This might sound like a fairly abstract point, but it is in fact a matter of great practical importance. They are, at root, material-specifically, they depend on the nature of one’s place in the economy. Like Hegel, Marx believed that human identity is constituted by social relationships but-and here is the crucial move-those social relationship are not, as with Hegel, determined by thought, by ideas. Karl Marx-Hegel’s most famous one-time disciple-turned Hegel on his head (and thereby, he argued, put him the right way up). So what has this to do with cultural Marxism? That person, whoever he might be, would not be me.īandying terms like ‘cultural Marxist’ and ‘racist’ around simply as a way of avoiding real argument is shameful and should have no place in Christian discourse. To be Carl Trueman is to exist in a network of specific relationships with other specific people, such that if I try to imagine what it would be like to be me but to have different parents, different friends, and so on, my head starts to spin. To cut through the jargon and to put this simply, Hegel is saying that we know who we are by the relationship we have to others-our parents, our siblings, our spouses, our children, our colleagues, and so on. Here is how he expresses it in his Phenomenology of Spirit: “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (111). Hegel who forcefully argued that human selves do not exist in isolation as self-conscious beings, but only have self-consciousness as they relate to others. To explain what I mean, it’s helpful to sketch some history. In this sense, we all live in Marx’s world now. Indeed, it witnesses to the fact that, while Karl Marx and his progeny may have lost the economic battle, a good case can be made for saying they’re winning the cultural struggle. Yet the emergence of the term, and even its deployment in inconsequential Twitter exchanges, points to an interesting and perhaps disturbing pathology of our times. It has become a verbal bullet, designed to kill any opponent on the left, much as “white privilege” has come to be used to hit those on the right. A staple of the media of Twitter and blogs, it seems to have gone the way of all sophisticated ideas when reduced to a few hundred characters and placed in the hands of those with too much time to troll yet not apparently enough to think. The term “cultural Marxism” has recently entered the mainstream vocabulary of orthodox Christianity.
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