Morning Comrades.
Normally, this would be a patreon-only dispatch but after having written this one I realized that this story is longer than I initially realized and decided to make this a three part story, for everyone that will conclude on Friday.
For you lovely paying patreons of this newsletter: I will have something special ready for you to end the year with either on the weekend or early next week. Promise.
Following up on yesterday’s take on Culture Wars I wanted to draw a linage of these so-called Culture Wars, what’s behind them and who. History is a funny one like that, I greatly enjoy it even though I realize that explaining why history, the understanding of it rather, is important is often lost on people. For what it is worth, the understanding of history, especially in a dialectical materialistic manner creates clarity and provides us with the platform from which we can act, rather than react.
From Kulturbolschewismus to the Woke Mind Virus
Origins
The origins of the term and act of a “culture war” are quite specific and superficially not essentially relevant to our understanding of it today. Nevertheless, here we go. The first recorded time this term and thus concept was employed dates back to 1872 and relates to the formation of Germany, under Bismark and the Emperor. After 3 wars, with Austria/Hungary, Denmark and then France, the Prussian Empire created the country Germany that laid the foundation for what we understand the country to be today. To cut a long, complicated story short, the country was then mostly protestant with the catholic population being at around 30%, yet, nominally in the industrial and wealthy parts of the new country. Control, fiscally, politically and socially obviously led to a conflict between the Protestant Prussians and the Roman Catholic Church. The details of this conflict are, for this discussion, irrelevant apart from two facts: one, the idea of a “culture war” was picked up internationally and translated, and secondly, a minority was picked ( in this case the Polish Catholics ) who were ostracized, “othered” and used as a pawn in this “culture war”- This being a significant strategic element in the upcoming clash of cultures.
Early Developments
The period between 1914-1918 saw several developments that played key roles for what we are experiencing today. National Media, Propaganda, A Global Capitalist War and several Workers Revolts across Europe, specifically the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
Whilst this time period shows signs of the early mechanism of manufactured culture war in forms of manufacturing national working class consent for killing each other in Europe, accentuated through propaganda that was based on “othering” and demeaning other cultures based on stereotypes it truly was the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 that then gave the Culture War a real enemy. When Marx in 1847 wrote:
“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles”,
he was of course not only correct, but the reaction of the global capitalist to the 1917 revolution in Russia, and its subsequent off shoots across Europe a few years proves this. This is where we arrive at the term:
Kulturbolschewismus or Cultural Bolshevism to Cultural Marxism
This is when, for our context, it starts getting interesting, only so because the ruling classes started utilizing the idea that capitalism and communism were competing ideologies rather than it being what it is, one being exploitation given weight by falsely attaching an ideology to it ( capitalism ) and the other being a scientific theory of alternative economic relations in society. The Russian Bolshevik Revolution and all its subsequent followers and global movements were not only physically attacked through conventional warfare but additionally, branded as “degenerate” “barbaric” and “violent” - and whilst this initially was started by the British government, this quickly was picked up by Far-Right movements and their liberal, centrist supporters in Germany, Italy and the U.S.
I am sure most of you can already draw the connection here, but obviously by aligning human progression outside of the existing order of capitalism to a “degeneration”, the flood gates to 20th Century Eugenics, Fascism, Racism, Nazism and so forth aligned with the powerful forces of Capitalist manipulation and their media empires.
Before piecing together its implications for today, it is important to understand exactly what the term ‘degeneration’ means. The best explanation I’ve found is in the English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley’s book Body and Will (1883), in which he offers this description of the word’s early shift in meaning:
[Degeneration] means literally an unkinding, the undoing of a kind, and in this sense was first used to express the change of kind without regard to whether the change was to perfect or to degrade; but it is now used exclusively to denote a change from a higher to a lower kind, that is to say, from a more complex to a less complex organisation …
The move from a more complex to a less complex form also implies a decrease in quality and, by extension, value. What degenerates becomes simpler and more crude, fallen from a higher standard and worth less than its precursors. The notion of an organic worsening has been applied readily throughout modernity, first to humankind itself and later to the cultural artefacts and ideas that humans produce.
Wherever he saw the mixing of races, Gobineau saw decadence. Hybridity equals morbidity, in his view
The term has had a particularly dark history in Europe. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was deployed to argue that climate differences between the places where people dwelled caused some human types to degenerate from an earlier, more perfect state. As scientific racism sought more concepts for its toolbox, the notion of degeneration proved a particularly helpful one. It was used to explain why some races thrived more than others, and how some had produced great scientific and artistic works and achieved a state of technological advancement as others floundered. The producers of these theories tended to rank their own civilisation as the most sophisticated, eliding or diminishing the achievements of the other civilisations to which they compared their own.
One of the founding fathers of Aryan thought was a French aristocrat, named Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, who argued that a race begins to degenerate the moment it mixes with other races. Hybridity equals morbidity, in his view. In his book The Inequality of the Human Races (1853-55), he writes in stark terms:
The word degenerate, when applied to a people, means (as it ought to mean) that the people has no longer the same intrinsic value as it had before, because it has no longer the same blood in its veins, continual adulterations having gradually affected the quality of that blood. In other words, though the nation bears the name given by its founders, the name no longer connotes the same race; in fact, the man of a decadent time, the degenerate man properly so called, is a different being, from the racial point of view, from the heroes of the great ages … He, and his civilisation with him, will certainly die on the day when the primordial race-unit is so broken up and swamped by the influx of foreign elements, that its effective qualities have no longer a sufficient freedom of action.
Gobineau’s hogwash is easily disproven by comparing the health and vitality of endogamic and exogamic communities, that is communities that only breed with their own versus communities that invite outsiders into their genetic pool. Wherever he saw the mixing of races, Gobineau saw decadence. For him, this problem was primarily a biological one, but in Europe throughout the 19th century, this body problem became a problem of the mind and the creative spirit.
This is where we arrive at the early stages of what is called Cultural Marxism, a Nazi term of the 20th Century that implied that anything outside of their demands was Marxist/ Socialist/Communist and often, Jewish.
The rest is history so we say. The history of racism, genocide and more. Such are the brutal realities of culture wars, tactics employed by the ruling class to protect their accumulation of capital by aligning themselves with and using fascists for their means.
From Cultural Marxism to the Woke Mind Virus
One would think that after the horrors committed during the 2nd World War the powers that be would want to dial down their commitment to manipulating the worlds working classes but the exact opposite happened. However, rather than relying on the open brutality of the 3rd Reich, the capitalist class got incredibly smart, applied Gramscian-concepts of Hegemony in real life and started utilizing what we now call the Frankfurt School of Critical Thought to undermine any and all movements that presented genuine threats to Capitalism. This is also the time the centre of manufacturing this consent moves from Europe over to the U.S. and one must admit, perfected its union of private money and state propaganda, unseen to this date and whose after effects we are most definitely still in the middle of today.
The list of developments for which "cultural Marxism" has been blamed includes the following: the LGBT rights movement, especially the legal push to eliminate sodomy laws and legitimize gay marriage; activism for transgender acceptance and recognition; the increase in divorce at the end of the 20th century and a decrease in nuclear family formation; African Americans protesting police abuse; art and music that fails to follow familiar genre conventions; increased depictions of a variety of races, genders, and sexualities in popular media; acceptance of immigrants and the cultural pluralism they bring; a lack of tolerance for non-liberal ideas on college campuses.
This bill of particulars is not new, especially from conservatives. The twist was to begin dragging Karl Marx into it. Whilst the Frankfurt School started in the 1920s and lasted well into the 1970s/80s, with the brutal anti-woke-communist reality in the West between the 1950s-60s particularly needing to be highlighted - today’s foundation of culture war started in the early 1990s when after several global Culture War coups - see the below take on the CCF for example -
the Capitalist powers in the U.S. really went for it.
I will continue on Friday with the last part of this story that will focus on the the foundations coming out of the Frankfurt School, how they moved into Conservative / Far - Right movement in the U.S. and thus the rest of the world and how that then ends up with the Western Tea-Party / Identitarian movement / to Trump and subsequently Musk and co.
As always, thank you for your time, attention and support.
Yours, warmly,
V.