Cultural Capitalism vs "Cultural Marxism"

Anyone else here think that we ought to start using a phrase like Cultural Capitalism or Cultural Liberalism as a counter to the "Cultural marxism" conspiracy or the clain that "the Left" have a monopoly on Western culture etc?

What I mean is that it is actually capitalism that is responsible for the degradation and "degeneration" (yes I know these are spooky terms but I'm trying to speak on Zig Forums's terms on purpose here to make a larger point so please bare with me) of culture generally, and particularly of "the West".

Michael Parenti points this out in his book the Culture Struggle and so does Chris Hedges throughout his work, but basically before capitalism became accelerated during the New Deal era and then hyper-accelerated during the neoliberal era, there was a multiplicity of different communities with various organic cultures all existing in the USA and throughout Europe, but as capital needed to expand markets and as the era of imperialism (Lenin's definition IE monopoly capital) and then globalization institutionalized and normalized itself as the definitive next step in capitalist development, the multipolar cultural landscape either was steamrolled over by one (or perhaps a few) uniform corporate mass culture(s) and what we now know as "pop culture" or said particular cultures still exist but are now so assimilated into the generalized mass media and pop culture that they have become too alienated from their origins to really be their own anymore.

The more markets expanded and profits needed to rise ever higher, the more that cultural progressiveness started to lose its anticapitalist character and became an increasingly efficient source of revenue for an ever-growing list of industries (this doesn't mean the fight for women's, minorities, LGBT, etc rights is worthless. Quite the contrary, but I will get into that as this thread goes on) and also a useful tool to split and divide the segments of the Left that were more class focused (see third pic related) by the State. Thus we saw the rise of the pornographic film industry, more PR firms using homosexuality and "alternative" lifestyles to appeal to wider demographics, even something like Woodstock 99 can be seen as an extremely vulgar example of the merging of progressive "countercultural" goals (sexual revolution, drug use for recreation, hyper-rock n roll ) with the neoliberal advertising landscape of the late 20th and early 21st Century (the fact that it was streamed live on pay per view, mTV giving wall-to-wall coverage of the whole thing, the price of an admission ticket, the ultimate realization of the "cool factor" of the late 90s in one big festival, even going so far as to get "antiestablishment" bands like Rage Against the Machine on the bill).

I think you guys see where I am going with this. However, a big problem I am having is that I feel that this argument, while valid, is flawed in two respects:

1) I have seen some "Woke" Rightists (such as S.trasserites, Ecofascists, anprims, members of the "New Right" in Europe and so on) make this exact same argument before but essentially fuse it with their bizarre "Capitalism and Communism are two sides of the same coin" talking point and draw the conclusion that this basically justifies reaction of all kinds, which I don't want to in any way enable

2) It seemingly goes against one of the "positives" of capitalism listed by Marx and Engels IE that the totalitarian nature of capital expanision is in the long-run a good thing since it leads "backwards" cultures into material reality and eviscerates the oppressiveness of old systems (something Zizek uses as an example of this point is the fact that to some degree India was even worse before it was colonized by Britain due to the caste system and also in Pierre Tru-Dank's video about imperialism he brings up how elements of Native American culture were inherently reactionary)

I'm sorry if I'm vulgarizing anything here. I'm not the smartest member of this board by a longshot and due to depression I haven't really been reading as much as I should so I really am not trying to offend or provoke anyone here and just want to have a genuine discussion about this and am just a bit ignorant about some of the more nuanced areas of the points i am trying to make. Thus why I made this thread, I need anons to help me strengthen this argument

Also, I have never read anything by Adorno, but ironically (because he's always listed as one of the forefathers of le gultural margism) from what i have read ABOUT him and the Frankfurt School they seem to pretty much agree that cultural artifacts and attitudes worth taking seriously can only really be preserved under socialism not capitalism. Should I read Adorno on this matter?

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I don't really understand your point? I was saying it's bad that there are Rightists who larp as "woke" (IE anti-capitalist, socialist etc) because they draw the working class away from actual socialists I wasn't trying to say they were a good thing

All culture we get is capitalist. We are all cultural capitalists eating from the trashcan. It's a redundancy.

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Please note that when a right-wing retard uses the phrase "cultural Marxism", "Marxism" can mean anything from black people smiling on a college brochure to when the government does something it becomes more socialister than it already was. Words don't mean anything to these people, and some Zig Forumsyps come in here and willingly admit that they don't care. "Cultural Marxism" was picked up by paleoconservatives during the 90's culture war because it sounded scarier than "Cultural Liberalism", and so it would rile up brain dead boomers who have just finished dusting their copy of The Gulag Archipelago

You are certainly aware of this, for when you mention "woke" rightist, its all about feels>reals for them, they will never formally make a distinction between capital and movement to abolish it, and so don't really expect them to see how capital and culture (or the superstructure) is linked together.

From a socialist standpoint, it does often seem that these morons are useful idiots for their capitalist masters (and more times than not, they do collaborate together), but if the word "capital" and "communism" mean nothing to them, don't expect "cultural Capitalism" to mean anything to them as well.

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Okay so maybe we shouldn't start using "Cultural Capitalism" to counter "le Cultural Marxism" but can you help me grasp the gulf between the preservation of certain cultures and whether or not it conflicts with the notion of capitalism's ability to abolish the old reactionary order?

No, that would be hypocrisy. It only makes sense if you are an idealist to begin with.

No. You can't convince well-to-do first worlders. Lenin, Mao, Che, Ho Chi Minh and even Hugo Chavez showed us that our best bet is to educate and radicalise the most downtrodden proletariat. First worlders live way too comfortably, they would rather choose fascism over proletarian revolution when they run into economic problems.

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There are plenty of downtrodden proles in America despite it being first world.
I think this is only true if there isn't a Leftist movement in said country to help educate those who would talk the proles into fascism and combat their propaganda

fuck off

That's already been talked about by Zizek, and it has nothing to do with with cultural Marxism.

See OP. This retard is a perfect demonstration of my point. Instead of grasping a historical understanding of liberalism and toleration (that has slowly evolved to include LGBT people), the mere suggestion that people outside of straight, white men deserve to be approached as individuals is enough to put him into an autistic fit where he has to prefix everything with the word "Jewish" in order to signify that those are the bad things that have to go away.

This but unironically.

Have we ever considered playing to our strengths instead?

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We're doomed.

What do you mean by "our strengths"?

Proletarian culture isn't capitalist

But where in the first world does proletarian culture really exist anymore? I'm not saying anything about "muh labour aristocracy" I just mean that anything resembling the proletarian culture of the labor movement of the early 20th Century, at least in America, has either been swallowed up by or assimilated into corporate mass culture.

For instance, country music for the most part now exists as boybands do, IE where a pretty face is selected than some boots and a cowboy hat are slapped on him or her while all the music is manufactured by a group of people who have a formula for how to generate hit after hit. A high amount of people who enjoy country music are still white working class people from the South and areas like the Appalachias yet it's not being created by them anymore and has lost any real class character or content it had in favor of selling an image, whether that be patriotism, nostalgia, or whatever, for the proles to escape into and forget the horrors of neoliberalism.

A lot of modern hip hop functions basically this same way, with a lot of rap basically just selling poor and working class black people the narrative that if they rob, cheat, steal, join a gang or whatever they will become rich and famous and that being rich and famous rather than their emancipation, reflection on shared experiences as an oppressed American class, criticism of the private prison industry and racist police who disproportionately target them etc. As I said this has started to change a bit in rap recently but even the new "woke" artists often choose liberal attitudes rather than revolutionary ones and focus on idealistic self-realization type narratives rather than solidarity-based revolutionary action like groups such as early Public Enemy did

Oh you meant as in currently existing culture? Then yeah, I agree, all current culture is capitalist. Obviously there are a few exceptions here and there, for example some music genres, but yeah other than the vast amount of current culture in the entire world is capitalist.

I actually am not that user and I agree with you that proletarian culture is innately anticapitalist but really the only place that still exists is in the third world. That's the one thing I agree with third worldists about although I disagree that this precludes the chance for a new proletarian culture to emerge in the West

Where exactly is it in the third world though? I would say that rather it being anywhere in a specific "world" (first or third) it's loosely present in small amounts all over the world. For example, I live in Chile and the music genre "New Chilean Song",obviously originally from here, is a pretty good example of proletarian culture in a (debatable) first world country, and it's still fairly popular.

I might be fucking up because I've been under the impression that the first world essentially means the West (defined as USA, Canada, the EU) and parts of Eastern Europe and that third world consists of countries that have historically been historically impoverished and plundered by these nations and that there are some countries now who are kind of inbetween.

However I feel like this definition obviously falls short since there's parts of the first world that now look like the third and vice versa, I was really only using the distinction for convenience.

Nope, because CM is a total meme by burgers who banked on the fact that everything that sounds european is scary.

It's true that there's plenty of marxists that went down the idealistic rabbit hole, just because they lost the economic struggle.

I think it's really sad. Because I would really love to read a marxist analysis on the latest 40 years of telecom development written by someone who has a deep education, experience and understanding of telecom.

So saying CL or CC will just enforce the lie.

Isn't it basically the same effect of commodified culture that Foucault talked about? Either way, right wingers are too dumb to understand what words mean so they'll just hide behind their cultural marx boogieman rather than really think about how economic systems work.