In our last installment on Cultural Marxism we noted that the new proletariat for this version of Marxism would be culturally disenfranchised. In classical Marxism the proletariat working class was to over throw the oppressive bourgeois ownership class and seize for themselves their rightful place on top in the newly reconstituted cultural order. In Cultural Marxism the same dynamic is at work with the role of the bourgeois being played by those who are instrumental in perpetuating christian culture and the part of the proletariat played by those who find Christian culture to be oppressive.
The way that this has worked out concretely speaking is a pastiche of groups that work in an interlocking fashion to advance the overthrow of a culture that is informed by Christianity. For example, Feminism takes up the attack to overthrow Christian informed culture by insisting that male and female equality means that male and female roles are artificial and thus should be eliminated. Feminism attacks the Christian notion that families, churches, civil magistrates, and business owners should be normatively men. This is said to be sexist and results in the implication that Christianity is by its very nature sexist and so must be overthrown. Another movement that is a part of the cultural Marxist proletariat is the sexual perversion movement. This movement attacks the notion that there is such a thing as sexual mores and standards that a culture should abide by. It thus, along with Feminism, attacks the paradigm of the Christian family. The result is that in a culture where cultural Marxism is being successful there are attempts to redefine what constitutes the family. A third movement that is part of the cultural Marxist proletariat is extreme environmentalism. A Christianity informed culture has always insisted that we are to be good stewards of the earth, while at the same time insisting that man is to have dominion over the earth. The Cultural Marxist environmentalists instead have instead followed a kind of nature worship where man is to be brought down to the level of animal and is to be seen as just one more species among all the species that are to be seen as having equal rights and equal value.
A fourth movement that helps form the constellation of cultural Marxist proletariat organizations are the varied minority movements. This movement becomes a bit more ticklish to deal with because of how successful the cultural Marxists have been with the issue of race. Christianity has no problem including people from every tribe tongue and nation in a culture influenced by Christian categories, but what the cultural Marxist have been successful at achieving is convincing minorities that to be part of the Christian West is the same as rejecting who they are as minorities. Cultural Marxism has convinced a large percentage of minority people that what it means to be part of a minority people is the equivalent to being cultural Marxists. This is so true that many of the organizations that exist to represent minority interests in reality represent cultural Marxist interests. This would be true of organizations like NAACP or La Raza. These groups exist to continue to enlist their people to the cause of cultural Marxism.
High percentages of minorities have been convinced that to be part of Western culture is to embrace being “white.” Being “black” or being “Hispanic” has increasingly come to mean being culturally Marxist. This is unfortunate because the end results of such thinking is the continued enslavement of minorities to a victimization mindset that cultural Marxism nurses and inculcates. This victimization mindset is wonderful for the cultural Marxist agenda but it is horrid for minorities because such a mindset means never rising out of the societal and economic underclass. And the really sad thing is that even if cultural Marxism overthrows Christianity in the West the minorities that are used as the proletariat shock troops to accomplish such a thing will not be any better off then they currently are. They will remain part of the underclass as the leveling effect of cultural Marxism will only serve to spread their misery, not relieve it.
Cultural Marxism, being an attack on Christianity and Christian culture, seeks to rid those who embrace it of all the traditional virtues associated with Christianity and Christian culture. As such the minorities and other groups mentioned that are swayed by cultural Marxism tend to eschew industriousness, frugality, a being oriented to the future, independence, chastity, and other virtues. These are often seen as being traits of being “white,” or “straight” or “Christian” instead of traits that have historically been associated with building successful and prosperous cultures.
One thing in all this that must be kept in mind is that the chief tools that cultural Marxists use to create this proletariat are the tools of envy, resentment, and victimization. All the groups named thus far have a sense that they have been taken advantage of by those who have built Christian culture. They have been ill used and take advantage of. They have been told that they would have advanced if not for the evil Western culture. This creation of a sense of being unfairly kept down is the same tool that the Serpent used in the Garden to entice Eve to throw off God’s authority. This reminds us that a criminal class, which cultural Marxism creates, is a class that will excel at accusing the social order that opposes them of being criminal.
Another part of the reason that the cultural Marxists have been so successful at creating a proletariat and at destroying the fabric of Christian social order is that Christians have lost both their nerve and the ability to overthrow the way cultural Marxist characterize Western culture. Until the West can find its voice in order to defend its culture, and until the West can find people who really do believe in the West the cultural Marxist and their proletariat will continue to own the field of discourse.