Cultural Marxism: WTF do we MEAN by the Phrase?

When a phrase comes to common use it's sometimes useful to dig into its origins a little bit for the sake of better understanding among those who've come to run with it. In the simplest terms, Cultural Marxism is something like and application of Marxist theory more universally to culture itself. But what are the ideas being applied, and how are they developed to apply so universally?

I think the first idea that needs to be explored is Conflict Theory. This is an idea that seems to be developed from Hegel's "thesis/antithesis/synthesis (TAS)" theory of history. Basically, a given historical status quo is always a distribution of power and wealth--thesis; the perceived persistent iniquities inherent to all such distributions will result in conflict between the various classes within society making a redistribution inevitable--antithesis; the class that can muster the most power behind their negotiating position wins the primary benefit from the redistribution and a new status quo is established--synthesis.

Another idea to explore is one of breaking this paradigm altogether. Rather than having cycles of TAS Theory marching endlessly through future generations, how can we disrupt them? Where does the power really lie? Throughout human history power distributed toward the few who could muster support from the masses, therefor the actual power rests with the most numerous class. The workers. All of the material prosperity of a society is the result of the labors of its working class. Somehow, though, none of the wealth or power devolves to them during the conflict resolution toward each new synthesis; it just redistributes among the elites, or among the elites and the professional/merchant/management classes.

Only fleetingly important is the notion of collective control/ownership of the systems of production by the workers--communism--as the antithesis of private ownership--capitalism. (That relationship is, BTW, the big fucking flaw in Marxist thinking.) The more important notion is that every attempt to bring on the glorious revolution either fizzles out or murders a few million workers along with a few thousands of middle- and a few dozens of elite class peoples. At the same time, the "synthesis" results in a few people in control of the power and wealth and the workers all quite fucked.

Herein lies the rub, and the move against culture. If we know the structures of society are distribute power and prosperity in manners that are grossly unfair to the working class, and we know that every time the workers throw their weight behind the middle classes in the battle against the elites for more equitable distributions, the workers and the elite both get fuck good and hard and the middle classes war among themselves for the spoils. We're right back where we started from. How do we liberate ourselves from this seemingly perpetual cycle?

Critical and Social Justice Theory changes the conflict relationships. Class based theory fails, but if you dream up new categories through which to frame Conflict Theory, the members between classes might be united by sex, race, ethnicity, religion, gender...help me out here...the differences among us are legion. The game of Cultural Marxism is to theorize new and exciting ways to get individuals to minoritize themselves into identity groupings that can be/are shared ACROSS class. Every culture in human history has developed to institutionalize norms, and if you can theorize a way to describe normal as a social construct you can denature society and break a culture's institutions.

Here's where we come to the above noted big fucking flaw in Cultural or otherwise Marxist thinking. Marxists of every sort are dreaming of the best possible synthesis. Cultural Marxists are fucking up in exactly the same way Marx himself was doing. Thesis, ANTITHESIS, synthesis. They get the order of operations wrong. They're theorizing every possible manner of antithesis to wield against the industrial power/privilege/oppression complex, ever wishing in both hands that for once in all of the history of human civilizations that the redistribution will eventually turn out to be fair.

Communism is a possible logical antithesis to capitalism, but revolution has lead every fucking time toward murderous socialism instead. Order of operations. Social Justice is a possible antithesis to "culturally embedded injustice," but we have now fucking idea what the synthesis might be. Given the stated goals of razing the institutions, I'm suggesting further study..........