Why Culture War?

The modern left are hard to make sense of. At first the left seem to be a bunch of victims. From a Nietschean perspective, one might conclude they seek religious rebirth. So they can wreck the revenge of the slaves once again, to turn the table on their masters (the capitalists)! It's not at all like that. The unifying thread in leftism is the culture war. When the old Soviet Empire died, beginning 1989, the left finally understood that the socialist economy fails because it creates inefficiencies all over the place. They came to believe they can never win an economic argument because Capitalism is intrinsically, effecient at allocating resources by markets. In place of arguing for a socialist economy the left initiated various culture wars. Such as: climate, trans rights, gay rights, immigrant rights, anti-racism, feminism? [note the question mark]. I'm making it sound like a conspiracy which it isn't. The seeds for cultural Marxism were sown in the 1930s when Antonio Gramsci began writing his Prison Notebooks. Gramsci's work was translated from Italian. It became hot intellectual property in the 1970s among the New Left; as they sought their own brand to distinguish themselves from the Leninist and Trotskyist politics of the, then current, far left.

Feminism kind of stands out here as a non-left concern. By the 1970s feminism had become a career and lifestyle concern for hetero women. Almost all women. Conservative women may not have been calling themselves Feminist but they adopted many of the formal demands of the feminist movement. Feminism always grated against Marxism too. Especially radical feminism but also middle class feminism. It seems to me that feminist thinkers, more so than gay, environmentalist, or anti-racist thinkers, were adept at challenging Marxism. In contrast trans rights offer leftists a blank slate to wage a culture war with. Almost a new kind of secret weapon! The constituency (of trans people) may be tiny, but lefties can make up whatever they want, provided it rhetorically "advances trans rights". Today's apparent conflict between women and trans people (men) is best seen as a chess move in the culture war.

By 1980s other Marxisms such Andre Gorz's Existentialism/Critical Theory fusion began to arrive too. All pointing to cultural politics. All these other concerns: women's equality, anti-racism, environmentalism, gay rights were to trump economics. The title of his book gives it away: "Farewell to the Working Class - An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism". All strands in Marxism were moving to culture to argue for change. By the late 1980s, Marxist economics was almost dead. So rather than see this as something planned one must understand it as leftists occupying the ground at Universities and adjusting anti-capitalism to mean something new: a new culture rather than a new economy. It morths into a culture war because with such flimsy politics, one must constantly go on the offensive to rally one's troops into an anti-capitalist army. As Hegel (or his anti-mirror: Marx) might have said: modern left politics became a culture war because that was the only niche an opposition could occupy.