From Class to Culture: Ideological Landscapes of the Left Thought Collective in the West, 1950s-1980s Andrei A. Znamenski University of Memphis, TN 38152, USA aznamenski@gmail.com Abstract. The paper explores the evolution of the political and ideological land- scapes of the left thought collective in the West. Heavily influenced by the clas- sical Marxian paradigm prior to the 1950s, it gradually shifted to the matters of culture and identity between the 1950s and the 1980s. In the left ideological paradigm, this transformation became known as the “cultural turn”; some early left authors also referred to this shift as “Cultural Marxism.” The latter became a favorite word of choice for scholars and writers on the right. Social scholarship on both sides of the political spectrum have frequently stressed the important role of the so-called Frankfurt School in pioneering the abovementioned transfor- mation. This paper argues that, as far as the mainstreaming of the cultural turn, there were more important intellectual sources that not only came to privilege culture and identity but they also expanded the geography of the left thought col- lective beyond Europe. These sources included racialized Marxism of C.L.R James, William Dubois, and Frantz Fanon (1940s-1960s) and British Cultural Studies, which gradually phased out economic determinism and the class-based approach of classical Marxism by shifting attention to the Third World, race and gender minorities within Western countries, and identity matters in general. Keywords: Marxism, Cultural Turn, British Cultural Studies. 1 Introduction In 2010, sociology professor Rick Fantasia [1], a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, struggled to explain the results of US Congress elections that were disas- trous to democrats and that, at that time, brought a majority to the republicans. Fantasia was part of a Social Forum, a 15,000-strong army of left activists who gathered in De- troit, Michigan. Observing this convention, he noted that most people who arrived at this convention mostly represented various minority organizations that were either in- volved into identity politics or represented immigrant workers. Fantasia also noted a heavy presence of countercultural and environmentalist elements, including New Age seekers. At the same time, the activist scholar pointed out that one important element was missing: working-class people, especially white workers. With frustration, Fanta- sia noted that there were only a few white workers: “The whites were mostly educated members of the middle class, organizers, activists, representatives of philanthropic