Oxford English Dictionary definition: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/93524422
cultural Marxism, n.
Forms: also with capital initial in the first element.
In sense 1, apparently with allusion to English cultural bolshevism (1932 or earlier), itself after German Kulturbolschewismus, denoting any cultural movement or practice perceived (and dismissed) as left-leaning or progressive (1919 or earlier, subsequently often in Nazi use). Compare German Kulturmarxismus (1924, in an attack on a Marxist philosopher, or earlier; rare before the late 20th cent. and in recent use probably after English).
1. Used depreciatively, chiefly among right-wing commentators: a political agenda advocating radical social reform, said to be promoted within western cultural institutions by liberal or left-wing ideologues intent on eroding traditional social values and imposing a dogmatic form of progressivism on society. Later also more generally: a perceived left-wing bias in social or cultural institutions, characterized as doctrinaire and pernicious.
2. The theory that the oppression of the working class is effected through social and cultural means.
The theory of cultural Marxism was originally developed by the Frankfurt School of social theorists as an elaboration and critique of the economic theories posited by classical Marxism.
SAGE Encyclopedia of social theory (2005, edited by George Ritzer ) ISBN 9780761926115 vol 1 pp 171-177
CULTURAL MARXISM AND BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES (by Douglas Kellner)
While during its dramatic period of global expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, cultural studies was often identified with the approach to culture and society developed by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, in Birmingham, England, their sociological, materialist, and political approaches to culture had predecessors in a number of currents of cultural Marxism
Traditions of cultural Marxism are thus important to the trajectory of cultural studies and to understanding its various types and forms in the present age.
In fact, human beings and societies are extremely complex and contradictory, but ideology smoothes over contradictions, conflicts, and negative features, idealizing human or social traits, such as individuality and competition, which are elevated into governing conceptions and values. Many later cultural Marxists would develop these ideas, although they tended to ascribe more autonomy and import to culture than in classical Marxism.
Cultural Marxism was highly influential throughout Europe and the Western world, especially in the 1960s, when Marxian thought was at its most prestigious and pro-creative. Theorists such as Roland Barthes and the Tel Quel group in France; Galvano Della Volpe, Lucio Colletti, and others in Italy; Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and a cohort of 1960s cultural radicals in the English-speaking world; and a large number of theorists throughout the globe used cultural Marxism to develop modes of cultural studies that analyzed the production, interpretation, and reception of cultural artifacts within concrete sociohistorical conditions that had contested political and ideological effects and uses. One of the most famous and influential forms of cultural studies, initially under the influence of cultural Marxism, emerged within the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, in Birmingham, England, within a group often referred to as the “Birmingham school.”
From the 1980s through the present, models of cultural studies expanded the range of theories, regions, and artifacts engaged, providing a rich diversity of traditions, originally deeply influenced by cultural Marxism and then taking a wide variety of forms. Critical cultural studies insisted that the politics of representation must engage class, gender, race, and sexuality, thus correcting lacunae in earlier forms of cultural Marxism.
Cultural Marxism thus strengthens the arsenal of cultural studies in providing critical and political perspectives that enable individuals to dissect the meanings, messages, and effects of dominant cultural forms.
Cultural Marxism: A survey, Jérôme Jamin, DOI: 10.1111/rec3.12258
In concrete terms, next to the history of Cultural Marxism as a well‐documented theory, devel-oped by Marxist scholars and thinkers within cultural studies from the 1930s, another theory has emerged during the 1990s, and is particularly influential on radical forms of right wing politics.
Cultural Marxism, and Critical Theory more generally with which it has a close signification, have both a direct link with the Frankfurt School and its Marxian theorists. Initially called the “Institute for Social Research” during the 1930s, and taking the label the “Frankfurt School” by the 1950s, the designation meant as much an academic environ-ment as a geographical location
From a philosophical point of view, Cultural Marxism, as Critical Theory, considers culture as something that needs to be studied within the system and the social relations through which it is produced, and then carried by the people.
If Cultural Marxism, as a school of thought, dates from the 1930s, Cultural Marxism, as a conspiracy theory, has appeared in conservative and radical American literature from the beginning of the 1990s.
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME: ESSAYS ON CULTURAL STUDIES Lawrence Grossberg isbn 9780822319160
pg 149–
CULTURAL AND STRUCTURAL MARXISM There have been two major responses to this lack of an adequate theory of either ideology or, more generally, the superstructure. Hall (1980c) has described them as "cultural" and "structural" marxism...The culturalists' revision of marxism (Williams 1973a) emphasizes the "humanistic" rather than the "economistic" side of Marx's writings...they continue to describe social experience in terms of class experience, although classes no longer are seen necessarily as homogeneous totalities but rather as an alliance of particular "class fractions," which are determined ideologically and politically as well as economically...One of the consequences of this view is that the category of the economic is largely absent from culturalist analyses, except in terms of class experience. Finally, the concept of ideology either is replaced by or supplemented with Gramsci's concept (1971) of hegemony...However, because the cultural marxist's final appeal is to the category of experience, there still remains a moment of distortion within the theory of hegemony, and a moment of correspondence between ideology and reality. Thus the culturalist's project is to compare the ideological representations, now located within the ongoing struggle for hegemony, with the lived experience of particular classes. Cultural marxism seeks homologies between class positions and systems of representation.
(Hall 1980c - 'Cultural studies: two paradigms', https://doi.org/10.1177/016344378000200106)
Cultural Marxism: far-right conspiracy theory in Australia’s culture wars - Rachel Busbridge , Benjamin Moffitt & Joshua Thorburn - https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2020.1787822
One of the issues associated with the Cultural Marxist conspiracy is that Cultural Marxism is a distinct philosophical approach associated with some strands of the Frankfurt School, as well as ideas and influences emanating from the British New Left. However, proponents of the conspiracy do not regard Cultural Marxism as a form of left-wing cultural criticism, but instead as a calculated plan orchestrated by leftist intellectuals to destroy Western values, traditions and civilisation, carried out since at least the 1930s
A discussion of Trent Schroyer's The Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory (farganis 1978) https://www.jstor.org/stable/656994
p436
Along the way, Schroyer detects a bifurcation in the Marxist interpretation between the "cultural Marxists," who have abandoned the traditional categories of political economy, and the "scientific Marxists," who have evolved a new version of the crisis theory of late capitalism.
437
The problem is compounded by the pluralistic access system which perpetuates the illusion of representative government and obfuscates the reality of domination and the potential within the system for change and transformation. It is at this point that the "cultural Marxists" and particularly Marcuse, Habermas and Offe make their significant contributions.
438
The ambiguity of politics from within the Frankfurt perspective raises a more fundamental question about the fusion between the cultural and scientific strains of Marxism which Schroyer attempts. The analyses of the cultural Marxists very often lead to highly pessimistic conclusions regarding the possibility of social change.
A Dictionary of Marxist Thought 2nd ed Tom Bottomore ISBN 0-631-18082-6
p130
The importance attached in Western Marxism to issues of culture and ideology is of course by no means just a matter of theory. What Trent Shroyer (1973) called 'cultural Marxism' was an important element, though more in Europe than in North America, in the 'counter-culture' of the 1960s (Roszak, 1970).
Adorno and the Need in Thinking New Critical Essays by Donald Burke (editor), Colin J. Campbell (editor), Kathy Kiloh (editor), Michael Palamarek (editor), Jonathan Short (editor) ISBN 978-0-8020-9214-4
p298
In addition to vanquishing the vague, imprecise cultural Marxism pioneered by Williams and Thompson, Althusser's dense theoretical apparatus abandons the simplistic class reductionism sweepingly attributed to most other forms of Marxist cultural analysis, including the so-called 'Western Marxism' of Lukács and the Frankfurt School.
Affective asymmetries - academics, austerity and the misrecognition of emotion http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2011.583486
213
There has been a persistent line of cultural Marxism influenced by psychoanalytic theory[6] which has always acknowledged the crucial significance of the irrational shaping class relations—the force of wishes and dreams—emotion/affect/desire have even been acknowledged in their absences,[7] not least because post Marxist theorists have understood that the 'working class' has consistently refused to behave as the theory dictated they should.
6. Rather than cite one specific text, I note the significant expression of the move from Marxism to Postmarxism enacted by many on the intellectual left in the pages of and beyond the publication Marxism Today—notably the 1980s discussions on New Times orchestrated by Stuart Hall (McRobbie, 1994).
7. Hoggart (1988) refers to the 'wantlessness of the working class'.
Community, Class, and Comparison in Labour History and Local History Elizabeth Faue http://www.jstor.org/stable/27516703?origin=JSTOR-pdf
p155
beginning in the 1960s, the field of labour history in both Australia and the United States underwent a rather startling transformation, shifting its focus from historical studies of national economies, labour parties, and institutionalised labour movements to the social, cultural and political history of the working classes. Catalysts for this shift included the revitalisation of left politics, the reemergence of social movements for sexual and racial-ethnic equality, and the maturation of cultural Marxism.
Contemporary Social Constructionism Key Themes Darin Weinberg iSBN 978-1-4399-0926-3
63
deconstructionism has also benefited from its association with antiessentialist strains in the social sciences that range from cultural Marxism to symbolic interactionism.
86
Without discounting the validity of biology as such, those we might call proto-social constructionists—cultural Marxists, Weberians, durkheimian cultural relativists, and symbolic interactionists (not to mention the innumerable hybrids these theorists spawned)—sought in various ways to establish that their own research required attention to people's understandings of their lives.
86
Thus, for example, cultural Marxists wrote of the myriad appropriations made of our organic bodies in capitalist societies (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972);
Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet Christian Fuchs ISBN (PDF): 978-1-911534-05-1
3
First, open cultural Marxism can revisit some of the contributions to cultural Marxism in an open manner. The Frankfurt School is an important tradition in cultural Marxism. One should, however, not reify particular traditions or thinkers, but practice an open conversation between various Marxist approaches.
In this book, the focus is on particular topics and categories in cultural Marxism: Lukács' concept of cultural work and ideological labour (chapter 2), Adorno's critical dialectical theory of knowledge (chapter 3), Marcuse's dialectics as foundation for the analysis of social media's dialectics (chapter 4), Lukács' and Honneth's concepts of alienation and reification in the context of Facebook (chapter 5), Habermas and the dialectical critical theory of communication (chapter 6).
4
Questioning this approach, this book does not argue for a reification of the Frankfurt School, but rather for an open dialogue in cultural Marxism that opens up debates and lines of communication between thinkers related to the Frankfurt School and other cultural Marxists such as Raymond Williams, Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Vološinov, or Ferruccio Rossi-Landi.
203
Jürgen Habermas has made important contributions for theorising communication, but his dualist idealisation of communication falls short of a dialectical critical theory of communication. It is therefore time to go beyond Habermas in critically theorising communication. This goal can be achieved by drawing on the diverse tradition of cultural Marxism in an open manner that is curious about less well-known texts, tries to connect thoughts from various authors, including the Frankfurt School and other versions of cultural Marxism, and relates to new developments in society and theory.
207
The task of this book is to present readings on specific works of selected Frankfurt School thinkers and to thereby open up the discussion on cultural Marxism to new frontiers. These openings are the opening of Marxism to culture and communication, the opening of the way we read cultural Marxism from single, dominant texts towards alternative, less well-known works, and the opening of discourse in cultural Marxism from the focus on single thinkers towards a plural dialogue and unity in diversity.
Cultural History under Khrushchev and Brezhnev - From Social Psychology to Mentalités https://www.jstor.org/stable/3664402
284
By the 1960s and 1970s Western cultural Marxism was engaged in a dialogue with structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics.
IDEOLOGY AND METHODOLOGICAL ATTITUDE Patti Lather https://www.jstor.org/stable/45157421
p369
Within post-Althusserean Marxism or cultural Marxism, ideology is viewed as something people inhabit in daily, material ways and which speaks to both progressive and determinant aspects of culture (Apple, 1982; Wexler, 1982; Giroux, 1983).
Introduction - David Bathrick and Anson Rabinbach https://www.jstor.org/stable/40926579
p2
Our concern from the very outset had focused on the "historical avant-garde" of the 1920s and 1930s, seeing in the political and cultural implications of the Brecht-Lukács debate - as well as in the theoretical critiques of orthodox cultural Marxism in the writings of such thinkers as Karl Korsch (Marxism and Philosophy), the young Georg Lukács (History and Class Consciousness), Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch- alternative possibilities for a revolutionary aesthetics.
Key Thinkers from Critical Theory to Post-Marxism Simon Tormey&Jules Townshend ISBN-13 978-0-7619-6763-7
p44
Oppressors must 'convince' the subject of the 'desirability' of a given state of affairs, rather than rely on mere acquiescence or 'silence', which is a much weaker basis for social governance. Here their analysis complements the cultural Marxism of figures such as Antonio Gramsci.
Neoliberalism and Political Theology From Kant to Identity Politics Carl A. Raschke ISBN 978 1 4744 5457 5
31
The transformation of 'class politics' into 'identity politics' was a shift that took place almost a half-century ago with the advent of the New Left in the late 1960s and what came to be called, for the most part by its critics, as a form of 'cultural Marxism' influenced by Herbert Marcuse and the later Frankfurt School.
124
It was Fraser herself who first applied the Hegelian category to the transition among radical anti-capitalist theorists in the transition during the 1960s and 1970s from historical materialism to what its conservative critics contemptuously termed 'cultural Marxism'.
New Social Movements A Critical Review https://www.jstor.org/stable/2952558
Some theorists have used the writings of Gramsci to illuminate the processes of cultural domination that the state employs to maintain power (see Carroll 1992 for an overview). This "cultural Marxism" is a critique of "Marx's concepts of the relations and forces of production for inadequate attention to the conscious experience of institutions and creative practical reasoning" (Weiner 1982:13).
Reimagining The Nation-State The Contested Terrains of Nation-Building (Contemporary Irish Studies) Jim Mac Laughlin ISBN 0 7453 1364 7
p34
Paradoxically, Althusser's neo-Marxian mode of theorising is closer to Hegelian idealism and ideological abstractionism, the philosophical positions which Marx sought to demolish, than it is to cultural Marxism or historical materialism (Lovell, 1980, pp. 235–7).
Researching youth culture and popular music - a methodological critique Andy Bennett DOI: 10.1080/0007131022000000590
p451
In the first part of the article I begin to account for this absence by illustrating how early research on youth and music rejected the need for empirical research, relying instead on theories and concepts drawn from cultural Marxism.
452
I start by charting the development of youth culture and popular music as an object of sociological study grounded in a discourse of cultural Marxism, which deemed empirical research an unnecessary element in the analytical project of understanding the stylistic responses of youth, before going on to critically evaluate subsequent, empirically focused work on youth and music.
Review Essay - Sociology for Seminarians The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion. Martin Riesebrodt 2001 https://doi.org/10.1086/340564
811
The development of cultural Marxism, especially the rediscovery of Antonio Gramsci, as well as the important debate about Max Weber's studies of religion make no appearance.
Sociology of Culture Mark D. Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan isbn 0-631-23174-9
pg 2
Margaret S. Archer argues that from structural functionalism to structuration theory to cultural Marxism, most theories of culture conflate cultural systems of ideas with socio-cultural interaction.
pg 105
Gramsci's (1971) cultural Marxism provided another conceptual tool for understanding how religion implicitly reproduces power.
The Critique of Domination review thomas 1975 doi:10.2307/1957920
Schroyer succeeds, for the most part, in preserving his critical distance from Marx and the Frankfurt School's "cultural Marxism" alike; indeed, he puts the achievements of Habermas into better perspective than is found in the evaluations of the latter's more intemperate admirers (such as the late George Lichtheim) or impressionistic critics (such as John O'Neill).
Habermas's attempt to reunite "classical" and "cultural" Marxism, which "opens up a new era for the critical philosophy of the social sciences," nevertheless in Schroyer's view issues in a formalistic, contemplative critique unrelated to the prospects of emancipation—unlike the Marxian original which, for all its drawbacks, was resolutely practical.
The Dialogue of Negation Debates on Hegemony in Russia and the West Jeremy Lester ISBN 0 7453 1630 1
118
Once again, along with Lukács, Gramsci did much to foster a growing interest in cultural studies in general and a new form of cultural Marxism in particular. What now emerges is an area of study which focuses much more on the institutionalisation of values, beliefs and attitudes and their conscious and unconscious effect on social interaction.
The Economy of Morals and Its Applications - An Attempt to Understand Some Central Concepts in the Work of Albert O. Hirschman Andreas Hess http://www.jstor.com/stable/4177315
354
Instead, Hirschman follows a rather different line of reasoning, a line that allows him to address almost all the questions which Thompson and Habermas have raised but without falling into the traps of either cultural Marxism in its more empirical form (Thompson) or the metaphysics of mutual understanding (in the grand theory of Habermas).
The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies Constantin V. Boundas ISBN 978 0 7486 2097 5
p429-430
By the last quarter of the twentieth century this had led to direct reflection on the nature of the appropriative exercise, whence Colletti's formulation concerning how to extract from classical bourgeois sociology an understanding of 'ideological social relations' (Colletti 1969), and Althusser's repositioning of Durkheim's sociology of religion as an account of ideology and 'social reproduction'
(Althusser 1971). It had also issued in a polyglot 'cultural Marxism' – as developed for example in Birmingham School cultural studies (Davies 1995) – that had absorbed essential elements not only from psychoanalysis and classical sociology, but also from
semiotics, linguistics, language philosophy, and even Nietzsche and the poststructuralists.
The Handbook of Economic Sociology, Second Edition Neil J. Smelser&Richard Swedberg ISBN 0-691-12126-5
p605
It was more likely reinforced by the rise of so-called Western Marxism or cultural Marxism (Anderson 1976), which focused more attention on the ways in which power and possibilities for resisting power were built into language, discourse, and social interaction.
The SAGE Dictionary of Social Research Methods Victor Jupp 978 0 7619 6297 7
pg 50
Theoretical sources for critique are multiple and include ideas drawn from cultural Marxism, critical theory of the Frankfurt School, praxis theory, cultural studies, feminist studies, racialized and queer epistemologies, and the broad postmodern critique of advanced capitalist societies.
The Wealth of Networks How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom Yochai Benkler 978-0-300-11056-2
p279
The twentieth century saw a wide array of critique, from cultural Marxism to poststructuralism and postmodernism. However, much of mainstream liberal political theory has chosen to ignore, rather than respond and adapt to, these critiques.
Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties Sherry B. Ortner http://www.jstor.org/stable/178524?origin=JSTOR-pdf
p139
There was also a movement that might be called cultural Marxism, worked out largely in historical and literary studies, but this was not picked up by anthropologists until recently, and will be addressed in the final section of the essay.
Time and Philosophy A History of Continental Thought John McCumber 978-1-84465-275-4
p240
One important strand of the Frankfurt School is thus the birth of what today is called “cultural Marxism”: the view that after Marxism's death as a programme for social change (at, we also saw, the hands of fascism), it lives on as a fruitful form of cultural diagnosis. Hence, when Horkheimer and Adorno apply their general views of the non-identity of concept and thing to the contemporary world, they do so indirectly, by way of a consideration of four specific cultural phenomena: the Odyssey, Sade's Juliette, the culture industry and anti- Semitism. The first three of these have to do with artworks and how they function in society.
Two Lives in Uncertain Times Facing the Challenges of the 20th Century as Scholars and Citizens Wilma A. Iggers isbn 1-84545-138-4
p123
The course focused on various forms of twentieth-century Western cultural Marxism—Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, E. P. Thompson, and the Frankfurt School, headed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno—which entailed not merely an economic critique of capitalism, but a critique of modern civilization.
124
Even before I knew of cultural Marxism, I held that cultural factors played an important role in the shaping of societies. I also felt that the definitions of class, even by so-called Western Marxists like Lukács and E. P. Thompson, were too simplistic and neglected the impact of religion and ethnicity as well as of traditional conceptions of status, gender, and morality on society.
127
With its exciting faculty Rochester seemed very attractive. Genovese was about to publish Roll Jordan Roll. The World the Slaves Made, and Herbert Gutman, who had been my office neighbor during my first year in Buffalo, was also there, working on immigrant working class culture as well as on the black family in slavery and freedom. Both Genovese and Gutman were cultural Marxists. Genovese was strongly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Gutman by E. P. Thompson, and both stressed the role of slaves or workers as active agents in shaping their own destiny. Genovese had earlier been a member of the Communist Party, but became increasingly conservative both politically and in his approach to history.