well-informed and much travelled journalist. So how did she go as a truth teller? Not well at all. For starters, Kristallnacht had nothing to do with a “tower of burning books”. It would seem the CNN correspondent confused Kristallnacht on November 9-10, 1938, with the massive book burnings undertaken by Nazis on May 10, 1933 — not long after Adolf Hitler’s regime came to power.

Certainly the works of Jewish writers went up in flames in German cities and towns in May 1933. But so did books written by liberal, social democrat and left-wing authors who were not Jewish.

On Kristallnacht, however, Nazis attacked hundreds of synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses. Around 100 German Jews were murdered. This was an attack on Jews and was the forerunner to Hitler’s genocide directed at European Jewry.

Amanpour’s comments on Kristallnacht itself were well meaning. But they were not accurate. In any event, there was a bigger truth that she missed; namely that this was an attack on Jews, not books. That’s why her attempt to link the Trump administration with the Nazi regime was misleading, and dangerously so. Which is why she felt the need to apologise.

At the end of CNN’s Amanpour on November 16, the presenter said: “I observed the 82nd anniversary of Kristallnacht, as I often do — it is the event that began the horrors of the Holocaust. I also noted President Trump’s attacks on history, facts, knowledge, and truth. I should not have juxtaposed the two thoughts.” Even Amanpour’s apology is hopelessly inadequate. The problem was not merely that Amanpour juxtaposed the events in Germany in 1938 and those in the US between January 2017 (when Trump came to office) and November this year. Rather, the error was that Amanpour believes that Trump and his supporters share the “same values” as Hitler and his supporters.

This is not a truthful statement. As writer Richard J. Evans has documented in his books The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power, Hitler came to power following widescale violence and intimidation. And he remained in power by establishing a ruthless totalitarian dictatorship — until defeated on the battlefields of eastern and western Europe.

Trump, on the other hand, won a democratic election in November 2016 and his administration has governed in accordance with the requirements of the US Constitution.

Amanpour apologised to Jews — but not to Trump. She could have gone further.

It does a grave disservice to history to compare like with unlike. However emotional the citizenry of social democratic or conservative run countries may feel, their circumstances cannot be compared with those who suffered and died at the hands of fascist, Nazi or communist dictatorships.

It is simply ahistorical for someone living in the US or Canada to compare their plight with those who lived in Hitler’s Germany or Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. With respect to the latter, anyone who has read the disgraceful work of Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times journalist Walter Duranty would know he was not a truth teller, just a pro-communist liar. The likes of Buttrose would be well advised to read SJ Taylor’s Stalin’s Apologist, if they have not already done so.

The historical hyperbole of an Amanpour encourages the likes of other Trump haters such as actor Alec Baldwin. On November 16 he tweeted: “Bury Trump in a Nazi graveyard and put a swastika on his grave. The majority of Americans made the right choice. Trump is a maniac.” The evidence suggests that Baldwin is into projection — in that it is the actor, not the President, who is manic.

Look at it this way. No US president has made himself as available to the media as Trump. And no US president has experienced such a hostile media as Trump. During the Trump administration, more journalists than usual became activists in the political contest — overwhelmingly on the anti-Trump side, led by CNN with a little help from MSNBC.

If Trump shared the same values as Hitler, he would have closed down CNN and Amanpour would have been incarcerated and possibly murdered. Baldwin would have suffered a similar fate. Hollywood would have been shut and its actors, directors and producers purged. Or else the film industry would have been compelled to make Leni Riefenstahl-style propaganda documentaries in support of the Trump regime.

Sure, Trump at times engaged in fake news. But not as much as Amanpour, whose critique of the US President involved a complete misreading of the history of the 20th century.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/trump-truth-tellers-need-a-refresher-course-in-history/news-story/fc890de19767d2cb8a78d8f7500407e8

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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