545 Comments on “Open Thread”
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ET says:
timdog
I could quite easily turn to you and say that you have been duped by a sustained, decades-long discourse in the right-leaning sectors of the mainstream media, and the shoal of remoras swimming beneath its belly which would have it that bone fide public health provision is somehow tantamount to a “marxism”, that “choice” (i.e. profit) is essential to defeat Joe Stalin’s hordes who are currently rampaging through schools and the BBC on a brainwashing mission, and that an evil global cabal of “cultural marxists” (say what, again???!?!) are preparing the planet for a New World Order.
This isn’t about rampaging hordes of ‘cultural marxists’, invading schools and TV stations. It’s about the slow shift in paradigm that I have witnessed during my long career on this planet and which I hold responsible for the current ‘bail-out’ mentality in all realms of life that seems to pervade most levels of Western society. If you haven’t noticed maybe it’s because you have been too long away from home.
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Arie Brand says:
until I noticed that “the left”, which was originally a movement for social justice, as well as “the green” were hijacked by cultural marxism aka Frankfurt School, with a different agenda and methodology, through infiltration in and for a great deal monopolizing the media and the educationary system to brainwash the young and undermine the core values upon which traditional society was build (sic)
ET what exactly do you mean here? I have seen these war cries “cultural marxism” and “Frankfurt School” on this blog before (from Ross) and I have no idea what is meant by them. The idea that a mass movement could have been genuinely inspired by the esoteric writings of Adorno (who wrote mainly in “Stacheldraht Deutsch” – “barbed wire German”), Horkheimer or Habermas (whose massive tomes on the theory of communicative action needed an explanatory guide – I wrote one of them) strikes me as ludicrous. The only one who was fit for some level of mass consumption was Marcuse but I wonder which of his ideas you find back in the “bail out” mentality you are referring to (which means exactly what?). Another question: which political scene have you mainly in mind when you speak about “cultural marxism”? Are you American? I ask because the idea to use these foreign gentlemen as bugaboos seems to have originated there among the likes of Pat Buchanan etc.
I hope to see your answer tomorrow – bedtime here.
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berlian biru says:
Just to preempt another tiresome Frankfurt School debate I think we can accept the general thread of ET’s analysis that the left has generally abandoned economic socialism in favour of cultural restructuring.
No longer do parties like the British Labour Party or the US Democrats stand for the rights of genuine, economically disadvantaged workers but rather for “minority” rights be they sexual, racial or whatever.
Indeed the old fashioned workers that these parties used to represent are now dismissed as rednecks and racists by the middle class academics, journalists, civil servants and celebrities who now dominate these once great parties of the “working man”.
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timdog says:
I hope to see your answer tomorrow
Actually, I’d rather not see his answer; I’d rather people manned up and debated the questions of how to run a country, rather than coming out with joosdiddit-style stuff about “cultural marxism” by way of diversion.
If Arie, who apparently knows a great deal more about it than I do, has no idea what “cultural marxism” means, then there’s no hope for me, despite the fact that I am apparently a signed-up member of the “movement” in question…
But hell, it certainly sounds scary – “cultural marxism”, something born in Germany! Well that’s good enough for me! Privatise my hospital by all means if it’ll save me from being brainwashed by German cultural marxists…
ET, you said
This isn’t about rampaging hordes of ‘cultural marxists’, invading schools and TV stations.
but then you started out by saying that:
“the left”, which was originally a movement for social justice, as well as “the green” were hijacked by cultural marxism aka Frankfurt School, with a different agenda and methodology, through infiltration in and for a great deal monopolizing the media and the educationary system to brainwash the young and undermine the core values upon which traditional society was build
Besides asking for a little consistency, forgive me if I ignore that assertion. I’ll also resist the urge to demand an explanation of exactly what this apparent moral decline (is that what it is?) you detect in “the West” consists of, but giving you the benefit of the doubt, and just supposing it exists, why on earth would it need to have anything to do with “the Left”, given that its rise (just supposing it exists) has been contemporaneous with the manifest atrophy of “the Left” as any kind of “movement” collectively or individually in the nation-states of the West, and that the same “decline” is allegedly present in the USA, a country clearly without a mainstream leftwing.
Hell, I think we’ve both agreed about a certain “declining” mentality in Indonesia too, a country totally without a leftwing…Incidentally, I’m in and out of my home country far more than your average “white man in the tropics”, and have always intended to go back there permanently if and when I ever settle down. Contrary to the tragic assertions of he-who-cannot-be-named that I “hate my own culture” (a claim that would be hysterically funny were it not for my hopelessly liberal compassion for a man clearly wrestling with the identity crisis of a serial immigrant)…
I genuinely consider myself very lucky indeed that I know precisely where I’m from and who I am, that there is not just a corner of earth in a country, but actually a community, and hell, a house and a landscape surrounding it, that is me, that for all the damage done to the place by the likes of Thatcher and Blair, the real elements of belonging – a recognised turn of phrase, a humour that belongs to us (and not to foreigners from Canada, America or Australia), a comforting sense of self-deprecation – endure and will always endure. And if you have that stuff, then you have no need whatsoever to fill a hole in your own identity with hysteria about “immigrants”…
Ahem… I digress…
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… and I could, of course, suggest that just like the vague clarion call of “cultural marxism”, the line issued above by BB would be a very, very convenient one for people of a certain slant, not wanting to bother with debating the actual issues – “look, the people who want to prevent the privatisation of services you’ve traditionally enjoyed free at the point of delivery, and who would like to take a slightly larger cut from very rich people, only really care about immigrants and homosexuals, and are all privaleged organic-rice munchers who hate you… so you better vote instead for the public-school educated aristocrats who want to cut their own taxes and set us off down a road that’ll end up with you paying through the nose for your medical care and education; yep, they’re the ones who care about you…”
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You would agree, would you not, that the current British Labour Party of Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Ed Milliband and their like bears little or no relation to that party which was led by men like Aneurin Bevan and Clement Atlee?
The issues that drive the current Labour Party, fox hunting, gay rights, race issues etc would not have been priorities for the Labour Party in the 1940s and 50s for the simple reason that they were not priorities for the working classes then, or indeed today.
I stand by my assertion that the left is driven today by middle class, academic issues of no relevance to the economic condition of the working classes.
Such a statement is so obviously true that it barely merits discussion.
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There is a perhaps apocryphal anecdote about a French socialist visiting Australia at the beginning of last century who, on meeting an Australian labor leader, asked him solemnly for his program. The answer he got was: “My program? My program? Ten bob a day is my program.”
Though it has been argued that Australian labor concerns were never as narrow as that it seems likely that right from the start it was of all labor parties in the English speaking world least concerned about theory and perhaps most about practical achievements. Maybe the fact that it was the first labor party in the world to govern in its own right has contributed to that.
Those who were concerned to give a theoretical defence of what Labor was about have said, among other things, that its endeavour was to ‘civilise capitalism’. The former Labor PM, Paul Keating, said in a recent interview that for him one aspect of that was “taking the banks of the street”. We can be grateful he did. Australian banks have, thanks to this regulation, not been able to create the havoc that they did in the USA and Europe.When I look at the major concerns and achievements of the Australian Labor Party over the last thirty years or so (during which it has thus far governed for eighteen) the major theme that stands out is “fairness”, not just to the working class (or what remains of it) but “fairness” to all. Its legislative achievements have to do with Medicare (fairness to all), land rights (fairness to aborigines), sex discrimination laws (fairness to women), environmental legislation (fairness to future generations) and, still to come, national disability insurance (fairness to the handicapped).
I don’t see a similar concern among its opponents.
I will leave it to Timdog to answer BB re. the English situation.
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There have been, right from the beginning of the socialist movement, doubts whether the working class was the appropriate vehicle for transformative politics of a leftist stamp.
Engels already complained about the desire for “respectability” of the British working class that created an impediment for working class solidarity.In recent decades a great deal has been made of the so-called “embourgoisement-thesis”. The working class, so it was argued, showed more and more similarity with the middle class. Because of technological change the purely manual parts of its work had often disappeared. Its income started to approach that of the middle class. It had started to live in mixed neighbourhoods, that did not qualify as traditional working class neighbourhoods. It was, through the mass media, continuously exposed to middle class values and concerns.
This view culminated in Andre Gorz’s famous (notorious) publication “Farewell to the Working Class” that appeared at the beginning of the eighties. He argued there that because of changes in the labor process socialism should let go of its hopes concerning the traditional proletariat as a vehicle for radical politics.
More recently it has been argued that the embourgeoisement thesis has been taken to far. There is still a great deal of structured inequality. Enduring differences in the possession of economic capital (money, real estate etc.), cultural capital (knowledge, skills, education) and social capital (relations, networks) remain obstacles to climbing the social ladder.
Goldthorpe, Lockwood et al argued in The Affluent Worker that the “working class” is one stratum within a system of “classless inegalitarianism” that “offered no basis for or response to radical initiatives”.
So, yes, Labor is no longer a typical working class movement if it ever was. But why should it – concern with fairness is no working class monopoly.
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Leaving aside Arie’s very interesting points, I’ll pick up with BB.
BB, you’re employing a certain technique there; a politician’s technique no less: “fox hunting, gay rights, race issues” are the “priorities” which “drive the current Labour Party”, something “so obviously true that it barely merits discussion…”
Well, actually it does merit discussion.
I assume you still pay attention to the news from home? Because for the last six months I’ve heard a great deal of noise from Labour (not entirely well articulated noise, admittedly) about protecting services, particularly the NHS, and nary a mention of gay immigrant foxes…
The current Labour Party is very clearly a pale shadow, ideologically, of what it once was. But I would suggest that to claim that this is because of brainwashing infiltration by those wicked Germans from Frankfurt would be to ignore history.
During the 80s the Left in general came under sustained and vicious attack from the government and its attendant rightwing press. The Labour Party appear to have been so traumatized by the experience, and by their apparent consignment to the wilderness, that instead of challenging the attack, they complied with the idea that anything remotely “socialist” was now “toxic” in mainstream politics, and set about “detoxifying” themselves (the points Arie makes above do suggest that by the 80s the old socialist constituency had largely been dismantled, but I personal believe that Labour went way too far in their “detoxification”. Hell, they’d probably have won in 1997 if Dennis Skinner was heading the party)…
This has all ended up with the absurd situation in which a manifest wet fish of the centre like Ed Milliband is deemed unelectable by the commentariat, not because he’s just crap, but because he’s “too left wing”…Despite all this, however, while Blair certainly appears to have been a man without any personal ideology, his government retained enough of a foot on the right (left) side of the trench to put in place plenty of measures that could certainly be identified as coming from a Labour hinterland.
For me, personally, a key part of this is that they returned the NHS to functioning health after two decades of Tory starvation. I have firsthand experience of this having been treated about five years ago for a life-threatening illness by the NHS, and being able to compare the experience to a previous bout of medical care a decade earlier, before Blair’s government got things working again.They also did a very great deal for the financially challenged elderly. I have firsthand experience of this through my grandmother, a working class white woman from a mining village, who scrimped and penny-pinched her whole life and raised two children as a widow, and who, thanks to the Blair government’s social support policies, ended up in her 90s enjoying a disposable income for the very first time.
Those are two things I have direct experience of; there is also the network of support for poor families through things like Sure Start, and the various schemes (many of them, admittedly, of limited success) for disadvantaged young people. The list goes on…And all you remember is the foxhunting ban and Section 28? Ephemeral teatime issues that could hardly be called the “priorities” of the administration…
As I’ve said before, the line you tout above – they only care about gays and immigrants – is, like the shriek of “cultural Marxism”, a piece of cheap diversion that has worked its way out of the rightwing mainstream media and into the mouths of blokes in pubs. It’s a means to avoid debating the actual issues – “Labour only cares about gays and immigrants, so you better vote for David Cameron and George Osborne, because they really care about the “working man” don’t they?”
Needless to say, all those measures of the Blair governments cited above, which certainly benefited “the little people”, are currently coming under unprecedented – yes, unprecedented – attack from the Con-Dems. But of course, it’s much easier to shriek “cultural Marxism” and “they only care about gays and immigrants” than to explain just how the dismemberment of the NHS will help the “working man”…
I would, kind of, like to digress on the subject of the foxhunting ban, given that I spent the winter Saturdays of my formative years wading through streams and scrambling over gorse-clad hillsides as a foot-follower of the Western, a ramshackle two-day-a-week farmers’ pack without a “toff in a red jacket” in sight – a fact which gives me a slightly unusual perspective on the matter for a “leftie” (and actually, the ban, absurd as it was, tied far more closely into the more misguided aspects of “Old Labour” sentiment, than you perhaps realize). But open though this thread is, perhaps it’s not that open…
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Wow, some really interesting stuff coming through at the moment and Ari I will have to get back to you on Australian Labor Party later. With the exception of Paul Keating’s government I would suggest a history of unmitigated disaster with the current shamoozle running neck and neck with the Whitlam mob as the worst of all time.
through infiltration in and for a great deal monopolizing the media and the educationary system to brainwash the young and undermine the core values upon which traditional society was build
This always puzzles me and a bit like the bloke who invoked the the soldiers of yore rolling in their graves as the things they fought for were disassembled by the evil cabal, I am still confused about what actual core values went missing? Are we talking about letting aboriginals vote and no longer referring to them as fauna? Or is it a pining for the White Australia Policy or perhaps a yearning for the very worst of the Catholic vs the rest divide.
Of course, there is a marginal debate about gay marriage but the truth is the majority of Australians could not care less who someone sleeps with and like the republic remains a sideline.
We do of course have the insane illegal immigrant debate that has been pretty much beaten up into the moooosslems are coming. Facts in this debate are the first to go, for a start it is not illegal to seek asylum and no it has no effect on the actual immigration quota (so much for queue jumping). The shrills on how much it cost seem to forget the massive amounts spent on previous immigrant and who could forget the ten pound poms.
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Berlian Biru said
I stand by my assertion that the left is driven today by middle class, academic issues of no relevance to the economic condition of the working classes.
Such a statement is so obviously true that it barely merits discussion.
This is partially true but it goes beyond. The shift in priorities occurred during the seventies with the emergence of the ‘New Left’ after the student revolts of the late sixties when suddenly the cadres of the traditional socialist parties and the environmentalist movement began to be populated with newly formed academics from the social and political sciences who were at that time highly influenced by Herbert Marcuse et al. Their goal was to become influential in the opinion making establishments of education and the media. They adopted the notion of political correctness in order to help bring about a new paradigm based on Marxist principles. They were the fear of corporate America (and Europe) and many multinational corporations like Exxon (where I was employed at that time) quintupled the manpower of their Public Affairs Departments in an attempt to counterreact to what they saw as a threat from within Western society itself.
This phenomenon of the New Left became later known as Cultural Marxism. It’s political influence may have ebbed away since the eighties but – and this is my personal opinion – it was successful in creating a new Zeitgeist in which private initiative, economic common sense, individual responsibility and accountability became subordinate to ideological affiliation and reliance on the public tit. Hence my allusion to the ‘bail out’ mentality that has spread like a cancer to all levels of society, even the highest ones. If you need a ‘ninja’ loan to buy the mansion of your dreams, just pop in at your local bank. If you cannot pay the mortgage any longer, drop the keys of the house in the letterbox of the same bank and disappear. Banks sell their junk bonds worldwide dragging almost the entire international financial system into the abyss while public and private debt continue to amount in the trillions. But no worries, in the end everything will fall back on the taxpayer’s money that was meant in the first place to provide the services that timdog in his leftwing utopia had foreseen, until even this pot of gold is empty and cannot be replenished fast enough.Arie brand
Are you American? I ask because the idea to use these foreign gentlemen as bugaboos seems to have originated there among the likes of Pat Buchanan etc.
No, I’m not but I have lived and worked there for several years. However I still have a network and return regularly to visit and keep my ‘finger on the pulse’.
And I may even be a bit of a paleoconservative à la Pat Buchanan. 🙂And now I have to stop writing because I’m suffering from a tenacious case of conjunctivitis – thank you Bali’s polluted air – and I can hardly see anything through the blur.
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Well, thanks for clearing that up ET. The global banking crisis of the 21st century is the fault of brainwashed cultural marxists. I would never have guessed.
Hope the eyes get better soon mister; it’s no fun seeing red…
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newly formed academics from the social and political sciences who were at that time highly influenced by Herbert Marcuse et al. Their goal was to become influential in the opinion making establishments of education and the media. They adopted the notion of political correctness in order to help bring about a new paradigm based on Marxist principles. They were the fear of corporate America (and Europe) and many multinational corporations like Exxon (where I was employed at that time) quintupled the manpower of their Public Affairs Departments in an attempt to counterreact to what they saw as a threat from within Western society itself.
Well I fear that Exxon was wasting its money. During the seventies I was employed in the social science departments of three different universities in three different countries (Scotland, the Netherlands and Australia) and I cannot recall that Marcuse was discussed at all – not one single time. The mood in social science departments then had more to do with the idea of the social roots and relativity of all knowledge and Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” was a far more influential book in these particular academic parishes than any of Marcuse’s.
And what, pray, has dropping the keys of a house that can no longer be paid for in the letterbox of a bank got to do with Marcuse?
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If I described you timdog as a beardy oul’ lefty in sandals whining about schools an’ ‘ospitals all the time and how old Etonian toffs are behind all iniquities, you’d justifiably ignore me.
When you, as you invariably do, dismiss those with whom you disagree with your “right wing saloon bar bores” spiel I too tend to switch off.
When you can’t debate without resorting to tired old stereotypes you know you’ve lost the argument.
Ari, did you seriously never encounter any of these leading thinkers behind the New Left movement who you claim you never heard of but who you nonetheless can assure us had not the slightest influence in modern day left wing ideology?
You really mustn’t have been paying attention in tutorials old man, or else you deserve a refund on your tuition fees.
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Nice work BB. So rather than actually respond to what was a firm and example-based challenge to your claim that it was actually “so true as to be beyond discussion” that gays, foxes and immigrants were actually the driving priorities of the modern Labour Party, you decide to throw up your hands and say “I’m not playing any more” becasue of – what was it? Mention of a bloke in a pub?
I would point out that the line in question actually wasn’t a jibe at “right wing saloon bar bores” (nice phrase there mister; never used it myself, but maybe I will next time), but a serious point – that those sectors of the UK print media pursuing a rightwing agenda (i.e. most of it), repeat certain lines over and over and over: “post code lottery”, demon NHS nurses and filthy hospitals, “political correctness gone mad”, we’re being “swamped” by asylum seekers and, yes, “Labour only cares about gays and immigrants”, until, purely through repetition, they obtain the status of a given. And then, of course, blokes in pubs, and blokes on blogs, and blokes in fishnets and high heels start telling you that the “fact” that Labour’s core agenda is the wellbeing of gays, foxes and foreigners is so true as to be beyond discussion (and the last government’s record on reviving the NHS, support for the elderly and for impoverished young families be damned!)…
But if you don’t want to play any more, well, never mind…
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Ari, did you seriously never encounter any of these leading thinkers behind the New Left movement who you claim you never heard of but who you nonetheless can assure us had not the slightest influence in modern day left wing ideology?
You really mustn’t have been paying attention in tutorials old man, or else you deserve a refund on your tuition fees.
In the period I described I was giving tutorials, not following them. And I never said that I had not heard of them, only that they haven’t had the influence that is ascribed to them in that fairy tale about “cultural Marxism aka the Frankfurt School”. My Leiden doctoral dissertation about the Frankfurt School, specifically Habermas, as compared to Weber was the first in Holland about that topic. So I did hear of them, yes.
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So rather than actually respond to what was a firm and example-based challenge …
Those facts would be the nonsense printed by the so-called right wing press in the UK which claims that the Tories “slashed” spending in the NHS under Thatcher, would it?
Have a look at this graph, pay particular attention to what happened to the spending on health after the 1997 Labour general election victory.
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/spending_chart_1979_2000UKp_11s1li011mcn_10t
You don’t actually believe all that nonsense about Tory cuts that is reported in what you naively imagine is a right wing British media, do you? The Tories have never cut spending on welfare and health, right-wing pub bores like me wish they would occasionally.
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BB, without questioning the veracity of the figures used on a page compilled by a self-proclaimed rightwing blogger whose key bugbear appears to be the spending of money by the government, any government, on anything, I would issue a summary mathematics lesson (gaurunteed free of cultural marxist brainwashing!) – 5.08% of a 478.51 billion GDP amounts to rather less than 5.08% of a 976.33 billion GDP, doesn’t it?
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Oh, and here’s some other statistics:
The Sun – 2,751,219
The Mail – 2,011,283
The Mirror – 1,122,563
The Star – 624,029
The Express – 586,707and then
The Telegraph – 596,180
The Times – 405,113
The Guardian – 229,753
The Independent – 117,084Surely you’re not telling me that four of the first five, including by far the biggest two, and two af the second four, including by far the biggest two, are no longer pursuing a right-wing editorial line? Oh please tell me that they too haven’t been infiltrated by brainwashing cultural marxists? If Richard Littlejohn turns out to be an adherant of the the Frankfurt School, and Melanie Phillips is bent on instilling a secret agenda of political correctness then the gates of the abyss are indeed yawning open…
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The Tories never cut spending on health timdog, or welfare. They increased it, they are still increasing it despite the nonsense today about “Tory cuts” from the BBC and the Guardian, that nasty right wing British media you’re always on about.
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BB, I could bash you out a whole bunch more statistics, like the increase in the number of NHS nurses by something approaching 100,000 between 1997 and 2009, like the fact (yes, one of those!) that you usually had to wait two years for a cataract operation in 1997, but had to wait around three months for the same in 2009. I myself once had to wait a year for something as simple as a USG of my heart in about 1996; I got another one of them in all of three days a decade later. (I could also point out that there’s been a 40% increase in people spending more than 18 weeks on an NHS waiting list since the Con-dems came to power). But I’d actually like to back up and ask you – not least in light of the above (and that earlier bit about my grandma) – for some more details about the assertion that “foxhunting, gay rights and race” are the actual priority issues of the modern Labour Party, something allegedly “so obviously true that it barely merits discussion”…
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Bill Berkowitz wrote an interesting article on right wing fancies about “cultural Marxism”:
Right-wing ideologues, racists and other extremists have jazzed up political correctness and repackaged it — in its most virulent form, as an anti-Semitic theory that identifies Jews in general and several Jewish intellectuals in particular as nefarious, communistic destroyers. These supposed originators of “cultural Marxism” are seen as conspiratorial plotters intent on making Americans feel guilty and thus subverting their Christian culture.
In a nutshell, the theory posits that a tiny group of Jewish philosophers who fled Germany in the 1930s and set up shop at Columbia University in New York City devised an unorthodox form of “Marxism” that took aim at American society’s culture, rather than its economic system.
The theory holds that these self-interested Jews — the so-called “Frankfurt School” of philosophers — planned to try to convince mainstream Americans that white ethnic pride is bad, that sexual liberation is good, and that supposedly traditional American values — Christianity, “family values,” and so on — are reactionary and bigoted. With their core values thus subverted, the theory goes, Americans would be quick to sign on to the ideas of the far left.
The very term, “cultural Marxism,” is clearly intended to conjure up xenophobic anxieties. But can a theory like this, built on the words of long-dead intellectuals who have little discernible relevance to normal Americans’ lives, really fly? As bizarre as it might sound, there is some evidence that it may. Certainly, those who are pushing the theory seem to believe that it is an important one.Read more:
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Hope the eyes get better soon mister; it’s no fun seeing red…
No need to become vicious, timdog. If leaning left for you means genuine concern for more social justice, care for the less affluent and redistribution of excess wealth one can only applaud. If, on the other hand, someone else’s reasons for being suspicious of what the New Left stands for seem incomprehensible and deserve to be ridiculed then the only conclusion is that we are on totally different wavelengths.
Amen. -
No need to become vicious
ET, in all seriousness I was only being funny rather than vicious. And I genuinely do hope the eyes get bet soon. For the record I’m currently labouring under the bout of bronchitus that visits me at least once every rainy season…
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Arie Brand,
Nothing to do with Jews or anti-semitism. If Marx and some philosophers of the Frankfurt School were Jewish is purely coincidental and of no importance. What’s next? A crypto-nazi and holocaust denial conspiracy of conservative America? Or another attempt to cast the slur of racism and extremism on ideological opponents?
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My Leiden doctoral dissertation about the Frankfurt School, specifically Habermas, as compared to Weber was the first in Holland about that topic. So I did hear of them, yes.
Yes, Ari you have mentioned your seminal work on the Frankfurt School in passing on numerous occasions.
I have always thought it odd that you should choose for such an important thesis a subject which you now claim is actually of no relevance, a bunch of nobodies who influenced nobody and who no one on the Left had ever heard of until a load of right wing nutjobs suddenly got all hot and bothered about them.
Strange.
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Other than the abolition of fox-hunting and Section 28, oh and the cack-handed mess they made of the House of Lords, I am struggling to find anything of lasting import that the 13-year Labour government actually achieved.
They borrowed a humungous amount of money which they lavished on their friends in the public sector bankrupting the country in the process (as oddly enough every Labour government does) but other than the above and all day drinking historians of the future will be hard-pressed to describe Labour’s legacy.
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Arie Brand,
re. Cultural Marxism, I’d rather prefer the term New Left. Cultural Marxism sounds too academic while New Left describes more what it really stands for. Some ideological emanation of sixties countercultures that needed a platform and grafted itself on the traditional leftwing parties and the emerging environmentalism (e.g. Mr. Daniel Cohn-Bendit) and labelled them ‘progressive’.
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BB wrote:
Ari, did you seriously never encounter any of these leading thinkers behind the New Left movement who you claim you never heard of
next letter:
Yes, Ari you have mentioned your seminal work on the Frankfurt School in passing on numerous occasions.
You are one of those careless readers, BB, who forces one to state repeatedly “I never said …” etc. So , I never said that these people were “nobodies”, I just claimed that they were not the spooks conjured up by those right wing “cultural marxism” crusaders. Habermas is of course a most important philosopher/sociologist.
ET, I am glad you have dropped the term “cultural marxism” – even though you deny it the whole movement around that is a rather smelly business. The “New Left” is of course a quite different kettle of fish. But there too the Frankfurt School was only one of the influences. Perry Anderson (Ben Anderson’s brother) took care, during his time as editor of the New Left Review, to pay attention to it but so he did with French and Italian socialist thought. And the British New Left could draw to a large extent on its own intellectual resources. The Dutch New Left too paid little attention to the Frankfurt School. For instance …Oops, I almost mentioned my “seminal work” again. That would have made it numerous plus one occasions.
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