Much of Cultural Marxism is pushed by the privileged few who take their wealth and position for granted and demand that even more is due them, as James Lindsay explains.
Some haunting words from Critical Theorist and father of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, in an interview he gave in 1969, at least if you think about them.
Question: What is, in your opinion, the basic reason for these violent student demonstrations in so many countries?
Marcuse: For American and West German students, whom I know better, it is a requirement that is not merely intellectual, but “instinctual.” They want an entirely different kind of existence. They reject a life that is simply a struggle for existence…because they think it is no longer necessary.
There’s a lot to chew on there in just a few short sentences. The violent students acting in protest (and one might mark ours today as the same) “want an entirely different kind of existence” and “reject a life that is simply a struggle for existence.” That’s pretty concerning and incredible, really.
The fact is, all life, anywhere you look, is a struggle for existence. All largesse, all wealth, is merely a stockpiling of the means of existence that delays the struggle until it runs out, which it will if it is not continually replenished.
These violently angry students do this “because they think it is no longer necessary.” That’s because they’re in a space of accumulated wealth that delays, not ends, the struggle for existence. That struggle is inescapable. It is the only real Law of Nature where life is concerned: existence is hard, a struggle, dangerous even.
These violently angry students, who are socialists, are violently angry because they don’t understand or have gratitude for the completely artificial circumstances they get to enjoy: wealth and relative security against the struggle that is existence.
Just like a comfortable room in a house on a very hot, very cold, or very inclement day, though, the means of maintaining those comfortable artificial circumstances require effort, energy, recognition, and support. They must be participated in, not assumed, and certainly not cast aside.
Socialism is a fantasy that the real means of production of wealth can be abandoned but that wealth can be maintained. Karl Marx says as much himself in his early writing, and his whole program was actually based upon it. But this is not just wrong. It is a fantasy. It is a delusion.
Should you adopt the socialist path, the socialist road as it has been called in other historical circumstances that no sane person would choose to revisit, you will eventually spend down the accumulated wealth while undercutting its real means of production. And then you will learn. Oh, yes, you will learn.
What will you learn?
That life is the struggle for existence. There is no other meaning to what life is.
By then, the gratitude you might find for what you
The oppressed and poor don’t have the time, money, or energy to engage in revolution—be used as a tool for revolution perhaps, but never other than that.
