Cultural Marxism Understood

Most people aren’t using this term correctly. Here’s why….

A lot of terms are thrown around today to describe extremist movements. One that keeps coming up is “cultural Marxism.” In an attempt to add clarity, political and historical accuracy, Clarion Project investigates the origin and current usage of the term and offers our suggestions going forward.

1The modern term “cultural Marxism” morphed from its original expression, which was “cultural Bolshevism.” This latter term originated in Germany as a response to the Frankfurt School in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s as a way to denounce the modernist movement in the arts and culture and was later used by the Nazis to claim that the Bolsheviks, the Marxist revolutionary movement in Russia, wanted to subvert the Germany values of family and national identity as well as its traditions in music, art and intellectual ideas.

However, the term “cultural Bolshevism” in Germany was also fundamentally used as an antisemitic canard based on the conspiracy theory that the Jews were behind the 1917 communist revolution in Russia. This canard was aided by the 1920s’ global circulation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a made-up document published in Russia in 1903 that purported to describe a secret Jewish conspiracy aimed at world domination. (To this day, Far-Right circles continue to believe that…