The blindness of cultural Marxism

Words we are not allowed to use any more now include ‘cultural Marxism’. Suella Braverman, now the Attorney General, used them last year and was immediately upbraided by the organisation Hope Not Hate. Very right-wing people sometimes use it too, you see, so it must never be uttered by anyone else. Banning the use of the phrase ‘cultural Marxism’ is about as culturally Marxist as it is possible to get, but I don’t suppose the cultural Marxists at Hope Not Hate appreciated the irony.

Cultural Marxism is a largely 1960s excrescence in which everything must be seen through the prism of unequal power relations, other than which nothing else matters at all. Especially power relations regarding race and gender, the basis of identity politics. As such, then, cultural Marxism is a dominant paradigm in university courses across the country which deal with what we once knew as history (but now might be better named ‘resentment studies’), geography, sociology and all those non-academic subjects of no use to man nor beast, such as gender studies or urban studies.