I researched the idea of ‘Social Marxism‘ on the internet, and found nothing. But I did find many entries for ‘Cultural Marxism’ here defined in ‘The Urban Dictionary’ as:
The gradual process of destroying all traditions, languages, religions, individuality, government, family, law and order in order to re-assemble society in the future as a communist utopia. This utopia will have no notion of gender, traditions, morality, god or even family or the state. The Philosophy was proven not to Work already by Vladimir Lenin as he tried in vein to control and subjugate the people. He admitted before he died that capitalism was the only true system in which people understand how to live with each other…. Lenin knew that there were a few western Idiots who kept spreading the communist ideas long after Lenin gave up…. he called these people useful idiots as they had more emotion than brains and could be used to subvert the western states for a military takeover in the future as the citizens would already be perverted and sick and weak from poisonous ideas, decadent lusts and mindless entertainment.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cultural%20marxism
If you read the first two sentences carefully , with little or no change this could be a definition of the Neo-Liberalism, whose reason d’etre is to destroy the Western republican tradition and replace it with the ‘Free Market’ and its Austerity/Penury for the 99%.
On the blatant nihilism of the Neo-Liberal project see: ‘Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution’, by Wendy Brown
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos
Communism in Europe collapsed in 1991 and Neo-Liberalism collapsed on 2008.
Look at Noam Chomsky’s political evaluation of Lenin, in which he calls Lenin a ‘Right Winger’:
Or see this entry on the Frankfurt School :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
On Theodore Adorno, one of the founders of the Frankfurt School, read ‘Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius’ by Detlev Claussen. I found this book informative , judicious not to speak of fascinating reading.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057135
Or The Melancholy Science : An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno by Gillian Rose, which I am currently reading:
https://www.versobooks.com/books/1555-the-melancholy-science
The notion that Marx and Marxism are somehow ‘alien’ to the Western Philosophical/Political Tradition, rather than integral of a critical tradition that reaches back, even if just an echo of Kant’s imperative of ‘self-emancipation from tutelage’, is not an exaggeration.
Your shopworn recitation of old Cold War hysterics about ‘Marxists, Socialists and Communists’ -in the throws of those hysterics you miss the New Deal Tradition, and its Left Wing Social Democrats: FDR and his allies. Not to speak of two of its contemporary exponents Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Is the Financial Times open to all who can pay the monthly subscription rate? Or is it the exclusive territory of Capitalist apologists/rationalizes?
StephenKMackSD
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