WI the idelology of the Soviet Union is cultural Marxism

Galba Otho Vitelius

This is an amazingly silly counter-factual, but its actually no worse in this regard than the "Soviet Union embraces Objectivism" that someone just posted, so OK here it is.

Frankfort School Marxism suffers from being mostly described by its critics, but the most neutral short description I can come up with is that it replaces the working class as the center of class struggle with various culturally marginalized groups. The Frankfort School theorists IOTL came about after the creation of the Soviet Union.

What if Russian intellectuals, for whatever reason is germane to 19th century Russian intellectual life, came up with the same ideas in a Russia context, and whoever won the early power struggles in the Soviet Union made cultural Marxism the center of Soviet ideology.
 

David T

Galba Otho Vitelius said:
This is an amazingly silly counter-factual, but its actually no worse in this regard than the "Soviet Union embraces Objectivism" that someone just posted, so OK here it is.

Frankfort School Marxism suffers from being mostly described by its critics, but the most neutral short description I can come up with is that it replaces the working class as the center of class struggle with various culturally marginalized groups. The Frankfort School theorists IOTL came about after the creation of the Soviet Union.
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This has nothing whatever to do with the ideas of Horkheimer, Adorno, etc. It may have some basis in some of the later works of Marcuse, but that is decades after the original Frankfurt School. In general, talk of "cultural Marxism" has about as much precision as talk of "cultural Bolshevism"--and is perpetrated by roughly the same kind of people... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory
 

overoceans

But, okay, disppensing with the rather awkward conscription of the the Frankfurt School into this scenario, maybe we can whittle it down to "Have the Soviet Union replace the working class as the center of class struggle with various culturally marginalized groups".

And then we have to ask what those culturally marginalized groups would be in a Russian context. For the later Marcuse(as an example), they were African-Americans and radical students. But even then, supporting the relatively-affluent radical students wasn't an end in itself for Marcuse: they were to be supported because they were at the vanguard of advancing other causes.

With Maoism, you DID have the replacement of a Marxist-defined proletariat by the peasant class as the primary driver of revolution, but even there, the peasants were important because of their pivotal connection to the economic system; they were not a "marginalized group" in the sense that the OP seems to be using the phrase.

So, I gues if you want Soviet Marxism to be something like what right-wingers mean when they talk about "Cultural Marxism"(not that I agree with that nomenclature, but it probably does point to real political trends), you'd need a Marxism focused on feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights, etc, and much less of economic justice. Also, with a heavy influence from university arts faculties.
 

David T

overoceans said:
But, okay, disppensing with the rather awkward conscription of the the Frankfurt School into this scenario, maybe we can whittle it down to "Have the Soviet Union replace the working class as the center of class struggle with various culturally marginalized groups".
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Lenin did in fact emphasize the need for the Revolution to attract groups other than the class-conscious proletariat--including dissatisfied nationalities. But clearly they were not to replace the working class:

"To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.-to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, “We are for socialism”, and another, somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism”, and that will he a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a “putsch”.

"Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.

"The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a bourgeois-democratic revolution. It consisted of a series of battles in which all the discontented classes, groups and elements of the population participated. Among these there were masses imbued with the crudest prejudices, with the vaguest and most fantastic aims of struggle; there were small groups which accepted Japanese money, there were speculators and adventurers, etc. But objectively, the mass movement was breaking the back of tsarism and paving the way for democracy; for this reason the class-conscious workers led it.

"The socialist revolution in Europe cannot be anything other than an outburst of mass struggle on the part of all and sundry oppressed and discontented elements. Inevitably, sections of tile petty bourgeoisie and of the backward workers will participate in it—without such participation, mass struggle is impossible, without it no revolution is possible—and just as inevitably will they bring into the movement their prejudices, their reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses and errors. But objectively they will attack capital, and the class-conscious vanguard of the revolution, the advanced proletariat, expressing this objective truth of a variegated and discordant, motley and outwardly fragmented, mass struggle, will he able to unite and direct it, capture power, seize the banks, expropriate the trusts which all hate (though for difficult reasons!), and introduce other dictatorial measures which in their totality will amount to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the victory of socialism, which, however, will by no means immediately “purge” itself of petty-bourgeois slag." https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/x01.htm
 
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David T

Mr.J said:
Well, that part seems easy, you just need a larger Russian Empire with more national minorities in it ;)
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National minorities can weaken the Empire at its periphery but you still need someone to defeat it in Moscow and Petersburg...
 

lefthandhummingbird

Marginalised minorities of the Russian Empire? Poles, Caucasians (of the sort that are actually from the Caucasus, not a weird term for white people), Jews, various Turkic and Ugric cultures, and so on. Now, one could imagine socialist movements for self-governance within certain of these cultures, while others would be unlikely to develop that way themselves (I wouldn't assume that, say, the Yakuts had access to the works of Marx, never mind the opportunity to keep abreast with the academic discussion on Marxism). So you'd look at a movement that would attempt to combine the interests of the radicalised intelligentia with those of every minority from Poles to Chukchi.
 
Mr_Fanboy

Mr_Fanboy

Roger II said:
I suspect you'd need a larger set of clearly marginalized minorities in the USSR. Dunno how.
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Maybe a world where the Nazis do much better in WWII, especially in the east, but still ultimately lose. European Russia is mauled much worse, meaning that Central Asians, folks in the Caucasus, etc are a much higher portion of the postwar USSR's population. Hence, more concessions are made to them.
 

Galba Otho Vitelius

One idea I just came up with is for the Tsars to actively move nationalities around their empire, as part of divide and conquer and to provide cheap labor. So you get it so that Russians are minorities in St. Petersburg and Moscow. And since they are the industrial proletariat, the Bolsheviks actively favor the other nationalities over the Russians.

But I don't know how you get later wave feminism (the USSR was already pro women's rights in early wave feminism contexts) into the mix.
 

Dixieland1861

Banned
For the record, "Cultural Marxism" is not an actual ideology the founders and scholars of the Frankfurt School never would have described their beliefs by that name. The term "Cultural Marxism" is basically as user Joke Insurance posted a scapegoat of the Far-Right, it's basically a term made up by the extreme fringes of the right (i.e. Alt-right). While non-racist variants of this theory exist (you"ll hear this theory quite a lot from paleoconservatives and some really hard conservatives) there are also racists/anti-Semites who happen to link to (you guessed) DA JOOZ! (linking the entire Jewish people as a whole to this organization) just because all of it's founders happen to be Jewish (of course their Jewish background is irreverent contrary to these racists when it comes to the founding of the Frankfurt School as their beliefs having nothing to do with them being either Jewish or Judaism for that matter). So why is this thread even created to begin with if the whole "Cultural Marxism" thing is just propaganda created by far-righters and paeloconservatives to blame things like feminism, homosexuality, egalitarianism, Affirmiative Action, multiculturalism, and so-called "Political Correctness" on this one single organization despite some of these movements already having been in full swing or in their early stages prior to the Frankfurt School's founding or DA JOOZ!.
 
Baron Bizarre

Baron Bizarre

And here I thought "Cultural Marxism" was like "Cultural Catholicism", where they called themselves Marxists, but really only Marxed on Christmas and Easter.
 
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