Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Cultural Marxism Industry (2024 Hard Core version)

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

A few years ago I put together a story about the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory with the writer and historian Martin Jay, today in 2024 the Cultural Marxism Industry is stronger than ever. An update for 2024.  

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. Earlier this year, I put out a nine-episode miniseries called Not All Propaganda is Art. And one of the main characters in this series is the writer and critic Dwight McDonald. And while I was researching his enemy, this cold warrior sociologist named Edward Shills, I stumbled upon something really interesting and early, maybe even the first usage of a term, cultural Marxism. Here's an excerpt from the series. This is Edward Shills here in 1957 attacking Dwight MacDonald and other critics of mass culture. Their earlier economic criticism of capitalistic society has been transformed into a moral and cultural criticism of the large-scale industrial society. This is Schills. They no

longer criticize the ruling class for utilizing the laws of property and religion to exploit the proletariat for the sake of surplus value. Instead, they criticize the merchants of kitsch. The indissoluble residue of their Marxism shows itself particularly in the expectations which form the standard of judgment which they apply to mass culture. Cultural Marxism is an argument right-wing pundits make all the time now. But this 1957 piece from Edward Schill's might be the first time it ever saw print. It was a cornerstone of Schill's thinking, as you can hear in his 1978 lecture on Bohemianism. The demise of the reputation of Stalinism did not destroy the faith in the kind of ideal which was thought to have been represented by the Soviet Union.

They simply found the Soviet Union an inadequate vehicle, an inadequate carrier of this ideal. But the ideal remained, the belief in the value of the life of the artist. Now, today, anyone on the left is more likely to be called a cultural Marxist rather than a Marxist Marxist. In fact, the folks behind the Pizzagate conspiracy put out a book this summer called Unhumans, in which they basically advocate for the mass extermination of communists. And they make it clear that their definition of communist is cultural Marxist. It's telling that this idea is gaining traction at the very moment when checks and balances on capitalism are basically disintegrating before our eyes. A few years ago, I put together a story about the roots of cultural Marxism

and how difficult of a theory it is to debunk. And I thought I'd run it again as we barrel into the 2024 election. In the 1930s, philosopher Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School fled Nazi Germany. He spent eight years in California, where he meditated on the horrors of Hitler's Germany and how the Nazis had come to power. He also dedicated himself to investigating how something like this could happen in America, his new home. This is when he coined the term the culture industry, which pegged popular culture as a new religion, a kind of opiate of the masses. This is also

when he worked on a groundbreaking study called the Authoritarian Personality. The work that Adorno completed in America also seeded one of the most powerful conspiracy theories of our time, cultural Marxism. Frankfurt School scholar Theodor Adorno was sliding Marxism into the American consciousness by attacking popular trends in the world of art. The group of Jewish sociologists that invented critical theory. Infiltrated American universities. Bringing in their cultural Marxist beliefs. Post-structuralism, queer studies, African-American studies. Cultural Marxism dominates practically everything about modern Western culture.

The connection between beta-haters, heretics and cultural Marxism. Theodore Adorno ended up running a big part of the cultural industry. Adorno might be friendless on Facebook, but on YouTube, well, they're definitely talking about Adorno. Theodore Adorno. He is a central figure for conspiracy theorists who believe that the Frankfurt School in the 1930s brought cultural Marxism to America. We welcomed the Frankfurt School. We accepted them with open arms.

They took full advantage. The world which I inhabit, and people talk about the Frankfurt School from a scholarly or sometimes activist perspective, in no way whatsoever has had any exchange with this other world, the world of all the memes on YouTube and elsewhere. It's a complete parallel rather than intersecting universe. This is Martin Jay, a Berkeley professor,

a world-renowned intellectual historian, and the author of numerous books on Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Around 2010, he decided to get to the bottom of this whole cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. Initially, my interest in this was spawned not by an understanding of the right-wing appropriation but rather by the fact that Fidel Castro, of all people, had followed a conspiracy theory which included the claim that the Frankfurt School had somehow been mobilized by conservatives to help dull revolutionary fervor in the United States through spreading the opium, as it were, of the people being not religion but rather

mass culture. Now Castro's conspiracy theory is totally insane. This one states that Adorno was hired by the Rockefeller Foundation to write songs for the Beatles to combat counterculturalism. But what Martin J. discovered is that this crazy theory and the right-wing Frankfurt School conspiracy theory both are indebted to the same source. A 1992 article called The New Dark Age, The Frankfurt School, and Political Correctness. In this article, for the first time, the Frankfurt School was named as the occult source behind,

first of all, cultural Marxism, and then secondly, political correctness. Now, the Frankfurt School and its collaborators determined that the easiest angle of attack was on the highest expressions of Judeo-Christian culture itself. This is Michael Manassino. He's the guy who wrote The New Dark Age, and he's speaking at a Lyndon LaRouche conference in 1993, just after his article was published in the LaRouche journal Fidelio. He was basically a young acolyte of LaRouche. And LaRouche was a, I mean, it was more a cult rather than a party. Clever enough to seduce people into thinking they had found the key to what made modern capitalist society work. Sometimes I miss seeing the LaRouche people outside of concerts and lectures.

They would always have these giant handmade signs explaining how the Queen of England is a drug kingpin, controlling scientific progress in order to keep the rest of the world backwards, and that a massive land bridge is being built by China to rule the globe. Today, the LaRouche cult is a shadow of what it once was, but their campus recruitment methods still live on. They would choose ironic issues that were just exploitable enough to get a bit of a fight going so that we could invite Linda LaRouche on campus and Lynn would talk about the meaning of life and

that's how we recruited a whole bunch of people. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious. In 1998 a right-wing political operative named Bill Lind seized on Mendocino's ideas to further his attacks on left-wing intellectualism. Political correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. Bill Lind produced a documentary about the Frankfurt School for the Free Congress Foundation. The film bills itself as a tell-all expose about Adorno and the other Jewish refugees who came to America fleeing Nazi Germany. Once in America,

the Frankfurt School gradually shifted the focus of its work from destroying German society and culture to attacking the society and culture of its new place of refuge. Bill Lind interviews a number of prominent conservatives in his film, people who rail against political correctness, cultural Marxism, and students. But he also snags a Berkeley professor, a world-renowned intellectual historian, and author of numerous books on Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Martin Jay, chairman of the history department at Berkeley, an author of the history of the Frankfurt School, explains why the name was changed. Well, I was simply asked to give an interview about the Frankfurt School

of Political Correctness, and what they used were the more obvious things where I said, well, of course, they were Marxists and no one ever denied that. And I mentioned that they had decided to call the institute the Institute of Social Research rather than the Institute for Marxism, which made it sound as if they were hiding their origins. So it's a fairly bland name, the Institute of Social Research. So they were able to splice the footage and, in a way, integrate what I said into their larger narrative.

Critical theory itself always felt reluctant about being put in the straitjacket of systematization and defied its reduction to a simple definition. Critical theory actually attempted to politicize logic itself. Cultural Marxism in a complicated way is a reality in terms of the ways in which the Western Marxist tradition did take culture very seriously. And so the Frankfurt School was part of an attempt to criticize bourgeois culture and to argue usually for an avant-garde culture, which would be able to realize the best potential of the Enlightenment in Western culture. Through unremitting destructive criticism of every institution of Western society, they

hoped to bring that society down. Now, at the very end of the piece, they hope to bring that society down. Now, at the very end of the piece, they're quite explicit that my book is written by a sympathizer of the school, and so they try to then say, be careful when you read this book, but nonetheless, this is the best source. So they give a kind of advertisement for the book, which rather oddly, I suppose, helped its sales,

but also trying to inoculate the readers against being too seduced by it. Bill Lind is very proud of his documentary. In 2009, he crowed, The video is especially valuable because we interviewed the principal American expert on the Frankfurt School, and he spills the beans. Right, right. Now, that's the metaphor that they loved.

Yeah, I know it's clear that they felt that they had, you know, it was kind of gotcha moment, I guess, or at least a moment in which I was playing the useful idiot. They could have, you know, basically had somebody else say the same things that I said, but by having me, they, I guess, gained a certain legitimacy. Thanks to Bill Lind and his documentary, the term cultural Marxism became one of the right's most important boogeymen, or strawmen, or straw-boogiemen, for people like Pat Buchanan, The hostile culture, which is rooted in deeply an anti-Christian belief, cultural Marxism, in two words.

and Andrew Breitbart. What scares me more about economic Marxism is cultural Marxism, and that is exactly what political correctness is. These guys hate cultural Marxists as much as Hitler hated cultural Bolsheviks. They were, to a man, Marxist Jews. If you peruse the comments on these YouTube videos dedicated to cultural Marxism, you will often see one word, all caps, JEWS. In his research, Martin Jay stumbled upon an 11-point list attributed to the Frankfurt School

from 1923. It's almost a philosophical Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is also a complete fabrication. The power of the Frankfurt School has been magnified beyond anything that any normal group of people could ever expect to have achieved. The first one on the list, there's 11 points here. The 11-point plan to subvert Western culture. I'd like you to just listen carefully and see if any of them sound familiar to you.

Absurd concepts like diversity is our strength and multiculturalism first one huge immigration to destroy identity this is certainly a product of cultural marxism the second the creation of racism offenses they would use racial groups to tear down the united states now the private school obviously was against racism, but it was not in fact at the center of its analysis. Their goal was to... Continual change to create confusion. Now this can, you know, I mean, you could argue this is exactly what the Trump administration does. They weren't after truth or understanding. They wanted to change society.

They never argued that we have to push for change. I mean, it's ludicrous. In the next, the teaching of sex and homosexuality to children. Indoctrinate, recruit, teach, and expose children to queer sexuality. The sex education was one of their plans. It's ridiculous. Primary school children are going to be taught pornography. The undermining of schools and teachers' authority. Tearing down campuses, vilifying decency, glorifying violence and pornography, and nancifying the spelling of America.

Where have they got, I mean this is, this is loony. It's a front of the school subversion technique to undermine schools and teachers. They never wrote about schools and teachers' authority. College campuses, many of which at this point become small, ivy-covered North Koreas. And the next is really out of space, the promotion of excessive drinking. To induce a helpless, alcoholic nation that can easily be controlled.

I can't even begin to think where that came from. The seventh is the emptying of churches. Chastity in the church caused repression, which eventually led to violence. And once again, I'm totally baffled. Cultural Marxism would attack religion because there was another place

where people could go other than to the government. We're moving down dependency on the state or state benefits. The socialist welfare stage and all of that. They were very,

very critical of the idea of paternalism as the way to go crazy. Then encouraging the breakdown of the family. The family structure

has got to be changed. Maybe even destroyed. They had a kind of nostalgia for the bour the family. The family structure has got to be changed, maybe even destroyed. They had a kind of nostalgia for the bourgeois family, even recognizing its patriarchal. The next one, unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime. We're seeing that massively today. Something they never advocated. And finally, control and dumbing down of media. Which shrinks the attention span down to two minutes of irrationalism and pornography.

Here too, this is the opposite of what they argued for. By making the culture that underpins our society completely meaningless, it can be easily overthrown. Well, the exact opposite. They wanted, in fact, media to be self-critical and to be much smarter. Only propagandist news would be allowed. That's because the same group of people own all of the newspapers, 99% of them anyway. Yeah, it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland world.

So in 2010, Martin Jay wrote an essay for the academic journal Salma Gandhi. It's called The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment, the Frankfurt School as scapegoat of the lunatic fringe. It's an attempt to not just exonerate himself, but also an attempt to once and for all expose all the anti-Semitic nonsense behind this twisted distortion of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. When you read the essay today, you can't help but note how bemused he is by it all. I wrote it with a sense of incredulity and amusement. The extent of it, the full power of it,

was unclear to me. The blast shattered this capital city on a sleepy Friday afternoon. It was like a riotous war scene from some kind of movie fire. Barely six months after the publication of this essay, a young man named Anders Breivik unleashed horror in Norway.

Police now say at least 80 people were killed in a shooting spree at a youth camp well you know obviously I was shocked as everybody was by by the act itself which was so diabolical in terms of extent its planning and the victims many of them children the whole thing seemed almost 9-11 like in its horrific quality. He called for a European revolution, a revival of a white Christian land. Breivik committed his act of mass murder to direct attention to his manifesto,

2083, a European Declaration of Independence. There are over 600 references to cultural Marxism. Breivik even cites Martin Jay. He'd read my book. There's considerable paraphrase of parts of the book and even, you know, in a weird way recommends the book. But the extent of Breivik's monstrosity, of course, was something that's impossible to, you know, to feel comfortable with. It leaves you with a very sort of sickening feeling. I mean, you never can choose your readers. The culture industry, it's a very useful term for us. I think that's a term we should be using and maybe even using it in a lot of the same ways as Adorno did.

Richard Spencer, the American Nazi, mostly famous for getting punched in the face, he also, like Breivik, advocates for a white nationalist state. And it turns out he wrote his college thesis on Adorno. I think cultural Marxism has infected the military in the United States. It's kind of incredible. But we had a major army general claiming that diversity is the great strength of America's armed forces. And so this kind of, let's call it the Breivik moment, is not one that will pass very quickly.

It's been quite a triumph. It doesn't really even make sense to call this cultural Marxism conspiracy theory a conspiracy theory anymore. Today, it's totally mainstream. What the Frankfurt School decided is in order to make this change happen, we have to change the culture. Ben Shapiro is a popular figure on campuses,

and he also has used the Frankfurt School meme in ways that suggest he's also consumed Kool-Aid. I don't believe the full-scale conspiracy theory that everybody was taken over by them, but I think that influential thinkers do have influence beyond just the people who read their books. There was no question that the anxiety of people who saw the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy coming to the United States through the migration that Hitler unleashed, the connection between that

migration and the current incredible anxiety about migrants from other parts of the world, that this has tapped a very deep fear in some circles in the United States, luckily not all, that something very valuable is about to be eroded and that we have to somehow stand firm against it, we meaning white patriarchy. We have very bad immigration laws. I just think it's changing the culture. I think it's a very negative thing. Martin Jay showed me a photo of Donald Trump shaking hands with Bill Lind.

Trump's holding up a copy of Lind's book, The Next Conservatism. And sure, it's highly unlikely that Trump read this book, but people who work for him most certainly did, like Rich Higgins, who was an aide in the Strategic Planning Office of the National Security Council. Shortly after these Charlottesville events, he wrote a memo called POTUS and Political Warfare. This memo blamed the opposition to the president on the cultural Marxism spawned by the Frankfurt School. Donald Trump Jr. gave this memo to his father, who supposedly gushed over it. And I know it's politically not necessarily correct to say that,

but I'll say it, and I'll say it loud. Martin Jay's return to his research into the cultural Marxism industry with a new essay that's less an update and more an investigation into why facts and rational thinking totally failed to debunk the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. His new essay points us in the direction of the authoritarian personality. This is a research project that Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School worked on when they were in exile in America. Martin Jay is convinced that the authoritarian personality

offers us a path to understand why people are drawn to conspiracy theories like the one about the Frankfurt School, and to individuals who evangelize them. The authoritarian personality has come back with a vengeance, and it's come back as a way to explain the phenomenon that we're seeing. I mean, why people accept strongmen, why they hunger after a kind of figure who is post-democratic, why they like the illiberal democracy of an Orban or fine Duterte or Ederwan or Bolsonaro in Brazil. I mean, why they're attracted to people like this.

In the introduction to the authoritarian personality, the authors state their conviction that mass delusion cannot be healed by focused propaganda. What is required, they insist, is a scholarly study of the root causes of the delusion. Adorno and his colleagues spent years interviewing prison inmates, college students, factory workers, housewives, office managers. Using a series of questionnaires, they attempted to figure out where America was on the F scale. That's F as in fascist. This is why the study was and remains controversial. Peruse the Amazon comments for the book today, and you'll discover that people are still outraged by the idea that the Frankfurt School

would take patriotic, God-fearing Americans and reduce them to fascistic personality types. But the authors of the authoritarian personality were not doing conventional typology. They were interested in the social reality behind personality types. For Adorno and his colleagues, even the typification of man itself is a social function. Adorno's larger argument was that the psychology was really itself in effect of the social reality. So yes, they were types, but not because they were psychologically somehow rigid, but because society had created types which they then internalized. So that the larger culprit, we might say, is not their own internal psyches or even their family backgrounds, but rather the ways in which they were somehow the victims of a society which created

pseudo-individuals and created conformists and created people who were not really capable of critical maturation. So that's a deeper argument. That means you have to not attack individuals as psychological types, but rather look at the social conditions which breed them. The authoritarian personality was an attempt to make the social conditions behind typology visible. thinking. In its present case, our social system tends objectively and automatically to produce curtains which make it impossible for the naive person really to see what it is all about. They nonetheless have a different evaluation of what it's all about.

Today, most of the attacks on the authoritarian personality actually come from those who are advocating for a sort of legitimate authoritarianism. They tell us that if we hope to regain what's been taken by immigrants, women, and cultural Marxists, we must first return to a legitimate authority. So some people think authority is a good thing, and they think that an overly permissive society and overly somehow individualist society is a corrupt society. So they want to bring back authority. So personalities that accept authority, that know who to obey, that know their place, that know what the hierarchy tells them their place should be, that this is a healthy rather than a problematic response. So there's a kind of meta-level understanding.

Yes, they're being labeled as authoritarian personalities, but it's not a bad thing to be a respecter of legitimate authority. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called The Cultural Marxism Industry. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway, and it featured Martin Jay. Martin Jay's essay on the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory will be included in his new book that comes out this July from Verso. It'll be called Splinters in Your Eye. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of

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