What is Cultural Marxism?

What people are now calling cultural Marxism and what used to be called cultural Bolshevism is frankly just the philosophy of Spinoza, Locke and Voltaire taken to their natural conclusions.

It's a little bit odd to hyperfocus on the the critical theorists like Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse who — while leftists of the worst sort — weren't very influential until after the New Left had already taken off and if anything are symptoms and not sources.

We can pin the issues of modern culture down to being a result of the movements that really blew up in the late 60s from West Berlin to West Hollywood, but that's an insufficient analysis on it's own because something caused those movements. Was it the Frankfurt School? Not really, they had an influence in academic circles and in Europe but they didn't cause the whole thing. The movements of the late 60s have their intellectual heritage in the movements in the beginning of the 20th century that culminated in the social upheavals directly after WWI. Those movements owe their basis to the mass social movements in the middle 19th century — the era that Marx was a product of — which were put down in the short term but won in the long run. You can keep going back and back and back and it comes back to the same sources: Spinoza, Locke and Voltaire.

To focus on the Frankfurt School or just the New Left is like trying to reverse an infection gone septic into just a regular old infection instead of actually curing it once and for all.

/r/Anarcho_Capitalism Thread Link - youtube.com