Talk:Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36: 30 days

There have been attempts to recruit editors of specific viewpoints to this article. If you've come here in response to such recruitment, please review the relevant Wikipedia policy on recruitment of editors, as well as the neutral point of view policy. Disputes on Wikipedia are resolved by consensus, not by majority vote.

The subject of this article is controversial and content may be in dispute. When updating the article, be bold, but not reckless. Feel free to try to improve the article, but don't take it personally if your changes are reversed; instead, come here to the talk page to discuss them. Content must be written from a neutral point of view. Include citations when adding content and consider tagging or removing unsourced information.

Discussions on this page often lead to previous arguments being restated. Please read recent comments, look in the archives, and review the FAQ before commenting.

view · edit

Frequently asked questions

Some common points of argument are addressed in the FAQ below, which represents the consensus of editors here. Please remember that this page is only for discussing how to improve this article.

To view an explanation of the answer, click the [show] link to the right of the question.

Frequently asked questions about Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory

Q1: Why is this topic called a "conspiracy theory" in the title?

A1: Because that's what the reliable sources call it, and Wikipedia follows what reliable, independent, secondary sources say. See the sources listed in the footnotes in the lead of the article, for example.

Q2: Why is it labeled "far-right" and "antisemitic" in the first sentence? Doesn't that show a biased, leftist point of view?

A2: See answer #1; because that's what the reliable sources call it; see the citations for the first sentence.

Q3: Dworkin (1997) has the term in the title of his book, so the field clearly must exist.

A3: Not if he's the first one to talk about it. Dworkin said (on page 3) that "My account is the first intellectual history to study British cultural Marxism conceived as a coherent intellectual discipline". If he's the first, then either it's not a preexisting field, or no one has discovered or named it before him. Either way, that would be a different topic; this article is about the conspiracy theory dating to the 1990s.

Q4: I came here to read (or edit) about scholars who apply Marxist theory to the study of culture.

A4: Much of this is covered at a different article, Marxist cultural analysis.

Q5: Why is this labeled "antisemitic"? Plenty of people involved with the Frankfurt school were Jewish!

A5: This article is about the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory dating to the 1990s, and the reliable sources consistently identify it as antisemitic. The Frankfurt school is a different topic, and dates back to Germany in the 1920s.

United States Low‑importance

	United States portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject United States, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of topics relating to the United States of America on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the ongoing discussions. Template Usage Articles Requested! Become a Member Project Talk Alerts United StatesWikipedia:WikiProject United StatesTemplate:WikiProject United StatesUnited States
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Conservatism Low‑importance

	Conservatism portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Conservatism, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of conservatism on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ConservatismWikipedia:WikiProject ConservatismTemplate:WikiProject ConservatismConservatism
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Socialism Low‑importance

	Socialism portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Socialism, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of socialism on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.SocialismWikipedia:WikiProject SocialismTemplate:WikiProject Socialismsocialism
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Politics: American Low‑importance

	Politics portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Politics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of politics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PoliticsWikipedia:WikiProject PoliticsTemplate:WikiProject Politicspolitics
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by American politics task force (assessed as Low-importance).

Discrimination Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Discrimination, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Discrimination on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.DiscriminationWikipedia:WikiProject DiscriminationTemplate:WikiProject DiscriminationDiscrimination
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the importance scale.

Judaism Low‑importance

	Judaism portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Judaism, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Judaism-related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.JudaismWikipedia:WikiProject JudaismTemplate:WikiProject JudaismJudaism
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Skepticism Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Skepticism, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of science, pseudoscience, pseudohistory and skepticism related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.SkepticismWikipedia:WikiProject SkepticismTemplate:WikiProject SkepticismSkepticism
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Alternative views Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Alternative views, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of significant alternative views in every field, from the sciences to the humanities. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion.Alternative viewsWikipedia:WikiProject Alternative viewsTemplate:WikiProject Alternative viewsAlternative views
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

This article has been mentioned by multiple media organizations:

David Auerbach (2014-12-11). "Encyclopedia Frown". Slate. Recently, an adequate and fairly neutral page on 'Cultural Marxism,' which traced the history of Marxist critical theory from Lukács to Adorno to Jameson, simply disappeared thanks to the efforts of a single editor.
Russell Blackford (2015-07-27). "Cultural Marxism and our current culture wars: Part 1". The Conversation.
Russell Blackford (2015-08-02). "Cultural Marxism and our current culture wars: Part 2". The Conversation.
McKinney, Kara (2021-11-29). "Tipping Point". One America News Network.
Alexander Riley (2022-05-12). "On Cultural Marxism, the Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory? Woke Deception at Wikipedia". Minding the Campus.
Shuichi Tezuka (2023-12-11). "Introducing Justapedia". Quillette.
Paul Gottfried (March 19, 2025). "Twisting the truth: Wikipedia's ongoing misinformation war". TheBlaze.com. Retrieved March 20, 2025.

A warning about certain sources: There are two sources on the subject of "Cultural Marxism" that represent a citogenesis or circular reporting risk to Wikipedia as they plagiarize verbatim directly from an outdated draft that came from Wikipedia, which can be found here (2006 revision here). The sources are N.D. Arora's Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2013) and A.S. Kharbe's English Language And Literary Criticism (2009); both are from publishers located in New Delhi and should be avoided to prevent a citogenesis incident.

Sources should be more accessible

For a controversial subject like this, it should be encouraged to have sources linking to accessible websites that aren't paywalled or have to be viewed through academic journals or books. Yourlocallordandsavior (talk) 10:28, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That’s not our problem and we can do nothing about it. Dronebogus (talk) 10:44, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

On paywalled sources, see WP:PAYWALL. Sadly the WP:BESTSOURCES are not always open access and for a contentious topic we should use best sources. I don't see excessive use of paywalled sources here. Are there specific contentious factual claims we make here that you are concerned about the sourcing of? BobFromBrockley (talk) 11:08, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Academic journals and book are generally the best sources. A lot of them are viewable through the Wikipedia Library. TarnishedPath^talk 14:20, 21 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Cultural Marxism was highly influential throughout Europe and the Western world, especially in the 1960s when Marxian thought was at its most prestigious and procreative. Theorists like Roland Barthes and the Tel Quel group in France, Galvano Della Volpe, Lucio Colletti, and others in Italy, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and cohort of 1960s cultural radicals in the English-speaking world, and a large number of theorists throughout the globe used cultural Marxism to develop modes of cultural studies that analyzed the production, interpretation, and reception of cultural artifacts within concrete socio-historical conditions that had contested political and ideological effects and uses. One of the most famous and influential forms of cultural studies, initially under the influence of cultural Marxism, emerged within the Centre for contemporary cultural studies in Birmingham, England within a group often referred to as the Birmingham School.

Source Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies Douglas Kellner (http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/) Isaw (talk) 13:19, 31 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

https://www.pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/articles.html Isaw (talk) 13:26, 31 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Isaw From the sources presented to date (1) the primary name given to the field of study you're talking about was at no time "C/cultural Marxism"; it was usually called "Cultural Studies"; and (2) for the last 20 or 25 years, the clear primary topic for the phrase "Cultural Marxism" is the far-right trope/conspiracy theory, which has little or nothing to do with (Marxist) Cultural Studies as it existed in 1990s academia. The titles of a couple of publications in the 1980s and 1990s have no impact on either of those well-sourced conclusions. Newimpartial (talk) 15:56, 31 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Why has the info about the Barnes review been taken off?

William S. Lind gave a speech about the topic for The Barnes Review, which was primarily a holocaust denial magazine run by Willis Carto... seems like a pretty obvious way to prove the theory was popularized by White Supremacists. 117.102.129.40 (talk) 02:29, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yeah, sources:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020628141751/http://www.barnesreview.org/Conference/

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/cultural-marxism-catching/

117.102.129.40 (talk) 02:32, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There's an academic source on this too. Talks about The Barnes Review on pages 13 to 14.

[1]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0031322X.2024.2373578?scroll=top&needAccess=true 2A0A:EF40:4E:2301:D1FC:B58A:8048:1B72 (talk) 15:01, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Cultural Marxism was not a white supremacist conspiracy theory. It was an established academic field in education in the 1980s and 90s. I would say most populated by leftist or left leaning academics. I know because I was in that field. I can supply sources. There were conferences and books discussing cultural marxism. The revisionism of cultural marxism being a conspiracy theory is a later development. It is very easy to check if such references exist. Isaw (talk) 11:51, 31 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For the academic topic, see: Marxist cultural analysis. This isn't revisionism, there certainly is a conspiracy theory pushed by the Heritage Foundation and Jordan Peterson, among others. 1101 (talk) 19:33, 31 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

https://www.pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/articles.html clearly shows Cultural Marxism as an academic field in education in the 1970s and 1980s Isaw (talk) 13:27, 31 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Isaw I'm afraid you aren't reading those sources correctly: from a quick perusal, precisely *none* of them establish that "Cultural Marxism" twas the name of an academic field in the 1990s (or earlier). Newimpartial (talk) 15:45, 31 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]