Brian Holmes on Sun, 18 Nov 2018 04:49:31 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Was cultural Marxism the leading force behind the new world order


On Sat, Nov 17, 2018 at 3:32 PM <analoguehorizon@gmail.com> wrote:
'Cultural Marxism' is a conspiracy theory propagated by the extreme right. The article posted by Ico above is good and I think it's fair game to bundle anyone who openly promotes or subscribes to it with the likes of Breivik. The European New Right have been reading Gramsci since the 70's afaik.

Certainly the term is to be avoided like the plague. However, Flick's memory of his radical professor is a perfect account of a widespread strategy in the 70s. In the 80s, British cultural studies provided a Gramscian theory for demands that had come straight out of experience. I don't think right-wing Gramscianism began in North America until the 90s, when conservatives finally realized what a powerful strategy this had been.

Anyway, it's a pleasure to read and listen to Quinn Slobodian. He makes the point that for neoliberal theorists like Hayek or Buchanan, there is no fixed doctrine, rather a constantly shifting field of challenges and opportunities in which they deploy changing ideas to meet core goals. He also shows that as the harms of financially driven globalization became obvious after 2008, the critique of neoliberalism was adopted and transformed by the new populists. The panorama is now much more complicated than right vs left. There are still neoliberals moving to replace all politics with their version of free-market economics. There are neofascists recoiling in horror from a globalism that they blame on the left. There are Keynesian social democrats who think they can revive the post-WWII boom. There are identitarians who blame everything on white males. There are old leftists who see the future in one big union. There are environmentalists with their increasingly inconvenient truth. There are anarchists convinced that civilization is about to end, good riddance. And that's just in the so-called West, which no longer controls a world increasingly dominated by the rise of Asia.

We are smack in the middle of the great crisis that technopolitical theory accurately predicted. As in the Thirties, an economic crash has set off incomparably more severe political problems. Most intellectuals are hopelessly confused, because they can't face the complexity and also, more understandably, because their loyalties and solidarities force them to go on using languages inadequate to the present. But amazingly, you can turn on Jacobin radio and listen to Quinn Slobodian. So who says Occupy accomplished nothing? Such an interview proves that democratic socialists can think, a rare activity these days. Theorists of the next generation, open your eyes. You have nothing to lose but your illusions.

https://www.blubrry.com/thedig/39413662/a-history-of-neoliberalism-with-quinn-slobodian

optimistically? I guess so, Brian
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