Marx did not consider culture to be an autonomous field; he considered it to be a domain of ideology, and thus an expression of capitalist production relations [ 8 ] . Some scholars, however, attempted to analyze culture from a Marxist perspective, with particular influence coming from the Frankfurt School (especially Theodor Adorno , Walter Benjamin , Herbert Marcuse ), the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci , active in the pre-war period , and the British literary scholar Raymond Williams [ 8 ] . For example, Theodor Adorno analyzed the status of art in capitalism from a Marxist perspective. He believed that mass culture transforms art into a commodity and degrades its value [ 9 ] .
Analyzing culture from a Marxist perspective has attracted the attention of some anthropologists, such as Michael Taussing and Jean Comaroff [ 8 ] . Both scholars sought to understand how local cultures can be a source of resistance to capitalism [ 8 ] .
In the 1990s, the concept of "cultural Marxism" began to function among the far-right in the USA as a kind of conspiracy theory , according to which members of the Frankfurt School had translated Marxism from the field of economics to the field of culture and created an allegedly totalitarian ideology of political correctness [ 10 ] . This concept was used by Anders Breivik to justify his terrorist attacks; Breivik claimed that his goal was to fight "cultural Marxism" [ 11 ] . Proponents of this understanding of the concept include authors such as Patrick Buchanan [ 11 ] , Gerald Atkinson [ 12 ] , William Lind [ 12 ] , Michael Minnicino [ 12 ] .
The correct name for this phenomenon, against which its opponents are opposed, is philosophical postmodernism (especially the theory of poststructuralism ), which does not have Marxist roots but draws heavily on the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger [ 13 ] [ 14 ] .