Risk and Extortion XXXV: A Critique of Cultural Marxism 1:

Marxist Fundamentalism

A return to academic gobbeldygook

Preparing a lecture on the Frankfurt School and hearing the echoes of hardline Marxists such as Gabriel Rockhill and John Bellamy Foster, my thoughts wander off to contemplate the perils of cultural Marxism. About two months ago, the Critical Workshop  posted a you tube video on Western Marxism and Imperialism, in which Bellamy Foster lusted the four main sins of Cultural Marxism, which Rockhill calls Imperialist Marxism and Foster refers to as Western Eurocentric Marxism: (1) retreat from Class, (2) retreat from Anti-Imperialism, (3) retreat from Materialism, Nature and Science,  und (4) retreat from Dialectical Reason.

These critiques are all justified if we conflate “Cultural Marxism” to the more popular interpretations of the Frankfurt School and in particular how they might serve as a theoretical background to Postmodernism (Fredrick Jameson would be the guy to blame here then). However, to those who have dealt with Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin or Marcuse with a bit more depth, these critiques probably sound a little hyperbolic. Yes, one might for example  argue that Negative Dialectics strongly deviate from Hegelian Dialectics, but they are still strongly aligned with Historical Materialism. Also, yes, the focus on Culture is often understood by old school Marxists as a retreat from Materialism, Nature and Science, but only if one understands culture in exactly the same way as bourgeois thinkers do. And yes, the Culture Industry might be retreating from a critique of Western Imperialism, but it can easily be understood as a comprehensive analysis of Western Imperialism. And finally yes, one might for example argue that mass deception by culture industries obfuscate class struggle, however, this might also be precisely the point to explain how class struggle has been undercut by the Culture Industry (just as revolutionary Marxism has been removed from universities through what Rockhill himself has called the Imperial Theory Industry).

In short, the kind of “in-fighting” by those who claim to be the legacy bearers of the one and only pure Marxist tradition seems more an exercise in click baiting than honest scholarly engagement. The issue here is that of fundamentalism. By claiming to speak in the name of pure tradition against the corruption of this tradition, one might actually be engaged in exactly the opposite.

Let us not fool ourselves. As academics interested in Marxism, we are already engaged in corruption; our salaries are paid by institutions that serve the bourgeoisie more or less through the delegation of its interests to that of the State. Employed by an institute of higher education makes us servants of the Ideological State Apparatus. We thus have to assume that whatever kind of Revolutionary Marxism we claim to represent is tolerated exactly because ii is harmless. A fundamentalist reading of Marxism would force the conclusion that this is proof that the theory is false.

However, this also means that the criticisms of Foster and Rockhill on Cultural Marxism have to be taken seriously not because they apply, but because the criticism address crucial aspects of a historical-materialist critique of contemporary society. A critique that ignores class analysis, the history of imperialism (and patriarchy!), the metabolic rift (extraction) and material-political epistemology (real abstraction) fails four important aspects of Historical Materialism and can therefore not be accepted. I would like to add a fifth, which Foster did not mention: libidinal economy. A theory that fails to acknowledge the historical-material and dialectical mode of production of desire will ultimately fail in its critique. And this is of course an area, to which cultural Marxism has made some serious contributions.

It is logical that those who seek to purify Marxism from corruption may not like a dialectical critique of desire. After all, what is that that they desire? Stalinist apologetics are not very convincing if one ignores the question of what Stalin desired? His well-documented neurotic paranoia, which led him to kill everyone close to him, including many of his former closest friends, of course cannot be justified by merely stating that he had real enemies. Killing or at least neutralizing your close friends is something all megalomanic dictators have done at some point. As an extreme form of neurosis, paranoia is a distinctively modern affliction.

Rather than justifying paranoia in the name of Revolutionary Marxism, it is probably a much better critique to dig a bit deeper into the structural roots of this affliction. This – perhaps surprisingly – will lead us back to class analysis.