The Woke Danger 4: Hegemony, Cultural Marxism, and Critical Theory

In The Woke Danger(1)(2) 3: Collectivist Roots and Shoots(3) we followed the collectivist/big state idea from Rousseau to Kant to Hegel to Marx to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. I pointed to Left and Right collectivism. Right collectivism was dealt a great setback with the defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII. In this presentation we follow Left collectivism further from Gramsci to the Frankfurt School, setting the stage for the postmodernist crash. 

Antonio Gramsci 

To pick up where we left off, the big wonderful communist revolution failed to materialize as it was supposed to, leaving Marxist theorists puzzled and searching for answers. We now come to the individual whom James Lindsey calls “the linchpin between historical Marx and present-day everything that’s gone out of control.”(4) 

Gramsci was a major figure in Italian Communism and its foremost theorist. He was imprisoned for communist activities and while incarcerated wrote extensively. One key idea he developed was the concept of “hegemony.” 

One author described Gramsci’s viewpoint this way: 

“[R]oughly speaking, Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ refers to a process of moral and intellectual leadership through which dominated or subordinated classes of post-1870 industrial Western European nations consent to their own domination by ruling classes, as opposed to being simply forced or coerced into accepting inferior positions.”(5) 

Gramsci’s fundamental idea of hegemony is that the people in power use government and the media to reinforce their being in power. The population is propagandized into thinking that things are as they should be and are lulled into acceptance of their situation. And so, the conclusion Marxists thinkers reached about why the communist revolution never occurred in Germany and elsewhere was because the rich succeed by propagandizing the workers who consent to continue to be exploited. 

Glenn Sunshine described Gramsci’s conclusion: 

“[F]or social progress and the liberation of the worker to occur, the current culture and value system must be attacked and replaced with a new one that reflects the interests of the workers, and, more broadly, the oppressed. Establishing this new ‘truth’ is critical to human liberation.”(6)

Gramsci wrote that, 

“Any country grounded in Judaeo-Christian values can’t be overthrown until those roots are cut … Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity … in the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”(7)

 And so Lindsey warns, 

“Gramsci understood 100 years ago that if you could subvert the church, you could remove the greatest impediment while creating the greatest delivery mechanism for the ideology possible.”(8)

 Gramsci’s focus on culture was embraced by the Frankfurt School which fundamentally reformulated the communist approach to subverting the west. 

The Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism

As we mentioned, when the German people did not revolt as anticipated, Marxist scholars were perplexed. Why didn’t they revolt and implement the glories of Marxism? Stuart Jeffries: 

“The [Frankfurt] School came into being in part to try to understand failure, in particular the failure of the German Revolution in 1919. As it evolved during the 1930s, it married neo-Marxist social analysis to Freudian psychoanalytical theories to try to understand why German workers, instead of freeing themselves from capitalism by means of socialist revolution, were seduced by modern consumer capitalist society and, fatefully, Nazism. . . . They [the Frankfurt school] re-conceptualized Marxism. . . They engaged with the rise of what they called the culture industry and thereby explored a new relationship between culture and politics. . . in particular, they reflected on how everyday life could become the theatre of revolution. . . ”(9) 

Key figures of the Frankfurt School included Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), and Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). A key move made by the Frankfurt School is the shift from Marxist focus on production to the theme of consumption.(10) Culture would be used to critique capitalism. The Frankfurt school writers moved their operations to America. 

“[The Frankfurt school] had airbrushed terms such as capitalism and Marxism from its texts while in American exile. . . Habermas and Marcuse were seeking. . . to reconfigure Marxism without the proletariat and without, as a result, the class struggle. . . consumerism in the west had become the new opiate of the masses.”(11) 

And where are we today? Eliane Glaser writes, “When every single person on a train carriage is staring at a small, illuminated device, it is an almost tacky version of dystopia. . . digital consumerism makes us too passive to revolt, or to save the world.”(12) Jeffries observes that “if Adorno were alive today he might well have argued that the cultural apocalypse has already happened, but that we are too blind to notice it.”(13) 

Critical Theory

 We next come to Critical Theory. As defined by Max Horkheimer, 

“A critical theory is adequate only if it meets three criteria: it must be explanatory, practical, and normative, all at the same time. That is, it must explain what is wrong with current social reality, identify the actors to change it, and provide both clear norms for criticism and achievable practical goals for social transformation.”(14)

Notice here that this is not the traditional approach of theory, which is to seek to understand something. Horkheimer demanded not only that understanding be sought but that actionable solutions be included. However, this approach moves sharply away from the careful objective stance since it weaponizes every issue it approaches by making the issue a vehicle for the promotion of alleged corrective action. 

It is important to differentiate between Cultural Marxist Critical Theory and postmodern critical theory: 

“Critical Theory. . . is mostly distinct from postmodern critical theory. . . The postmodern Theorists adopted the critical method, or at least the critical MOOD, of the Frankfurt School and adapted it into the structuralist context, particularly its view of power. The ‘critical’ goal remained the same, however: to make the problems inherent in ‘the system’ more visible to the people allegedly oppressed by it—however happily they might be living their lies within it—until they come to detest it and seek a revolution against it. The Frankfurt School developed the Critical Theoretic approach specifically to expand beyond critiques of capitalism, as the Marxists had been doing, and to target the assumptions of Western civilization as a whole, particularly liberalism as a sociopolitical philosophy and Enlightenment thought in general. It was this approach to critique that the postmodernists turned upon the entire social order and its institutions, insisting that hegemonic power structures (a concept adopted from Antonio Gramsci) exist across all facets of difference and require exposing and eventually overturning.”(14)

 Critical Theory has its consequences, and is going to result in full blown postmodernism, which I will address in The Woke danger 5. 

 Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.

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References in video:

1. The Woke Danger 1: Applied Postmodernism. https://youtu.be/XnUsk_MR4Eg

2. The Woke Danger 2: From Evergreen to the Purge. https://youtu.be/lfPTCPc-Tj8
3. The Woke Danger 3: Collectivist Roots and Shoots. https://youtu.be/72I_qBRrWcc

4. James Lindsey, Antonio Gramsci, Cultural Marxism, Wokeness, and Leninism 4.0, https://soundcloud.com/newdiscourses/antonio-gramsci-cultural-marxism-wokeness-and-leninism-40/s-R8JuNGiijJ5

5. Hegemony in Gramsci, https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/20/hegemony-in-gramsci/

6. Glenn Sunshine, Cultural Marxism: Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, Emerging Worldviews 4. https://www.breakpoint.org/cultural-marxism-gramsci-and-the-frankfurt-school-emerging-worldviews-4/

7. Gramsci's Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process (NewYork: Clarendon Press, 1981). op. cit. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/leftwing_ideology_a_cult_a_religion_or_science.html

8. Lindsey, Ibid.

9. Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, Verso Books, London 2016), 7, 9-10.

10. Jeffries, 128.

11. Ibid., 305

12. Ibid., op. cit. Eliane Glaser, 390.

13. Ibid., 390.

14. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Critical Theory, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/, accessed 2021-03-01.

15. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsey, Cynical Theories, Notes, 1 Postmodernism, note 1, pp. 271-272.