Culture wars: We need to take care about who we label 'Marxist'

The only problem is that the old beardie philosopher and Communist revolutionary is now, well, completely unrecognisable.

In his new fantasy guise, the author of the the turgid Das Kapital isn’t trying to overthrow capitalism, he IS capitalism. In fact, according to some Republican high-ups, Marx’s followers are responsible for all the “wokery" in corporate America.

Yes, there are people who think Bud Light used a trans woman in its advertising and Disney cast a woman of colour as the Little Mermaid because of a sometimes unreadably boring 19th century thinker.

I wish I could make this make some sense. I am not sure anybody can. This is just how scrambled people’s brains get after tuning in to Fox for a few decades.

Scottish education: Decline in learning languages is making us poorer

Across the Atlantic the word “Marxist” has become a meaningless slur for anybody even mildly liberal or progressive, even if they are – I kid you not – Wall Street financiers.

It has been this way for a wee while now. But it is worth stopping for a moment to bask in the sheer absurdity of US popular and populist culture still being haunted by the spectre of communism, three and a half decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I guess, like Old Man Karl said in one of his best one-liners , ‘the tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living”.

So, hey, yes, labelling people this way must stir some old enmities and fears. But is it fair or accurate? Usually not. And what are we now supposed to call actual Marxists, including perfectly respectable ones?

Some of those smeared as left ideologues would not recognise dialectics if they were delivered to them personally by the Owl of Minerva spreading its wings at the falling of dusk.

The “You’re a Marxist” slaggings arrived on Scottish social media from America a few years back. Now they are – increasingly – seeping in to the mainstream.

This is hardly a revelation for anybody who has been paying attention. But should we not be talking about it? Because it is getting pretty bizarre. And potentially toxic.

The Scottish Greens, for example, are routinely described as Marxists even though that is far from what they are in reality.

READ MORE: Pronouns culture war: Does it matter what people call themselves?

The environmentalist party is definitely anti-capitalist and back in 2020 some members tried to have it declare itself ‘socialist’ but failed to win the two-thirds majority at conferences to do so. So the SNP’s coalition partners definitely include watermelons, reds with green skins. But Marxists? Nah. Like Disney and the makers of Bud Light they are innocent of the charge.

Those throwing the M-word around hope their audiences either do not know or care enough to notice the slur does not fit.

Adam Tomkins, the former Tory MSP, last year equated the Greens with the Bolsheviks, the violent splinter group behind Russia’s October Revolution of 1917. The law professor was surely joking: Patrick Harvie is not going to storm Holyrood Palace on his bike.

There is clearly an agenda to frame environmentalism – even in its relatively establishment-friendly and democratic Scottish incarnation – as “extremist”, another word that is routinely used where it is not warranted.

We can all be guilty of a bit of hyperbole. There is nothing new in comparing opponents with violent authoritarians or extremists. Winston Churchill, remember, suggested Labour’s Clem Attlee would “need some kind of Gestapo” to deliver his promises, like creating the NHS.

READ MORE: David Leask: A century after fascism’s first victory, we must wise up to the new-look far right

Indeed, the whole “lefties are all Marxists” shtick reminds me of how routinely conservatives have been unfairly branded Fascists over the years. All this rhetoric does is rob us of the vocab we need to describe real political forces and ideologies.

I make this point because much of the growing patter about liberals, lefties, Greenies and even Scottish nationalists being Marxists has fascist roots. And by “fascist” I mean actual “fascist”.

I am talking about the term “cultural Marxism”. This weird little formulation started oozing in to Scottish and UK online discourse last decade. But it has a longer and more sinister pedigree.

Its precursor – Kulturbolschewismus – was mobilized by the Nazis against left-wing and Jewish scholars reimagining Marx and other thinkers for a new century, especially those in what became known as the Frankfurt School.

By the 1990s America’s alt-right started talking about a whole range of critical theory on gender, race and sexuality as “Cultural Marxism”.

This narrative, with its flimsy justification that the Frankfurt School influenced such thinking, is now at the heart of a conspiracy theory that a powerful group of mostly Jewish intellectuals is waging a war against traditional Christian family values.

Not everybody who talks of “cultural marxists” is a Jew-hating conspiracy theorist. But enough are – including Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik – to make racism experts very worried indeed.

Back in the summer of 2018 a leading Young Conservative tweeted the term. There was backlash – an article in The Courier – and the offending post was deleted. Let us hope the youngster – who is now pursuing a career in politics – was just being daft and learned his lesson.

Others did not. Scroll forward a year and Suella Braverman, now the UK’s Home Secretary, used the term. That prompted the Board of Deputies of British Jews to urge her and other politicians to avoid such anti-semitic language. Not everyone heeded their warning.

Rank chat about Cultural Marxism is no longer just on the fringe. Sure, the internet brims with weirdos – the creeps who obsess about sex education and the cranks who hate foreigners – who bang on about their attempts to counter some sinister woke cosmopolitan plot. Their dogwhistles should give us earache. But do we really want our any of centre-right democratic politicians indulging American far right jargon?

I don’t think so.