(Rev Left Radio)The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the WestBreht is joined by A.J.A. Woods, author of The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West. In this conversation, they explore the genealogy of the “Cultural Marxism” myth, the reactionary forces that shaped it, and the way it continues to animate right-wing attacks on liberation movements, critical thought, and social progress. Moving from the upheavals of the long 1960s through Lyndon LaRouche, the New Right, the Tea Party, and today’s panics over “wokeness,” CRT, and gender, Woods shows how “Cultural Marxism” functions less as a coherent theory than as a flexible ideological weapon: one that explains away popular struggles for equality and emancipation as elite manipulation, cultural subversion, and civilizational decay. The result is a rich historical and political analysis of one of the contemporary right’s most influential myths, and of the broader culture-war terrain on which reaction, neoliberalism, and authoritarianism increasingly converge.
https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/the-cultural-marxism-conspiracy-why-the-right-blames-the-frankfurt-school-for-the-decline-of-the-westYouth in Revolt: A Roundup of Protests in Europe and Around the WorldFaced with austerity measures, the dismantling of public education, precarious living conditions, authoritarianism, and — particularly in Europe —opposition to rapid military rearmament, young people are rising up in different parts of the world, rejecting the idea that they should accept deteriorating living conditions at home while being rallied behind their governments’ political and military agendas. The determination young people have shown in the streets could inspire workers to join the struggle, and their unity could carry the movement into workplaces, where strikes and other forms of collective action could deepen the confrontation with the government. France, is currently the epicenter of class struggle, after massive and intense clashes that made worldwide headlines in recent days. The situation is intensifying, with the Macron regime stepping up repression and sectors of the establishment threatening to call in the army, while young people, alongside the Yellow Vests and sectors of the working class, make it clear that they are preparing to intensify the struggle. At the same time, Italy, Spain, Albania, and Portugal are among other countries where the past few days have seen mass mobilizations, sit-ins, and clashes with the police — demonstrating that, beyond the specific circumstances of each country, the rejection of the rottenness of this system is beginning to be felt more and more strongly beyond France alone.
https://www.leftvoice.org/youth-in-revolt-a-roundup-of-protests-in-europe-and-around-the-world/Amadeo Bordiga: The Solution of BukharinWhen later Stalin was asked which fraction was worse, Left or Right, he replied that they were both worse and he made it clear that his plan was to crush both of them. In the meantime, what was the “Stalin” fraction? It was the one that consisted in not having a tendency, in not respecting principles, in administering the state for the state, in governing Russia for Russia, in replacing the position of class and the international position with a national and then imperial position: even assuming that neither Stalin nor his followers were originally aware of it. It seems strange to those who write History “by taking an interest in people” that, from 1927, the right and the left came together to engage in an unequal struggle against the “leadership”. It would be strange to think that in insulting Stalin (ten times less than it should have), the Left was insulting a Right deviation in the theses from which Stalin, true weather vane of politics, had drawn before drawing, as we shall see, from the doctrine and theses of the Left But it is not strange if one makes history by the school of Marx and Lenin and not in the manner of Tecoppa. The explanation does not lie in Joseph Stalin’s “maffioso character”, but it rather another proof that the revolution had been historically “shortened” from a double revolution to a bourgeois-only revolution, wherein the latter the leaders cut each other’s heads to steal ideas and brains. Trotsky himself, tied to the traditions of this struggle, devalued the “Right” even in his subsequent works, and he failed to understand the truth: that the Left and the Right were both on the ground of the Marxist principles, and that the “Center”, in each of its successive turning points in Russian as well as international politics, moved away a little more each time. Trotsky has the immense merit of having, since 1923, individualized this demonstration which was to kill the Marxist party which alone had seized power: the handling of the apparatus of State, cruel and cold machine built to exert the terror on the class enemy, against the party apparatus – and such a pathological crisis stemmed from the retreat of the external revolutionary forces and the mistrust of an overwhelming non-proletarian population towards these revolutionary forces. On this question, the Italian left was completely with Trotsky – but for motives that have nothing to do with later “Trotskyism”. These episodes of abuse did not hurt the non-Marxist demand for “democratic respect for grassroots consultation”, they hurt the Marxist doctrine that the revolutionary dictatorship does not have as physical and concrete subject the people, nor even the national working class in general, but the international and historical communist party. The path of the revolution that retreated from the socialist revolution to the bourgeois revolution was then marked by the maneuvers inflicted by history – and not by the caprice of the “non-collegiate” Stalin, nor by the defamed “capitulators of the Right” – at the machine of the Russian state. When Right and Left saw that most of the Bolshevik tradition and world communism was in danger, they united, but belatedly, after having suffered the end of the Curiatii – in the order Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin – in the struggle against the Stalinist counter-revolution that ultimately killed them. So let us not be astonished if we rehabilitate Bukharin, not of the accusation of having been an agent of the foreign bourgeoisies – a charge that the disgusting exterminators themselves had to swallow as the insane who eat their own shit – but of the strong criticisms that Trotsky himself addressed to the famous “Enrich yourselves!”.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1956/12/bukharin.html