It goes about seven and a half minutes, and it’s well worth your time – because it provides a history and a definition of cultural Marxism and critical theory, the poisonous left-wing doctrine which has infected the majority of American culture particularly in the universities and large swathes of the media. Cultural Marxism is the reason your kids sound like unmitigated morons to you after their first semester at college.

As we’ve said here at the Hayride multiple times, there is nothing organic about political correctness. It’s the product of a long and determined effort by a leftist elite. This video covers some of who they are and how they got started…

The Marcuses and Adornos and their intellectual progeny have had essentially two generations of free rein to impose their rotten philosophies and theories on the Western world, and they’ve done an amazing job of tearing down the greatest cultural patrimony ever built by humanity. And the design of critical theory by those members of the Frankfurt School was a reaction to their own defeat.

A bit of history that the video doesn’t quite touch on – the reason for the switch from classical Marxism, as defined by the awfully long-winded treatises Marx wrote which were patently and provably wrong as an analysis of economics, to cultural Marxism was World War I. The pre-war Marxists saw the coming of that war as the maelstrom from which would come the Great Revolution of the Proletariat, which would sweep away the economic injustice and oppression of private ownership of the means of production and bring about the socialist utopia of their dreams. They figured the working classes of Europe would turn on their national elites rather than accept the carnage of the war, and this would destroy the capitalist regimes on the continent.

Except the working classes in France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Britain and elsewhere happily enlisted in the slaughter, because for them it was more important to fight for their countries than to take up the great socialist struggle. Yes, the Communist Party took power in Russia, but Russia was seen as the worst place in Europe and not the prize a Germany or France or Britain would be.

So from a Marxist perspective World War I was a failure, and the Marxists spent the entire 1920’s and 1930’s attempting to recover.

The Frankfurt School, as the video says, was an academic cabal attempting to recast Marxism in a way that would produce the Great Revolution. The members of that school settled on the culture as the vehicle, because it was French, German, British and Italian culture the citizens of those countries went to war to preserve. The culture had to be destroyed to pave the way for Marx’s theories to prevail.

Couple that revelation with the theories of the Italian socialist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who had come up with the concept of the “march through the institutions,” meaning that Marxists needed to populate the institutions which controlled human thought like newspapers, the academy, the arts and so on, and you had a formula for sapping and rotting Western culture from within its center. And that’s what the Left has done. Their victory is nearly complete and the Right hasn’t had an effective defense against it since Joe McCarthy’s political career was wiped out.

It’s imperative that those of us who love Western and American civilization understand this stuff so that we can commit to fighting it off before it’s too late. If you agree, spread this post or the YouTube above and educate your friends.