From a 2020 interview:
Jennifer Grossman [43:41]: Is Cultural Marxism a real thing? Where are the greatest dangers? And how can we fight against it? Maybe you could just start with what is Cultural Marxism.
Stephen Hicks: The quick-and-dirty version is that Cultural Marxism is a real phenomenon, and it is a danger. The quick genealogy is to start with classical Marxism in the 1800s. And that’s the Marxism is formulated primarily by Marx and his colleague, Friedrich Engels.
Fairly quickly, by the end of the 19th century on into the early 20th century, lots of smart people who buy into classical Marxism recognize that it has problems. Yet they are committed to Marxism. So they introduce some significant changes to Marxism, but nonetheless retain most of the bases of Marxism. So I think it’s fair to say, second-, third-, fourth-generation, you had Neo-Marxisms. Leninism is an example of that. Marxism-Leninism is a neo-Marxism.
But then a new school of thinkers—after World War One but before World War Two—argued that we (Marxists) needed to make some more fundamental changes. There are elements of the Marxist framework that are right—the determinism, the idea that we live in an oppressive society, that capitalism is exploitative, and so forth—all of that is correct. But Marx is wrong in making economics fundamental, that there are other cultural forces, aside from economics, which we have to understand contemporary society. So, we should understand that it’s not just economic oppression, but also family oppression, also racial oppression, also sexist oppression, and so forth. Or it’s also human beings oppressing and exploiting the environment. So if we’re really going to understand how sick our society is, we can’t just be mono-maniacally focusing on economic issues the way classical Marxism is. Cultural Marxism is a generalization on the Marxist themes to say there are many interacting elements of culture, but it’s still broadly speaking a Marxism. That is the most important Left movement prior to World War Two.
But then, after the pause of World War Two, we get into the 1950s. And we start thinking about everything again. The old Left, which had been dominated by classical Marxism, is widely seen as problematic. And then we have the shift to the New Left, that we’re all familiar with from the 1960s. And Cultural Marxism was probably the most important framework of the New Left. But of course, things have moved on, there are still cultural Marxists around. But it’s not the only version. And I’m not even sure it’s the most important version of Leftism anymore.
The full interview is here:
Related: Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, in the Philosophers Explained series.