What's what?

This may interest. Maybe not.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/16/secret-history-trumpism-don...

I think "cultural marxism" is another one of those quirky US imports that the likes of Corey Bernardi wants to sell to the Aussie public.

Pretty much meaningless.

& pretty much interchangeable with "political correctness", as in the catch-cry of the right-whinger, "it's political correctness [cultural marxism] gone mad!!!!"

Whoah, comrade, cool your jets. It looks like you should tell me what "cultural marxism" is, hey? You know you want to.

And while you're down there, might as well share YOUR interpretation of "political correctness". Or not. Whatever suits.

Nothing really to add.

"It's cultural marxism gone mad!"

I think you may have jumped the gun there, Andy, literally false-started (to keep the sports analogy going).

I thought the links the Mad Turkey supplied sufficed. I don't know if I would've used Rational Wiki myself, but compared to Metapedia, well, there is no comparison. Not much to add to that UNLESS Manbat wants to really discuss Marx and Marxism (not to be conflated...in fact, it can't be, reasonably), and 20th century critical theory, and how things intersect.

Maybe he does? But with Metapedia, and Molyneux as sources?!

I'm not able to post links at the moment (Swellnet does this to me from time to time. Why? I was trying to post some Shel Silverstein info to the books thread before) but I remember Turkey posting a good link somewhere about Marx and Marxism.

Marx was a thinker and writer that revealed a different way of seeing the world around him. He saw through it, and made clear some things that were hitherto hidden in plain sight. That's about as close as him being a 'seer' comes. I mean, comparing him to Nostradamus, Manbat? It'd be as silly as comparing Marx to William Lind or Pat Buchanan, or Metapedia to even the Guardian article you included or the Wikipedia entry (which has been the site of controversy itself...see The Conversation article below).

If interested, google "The Conversation" and "cultural Marxism", and read it. Or not.

It is fairly comprehensive.

Manbat, as I wrote, I can't post links. My "Marxist moralising"? What does this mean? I've proselytised for Karl Marx, the man, on his personal morality?

Molyneux parrots Paul Johnson. Who wrote a book called Intellectuals. The book was written in the 80s, in the context of the Thatcher regime. Johnson was a 'leftist' in the 50s and 60s, then veered radically to the right. He was also an advisor to Thatcher.

I've got to run. Literally. Here in all its glory is a review of that book and its central ideas. Ha ha. Sorry about the length.

THE GREAT UNWASHED
By WENDY DONIGER O'FLAHERTY;

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty is a member of the Committee on Social Thought and the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. Her latest book is ''Other Peoples' Myths.''
Published: March 12, 1989

INTELLECTUALS By Paul Johnson. 385 pp. New York: Harper & Row. $22.50.

This is a book by an intellectual who tells us not to listen to intellectuals. Aldous Huxley once defined an intellectual as someone who had found something more interesting than sex. Paul Johnson's definition is equally idiosyncratic: an intellectual is someone who wants to refashion the world, politically, in accordance with principles of his own devising. Moreover, a ''disregard for truth and [ a ] preference for ideas over people . . . marks the true secular intellectual.'' Of the people whom Mr. Johnson forces to lie on this Procrustean bed, a dozen are given a chapter apiece: Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz and Lillian Hellman. A final chapter lumps together George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, Kenneth Tynan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, James Baldwin and Noam Chomsky. Mr. Johnson, the author of ''A History of the Jews'' and ''Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Eighties,'' hurries through a superficial summary of each literary corpus, the ideas, to get to his real concern, the lives of these men - and woman. He is interested not in what they wrote, but in what they did - more precisely, in what others say they did, since the book is based almost entirely on secondary sources.

The obvious thesis is that intellectuals lead bad lives. The not so obvious, implicit corollary is that, therefore, the ideas of intellectuals are bad. The various accusations are quickly generalized through recurrent comparisons that give the general impression that these flaws are held in common by all intellectuals (implying that there are no intellectuals who are not thus flawed) but not by other people (implying that there are no nonintellectuals who are thus flawed). Mr. Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done, and the reveling parts of the book are great fun to read. Special attention is paid to a trinity of sins that characterize this group: lying, fornicating and dishonesty about money.

Lying is of particular relevance to Mr. Johnson's argument, since it implies that we should not believe what intellectuals say: ''One thing which emerges strongly from any case-by-case study of intellectuals is their scant regard for veracity.'' The lies range from self-serving deceits and conscious revisions of history to idle mythologizing, sexual boasting, self-deception and mere difference of opinion. Thus, when we are told that Hemingway's story about his inspection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's penis in a men's room ''seems to be a piece of fiction,'' we may wonder how Mr. Johnson knows the true case. He acknowledges that it might be unfair to accuse writers of ''lying,'' that Hemingway regarded lying as ''part of his training as a writer'' and admitted that writers ''often lie unconsciously and then remember their lies with deep remorse.'' Yet Mr. Johnson asks: ''To what extent do intellectuals as a class expect and require truth from those they admire?''

Intellectuals (particularly Rousseau, Tolstoy, Hellman, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Russell, Hemingway, Gollancz and Baldwin) write apparently ''frank'' confessions whose ''selective honesty is in some ways the most dishonest aspect.'' They ''disarm the reader by what appears to be shocking frankness and admission of guilt [ but ] . . . in fact hide far more than they reveal.'' This false glasnost infuriates Mr. Johnson because it works, because other people do not think, like him, that these people are liars. The false confessions are also condemned for the trouble they cause, particularly when they lift the lid of the Pandora's box of sexual secrets and expose the contents to the intellectual's partner as well as to the general public. Mr. Johnson skillfully documents the misery that such ''open diaries'' produced in the lives of Rousseau (who confessed that one woman with whom he was impotent said, ''Leave women alone and study mathematics''), Tolstoy and his wife, Sonia (whose ''nightmarish battle of the diaries'' eventually drove Tolstoy to keep ''a 'secret' diary, which he hid in one of his riding boots'' and which his wife, of course, found), and Simone de Beauvoir (who so infuriated Nelson Algren when she published his love letters to her that he said, ''I've been in whorehouses all over the world and the women there always close the door'').

These male intellectuals exploit women, Mr. Johnson says. Shelley toyed with the idea of incestuously involving his sisters in his harem, Tolstoy ''failed to tell women with whom he had sex that he had contracted venereal disease and might still have it'' and Hemingway ''wrote an obscene poem, 'To Martha Gellhorn's Vagina,' which he compared to the wrinkled neck of an old hot-water bottle, and which he read to any woman he could get into bed with him.'' Sartre ''dedicated his 'Critique de la Raison Dialectique' (1960) publicly to de Beauvoir, but got his publisher Gallimard to print privately two copies with the words 'To Wanda.' '' Mr. Mailer stabbed his second wife in the abdomen and back. When Fassbinder got married, ''the bride found her bedroom door locked, and the groom and the best man in her bed.'' Connolly, in bed with a married woman of quality during a V-bomb raid over London in 1944, ungallantly jumped out, saying, ''Perfect fear casteth out love.''

Intellectuals (or Mr. Johnson's selection of them) are obsessed with the male sexual organ. Rousseau ''always had trouble with his penis''; Marx had boils on his; Ibsen ''would not expose his sexual organ even for the purpose of medical examination. Was there something wrong with it - or did he think there was?'' Victor Gollancz believed that he would lose the use of his penis, imagined that it kept disappearing into his body and ''would constantly take it out to inspect it, to discover whether it showed signs of VD or indeed whether it was still there at all.''

Now, these are delightful dirty stories, but what do they tell us about intellectuals? We learn that, as they get older, many of them (Ibsen, Hemingway, Sartre, Russell) preferred younger and younger women - a taste hardly confined to great thinkers. Indeed, it needs no feminist come from the grave to tell us that men have generally mistreated women. Another character flaw to which Mr. Johnson devotes what seems a disproportionate amount of attention is the lamentable personal hygiene of most intellectuals, which he grumbles about like the mother of a teen-age boy. Marx ''rarely took baths or washed much at all,'' and his room was a pigsty. Hemingway (according to his third wife) ''was extremely dirty'' and allowed his unneutered tomcats to march all over the dining table. Brecht ''was always dirty,'' and aggressively, dishonestly so: '' [ Theodor ] Adorno said that Brecht spent hours every day putting dirt under his fingernails so he looked like a worker.'' Russell had such bad breath that Lady Ottoline Morrell refused to sleep with him for a while. Sartre was ''disgustingly dirty,'' and Connolly left ''bathroom detritus'' in the bottom of his host's grandfather clock and bacon rashers marking his place in his host's books. Why does Mr. Johnson bother to tell us? Did the physical filth of these men make their thoughts unclean?

This line of argument, from life to art, is explicitly applied to Marx, whose ''grotesque incompetence in handling money . . . explains why he devoted so much time and space to the subject.'' The argument runs like this: Marx, unable to pay the interest on his debts, came to view ''the charging of interest, essential as it is to any system based on capital, as a crime against humanity.'' He himself, however, immediately began ''exploiting anyone within reach.'' Rousseau, Shelley, Brecht and Russell are all described as exploitative, but Marx in particular is accused of having a ''tendency to exploit those around him,'' and this is said to have led to his theory that the masses are exploited. An unconscious satire on this simplistic correlation of life and theory is provided by Marx's mother, who wished aloud that ''Karl would accumulate capital instead of just writing about it.''

Marx brings us to the true serpent in the intellectual garden - not sex but politics. It becomes gradually apparent that ''intellectual'' is a euphemism for what Mr. Johnson occasionally calls ''a radical'' or ''a radical intellectual.'' If radicals are liars, we might expect conservatives to tell the truth, and lo, this is the case: Waugh ''had an unusual regard for truth. . . . He was, he said, a conservative. . . . Waugh described society as it was and must be.'' Most of Mr. Johnson's intellectuals are leftists of one sort or another, and ''intellectual'' is ultimately revealed to be a synonym for ''socialist'' or even ''Communist'': ''Social engineering is the creation of millenarian intellectuals who believe they can refashion the universe by the light of their unaided reason. . . . It was pioneered by Rousseau, systematized by Marx and institutionalized by Lenin.''

It is certainly noteworthy that Mr. Johnson does not discuss any of the intellectuals on the far right, such as Heidegger, Pound and Paul de Man, whose lives are currently the subject of much heated debate. Orwell and Edmund Wilson, the only liberals for whom Mr. Johnson expresses any approval or sympathy, are the exceptions that prove the rule, men who, ''unlike most intellectuals,'' cared about real people and cared about the truth. They acted out the old saying that a man is a fool not to be a Communist until he is 30 years old, and a fool to remain one after that. Both Orwell and Wilson recoiled from the far left and moved toward the right, a move Mr. Johnson, not surprisingly, finds compatible.

In the final reckoning, it becomes apparent that Mr. Johnson dwells on the dirty habits and unpaid debts because he believes that moral flaws are political flaws. In writing of ''the strain . . . in carrying the Left Man's Burden,'' he cites with approval Connolly's statement that many had joined the left ''because 'they hated their father or . . . worried about sex.' '' It is because intellectual politics is the work of drunkards and adulterers that it is irrational and characterized above all by violence. And this violence rages unchecked because the intellectuals are godless. ''Radical intellectual'' is sometimes replaced here by ''secular intellectual,'' for the intellectuals have scorned religion and set themselves up in place of priests; indeed, they have committed the supreme act of hubris by presenting themselves not merely as false priests but as false gods: ''The secular intellectual might be deist, sceptic or atheist. . . . Unlike their sacerdotal predecessors, they were not servants and interpreters of the gods but substitutes.''

So we see how evil intellectuals are, and we also see why. ''It is all very baffling,'' Mr. Johnson writes, ''and suggests that intellectuals are as unreasonable, illogical and superstitious as anyone else.'' The banality of this belabored point is mind-boggling. Unlike Captain Renault in ''Casablanca,'' we are not ''Shocked! Shocked!'' to find that Shelley was a schnorrer, Tolstoy a compulsive gambler, Hemingway an alcoholic. What is shocking is Mr. Johnson's moral indignation and his expectation that we, too, will click our tongues in disapproval.

Why should intellectuals behave better than nonintellectuals? Mr. Johnson argues that people who tell us how to behave should behave better than people who don't tell us how to behave. He cites numerous instances of the glaring disparity between words and deeds in the treatment of women by men like Ibsen, Shelley, Russell and Sartre, who were pioneering champions of the women's movement, and in the treatment of their own children by men like Rousseau and Tolstoy, who wrote so much about the importance of education. He admits that ''very few of us lead lives which will bear close scrutiny, and there is something mean in subjecting Rousseau's, laid horribly bare by the activities of thousands of scholars, to moral judgment. But granted his claims, and still more his influence on ethics and behavior, there is no alternative.'' He approves of Orwell's judgment of Pound: ''One has the right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet.''

But one could easily argue the contrary case, and expect poets to behave worse than other people; many great thinkers have been highly neurotic, some downright mad. Indeed, it may well be that their high-minded ideals, far from rendering them vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy, keep sinful intellectuals from being even worse human beings than they would otherwise be. Evelyn Waugh, when asked how he could behave so badly after he had become a Roman Catholic, replied, ''Think how much worse I would be if I were not Catholic.'' The rarity is not intellectuals who sin but those who don't, those few double geniuses who are good both at life and at art. A book about them would be worth reading.

Mr. Johnson might have kept in mind the fine book by his hero Edmund Wilson, ''The Wound and the Bow,'' which argues for a necessary correlation between artistic gifts (the bow) and serious personality flaws (the wound). Or one might take another tack and argue in defense of sublimation: people who cannot love real people channel their blocked human feelings into the public forum and express them in ways that benefit far more people than their (neglected) immediate family. Tolstoy's well-earned guilt drove him to produce the great art that he left in payment of his human debts. Many a Nobel laureate, like the man who established that honor (a manufacturer of ammunition), has needed his unusual talents to atone for his unusual sins. We should therefore ''pardon them for writing well'' (as W. H. Auden remarked of Paul Claudel, in his poem on the death of Yeats).

But even if we grant - and the case is certainly far from airtight - that the people Mr. Johnson has chosen to write about are nasty pieces of work, are their ideas nasty? Should men's words be judged in the light of their deeds? Mr. Johnson thinks they should. He agrees with Waugh's judgment on Connolly, asking: ''How could someone like Connolly give advice to humanity on how to conduct its affairs?'' Mr. Johnson focuses on ''the moral and judgmental credentials of intellectuals to tell mankind how to conduct itself. How did they run their own lives? . . . Were they just in their sexual and financial dealings? Did they tell, and write, the truth?'' He concludes that, for intellectuals, ''ideas came before people, Mankind with a capital 'M' before men and women, wives, sons or daughters.''

Mr. Johnson thinks this should not be so. He argues that ''massive works of the intellect do not spring from the abstract workings of the brain and the imagination; they are deeply rooted in the personality.'' This is certainly true; but it does not necessarily follow that, if the personality is flawed, the works of the intellect are flawed in direct correlation. We have learned from Freud that motives are overdetermined in far more complex ways than such an assumption implies. Moreover, the ultimate effect, for good or ill, of a work of the imagination that endures for centuries cannot be bounded by the brief life of the personality that created it. ''Intellectuals'' is symptomatic of the philistinism of our culture, which incites the press to pillory mature public figures for the sins of their high-spirited youth. But the relationship between the life lived and the art left behind is not a simple matter of politics.

D. H. Lawrence (who knew well whereof he spoke) was right to advise us: Trust the tale, not the teller. And many a sadder but wiser sage has rightly warned his disciples: Do as I say, not as I do. Sartre best stated the true and sad irony of the matter: ''For many years I treated my pen as my sword: now I realize how helpless we are. No matter: I am writing, I shall continue to write books.'' The books of great thinkers are often salvaged from the debris of lives tragically flawed. And our time is better spent in reading their own great books than in reading trivializing books about their shabby lives.

Marx's "maid" also lived with the family after Marx's death, then with Engels, and when she died was buried in the Marx family plot, as were her wishes. She also had an illegitimate son that may have been Karl's or Engels or neither. Karl also didn't like baths.

Apparently.

Oh, and forget neo-Marxism, check out neo-Gramscism, comrade. Seriously.

Interesting comment, Manbat:

"Thanks Shats good post, I agree wholeheartedly. This is my point, simply because you or turkey choose to scurry around and dig up the dirt on the sources posted doesn't mean that the ideas or at least some of them are not real or not worth discussing. I don't claim that Marxism has nothing to offer simply because he wasn't personally true to his theories but I will point it out as a double standard if that's the level of debate that an opposing position wants to take."

You are talking about that review, hey? The one that refutes Johnson's thesis. You agree wholeheartedly with the review that Johnson's thesis is flawed? I dunno about "wholeheartedly" but I concur somewhat too. I reckon Johnson's thesis is fairly flimsy and flawed.

"[Johnson] argues that ''massive works of the intellect do not spring from the abstract workings of the brain and the imagination; they are deeply rooted in the personality.'' This is certainly true; but it does not necessarily follow that, if the personality is flawed, the works of the intellect are flawed in direct correlation. We have learned from Freud that motives are overdetermined in far more complex ways than such an assumption implies. Moreover, the ultimate effect, for good or ill, of a work of the imagination that endures for centuries cannot be bounded by the brief life of the personality that created it."

In regards to Marx specifically, again, I found this telling:

"This line of argument, from life to art, is explicitly applied to Marx, whose ''grotesque incompetence in handling money . . . explains why he devoted so much time and space to the subject.'' The argument runs like this: Marx, unable to pay the interest on his debts, came to view ''the charging of interest, essential as it is to any system based on capital, as a crime against humanity.'' He himself, however, immediately began ''exploiting anyone within reach.'' Rousseau, Shelley, Brecht and Russell are all described as exploitative, but Marx in particular is accused of having a ''tendency to exploit those around him,'' and this is said to have led to his theory that the masses are exploited. An unconscious satire on this simplistic correlation of life and theory is provided by Marx's mother, who wished aloud that ''Karl would accumulate capital instead of just writing about it.''

Johnson is bordering on farce here, especially if using this idea to dismiss all Marx's work and analyses. Flimsy, very flimsy.

Manbat, I know we're not at school or uni, but you'd know that if you want to put forward an argument, the strength of it is determined by your personal experience and observation bolstered by reputable third-party sources. It's what you get marked on when you write an essay. An essay being, essentially, a structured argument. Now if you wanted to attack Marx's work and ideas, you'd go to his research sources, Hegel, say, or the statistics and mathematics that make, say Capital extremely hard-going (in Volume 1 especially). Not "him". And what you can glean of his life-history. Flimsy stuff there.

If the research sources aren't reliable or reputable, then what's the argument then? Reliable? Reputable?

To get a really good mark, we should both read Johnson's book, and proceed from there. BUT imagine doing that spade-work for every thing that gets thrown your way from the likes of the "cultural Marxism"/"political correctness"/"groupthink" brigade? Sometimes a line has to be drawn or else Brian Cox would still be entertaining Malcolm Roberts now!

The world is definitely entering "interesting times". Understanding and navigating and imagining is going to be "interesting". Marx is a tool. Johnson and that other bloke reckon Karl, the man, is a tool; I reckon his ideas are tools.

A bit of Marx. Reminiscent of anyone in particular?

"Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. There I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever?"

Sorry, Manbat, but I don't see where you've "pointed out the source of much of [my] posting is neither reliable or reputable".

I don't know if you did google "The Conversation" and "cultural Marxism". Not a reliable/reputable enough source?

With these terms, "cultural Marxism", "political correctness", "groupthink" and the like, it's interesting the historical background, the context, and how things have then been cherry-picked out of context, mis-used and abused (willfully), sometimes to such an extent that they are rendered meaningless in regards to their original conception.

Re-invention?

I'm interested, increasingly so, in the 'why' of these mutated term's useage, and the motivating factors of the groups (mis)using them pejoratively.

Investigating/interrogating the 'why' may help us all, especially the groups on the receiving end, and ultimately those involved in the useage of these terms as pejorative.

Winning arguments? Just make a decent case. With decent evidence. And reputable and reliable witnesses. Is that bad practice or something? Jury/judiciary rigged, you think? Make a case. The Swellnet court of appeal awaits.

Anyway, google "Bakunin" and "First International". Now there's some heavyweight criticism flying about.