Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

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Turner, Graeme (2002). British cultural studies: an introduction (3rded.). Routledge. ISBN 9780415252287. Gramsci’s major body of work – his voluminous collection of Prison Notebooks – was not published until the 1950s, long after his death in 1937 and too late for him to exert any significant influence on the Frankfurt School. However, his ideas became increasingly influential in the 1950s and 1960s, and especially in the 1970s with the publication, in 1971, of an English translation of selections from the Prison Notebooks. Curtis, Polly (18 July 2002). "Cultural elite express opposition to Birmingham closure". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 7 December 2018.

Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain - Duke University Press

In the upshot, the British tradition of Marxism, especially over the past fifty to sixty years, has been influenced by theorists who emphasize certain styles of critique, including the idea of popular and mass culture as complicit in social domination of the individual and the hegemony of bourgeois ideology. T]he first comprehensive history of British cultural Marxism conceived as a coherent intellectual tradition. . . . Dworkin writes in a readable and accessible style, providing an excellent guide to those unfamiliar with the byzantine complexities of the postwar British Left.” — Martin Francis , Journal of Modern History In this intellectual history of British cultural Marxism, Dennis Dworkin explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought. Tracing its development from beginnings in postwar Britain, through its various transformations in the 1960s and 1970s, to the emergence of British cultural studies at Birmingham, and up to the advent of Thatcherism, Dworkin shows this history to be one of a coherent intellectual tradition, a tradition that represents an implicit and explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar British Left. Unfortunate cultural tendencies, including those that manifest a left-wing style of authoritarianism, can usually be labelled in less confusing, more effective, more precise ways. By all means, let’s develop useful terminology to express whatever concerns we have about tendencies on the Left, but “cultural Marxism” carries too much baggage. As he develops his thesis, Schroyer explains the “crisis theory”, shared by the Frankfurt School with other “cultural Marxists”, as identifying a social process of rationalizing endless growth. This forces social-cultural processes to adapt in ways that undermine individual autonomy ( Critique of Domination, p. 171). More specifically, Schroyer explains the central idea of the Frankfurt School as follows: “As advanced industrial societies developed, the individual was more integrated into and dependent upon the collectivity and less able to utilize society for active self-expression” ( Critique of Domination, p. 227).Nonetheless, there is at least a minimal commonality between the work of Marxist scholars such as Schroyer and the theories of right-wing culture warriors. To some extent they were focusing on the same tendencies in Western Marxism. Thus, there is a grain of truth even in Breivik’s conspiracy theorizing, and I wonder whether this might explain the hostility to including an article on “cultural Marxism” in Wikipedia. The same scholarship that supports Schroyer’s analysis, for example, gives a degree of superficial credibility to the likes of Lind, Buchanan, or Breivik.

Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain - Google Books

Webster, Frank (2004). "Cultural Studies and Sociology at, and After, the Closure of the Birmingham School". Cultural Studies. 18 (6): 848. doi: 10.1080/0950238042000306891. S2CID 145110580.

History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies

More generally, serious intellectual history cannot ignore the complex cross-currents of thought within the Left in Western liberal democracies. The Left has always been riven with factionalism, not least in recent decades, and it now houses diverse attitudes to almost any imaginable aspect of culture (as well as to traditional economic issues). Many components of the Western cultural Left can only be understood when seen as (in part) reactions to other such components, while being deeply influenced by Western Marxism’s widespread criticism and rejection of Soviet communism.

Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain - Scribd DWORKIN, 1997. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain - Scribd

Paul Gottfried. The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2005. Schroyer opens The Critique of Domination by declaring that, “The critique of domination, or the reflective critique of socially unnecessary constraints of human freedom, is as old as the Western concept of reason” ( Critique of Domination, p. 15). It is not clear to me whether Lind and others on the culturally conservative Right invented the term “cultural Marxism” independently, or whether they co-opted the earlier usage of scholars such as Schroyer. I find it difficult to believe that they were entirely unaware of Schroyer’s relatively well-known work; however, I am not aware of any of their writings in which they specifically cite The Critique of Domination (if readers know of any, I’d welcome the information). All the same, the term is widely used, often without explanation. As I stated in Part 1, it has become a familiar meme. Given the confusion surrounding it, it is worth getting together some information on how the term “cultural Marxism” has been employed – whether by right-wing culture warriors, serious scholars, or occasional individuals who might be mixtures of both – what circumstances and ambitions have motivated its use in different contexts, and what real or imaginary social tendencies it denotes. Hall, Stuart (1989). "The origins of cultural studies [videorecording]: a lecture at UMass Amherst".Broadly Marxist critique of specifically British culture assumed increasing prominence from 1956, when both the New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review were founded as important journals of socialist thought in the UK (Ioan Davies, “British Cultural Marxism,” p. 324). These later amalgamated in 1960 to become the New Left Review. This section possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. ( December 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Dennis Dworkin provides a careful and relatively comprehensive assessment of cultural Marxism’s emergence as a postwar British intellectual and political project, which developed around both history-writing and what came to be called cultural studies.” — Dan Schiller, Left History