The enlightening discussion in Hawaiian Libertarian’s latest fine post references a few works by William Lind. I highly recommend this material to the readers of this blog, because Lind summarizes quite well what we are basically up against in the current culture — a sustained campaign of cultural Marxism.
Cultural Marxism is often criticized by leftists and radicals as being a conspiracy theory, but that’s wide of the mark. No-one is suggesting that there is a cabal of left-wing masterminds sitting around a table in some smoky room in Sweden directing this campaign in a conspiratorial way. No, it is instead a loose cooperative movement which operates largely in the open, and which uses methods, and teaches theories, which are clearly Marxist in nature.
In essence what has happened in the West in the past several decades is the result of the realization by the radical left in the early to mid 20th century that the campaign to radicalize the proletariat and mobilize them against the bourgeoisie was not going to be successful a large scale in the West. This realization led to a new strategy. The economic Marxist dialectic of opposing the proles and the bourgeois was retained in the form of socialist or social-democratic political parties in many Western countries, using legislation as a means to further that agenda, while the radical left looked to other categories to create a new revolutionary dialectic that could impact society in a broader and more fundamentally revolutionary way. The Italian communist theorist Antonio Gramsci was instrumental in steering this line of Marxist theory, from the intelletctual and theoretical perspective. Gramsci’s insight was that a certain set of cultural assumptions and structures supported the capitalist system, and needed to be undermined or outright dislodged in order for the revolution to eventually succeed in overturning the established order.
Following Gramsci’s insights, the philosophers of the radical left, in particular the “Frankfurt School“, began to examine different criteria which could be used to create the kind of cultural disruption Gramsci described. Various theories and leftist intellectual currents developed from this group, but one strong line of thought was that once the left placed into conflict (1) everything that was not straight, white and male against (2) everyone who was straight, white and male, a much more powerful and visceral dialectic would be created which could be harnessed to destroy what the Marxists saw as a deep, structural cultural resistance to the revolutionary change that they sought.
This approach proved to be more effective than the “classical Marxist” economic dialectic because it tapped into long-standing, visceral hatreds that certain segments of the population had against straight, white men due to long-standing grievances. As a result, the radicals needed to do less to “radicalize” the new “proletariat” (i.e., women, minorities and gays), because the visceral emotional hate was already largely there and could easily be harnessed as a drive for revolutionary change on the cultural level. Essentially, it was necessary to rewrite history from the perspective of viewing almost everyone as having been ruthlessly oppressed by straight, white men for all of history, and reduce our understanding both of all of the past and the present structures in society to a vision which views the entire narrative as one extended campaign of white male rape and domination of everyone and everything else.
Once this revisionist narrative was completed and disseminated, it provided powerful kindling for the movements which characterized the cultural revolution that took place in the West in the 1960s and 70s and its aftermath. The revisionist vision provided a rigid, reductionist narrative which could serve as a lexicon to explain everything in the past and the present, much as economic Marxists had tried to do with “classical” economic Marxism in the early 20th century. The seductiveness of a narrative which portrays everyone other than straight, white men as past and present victims is quite obvious — it liberates those in the “preferred” classes from taking responsibility for their own problems, and instead permits them to blame straight, white men for everything that they find wrong in their lives and in the wider world. And this is precisely what has been done, and which continues to be done, by disproportionate numbers of people in the “preferred” classes (i.e., women, minorities and gays).
The best part was that it wasn’t at all necessary that the Marxism be expressly preached. Although some of the feminists and race liberators did, in fact, deploy Marxist theories openly, most did not do so, while they nevertheless read from the new cultural Marxist reinterpretation of history as being nothing but a story of domination by straight, white men to the detriment of women, minorities and gays. In other words, even those activists who would not admit that they were Marxist, or who would truthfully deny that they believed in Marxist ideas, nevertheless drew from a revisionist history which was, itself, thoroughly Marxist in content.
The main success of the Marxist-Feminist movement lies in its success in peddling this revisionist history to the culture as a whole. In many circles, for example, it is now taken for granted that recorded history is nothing more than a catalog of straight, white male crimes against everyone else. This is the version of history that dominates in our universities, and the one which is endlessly peddled by the mainstream media as well. It creates an atmosphere which entitles everyone to hate straight, white men, and to support laws and social customs which are designed to wrest “power” (even in an age where men are disproportionately impacted by recession) from straight, white men and redistribute it to everyone else, as a matter of “social justice”.
Of course, due to the “structural power” of men in the highest echelons of society, none of this cultural and legal change could have taken place without their collaboration. So, why did they collaborate?
The main reason is that the “men-in-power” at the top of any given society have always regarded the larger mass of men with a mixture of contempt and fear. Males, generally speaking, compete in hierarchies, and the ones at the top of the hierarchy generally know that they are under some threat from the males in the rest of the hierarchy. Historically this has been managed by those at the apex through a combination of feudal loyalties and practices designed to cull the lower ranks of men, such as prolonged warfare and the creation of a eunuch class. The cultural Marxism of the late 20th century handed the men-in-power a powerful tool to keep the lower ranked men at bay, more or less permanently, by arranging the entire rest of society against them. In this way, the men-in-power reduced the threat to their position from other men. For the most part, this group did not fear that it, itself, would ever be replaced by people who are not mostly straight, white men, precisely because it was creating cultural structures that would prevent this from other men. This class certainly did not fear being replaced by women at the top of the ladder, probably because the men at this level are on the right tail of the curve in some power-related traits such that being supplanted by women does not seem to be a realistic risk.
That’s not to say that there was, or is, a “conspiracy” between the radical left and the men-in power. Rather, the men-in-power have collaborated with the ideas of the radical left because it serves their own interests — namely, preserving their own power at the heights of society by hemming in most other men through a tangled web of entitlements, preferences, and outright discrimination designed to displace men by less threatening people who are not white, straight and male. It’s this precise alignment between our elites (still mostly white guys) and our radical leftists that permitted the cultural revolution to have the impact that it did, and does, in the culture, and which operates to keep most men down, rather deliberately.
I think it’s impossible to understand what has really happened in the West since 1960 without understanding the underlying cultural Marxist basis. This also explains why the system created in the aftermath of the cultural revolution has been so resilient and strong — it has the backing of almost all of our elites, in one form or other. Of course, in the long run, the elites will get knives in their backs from the radical left, if the revolutionary programme ever comes fully to fruition. But for the time being, there is a quite strong alignment of interests between the elites and the radicals, such that the entire society has been recast in ways that actually serve to preserve the power of the current elites by dividing the rest of the population against itself.
The path forward for men needs to recognize this cultural Marxism and its deliberate demonization of our sex, often with willing collaboration by useful idiot males (I won’t call them “men”, because, frankly, they do not deserve that term). But it also needs to recognize that our path is nevertheless a revolutionary path, and one which will take us in new directions, rather than old ones. We are the masters of our own destinies, if we let ourselves be, and we can go in so many stunning directions if we simply have the will to do so. A pre-requisite for that is understanding this cultural Marxist apparatus that has been set up to screw us, and the fact that the social conservatives are collaborating with it. The next step is raising our middle fingers at that apparatus and its social conservative enablers and walking off.
The step beyond that is true male liberation. It will come to us, as individuals, if we take these steps, with integrity and confidence. And with a healthy and utter disregard for what women think of this. This is our game, and our lives.
