Main Forms

Important forms of cultural Marxism are the collectivization of life and sensibility, mechanization and finally the unleashing of elementary forces. There in certain of its aspect, these tendencies lead to an anarchist liberation of the Self and subjectivity, in other of its forms we see a veritable destruction of the human element, of the feeling of all that is individual and tied to its own proper quality. In a certain measure, it is about the repercussions of an environment in which technique has determined, close to a fatal premise of standardization and leveling, the principle forms of life, sensibility, and taste.

Decadent Art

Alongside technique, Evola mentions modern art. Evola points to modern music which

puts the pure symphonic element over the melodic in a way that leads either to the unleashing of pure rhythm (Stravinsky) or the breakup of so-called atonal music (Schoenberg)

As for pop music, he singles out African influenced music, or more generally, the savage element, which involves not just the snobbish connoisseurs, but

rather the great masses of the entire world, which in the syncopated forms of rhythm, in the motifs of jazz where precisely the essential is formed by the primitive, by pure sound texture in forms of an automatic and obsessive repetition, we find rather more than in any of their traditional music.

How that would apply in particular to pop music is left to the reader, much of which is pure rhythm and no melody, even among those who claim Evola as an inspiration. In pictorial art, he points to the “liberation of”

• pure color (post-impressionism)
• pure form (cubism)
• pure dynamism of pure sensation (futurism)
• pure incoherency (Dadaism)

As for architecture,

the elementary and rational are associated in a single front that chooses for its ideal the functional style of the machine and tries to liberate constructive forms from every residue of decoration, of traditional estheticism, and of the artistic will.

The Traditional Conception

In order to understand the deleterious effects of cultural Marxism, Evola first makes clear the basis of Tradition.

According to the traditional conception, every organization is based on a dualism, on a polarity: on one side there are the forces of the cosmos, that is of order, form, conscious personality; on the other side, there are the forces of chaos, unleashed nature, instinct, the subpersonal. The symbolism of the ancients attributed to the former a divine, luminous, heavenly character and to the latter, instead, a dark and demonic character. The organization needs both these forces, however in a combination according to which the forces of chaos are constrained, ordered, formed and liberated from their primordial nature by the forces of the cosmos.

Such a transformation has various levels, and such levels correspond to as many planes and, in certain civilizations, to as many castes of the hierarchical ordering. At the highest point, this transformation has the human personality appear directly as the virile, regal, and dominating carrier of pure spiritual authority. At the next plane, there is already a residue of elementariness, but it receives the form proper to the warrior, the aristocrat, the military chief: it is the warrior-aristocratic caste. Still lower, there is the bourgeoisie and finally the working mass, which, in this traditional order, also has its ritual mode of living that, for example, is clearly visible in the ethical and even religious character of the ancient guilds.

The Essence of Marxism

The essence and meaning of Marxism and communism is lost on those who do not know how to see in it not an isolated phenomenon and a type of unexpected perversion, but rather the last episode of a series of destructions and subversions that, for the successive levels, have overwhelmed the higher formations of the general hierarchical ordering and, reaching the plane of the masses, have led them to a definitive liberation from every superior principle and there to a unleashing that had to make its immediate expression of a bursting out of the substrate of chaos, of elementariness, and of an obscure materiality that previously had been constrained and formed by higher forces. And so that a purposeful light rises on the fact that in Marxism the ultimate products of the western ideological disintegration meet with the primitivistic, confused substance of a people who, like slaves, have never had the benefit of a true formation and traditional articulation.

Next: Spiritual decadence and conclusions.