A section of Indian elite drawing inspiration from Cultural Marxism: economist

Cultural Marxism, originating from Antonio Gramsci's ideas, has spread to India's intellectual elite, says Prof. Kausik Gangopadhyay.

The impact of Cultural Marxism is not confined to the United States but many within India’s intellectual elite look to the West for inspiration, potentially resulting in the widespread adoption of those ideas within Indian society, according to Kausik Gangopadhyay, Professor of Economics, Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode.

He was delivering the Dr. B.S. Harishankar (archaeologist and historian) Memorial Lecture on the topic ‘Cultural Marxism - a Critical Look’, organised by the Bharatheeya Vichara Kendram here on Thursday.

Prof. Gangopadhyay said Cultural Marxism, also called neo-liberalism, left-liberalism, or progressivism by the adherents, had emanated from the work of Antonio Gramsci, a communist leader from Italy who applied the ideas of Marx to the cultural domain. Gramsci’s application of Marxist ideas to the cultural sphere is what scholars like James Lindsay commonly refer to as Cultural Marxism, he said.

Cultural Marxism, he said, had made its way to the Frankfurt School in Germany, where scholars like Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno further refined such ideas. Herbert Marcuse, a student of this school, sought refuge in the United States during the Nazi era and introduced these concepts at Harvard University. This intellectual tradition also gave birth to Critical Theory and Postmodernism, Prof. Gangopadhyay pointed out.

He said Sheldon Pollock, an American scholar of Sanskrit who demonises the Sanskrit language as the cause of the Nazi Holocaust, had appealed to Critical Theory in the domain of Indology. The adherents of this theory believe in capturing media, academia, and pop culture to propagate the theory, which has actually happened in the United States, resulting in dogmatised education and sexualised content in school textbooks, he said.

Prof. Gangopadhyay said Cultural Marxism also promoted ‘Cancel culture’ in the US, resulting in an effective ban on alternative viewpoints in American university campuses and much of the American media.