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First off, I’m surprised that nobody has brought up James Lindsay and his New Discourses project. Lindsay gets a ton of ridicule from many on the right (some of it justified) and is treated as a joke by the left, but I think he has done a wonderful service on this front. He does sprawling podcasts where he actually reads and deconstructs some of the foundational works of 20th-century post-Marxist thought, tracing the explicit genealogy not only of the ideas but also of the authors. It’s trivially true that most of the writers and thinkers people are taking about have common intellectual mentors and influences, and I think Lindsay does an able job of demonstrating this.
Secondly, people are getting hung up on the specific term “cultural Marxism” when in fact most of the proponents of that school of ideas would instead call it “critical theory”. (There are, of course, various subdisciplines - most famously critical race theory, but also critical fat studies, critical pedagogy, gendercritical, etc.) Critical theory also comes with critical praxis - the specific actions and analytical approaches applied by practitioners of critical theory, who for a while were calling themselves crits. (I don’t remember if it was Richard Delgado who coined the term. I’d have to go back and check.)
In discussions about whether or not “critical race theory” is being taught in K-12 schools, educators will usually protest that critical theory is a college- and graduate-level set of ideas which are both inappropriate for, and impossible to teach to, children. And that’s true! What they are teaching children is critical praxis. They’re teaching children how to apply a critical (and this word has a very different meaning in this context than it does in the phrase “critical thinking”) lens to specific real-world examples.
And what is critical theory? Succinctly, it’s the view that social relations can be accurately described as a set of unequal power relations between socially-constructed affinity groups, such that groups can possess and accrue social capital - the power to disseminate and reproduce a hegemonic set of cultural norms - which, barring intentional efforts to redistribute social capital/prestige, will allow those groups to maintain their dominant cultural power indefinitely. In this sense it is applying the analytical tools and framework of Marx (the dialectic, the identification of complex power relations, the belief in accrued capital as an inherently unjust state of affairs) and treating social/cultural hegemony as the unit of capital, rather than money or land ownership. And much as communists seek to intentionally seize and redistribute/democratize the means of economic production, crits seek to seize and redistribute/democratize the means of cultural production.
Just as the end goal of communism is a world in which no person or group can possess and selfishly hoard more economic capital than another, crits want a world in which no group has more prestige than another. No group feels more “at home” in a certain place, no group feels confident as a majority to impose its cultural norms on others, etc. To get there, we must first identify the current power relations and actively subvert them; the formerly-marginalized must be centered, the hegemonic/bourgeois cultural norms must be relentlessly critiqued and negated, and the means of cultural production must be actively turned toward the dissemination of counter-hegemonic narratives.
I fail to see how anyone can miss that this is Marxist analysis applied to culture and status instead of money. I think that a fair reading of the authors in question will make their intellectual foundations very obvious.
I remembered another thought I had about this. Whenever I have a moment to dive back in to some of the things these folks are saying, I'm always struck by how it seems to me that they should be obviously anti-education. At the very least, against any sort of specialized education that is not completely uniformly applied and achieved. I think the crits have abandoned the old Marxist line of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need", and that might be one of the biggest dividing lines. Because the conceptual point of education is to improve oneself, in terms of understanding and ability. And if one is improved in such a way, they become unequal and unfair. They may feel like their enhanced understanding and ability provides them more prestige. They may feel more "at home" in places that use/need such specialized understanding/ability.
So all through the discussions of things like affirmative action at Harvard, I often find myself wanting to know why these folks are not staying true to their theory and simply saying that prestigious institutions like Harvard should simply not exist. I vacillate in my theory. Could be that I have, indeed, misunderstood something about their theory. Could be that their theory is a mostly-bullshit veneer of credibility slapped on top of what is really just class/race/etc warfare at its core. Could be that it's pure cognitive dissonance in that they've gained all of their power/prestige by means of taking over academia, so they can't bring themselves to 'deconstruct' their own source of outsized power/prestige.
As an aside, I'm pretty sure they've abandoned "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need", because I've asked multiple times if people who are otherwise spouting ideological beliefs that shall not be named are willing to apply this idea to the one area where it is the most likely to succeed - tracking in schooling. Where else do we have such close involvement by parties that are highly invested in accurately assessing a person's ability/need? Parents and teachers are incredibly closely-involved, and they can use a wide variety of assessment methods, methods that are vastly more suitable to the task at hand than we have available for similar assessments in any other realm of life. Where else do we have vast quantities of state dollars committed specifically to providing precisely to the needs of each individual child? If "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is going to work anywhere, it should obviously work best in schools, and I can't interpret that meaning anything other than tracking, identifying those of high ability and asking much of them (with difficult/advanced coursework), as well as those of low ability and providing their needs as best as possible. Yet I cannot find a single person, either an economic Marxist or an ideology-that-shall-not-be-named-ist who is willing to embrace "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
They're way ahead of you. "Why do they go to Harvard, though?" isn't that much of a gocha for people who think society-improving action must be collective. It's on the same level as "if you're in favor of higher taxes, why don't you donate your money to the government?".
I think the slogan was for the workers of the world to unite and slay the capitalists, not that the workers of the world needed to become capitalists in order for their society-improving action to be collective. And at least the people who have a theory that implies that higher taxes are better are willing to say that they're in favor of higher taxes, admitting that it doesn't make sense for them to individually donate their money to the government because of the collective action problem. I would be perfectly happy to just hear people seriously saying that academia is a problem, that it needs to be banished by law, but that due to a collective action problem, they're stuck individually having to game the system. I'm not seeing anyone doing that.
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I'm not criticizing you, as you're just describing, but man. The last one contradicts the others! They have to impose their own preferred cultural norms on others in order to get those things. And can you imagine how utterly insane such an imposition would be? I've talked here before about the Khmer Rouge banning free enterprise and preventing people from picking berries in the countryside, because they might acquire a lot of berries, maybe even sell them on a black market or something, then become unequal and unfair. And that's just economically. Can you imagine not allowing anyone to have more prestige than another? One of the diagnoses I've seen here for what is perceived as a cultural malaise today is that, in the before-internet days, people had all sorts of little local hierarchies that people could climb and feel good about. You could knit the best socks or play the best chess or cook the nicest meal in your little local social circle. Nowadays, everything is so globalized that people can always tear down any hobby you just want to self-improve on and point to the few on Insta that you'll never match up with. Forget whether this diagnosis is true or not or which of those worlds you'd prefer, but can you imagine the extreme anti-prestige black shirt brigade you'd need to make sure that nobody was feeling just a hair too smug about how they won a local chess tournament? When it's worded as bluntly as this, I don't see how they could possibly accomplish their goals without completely grinding down all the hopes and dreams of literally every person on the planet, even more brutally than forcing them all onto the State farm and prohibiting them from picking berries.
That's the contradiction at the heart of all liberalism. They want to be tolerant. But that requires discriminating against "the intolerant." They want everyone to be equal. But that requires unequal power to impose unequal treatment on the naturally unequal. And crits want to get rid of all cultural superiority but that requires themselves to hold cultural superiority.
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The 'crit' term is older than Delgado and actually originally applied to the predecessors of the critical race theorists like him: the critical legal theorists. Once the critical race theorists began to think of themselves as a real distinct group in the 80s and 90s, they were actually the crats, as opposed to the crits, who they were reacting against.
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