It’s evident how deeply political correctness has penetrated into every aspect of Western Culture. Even more interesting are its origins which can be traced back to the Frankfurt school, a group of Marxist scholars and thinkers, which wanted to find a substitute for the “revolutionary class", which they found in supposedly subdued fringe groups like women, homosexuals, foreigners/immigrants, minorities etc.
Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not just to the 1960s, the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I. If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious.
Parallels between economic Marxism and Cultural Marxism/Political Correctness
Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters.
Just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good – feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist or to be a negative example of backwardness) blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be “victims,” and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism
Both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property and redistributed it to the revolutionary class. Churchill called that “the even distribution of misery”. Cultural Marxism also relies on expropriation by the so called “positive discrimination” or affirmative action, where male whites are intentionally disadvantaged. F.e. not the one with the best qualifications gets the job, but the one belonging to a supposedly subdued minority. Same absurd “positive discrimination” happens during public tenders so that not the enterprise with the best offer gets the contract, but the one which is owned by a member of a certain “victim group”. That’s nothing but discrimination and in the end expropriation.
Finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction
The Historic background of Political correctness is Marxism
The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this.
History shows us that shortly after the first practical attempts to implement Marxist economic socialism it became clear that the theories of Marx failed, because the working class as the motor of socialist revolution wasn’t revolutionary.
Marxist theory said that when a general European war came (as it did come in Europe in 1914), the working class throughout Europe would rise up and overthrow their bourgeois governments, because the workers had more in common with each other across the national boundaries than they had in common with the bourgeoisie and the ruling class in their own country.
But throughout Europe, workers were patriotic, rallied to their flag and happily marched off to fight each other. Obviously nationalism was more attractive to the people than socialism.
The Kaiser shook hands with the leaders of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany and said there are no parties now, there are only Germans. And this happened in every country in Europe. So something was wrong.
Marxists of course didn't question their crude theory.
In 1917, they finally got a Marxist coup in Russia and it looked like the theory was working, but it stalled again. It didn’t spread and when attempts were made to spread immediately after the war, with the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, with the Bela Kun government in Hungary, with the Munich Soviet, the workers didn’t support them.
So the Marxists’ had a problem. And two Marxist theorists went to work on it: Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary. Gramsci said the workers will never see their true class interests, as defined by Marxism, until they are freed from Western culture, and particularly from the Christian religion – that they are blinded by culture and religion to their true class interests. Lukacs, who was considered the most brilliant Marxist theorist since Marx himself, said in 1919, “Who will save us from Western Civilization?” He also theorized that the great obstacle to the creation of a Marxist paradise was the culture: Western civilization itself.
In order to achieve any notable revolution it was necessary that that revolution should focus not only on the economic order, but also, and firstly, on the cultural. This is the root of cultural Marxism which became political correctness.
In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank was established, the Institute for Marxism that took on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that created Political Correctness as we know it today. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it’s a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research).
Wilhelm Reich, one of the early members of the Frankfurt school, wrote a book entitled The Authoritarian Personality, which makes the claim, according to Raymond Raehn, “that the presence in a society of Christianity, capitalism, and the patriarchal-authoritarian family created a character prone to racial prejudice and German fascism”—that is, everything Western is necessarily prejudiced. The solution according to the Frankfurt academics was that “the patriarchal social structure would be replaced with matriarchy; the belief that men and women are different and properly have different roles would be replaced with androgyny; and the belief that heterosexuality is normal would be replaced with the belief that homosexuality is ‘normal’.
In the late 60ies during the student protests these ideas of cultural Marxism were revisited and transported into mainstream society via the “Marsch durch die Institutionen” (march through the institutions), a slogan which was used by SDS activists in order to articulate their goal to change society radically.
Supporters and proponents of Cultural Marxism/ Political Correctness
The biggest supporters of political correctness are of course socialists and do-gooders.
Partially the support can be explained by the lust for power among political strongmen and numinous redeemers who understand that socialism enables them to consolidate the power they crave in their own hands. But it also requires the backing of intellectuals and academics who naively believe that socialism opens the way to a juster and more equable society. History teaches that such a chimera is catastrophic in the application. It is generally embraced as an ideal by an intellectual class isolated from the lives of ordinary people and therefore immune or indifferent to reality.
Instead of allowing their ideas to emerge from the people, “intellectuals reverse the process, deducing their ideas first from principle and then seeking to impose them on living men and women.” Insulated in their cerebral bunkers, they are “library socialists” in love with an idea, who regard human beings, whom they profess to cherish, as obstructions to the unfolding of their master plan.
Most of these theoretical prodigies, live in the gated communities of the left and have little knowledge of the actual conditions under which people struggle, legislating down to the masses from their positions of authority and ostensible moral elevation.
They are the bearers of a totalitarian mindset, consisting of three characteristics: a voluntary ignorance of the facts; an ability to live with contradictions that refute its own principles; and a refusal to analyze the causes of failure. They are the intellectual and political leaders of the Utopian army that is once again sweeping across the globe, organized as modern day versions of the medieval guilds intent on exercising power while defending their prerogatives.
They view themselves as progressivists who have humanity’s best interests at heart. But as the effects of their incessant tampering in social and political affairs reveal, they are really irresponsible parasites devouring the body politic.
Fanaticism is the oxygen that our public intellectuals, left-wing academics and political elites breathe. These social revisionists wish to create a regulatory socialist state.
They will write books, teach classes and pass laws accountable to none but themselves, secure in their self-election as far-sighted legislators and their assumption of a rarefied wisdom inaccessible to the common ruck of mankind. They are very dangerous people who will not rest until they have made a shambles of the world we would have preferred to live in. They are, quite simply, the bane of our existence.
Methods and Goals of Cultural Marxism/Political Correctness
A strangle-hold on popular media and the universities and what they are allowed to say and teach is a key element of the long-term goals of Cultural Marxists / Politcal Correctness proponents. They permit no opposition to their supposedly enlightened diktats.
The immediate goal is to destroy all barriers to the introduction of more women and minorities throughout the power structure, which will deprive the power of the traditional elite. These methods of so doing include laws and lawsuits, intimidation, and demonizing of white males as racists and sexists.
A graphic illustration of such demagogic tendencies, much in the news these days, comes from the European Union and its unelected, de facto politburo, whose “Council Framework Decision on Combating Racism and Xenophobia” of November 28, 2008 and recently passed into law allows for the extradition from one country to another of anyone deemed to have offended its prescriptions. It has also mandated a “European Gendarmerie Force” to carry out its decisions.
The idea behind, is the complete eradication of Western civilization to be replaced with something new. That something new is nothing less than “a society of radical egalitarianism enforced by the power of the state.
One of the methods to achieve the destruction of the traditional western culture is deconstruction and Critical Theory. The latter calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down.
Deconstruction essentially takes any text or something like f.e. culture, identity or sexuality and removes or at least undermines all original meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. Gender madness, Feminist-, Queer and Cultural Theories heavily rely on Deconstruction.
We see this even on this board like leftists usually deny the fact, that all Europeans have something in common culturally, which is based on Christianity or at least a society which is informed by Christianity and Enlightment, common history and more or less close historic links to each other.
Left wing board members also tend to deny that there is a unique national identity. It is already deconstruction in order to undermine a feeling of cohesion and unity which would exclude other groups and threaten the also destructive multiculturalist agenda, which is a tool to undermine the traditional western nation state, since it promotes diversity not unity, fractioned parallel societies and not homogenous nation states.
Multiculturalism requires “intercultural education”, political correctness and illiberal laws to enforce it, otherwise it wouldn’t work at all, which demonstrates how unnatural this agenda is.
The History of Political Correctness: A Marxist Tool
Originally Posted by Simon Cashmere
