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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29660 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Suppose there is a person who is very concerned with social justice. They believe that racism and sexism are among the most serious problems facing our society, they are deeply committed to battling the kyriarchy hydra. They are interested in cultural critique, in sociopolitical theory, and have educated themselves extensively on these subjects. In my experience, such people are not particularly rare, and probably most people commenting here will have encountered several of them.

Based on you experience, how likely is such a person to be familiar with and use the term "late stage capitalism"? My experience would be that it is very likely; does yours differ?

If they do use that term, what do they mean by it?

Why does the kyriarchy hydra in the linked comic have a "class" head, and why is that head resolved into "economics" in the last panel? What sort of economics do you suppose the author intended?

That comic is from the website everydayfeminism. If I search that website for references to "capitalism", I get many, many hits. How many of those hits do you suppose involve discussion of Capitalism as a positive force in the world, versus a negative force? Why should that be?

....I've just searched "Patriarchy and late stage capitalism".

Having previously identified the socialization and naturalization of inequalities, we now look at the influence of capitalism. Although patriarchy pre-existed it - many societies were already characterized by a sexual division of labour, gender-based violence, or gender norms often privileging the male - the specific contribution of capitalism was undoubtedly the institutionalization of the devaluation of women and their work. The devalued or even unpaid domestic work, the concept of the “housewife” that accompanies it, as well as professional segregation, have their origins in the era when capitalism gradually replaced the medieval feudal system. They are thus not, as we often hear, the remnants of a dark and barbaric medieval era, but rather constitutive of the first phase of capitalist accumulation which, as we shall see, led to a phenomenal regression in the status of women.

Judging by this excerpt (or the article as a whole, I'm not your dad), what general branch of political philosophy do you think has formed the author's worldview?

The dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background that models gender difference on class relations. The relation between manager and worker is not just one of “difference.” The manager and worker are situated within a system of social relations that unequally distributes money, power, status, etc. Likewise, men and women aren’t just “different,” but are categories of persons – like manager and worker – that are defined in terms of social relations that position them in a complex class/race/sex hierarchy. Given this background to the dominance approach, it is useful to consider a bit of the history of the relation between Marxism and feminism.

What do you think the author means when she says that "the dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background"? What does it mean to "model gender differences on class relations?" Why do you suppose the author spends so much of their paper discussing Marx? Why does she believe that "Socialist feminism involves a commitment to “the practical unity of the struggle against capitalism and the struggle for women’s liberation." Why is she interested in a struggle against Capitalism, and where does Marx come in to this struggle?

This article argues that modern imagery of the Black female body exists in opposition to sexual health and sexual rights by focusing on existing representations of Black female eroticism as a legacy of colonialism. It addresses Black feminist thought on the history and contemporary use of the Black female body and offers a human rights perspective on uses of the Black female body within patriarchal capitalism.

Where is this idea of "Patriarchal Capitalism" coming from? Do you think the author developed it herself? If not, how did she come by it?

Contemporary feminism is currently at a crossroads, facing a concerted onslaught from both neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. While these ideologies are inherently different—neoliberalism often appropriates feminist language to serve capitalist ends, and neoconservatism typically attacks feminist principles—they similarly reinforce the traditional role of families as providers of welfare. This crisis of alienation in feminism is characterized by three key factors: the gender divisions brought about by feminism’s shift to identity politics, the obscuring of feminist critique of capitalism by the spread of commercialization, and the instrumentalization of feminism in politics. These challenges have resulted in increased class antagonism and the further marginalization of lower-income women, reinforcing one another. To address this multifaceted crisis, a return to Marxist thought is deemed necessary for women’s liberation.

How can Feminism "return" to Marxism, when it never had anything to do with Marxism in the first place?

Anxiety disorders are one of the most prevalent mental disorders globally, and 63% of those diagnoses are of women. Although widely acknowledged across health disciplines and news and social media outlets, the majority of attention has left assumptions underlying women's anxiety in the twenty-first century unquestioned. Drawing on my own experiences of anxiety, I will the explore both concept and diagnosis in the Western world. Reflecting on my own experiences through a critical feminist lens, I will investigate the construction of anxiety as mental disorder in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and biomedical psychiatry.

Where does the idea of "Late-stage Capitalism" come from? What are the other stages?

The term “late capitalism” regained relevance in 1991 when Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson published Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Drawing on Mandel’s idea that capitalism has sped up and gone global, Jameson expanded his analysis to the cultural realm. His argument was that late capitalist societies have lost their connection with history and are defined by a fascination with the present. In Jameson’s account, late capitalism is characterized by a globalized, post-industrial economy, where everything – not just material resources and products but also immaterial dimensions, such as the arts and lifestyle activities – becomes commodified and consumable. In this capitalist stage, we see innovation for the sake of innovation, a superficial projected image of self via celebrities or “influencers” channeled through social media, and so on. In this time, whatever societal changes that emerge are quickly transformed into products for exchange. Unlike those who celebrate postmodernism as replete with irony and transgression, Jameson considers it to be a non-threatening feature of the capitalist system in contemporary societies.

How can Marxist analysis "expand into the cultural realm"? If the term "late stage capitalism" were related to attempts to expand Marxist analysis in this fashion, would the prevalence of the term be some level of evidence for the memetic spread of this expansion?

...In my younger days, this is the point where I would drink several cups of coffee and spend the next twelve hours pasting the first paragraph and a few pertinent questions for every one of the first five hundred search results in the fifteenth tab in my brave window and then wrap it up with six solid pages-worth of compact, four-letter obscenities, but I'm older and I have kids now and my back hurts, so let's not do that.

It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism. It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly. I think the above position can be defended unassailably by looking at the academic output that constitutes the headwaters of the Social Justice movement. I think that those who argue that the obvious, inescapable ties between Social Justice theory and Marxism are some sort of hallucination or sloppy categorization are either woefully uninformed or actively dishonest. To those who have advanced such arguments in the thread on the subject below, I offer an invitation: assuming the above examples are insufficient, what level of evidence would satisfy you? How many papers from how many journals do you need to see? How many quotes from how many prominent figures within the modern social justice movement, and the people who taught them, and the people who taught them, and so on? How far back do we need to go to satisfy you? How deep do we need to dig to bring this question to a conclusion?

Or maybe I'm totally wrong. Let's run with that. If I'm wrong, if the above is the wrong approach, why is it wrong and what would be better?

You're not wrong that the left-progressive memeplex draws a lot from Marx. However, as someone with some training in intellectual history, I would insist that really modern progressives have a pretty-attenuated relationship with Marx. They tend to directly interface more with more recent thinkers who have fairly radically-expanded the Marxian canon from its original roots: e.g. the Critical Theorists and Fanon incorporated Freud, Friere incorporated both Fanon and Rousseau/Dewey, all incorporated their own original insights, and so on. So yes, its "Marxist"...but there's an awful lot of elaboration in there, to the point that it's really unclear what Marx himself would think of it, or whether he would even recognize it if you could unearth and revive him. One analogy might be that modern progressivism is Marxist in the sense the orthodox Marxists were Hegelian. Like, where's the Marxism in the proliferation of radically-divergent sexual mores among the professional classes and capital-owning bourgeois classes? I could buy it if you were talking about the broader left-socialist tradition, referencing important contemporaries of Marx who time has rendered more obscure like Fourier and Robert Owen, but not Marx. In a lot of ways, modern leftists insist they are in a Marxian tradition as much to gain the cachet associated with asserting a famous genealogy than they do because they really care about and have deeply drawn from Kapital etc.

But all this wrangling over the intellectual history (which is incredibly rich and complicated and admittedly fun to wrangle over) aside, if you're seeking to understand and grok modern leftism you're not going to do it just by looking at Marx. And if you want to combat modern leftism you're not going to get very far just by calling it "Marxist." I don't think modern progressivism is an intellectual movement; not really. It, at least as it manifests in its politically-relevant common outbreaks is a morality, a teleology, an zeitgeist; a system of unfalsifiable, unquestioned assumptions about virtue and value that people feel more as vibes, aesthetics, and a priori interpretive lenses than they do as rational arguments for any particular falsifiable theory. It's not any rational system of thought that turns a completely normal list of basic life tasks...and turns it into icky ragebait with the addition of "...for a husband and family" to the end of each of them. Marx is a lot of things, but he's not that, and to the extent his thought has been absorbed into it, it's part of a lot richer inheritance including deracinated, desacralized protestantism, and the same leveller impulse that even appears in some of the wilder parts of the Christian tradition (such as, famously, Christ's admonition to forsake family and wealth to follow Him, the Diggers, Waldensians, early-church communes described in parts of the Book of Acts, and a lot of the religious movements Engels was banging on about in "The Peasant's War in Germany"). And if you want to address it, you need to do so on its own level - catechism of the young, and evangelization (or de-conversion) of adults where possible.

Marxist in the sense the orthodox Marxists were Hegelian

Except in the sense that Hegelianism means something more specific that Marxism isn't, a lot of what's wrong with Marc absolutely comes from an over reliance on Hegel. Marx was just another German working in a tradition of German historicism, but he took on a particularly Hegelian form of historicism that turned out to be congenial with generating evil outcomes.

When asked for his thoughts on Hegel, Wittgenstein replied, "Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different". There is of course a time and a place for both. But my preferences lean towards the latter.

Certainly, the popularity of anti-capitalist rhetoric in woke circles gives it a superficial similarity to Marxism proper. Certain people in those circles may even profess to be Marxist. But we can't always take what people say at face value. It's more important to analyze what they actually think and do. Conveniently, Marx himself provides an example that can be used as an analogy. He and many of his immediate intellectual descendants said that Marxism was "scientific". Is Marxism actually a science? They certainly called it one. They certainly wanted it to be one, since the name "science" bestows a veneer of intellectual respectability upon whatever it adorns. It's easy to find certain similarities between what Marx did and what scientists do; to at least some degree he engaged in a process of hypothesis formation and attempted to measure those hypotheses against empirical evidence. He revised his thinking as new data came in. But in spite of all this, Marxism is still not a science, because in its essential properties it differs from what makes a science actually be a science. The whole enterprise is crucially dependent on ethical and non-empirical propositions.

My position is that you simply have to examine individual leftists on a case by case basis to determine if they're actually Marxist or not; it can't be assumed just because of their adherence to feminism or anti-racism or any other leftist position. There are undoubtedly some genuine Marxists among today's leftists today, but I'm quite convinced that they're a minority. If, after a careful accounting of someone's politics, their revealed preference is for a world that is essentially similar to what we have now, except with more women CEOs and more government financial assistance for non-whites, that's not Marxism. That's liberal capitalism with some of the money shuffled around.

As a general note, I find considerations regarding provenance and genealogy to be largely irrelevant to this debate. It has been sometimes argued that Western science grew in some essential manner out of Christianity; science as beginning with the conviction that the divine creation was imbued with a rational order that was intelligible to man. Supposing that were true, does that mean that science is Christian in some essential sense? It seems plain to me that science is neither Christian nor non-Christian, regardless of its origins. Origins certainly can be relevant, but not in every case.

He and many of his immediate intellectual descendants said that Marxism was "scientific". Is Marxism actually a science? They certainly called it one. They certainly wanted it to be one, since the name "science" bestows a veneer of intellectual respectability upon whatever it adorns.

Marxism would have been a science by the standards of the 1800s because the standards of the 1800s were pretty sloppy. It's not until you get to Karl Popper's idea of Falsification in the 1930s that we get the more rigorous definition of science we have today. And then Popper quickly applied the idea of falsification to Marx (among others) to distinguish his pseudoscience from the actually useful science being done in other fields like Physics.

It's easy to find certain similarities between what Marx did and what scientists do; to at least some degree he engaged in a process of hypothesis formation and attempted to measure those hypotheses against empirical evidence. He revised his thinking as new data came in. But in spite of all this, Marxism is still not a science, because in its essential properties it differs from what makes a science actually be a science. The whole enterprise is crucially dependent on ethical and non-empirical propositions.

As bad as the naming of "exploitation" is in Marxism, it's still a theory derived from earlier economic theories, that predicts that removing capitalists will result in workers being better off via keeping their "surplus value" that capitalists were taking from them. But it wasn't the result of empirical observation. It was a logical deduction from the Labour Theory of Value, but LTV was disproved towards the end of Marx's career. Similar happened to Marx's theory of history. The failure of Marxists to respond to empirical evidence, by ignoring it, adding epicycles, or abandoning any pretext of caring about empirical evidence by switching to ideas like critical theory, is why it became a pseudoscience.

Ok, but, seriously what's the point? I mean yes this is an obscure internet forum on which people advance their technical theories about political topics for no reason beyond being right on the internet and if that's the case then you can stop reading here...

On a bigger scale though when I see this argument employed on the internet in general it seems like proponents of the theory seem to think of it as some kind of "gotcha". I just don't really see it. If the woke or critical theorists all threw up their hands and said, "you got us, we are cultural marxists and will go by this term form now on," what do you expect to change? Socialism polls higher among 18-30 year olds than Capitalism. They're the main group that the woke try to persuade and recruit from. The red scare is a distant memory at this point. The woke didn't rise to power in the USSR or China, if anything these places seem resilient to their influence. They came to power in turbo USA, the most capitalist country ever finally ridden of it's cold war rival. You could make an argument that capitalism is just using cultural marxism and regardless of their roots they are just useful idiots (and many old left types do).

At best you're achieving some weak guilt by association, mostly that will work on people over the age of 65, at worst you're actually making woke sound cooler to younger generations. Just attacking how irrational woke ideology is seems far more effective than all the ink spilled over the cultural marxist label. Pointing out that the woke has its roots in marxism, and then just assuming that people associate marxism with bad and capitalism with good seems intellectually lazy. If conservatives want to win people over they need to be better about pointing out both the flaws in communism and admitting and fixing the flaws in capitalism otherwise at the current rate it seems like both communists and capitalists will be relegated to some stupidpol type forum where they complain about how both the actually relevant political parties aren't "true" left or right.

If anything the failures of both systems seem eerily similar. Focus on material gains neglecting cultural or spiritual growth and interests, using stats on increases in material wealth to hand wave away deep dissatisfaction and malaise. Focus on equality as a selling point (meritocracy in which all people can advance is implicitly part of the western social contract) motivating both groups into ridiculous beliefs, lamarckism for the USSR, blank slatism and "magic soil" in the west. Increasingly centralized power to increase efficiency and productivity, resulting in swaths of people losing agency and corrupt out of touch power centers. I guess i'm not a paleocon at all and more of a post liberal or something so i'm not typical right wing, but the boomer right wing type people need to fix these issues if they want people to just reflexively like capitalism and dislike marxism again.

Ok, but, seriously what's the point?

First, naming the beast. Second, denying dishonest actors the rhetorical victory of obfuscating the beast's name.

What is the utility of 'naming the beast'?

The pages linked in the top-level post openly use words like 'socialist', and denounce 'capitalism' without a moment's hesitation. They don't seem to be hiding their agenda. What is revealed about them by using an alternative name?

I think remzem's point holds up - if you or we want to combat them, they need to make a substantive cae against socialism as such, and a substantive case for capitalism (or better yet, for capitalism as a component of some more integrated political vision). If you got everyone to call all left-wing politics Marxism, then people are just going to shrug and say, "Okay, I like Marxism". There's no substitute for actually convincing people.

From the old country, worth linking to.

Occasionally, I find myself listing out all the different things that people use the words "capitalism" or "capitalist" to mean. I think I need to add a couple.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/artngn/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_18/eh74d2h/

That website is using the "state of alienation, strife, and scarcity; considered as a moral and natural evil" meaning.

I don't think you are wrong though but orthodox marxism can be overstated as part of all modern woke types and helps woke capitalists get away with it. I do agree that cultural marxism has expanded from class towards the cultural realm. We should just not underestimate Woke capitalists who are also for cultural marxism and moreover Cultural Marxism is compatible with some version of managed capitalism that accepts its ideology.

For example BLM, a black marxist group created by a Jewish marxist who was part of the weatherman underground group, managed to get enough capitalists to support its agenda to hire non whites over whites.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-26/corporate-america-kept-its-promise-to-hire-more-people-of-color

So capitalists actually collaborated with a marxist group. Which is why you aren't wrong, it is just the issue that we shouldn't forget the cultural Marxists who also see their version of capitalism as helpful to their project.

There is a certain woke, pro capitalist in theory who opposes OG marxism, at least in theory but they still have the cultural marxist agenda. Of course, in reality they compromise with a movement which has included plenty of marxists among it. But this exists. The compromise with marxist organisations does undermine some of their anti marxist credentials.

Are these people cultural marxists? Of course, even someone who isn't orthodox marxist, can be a cultural marxism by applying the marxist logic without prioritizing class.

The activist groups and movements that rose in the 20th century in the USA especially are very important parts of it. But of course such movements had plenty of Marxists involved too. Cultural marxism does come from the original left and original marxism had those elements too, and that is why opponents of it also raised some of the same concerns.

Someone who is a marxist in general can be a cultural marxist too. There are plenty of those who also argue that redistribution in the cultural marxist arena is anti capitalist and a fulfillment of Marxism. Kendi IIRC is one of those types. This is indeed a very important element of it. But cultural Marxists are not about prioritizing the working class but primarily about favoring in western societies progressive identity groups like women, Jews, Blacks, migrants, Muslims, Indians, etc, and against right wing, white, conservative, nationalist, men. And also adopt the ideology of the diffusion of national, conservative, and gender roles and values of groups, especially of their outgroup.

Business owners can share this agenda and agree with it ideologically, and some do this also in part due to a profit motive. For example, they benefit from a system where the goverment pays for welfare, and support the importation of cheap labor. They can agree with the cultural marxist, and general marxist agenda of the idea of dissolution of gender roles, tradition, native nation, because they prefer so much so for women to work over being mothers, even if that would harm society and lead to unsustainable low fertility rates. Or they are part of the DEI industry and there is an obvious profit motive there.

There can also be a resistance to some elements of cultural marxism that partly has some economic leftist elements which show some nationalism, even though cultural marxism comes usually with an economically leftist redistributist package. There have been some leftists who opposed open borders and high numbers of migration on basis of prioritizing the well being of their own working class. Usually they did this while also expressing that they have solidarity with foreign working classes. More of the left pushed the opposite agenda and even most of those who opposed it have went along and changed their tune. Still this has existed.

Cultural revolution in favor of an economic model as the priority can coexist with both communists and people who want to promote their more capitalist economic system, although they too as we observe tend to be ideologically aligning with the idea of screwing "oppressor" groups in favor of "oppressed" and playing motte and bailey games between economy as only allowed concern for the outgroup and then accepting as legitimate concerns of the cultural marxist sort.

The idea of an utopia coming out of destroying the distinctions, or the actual nations, racial, property rights, classes, borders, religions, nuclear family, gender roles, usually with some groups and categorizations targeted as reactionaries than others can exist also among woke capitalists, who are cultural Marxists and have definitely been influenced by the intellectual legacy of Marxism and share elements with OG marxism. And I do agree that actual self identified Marxists have been influential in the cultural marxist movements.

Just adding some of the nuances of the issue, so we don't let woke capitalists get forgotten as part of the issue of Cultural Marxism.

Coming from a Christian mindset, social justice is simply one of the many things Jesus would engage in during his time here on earth. People want to appropriate social justice to whatever philosophical ideology suits their worldview, and I just don't understand it. "Do the needful" comes to mind.

Im afraid i have to disagree. Partially for the reasons @ThisIsSin describes below, but more so because the entire theory and praxis of "Social Justice" revolves around tearing people down and promulgating individual injustices in the name of some greater good. I do not get the impression that Jesus would've been down with that at all.

Jesus explictly tells us that he doesn't hang out with whores, sinners, and tax-collectors (ie those who collaborate with the occupying regime) because he thinks that it is totes ok to be whorish, sinful, or a collaborator. He does it because it is the sick who need a doctor the most.

Im afraid i have to disagree. Partially for the reasons @ThisIsSin describes below, but more so because the entire theory and praxis of "Social Justice" revolves around tearing people down and promulgating individual injustices in the name of some greater good. I do not get the impression that Jesus would've been down with that at all.

Would you say that ending police brutality fits into this praxis? Would you say that ensuring low or no-cost healthcare for everyone fits into that praxis? Wouldn't these issues be something where Jesus would take the side of minority group?

Jesus explictly tells us that he doesn't hang out with whores, sinners, and tax-collectors (ie those who collaborate with the occupying regime) because he thinks that it is totes ok to be whorish, sinful, or a collaborator. He does it because it is the sick who need a doctor the most.

Yes, and I would consider that to be an example of intersectionality. He's bringing everyone in from all walks of life and instructing them on not only how to become better people, but to follow Him in all that they do.

The theory is "reducing police brutality" the praxis is replacing the brutality of the police with the brutality of the mob.

Social justice warriors do not seek to reduce or mitigate the violence inherent in the system (just the opposite in fact) they seek to redistribute it.

social justice is simply one of the many things Jesus would engage in during his time here on earth

The more I think about this the more I fundamentally disagree with this. Jesus accommodated every social standard of the day except for the ones he was explicitly sent to overturn [almost like trying to overturn others would be counterproductive in this regard]. You can see that by how He talks to women at fountains; but in other instances interacts and employs other women very, very differently (which then creates problems because you get selfish traditionalists going "haha Jesus patrolled thots lmao, I'll do the same thing to women I meet and claim it's correct because Jesus", and then 20 years later wonder why they can't get young families to come to their Church any more).

People want to appropriate Christianity to whatever philosophical ideology suits their worldview

Yes. If Christianity isn't social justice enough, then social justice can/will be added to Christianity to fill that void if the Church isn't prepared to deal with that. This is why young men went tradcath; they perceive (correctly) that Catholicism is the most alien to their sociopolitical adversaries and this is just a reaction to social [in]justice that targets them (for the same reasons that everyone on the losing side of oppression seems to become Christian for some reason, almost like that's by design; despite what Medieval mythology might have you believe Christianity really isn't meant for people who see themselves as winners, and those young men are eventually going to leave the Church because of that- it's exactly the same thing where [young women] SJWs are burning down their own churches in its name and forcing everyone out, as they simply want to win harder as is human nature to do).

and I just don't understand it

Moral superiority is one of the rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy (usually labelled as "security"). It's a thing most human beings have a psychological need for; evidenced by the emotion of disgust being universal to all cultures.

Some people are moral mutants and don't need that to function correctly (and can do things like answer "no" when the question of "aren't you just violating moral X for selfish reasons?" comes up, and be autistically/childishly 100% honest when doing so), but those mutants tend to fail to understand that moralfaggotry [I don't have a better word for this, sorry] is of vital importance for everyone else. This is part of the "struggle" that some philosophers and political thinkers talk about; I think one of them wrote a book with that title. It's a biological holdover, and you need some of it for social cohesion; most of what we see as traditional Christian morality is just playing to biological strengths anyway, so it makes having those morals both easy and as productive as you could make an emotion whose purpose is fundamentally destructive/self-preservatory.

[No, I haven't actually read the Screwtape Letters yet.]

Where you start to get problems is basically just the midwit meme where they're able to recognize "wait, all this moralfaggotry is fake!" (usually accompanied by "only God can judge me"/"in this moment, I am euphoric, ...enlightened by my own intelligence", which is why everyone else thinks [and 99% of the time, correctly] it's just people doing it for selfish reasons) but not capable of recognizing why it exists, or who it exists for, in the first place.

Jesus accommodated every social standard of the day except for the ones he was explicitly sent to overturn [almost like trying to overturn others would be counterproductive in this regard]. You can see that by how He talks to women at fountains;

Interesting. What do you think of the times that he heals people -- people he knows to be sinners, unclean, or undesirable -- or when he calls Matthew, a tax collector, someone who at the time people viewed as an "elite" to follow him?

Jesus healed sinners and the demon-possessed with the instruction to sin no more. His miracles weren’t meant to be a blank check to go out to continue to sin. (“A wicked generation looks for a sign”, says Jesus from Matthew 16.) That’s a big difference. Today’s social justice calls on people to tolerate and not change their ways, but Jesus calls on people to be loving. And sometimes being loving means calling on people to repent of evil and change from their sinful behaviors. God does not tolerate evil. He patiently waits, but there will come a day of the Lord where He will no longer wait.

As for Matthew the tax collector, he was by no means an elite. He may have gotten rich but only by cooperating with the Romans against his own people, much like the Jewish Councils in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere occupied by the Nazis. There was no mistaking who the ruling class was at those times; the film The Pianist also depicts them a little bit.

SJWs also call on people to repent of evil and change their ways; they just have a different idea of what constitutes evil. Transphobes, homophobes, xenophobes, racists, sexists, capitalists, Republican voters, gun owners, climate change denialists, etc. are all being asked to “go forth and sin no more” by abandoning their previous beliefs and behaviors and becoming SJWs themselves. By 2020, BLM activists thought the day of reckoning had finally arrived, and they declared, “We are done waiting.” (PDF)

Basically, I think you’re missing that SJW’s tolerance only extends to the in-group, which in some ways is not totally far off from Jesus’ own teachings. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” vs. “You brood of vipers,” and so forth.

Jesus healed sinners and the demon-possessed with the instruction to sin no more. His miracles weren’t meant to be a blank check to go out to continue to sin.

I certainly agree with that. But the issue then, as with many others in the Christian ethos, is what does constitute sin? A traditionalist perspective is going to pull from orthodox teachings about sin, whereas a more liberal approach would involve understanding and analyzing the cultural context of the scripture that proports to declare something is a sin, and also through the lens that the Bible is the inspired word of God, written by people who were imperfect and may have embellished, editorialized, or understood God in a different perspective, while still viewing it in an overall authoritative light.

Re Matthew: this is an excellent and often unapprecied point.

The reason being a "tax collector" was seen as dirty/dishonorable job was that it often meant that you would be working against your own friends, family, community, etc... on the behalf of a distant and foreign power. It's only natural for people to have an issue with that and view you with suspicion as a result.

his is why young men went tradcath; they perceive (correctly) that Catholicism is the most alien to their sociopolitical adversaries and this is just a reaction to social [in]justice that targets them

One of these days I'm going to effortpost on anthropology of actual rad trads(who are not a very online demographic, and may have local gender skews but on the whole don't have a particularly cartoonish split- and who also exist within an existing framework of conservative and self-consciously orthodox Catholic movements) and compare to DR twitterati tradcaths(who it seems are mostly trad Catholic in the sense that the church to which they do not go is in Latin). But for now- these are two different demographics(not to say no overlap) and I suspect the DR twitterati tradcaths aren't so much lashing out at liberalism as they are attracted to something(probably very obviously western, growing, and real world reactionaries with a white majority who are also very cool looking and sounding with all the incense and chanting and whatnot) and just not sold on having to change their lifestyle. I think a tell tale of these being largely different groups of people is that the twitterati tradcaths are so likely to be sedevacantists, which is a fringey position viewed by most actual irl rad trads as a collection of cults with serious skeletons in their closets led by madmen with possibly-invalid sacraments(IRL sedevacantists are not a very large number of people, and nor are Williamson's followers. Reactionary families attending SSPX or fully regular Latin masses will happily associate with each other, but shun sedevacantists/followers of Richard Williamson).

What I find really hilarious about a lot of replies to both this thread and the original one is how many people seem determined to defend the honor of Karl Marx, as if it pains them to see people “misrepresent” his views.

You have me and FC and Arjin pointing out very specific quotes by people who are deeply immersed in Marxist discourse, who have studied the massive corpus of theory and commentary and praxis that have sprung up in the two centuries since Marx was writing (the kind of stuff you can find on marxists.org, for example), and who lay out very sophisticated explanations for why their work is a valid and important extension of Marx’s work, and people here are basically just saying, “Nope, you’re wrong, you don’t know what you’re doing. I know what Marx wanted better than you do.” It’s very reminiscent of the New Atheist era, where atheists would quote scripture at Christians and say, “I know your Bible better than you do. Jesus would hate you.”

Marxism has been an evolving umbrella of thought for a long time. Marxists, for all of their flaws, really do think very deeply about this stuff and talk about it, out in the open. I compared it to Christianity earlier, with the many splits and theological developments and infighting that has taken place within Christian thought, and nobody seems to have a good explanation for why this is not a valid comparison. There are plenty of individuals today who see themselves as church authorities, and who believe they are qualified to interpret, expand upon, and even advance Christ’s statements. It’s very possible that if Jesus were here right now to speak to us, he would set the record straight that some or all of those guys are wrong! But he’s not, so we’re stuck doing the best we can to figure out how to apply his ideas to a modern world that is profoundly different from the one in which Jesus lived. (What would Jesus say about artificial intelligence, or nuclear weaponry? We can only try our best to reason it out.) Marxists are doing the same thing with applying Marx’s ideas to a very different paradigm. Why is this so difficult for some people to accept? Why is it so important to you to maintain the belief that Marx only cared about economics?

Why is this so difficult for some people to accept?

Socialists argue strenuously on this point primarily for one of three reasons:

A. Cognitive dissonance. One of the central tenets of the socialist religion is the claim that they and only they, by definition, have the nous. Similarly, all others, by definition, lack the nous. Therefore, a socialist literally cannot process a situation where a non-socialist presents facts about socialism because a non-socialist cannot, by definition, have that knowledge. Hence we recently saw:

I'm a Marxist. If [Cultural Marxism] were real I would have heard of it. The first time I heard of it was from ultra-right wing extremely online types. And they continue to be the only ones that talk about it. This leads to at least one of two conclusions

I am in on the conspiracy. And I am lying to you.

Somehow, you and a bunch of other online fascist adjacent types understand Marxism better than me.

In the years I have argued Marx and Socialist stuff I have pretty much never encountered an anti-Marxist that really knew much of anything about Marxism. It really is kind of astounding how ignorant anti-Marxists are about the ideology they profess to hate, actually.

B. Purity spiral. As a rule, there can only be one true socialism, and true socialists are duty-bound to eliminate all pretenders, or else their project will never be completed. Thus, some reactions against the idea are just socialists doing their usual infighting.

C. PR. Since ancient times, literally in the original 'mysteries', socialists have sought absolute message control about themselves and seek to eliminate disfavorable facts. Some socialists view a connection between modern, cultural Marxism and doctrinaire, Marx-and-Engels Marxism as a potential vulnerability, and so attack the association wherever it appears.

An additional reason is that wokism and such has to this point "won" the culture war. Marxists are not the only ideologs who seek to take credit for social justice as a successor movement to liberalism, you see this with Christians (particularly in some denominations such as Methodists), capitalists (there's decades of writing about how responsible capitalism requires this sort of thing culminating in ESG), and especially neoliberals. It's natural that older, more dysfunctional intellectual traditions would try to extend claims over their successor movements.

I don't disagree with you, but I just want to point to a better analogy for SJW in the Marxist paradigm.

Specifically, it's gnosticism. The wokes are cathars. Literally etymologically comparable- gnosticism comes from gnosis, meaning (hidden)knowledge, while woke refers to being awoken and realizing truths that most are blind to. But also just fundamentally- woke ideas are pretty far from orthodox Marxism(which is pretty clear about cultural ideas being of secondary importance/solved by economic ideas) and I have a post below about how you can square the circle with their obvious descent by realizing the woke view of the kyriarchy is as an opiate of the masses. A demiurge deceiving the masses, if you will. I had this realization reading your post and it's kind of blowing my mind right now. Wokes have cathari initiates who help allies advance through no personal effort(seriously, there's a pretty big division in SJW culture as to how much effort is expected from people who agree with them).

History never repeats, but it does rhyme.

Right, yesterday I referenced James Lindsay, who goes into great depth pointing out the explicit parallels between modern post-Marxism/“woke”/critical theory on the one hand, and Gnosticism on the other. I think the influences and similarities are unimpeachably obvious. Wokes very much do treat “society” as a demiurge to be defeated by an initiated majority of ensouled, elected individuals who have achieved varying levels of gnosis. The end goal being to reclaim Eden - an anarchoprimitivist, purely-egalitarian utopia.

(this comment is equally relevant to @hydroacetylene and @ChickenOverlord)

There is a surprising amount of literature out there showing the direct, continuous relationship between the modern socialist religion and the ancient one. You can see a previous comment of mine for a partial summary of The Socialist Phenomenon, which discusses the continuity of practice and belief through ancient and medieval groups. There are plenty of more modern, academically rigorous sources (e.g, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition by Magee; Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern times by van den Broek and Hanegraaff; etc.)

I wish I could make people read that fucking book (or any of those books). Even just the people here. If I could send mottizens copies without anyone breaking opsec, I would do so free of charge.

I'm not a theist but our society is clearly locked in a religious, spiritual conflict with the latest flavor of that most despicable and ancient of Mesopotamian religions. This conflict has material harms, but they cant be addressed until people recognize it for what it is. I wish there were a way to communicate this fact to the average person but I don't think anyone has cracked the code yet.

The oldest of the Mesopotamian religions is either Judaism or Zoroastrianism, which, disagree with them though I might, are clearly less harmful than Islam.

Mediterranean may have been a better word.

In any event, I think the socialist religion pre-dates Judaism. I refer to the religious socialists as the Identicals; as the core purpose of their faith is to make everything (thought, matter, etc.) identical, not just with eachother, but with god. The Identicals can be traced before 500BCE, with clearly developed religious and philosophical currents in the OG "mysteries," Thales of Miletus, and also in the century or two after, in Pythagoreanism, general mysticism/syncretism/esotericism in the eastern half of the Med, Gnosticism, early Hermetic writings, etc.

Judaism on the other hand, is just a bit later, but not by much. Somewhere after 500BCE, Yahwism becomes monotheistic and then becomes Second Temple Judaism. However, certain currents of Judaism I think are rather indistinguishable from the Identicals. The more I understand the history of Kabbalah, the less distinction I see between it and any of the other esotericism and gnosticism of the same time and place.

Taking a bit of a tangent, I would like to ask your input on the most effective name for this religion. Socialism? the Identicals? Gnostic Praxis? Political Gnosticism? 'Oh my god, those Egyptian Hermeticists really were up to something!'?

My biggest qualm with folks claiming that Wokism and Gnosticism are the same/similar ideologies is that the Gnostics despised the body (and material reality generally). Woke types tend to be obsessed with this material reality only (and most don't believe that there is anything outside of this life/material existence).

To add to @Hoffmeister25, I know absolutely nothing of gnosticism and had a hard time parsing this post since despising material reality is to me one of progressive's defining qualities. They're frequently hardcore constructivists who'll outright deny the existence of an objective reality altogether.

The truly committed wokes do despise the body and material reality. What do you think transgender stuff is? The critical fat studies people are the same - you see a lot of talk about “life in a fat, marginalized body.” Like yeah, there’s some tension there with the “fat acceptance”/“healthy at any size” stuff, but the latter is basically the short-term stopgap solution (reducing/eliminating feelings of shame and otherness as a result of living in a disfavored corporeal form) but the transhumanism is the long-term vision. The abolishment of unchosen bonds includes unchosen bodies.

I think you kind of miss the point. The people arguing that modern SJW ideology is descended from Marxism aren't wrong, but they are wrong when they think it's a direct and coherent lineage, and especially when some people seem to think that it's part of some grand master plan laid out by Gramsci and the Frankfurt school. (Or, going deeper down certain rabbit holes, a grand master plan by George Soros and Da Jooooooos!) Frankly, I think it is all fundamentally about resentment of the have nots against the haves, and this is essentially a parallel development. Marx built an entire economic theory around it, but without Marx, we'd still have people agitating for redistributive efforts and cutting down the tall poppies; they'd just use different labels.

Thus, arguing about whether "Cultural Marxism" is a thing or whether it's "really" Marxism seems pointless to me. Yes, "cultural Marxism" is a thing whether you call it that or something else; are "Cultural Marxists" actually trying to bring about a revolution of the proleteriat and the True Communism That Has Never Been Tried? Mostly not.

Most people (rightists and leftists) don't actually think about this very deeply the way us Motteian nerds do. The average SJW, including, I would wager, the chick who drew that "Kyriarchy" cartoon @FCfromSSC linked to, and the average right-winger railing about "cultural Marxism," cannot actually articulate what Marx espoused except in very general terms. The New Atheist/Christian analogy is apt; you're right that New Atheists smugly declaring they know the Bible better than the Christians they're arguing with were very obnoxious, but they were frequently correct.

The problem with the "Cultural Marxist" label is that it just reads as a cheap low-effort pejorative. "Commie" is still a dirty word in America, and calling SJWs "Cultural Marxists" reads as "Hurr hurr you commie!" It reminds me of right-wingers claiming every Democratic president ever was actually a communist.

There is of course a visible shift happening now where the left is using the same tactics to call every conservative "far right" and every Republican a "fascist." Boomerang back to conservatives claiming Nazis were actually leftists.

It's sloppy thinking all around, and while @FCfromSSC wrote a very thoughtful post tracing the lineage from Marx to Everyday Feminism, most critics don't and can't. (Freddie DeBoer, everyone's favorite anti-woke actual Marxist, is constantly driving himself crazy(er) trying to explain how everyone on the right and the left is Wrong About Everything.)

Yes, "cultural Marxism" is a thing whether you call it that or something else; are "Cultural Marxists" actually trying to bring about a revolution of the proleteriat and the True Communism That Has Never Been Tried? Mostly not.

The people who fit this description in the strongest sense believe that the Cultural aspect has superseded the OG economic analysis of Marx; mostly they probably don't think about that at all, or maybe endorse some sort of MMT in which debt doesn't matter and therefore needn't stand in their way. Not sure how much they think about their desired end-state either, but my impression is that it looks less like a dictatorship of the proletariat and more like a dictatorship of them personally -- maybe we can switch the name to "Cultural Stalinism"?

plan

What of the march through the institutions, the endless attempts at entryism?

Frankly, I think it is all fundamentally about resentment of the have nots against the haves, and this is essentially a parallel development.

The Frankfurt school brings a memeplex that the solution is obvious, and those in-the-know just have to keep reiterating why the problem is bad until people come around.

But it's also postmodern and Gnostic. The one unifying agreement is that everything is white cis-hetero patriarchal capitalist—our modern Yaldabaoth. That Everyday Feminism comic is reminding you that even if you think that you have gained knowledge and escaped, you probably haven't. There's always more work to do.

but they are wrong when they think it's a direct and coherent lineage

What exactly do you mean by this? If there isn't a direct and coherent lineage, why can I literally draw a straight line from Marx to Gramsci to the Frankfurt School to people who self-labelled as Cultural Marxist to Critical Theory to all the stuff that people complain about when they talk about SJWs? If that's not a direct and coherent lineage, what is?

The problem with the "Cultural Marxist" label is that it just reads as a cheap low-effort pejorative.

How is that my problem? Maybe they should have picked a better name?

https://music.ishkur.com

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music discusses various ways that music genres grab ideas from other music genres. Or enthusiasts take a particular element from one genre and put it front-and-center into new tracks, making it distinctive enough to be its own genre. Calling this process "direct and coherent" would overstate things.

Same process here.

(I suppose that "Cultural Marxism" is roughly equivalent to the hearing "Oh, you listen to disco?", back in the day.)

(I suppose that "Cultural Marxism" is roughly equivalent to the hearing "Oh, you listen to disco?", back in the day.)

In another comment, somewhat to my surprise actually, I've found and linked that a woman who was unironically using the term "cultural marxism" to describe her own ideas back in the '80s, has recently published a book about Critical Pedagogy. If you follow the likes of Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, you'll see that Critical Pedagogy is a decent chunk of what they're raging against. I don't know about you, but "written by literally the same people" is hard to beat in terms of "direct and coherent lineage" in my book.

I'm saying the average SJW/woke posting BLM flags and talking about trans rights is not a "cultural Marxist" in a coherent manner and literally wouldn't know what you mean by calling them a Marxist (or they'd laugh at you because they kind of know what Marxism is and don't consider themselves to be one). You can argue their ideas are influenced by Marxism, which is true, but true in the same way we all swim downstream of Marxism, Christianity, and all the other memeplexes in our culture. I'm saying calling them "Cultural Marxists" is only very vaguely accurate and not very useful except as a boo word. (And of course boo words are pretty useful as rhetorical devices, but annoying to people who actually pick apart what words mean.)

How is that my problem? Maybe they should have picked a better name?

If by "they" you mean the people who actually call themselves Cultural Marxists, obviously they wouldn't contest the label, but they are a small percentage of the people you typically attach it to.

I'm saying the average SJW/woke posting BLM flags and talking about trans rights is not a "cultural Marxist" in a coherent manner and literally wouldn't know what you mean by calling them a Marxist (or they'd laugh at you because they kind of know what Marxism is and don't consider themselves to be one).

What do you mean by "lineage" then? I'd say that by definition it must include people from who woke SJW BLM-flag-posters derived their beliefs.

If by "they" you mean the people who actually call themselves Cultural Marxists, obviously they wouldn't contest the label, but they are a small percentage of the people you typically attach it to.

I mean people who used to call themselves Cultural Marxists. Some of them still hold on to the label, others seem to have moved on. In any case a lineage, the way I understand the term, exists, and is direct and coherent.

What do you mean by "lineage" then? I'd say that by definition it must include people from who woke SJW BLM-flag-posters derived their beliefs.

Maybe it's my bubble, but most of the SJW BLM-flag-posters I know are liberal Christians/former Christians, the sort who if they go to church at all anymore go to one with rainbow flags, or a UU congregation. They would argue passionately that their beliefs are derived from Christianity and what Jesus taught, and I don't think that is less accurate than saying their beliefs are derived from Marx. (There has long been a strain of liberal Christianity arguing that what Jesus preached was in fact a sort of proto-Marxism.) That many traditional Christians would vehemently argue otherwise is no more relevant than Freddie DeBoer saying they aren't "really" Marxists.

My point here is that calling a woke trans rights activist a "Cultural Marxist" is not much different than calling a MAGA a fascist.

I mean people who used to call themselves Cultural Marxists. Some of them still hold to the label, others seem to have moved on. In any case a lineage, the way I understand the term, exists, and is direct and coherent.

Are you talking about individual people who literally called themselves Cultural Marxists, or are you claiming the entire movement (for some value of "movement") used to call itself Cultural Marxism? Because there might be some of the former, though I don't know who you are referring to, but if you mean the latter, no, I don't think there is some single coherent movement that used to be known as "Cultural Marxism" and has now relabeled itself BLM, woke, trans rights, etc.

My point here is that calling a woke trans rights activist a "Cultural Marxist" is not much different than calling a MAGA a fascist.

Well, this is getting a bit confusing because when 4bpp tried conflating "wokness" / Cultural Marxism with LGBT rights, I was the one that had to point out he's making a mistake. So I'm not sure why this point is directed at people who want to use the term "Cultural Marxism" rather than the people who are dissuading from it's use.

I hold that trans activism is Cultural-Marxism-agnostic, but that there is a strand inside it, that traces it's lineage to Cultural Marxism. Or are you saying that when the WPATH name drops "intersectionality", "power and privilege", or "minority stress", those ideas are derived from Christianity?

but if you mean the latter, no, I don't think there is some single coherent movement that used to be known as "Cultural Marxism" and has now relabeled itself BLM, woke, trans rights, etc.

Trans rights is a broader term that includes non-Cultural-Marxism-derived ideas, but if we go with Queer Theory, BLM, and "woke", all of it sprouts from "Critical Theory" which is the politically correct (for now) term for what was once known as Cultural Marxism. If you don't want to call it Cultural Marxism anymore, I'm ok with that, but the idea that there isn't a direct and coherent lineage from ideas commonly known as "woke" to Critical Theory and from there to Cultural Marxism seems just flatly wrong to me. I'd even be willing to bet that even your friends who swear they got those ideas directly from Jesus, took some kind of a Critical Theory course at some point in their lives.

many people seem determined to defend the honor of Karl Marx

As I laid out in the last paragraphs of this reply, my main concern in this discussion is that the right not recapitulate the type of sloppy thinking that I find so obnoxious about the left. I raised two issues regarding what I see as fallacious thinking:

  1. The tendency to refer to every idea on the left as "Marxist" seems to me to be analogous to the left's tendency to call everything they don't like "fascism". Describing every non-leftist position as fascist is simply incorrect; and it is similarly incorrect to describe all leftism as Marxism. Let me put it this way: can someone subscribe to a typical woke agenda (trans surgeries for minors, mandatory racial diversity quotas, the need to overthrow the patriarchy and empower women, etc) and not be a Marxist? Or has (what is alleged to be) the historical provenance of those ideas made them intrinsically and permanently Marxist?

  2. I believe that the right's preoccupation with "cultural Marxism" carries with it an implicit assumption that without Karl Marx, none of this would be happening. If we just didn't have those darn radical Marxist professors who were giving our kids bad ideas, then men would still be men and women would still be women, racial minorities would be at peace, Jesus would reign and everyone would be happy. And I think that assumption is simply based on mistaken models of history, psychology, and politics. It's the right's version of "if only Trump supporters weren't brainwashed by Russian bots, then they would see that Trump is a threat to democracy just like we do". It fails to take seriously the notion that different people really do just think fundamentally different than you, and that their ideas aren't just random bullshit, but are instead a response to actual real conditions. Woke ideas wouldn't be as popular as they are if people didn't find them genuinely appealing, independent of whatever authority figures endorse them.

Let me put it this way: can someone subscribe to a typical woke agenda (trans surgeries for minors, mandatory racial diversity quotas, the need to overthrow the patriarchy and empower women, etc) and not be a Marxist?

Oh, certainly! The trans surgeries for minors things seems more driven by the medical establishment’s desire to make huge amounts of money off of trans people - and to a lesser extent by transhumanists using trans surgeries as a foot in the door to different types of alterations of the human form - than it does by Marxism. Racial diversity quotas are isomorphic to the kinds of ethnic spoils systems that have existed in tons of multiethnic/multiracial empires throughout history. And the shattering of patriarchy and empowerment of women has been a recurring strain of thought in several religious traditions - for example, Baha’i - and liberal philosophical movements. However, I would say that the specific framing that sees sex relations as an explicit dialectical class conflict between two competing groups is distinctly Marxist.

Or has (what is alleged to be) the historical provenance of those ideas made them intrinsically and permanently Marxist?

I think it’s plainly true that the vast majority of the people who actually achieved the real-world implementation of these ideas, whether in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, or Asia, were Marxists and were doing so because they were Marxist. It’s true that they also could have arrived at these ideas by other paths - they just didn’t. Martin Luther King was a closeted communist, and his speeches were likely ghostwritten by Stanley Levison, his handler and fundraiser, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. These activists were overwhelmingly motivated by an explicit commitment to Marxism. That doesn’t even mean all of their ideas were wrong! I don’t think Marxists are wrong about everything! It’s just an accurate description of the provenance of their ideas.

I believe that the right's preoccupation with "cultural Marxism" carries with it an implicit assumption that without Karl Marx, none of this would be happening.

Right, so to a large extent I agree with this whole paragraph. If it hadn’t been Karl Marx developing these ideas, it would have been someone else. Hell, Marx was only one of a number of commentators writing about similar ideas at the time, reacting to the same influences and in discussion with each other. MLK and the other major figures behind the Civil Rights movement were communists, but they clearly won by appealing to pre-existing moral sentiments and vulnerabilities present among liberal Christians. Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the seminal figures in early gay right activism and the man who founded the medical institute that performed the first sex-reassignment surgeries in history, was a socialist, and Harry Hay, a very influential American gay rights activist, was a long-time member of the Communist Party. However, these men were building on, and in ongoing dialogue with, thinkers who were coming from totally different and non-Marxist philosophical backgrounds. Many of these movements are natural extensions of ideas contained within the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

I think it’s important to tease out the provenance of these ideas very carefully and to find a way to rescue what’s good about them while discarding all of the Marxist class-struggle garbage that accumulated around them. That requires being very honest about not only the fact that it was Marxists leading the way on most of them, but also why that was the case and how to wrest control of them away from Marxists moving forward.

but they clearly won by appealing to pre-existing moral sentiments and vulnerabilities present among liberal Christians.

In an American context referring to 'liberal Christianity' pre-Roe v Wade ranges on a narrow spectrum from potentially misleading to flat out false. The clearest throughline is from churches opposed to eugenics and churches teaching socially conservative doctrines today, and these weren't particularly present on the segregationist side- indeed, the largest, the Roman Catholic Church, excommunicated members who engaged in segregationist advocacy.

It's better to say that Christianity's discomfort with racial inferiority aligned with liberal activists. There were Christians on both sides, but the civil rights movement was much more religious than the segregationists- and it's notable that many of the segregationists had a change of heart when they found Jesus later on in life(yes, racism was now deeply unfashionable, but Christianity coincided with repudiation of racism in most of these cases).

Much of this discussion about historical uses of "cultural Marxism" in the literature is irrelevant, or at least to me. If the name had never been used before and was invented yesterday, then I would think it a very good description of the ideology that we might clumsily refer to as wokism, critical theory, SJWism, etc. I suspect that the name has likely been reinvented multiple times by different people with no idea of its historical use, because it succinctly captures the basic idea--Marxist style analyses but with economic categories substituted with cultural categories. No other name is so accurate while also being easily understood.

It helps that most cultural Marxists are also, at least implicitly or vaguely, economic Marxists. They seem to assume that something approximating economic Marxism will be the downstream consequence of their cultural Marxist project, though they don't forefront it in their rhetoric. More concretely, cultural Marxists are anti-capitalist, at least in principle, even while often living comfortably within a quasi-capitalist system. Their general idea seem to be something like using capitalism to destroy capitalism from the inside, and a big part of that is pushing cultural Marxism to undermine the foundations of capitalism. The "late stage capitalism" talk is related.

Orthodox Marxists seem to regard this as folly. In their view, the cultural Marxists have been captured by and are now unwittingly serving their enemies. They may talk in Marxist-like rhetoric and language, but they divide the people and strengthen capital with their frivolous social status games.

The name "cultural Marxist" is a really good name. I don't care if orthodox Marxists like that association.

I think the problem is that the meme of calling things "cultural Marxism", while useful in persuading some people, is also a bit of a self-own by right-wingers because it can turn off people who care about a higher level of intellectual rigor than calling their opponents names. The term is historically imprecise. Leftism, feminism, the struggle for racial equality, blank slatism, and so on all pre-date Marx and would exist even if Marx had never existed, and I see no reason to think that without Marx, they would not eventually have developed militant dogmatic offshoots that are similar to today's SJW ideology. You can already see a large fraction of the modern leftist ideology in the French Revolution, thirty years before Marx was born. Marxism is a specific type of leftism. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that 99% of the people who use the term "cultural Marxism" have never read a page of Marx. So why use this term? Why not come up with an equally potent one, but one that is also more accurate, so that it does not seem weird to people who know a lot about history?

Now it is true that much of the modern left in the West, in its specific form, derives from the New Left of the 1960s, which was in many ways a reaction by actual American Marxists to the traumatic realization that Stalin's USSR was a horrific society that practiced atrocities on a mass scale, and was also maybe in some ways a reaction to the realization that economic leftism had little chance of succeeding in America's prosperous society - hence, as a consequence, the left shifted to emphasizing the struggle of the Third World against imperialism, of black people against oppression in the US, of women against oppression by men, and so on. But this shift happened almost 70 years ago. I am not sure that today's SJWs can really be described as Marxist in any other than a tangential way. There are still genuine Marxists around... there are entire subreddits full of them... but they make up a pretty small fraction of modern Western leftists.

was also maybe in some ways a reaction to the realization that economic leftism had little chance of succeeding in America's prosperous society

This was far more of a factor than any shock about Stalin. Remember, they switched to supporting mao and the Khmer Rouge right after, so it's not like a few famines and executions upset them.
The whole point of third world maoist new leftism was that the working class of Western countries had betrayed the revolution and were now class enemies just like the capitalists. The French like Sartre and Fanon* made this explicit, the weathermen and the rest of the "days of rage" gang followed, and ultimately we got "Settlers: the myth of the white proletariat" calling for the extermination of oppressor races.

This is also the answer to the question "why do they love Haitians so much", which I've been meaning to post cites for.

Leftists sneering at people for noticing this while they literally have "read Settlers!!!" in their twitter bios is one reason I've moved from thinking debate is possible and healthy to a completely exterminationist stance.

* "Sartre began to argue that the European working classes were too apolitical to carry out the revolution predicated by Marx, and influenced by Frantz Fanon started to argue it was the impoverished masses of the Third World, the "real damned of the earth", who would carry out the revolution"

90% familiar with (it's hard to escape when you have any interaction at all with left-leaning meme groups), maybe 15% an unironic user, 30% were an unironic user at some point in the past. This might be because most of the SJWs I know are ones who "made it" - they have tenure or at least are so embedded in the community that it would cause a scandal among their allies if they did not get it, or well-paying and stable admin jobs, or work as some form or another of creative consultant.

In my impression that term is mostly popular with 20-30somethings going through a phase of post-leaving-the-nest poverty, where the necessity to pay for Netflix premium, takeout and instagrammable experiences leaves them somewhat squeezed on the housing side; as such, it is tightly associated with violent fantasies towards landlords. Those who largely get their college life arranged and paid for don't use it unless they need to fit into some poorer crowd. Every time I see it on my Boomerbook wall, I have to fight the urge to respond with something like "what if I told you that this is actually still only the early stage".

Wait, was this meant to be a reply to something in the "Cultural Marxism" thread a couple of top-level posts down?

It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly

I really doubt this. Well, I doubt the explicitly part.

The median SJW(let’s use a simple descriptor instead of a politically correct neologism) does not know about his(ok, her, but I’m going to start making a point of using the generic masculine) ideology’s descent from Marxism. And usually doesn’t care to. SJW complaints have little upfront economic class valence; race gender and sexuality are prima facia, and any characterization of their opponents as wealthy is a) not that different from republicans calling their opponents elite and b) usually wrapped up in some alternative descriptor, like ‘white’ or ‘male’. And while lots of SJW ideologies are realistically better modeled as class interest movements- mainstream feminism in particular resolves a lot of its internal contradictions out once you realize that it’s specifically a movement in favor of educated, urban girl bosses, and has little to offer(and doesn’t want more)for poor women, rural woman, housewives, etc- the main contribution of Marxism to SJW thought is the ability to rationalize opposition.

See, Marx was a theorist of economics. His economic ideas are wrong, obviously- see holodomor, the, great leap forwards, the, cultural Revolution, the, people’s republic of Cambodia, the, etc, etc- but his critical insight was that economic interests influence historical processes more than individual great men, and so it follows that if you understand economic interest well enough you can derive psychohistory from it, Hari Seldon style.

Obviously this is stupid but it’s like crack to ivory tower academics. Fortunately Marx provides epicycles upon epicycles for when this psychohistory is fake. And SJW thought is, in a lot of cases, derived from pounding a square peg of something that actually exists(yes, there is such a thing as patriarchy, and yes, there’s plenty of people who view blacks poorly) into the round hole necessary for it to be a Marxist epicycle. But the median SJW doesn’t know or care about the kyriarchy being a Marxian concept of the opiate of the masses- I mean the kyriarchy is also fake, but that’s besides the point.

Based on you experience, how likely is such a person to be familiar with and use the term "late stage capitalism"? My experience would be that it is very likely; does yours differ?

My experience does not differ.

If they do use that term, what do they mean by it?

It comes from Orthodox Marxism, which predicts that humanity progresses through different "modes of production", one of which is Capitalism, which will inevitably be replaced by Socialism and then Communism. "Late Stage Capitalism" is basically just hyping up the inevitably end of capitalism that Marxists believe will occur, because they're alleging that we're already past the early and middle and thus are in the "late" part of it.

It's pretty much the commie version of the Millenarian Christian "End Times". One says we're living in Late Capitalism because they're prophesizing the second coming of Communism. The other says we're living in the End Times because they're prophesizing the second coming of Jesus.

I will investigate the construction of anxiety as mental disorder in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and biomedical psychiatry.

Worth adding that "neoliberal" here is effectively a meaningless snarl word when used by these groups, used to refer not just to something like Milton Friedman's beliefs, but to pretty much anything they dislike including, in one thing I read, String Theory. You can mentally replace it with "nasty" and no information will be lost. Or more precisely, they end up calling random stuff neoliberal because they believe all not-explicitly-Marxisdt scientific theories produced under our current culture is just discourse serving power.

It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism. It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly.

Many of them, yes. But some of the rest ascribe to what Marx would have called "Utopian Socialism" which can be summarised as dood, what if like, we were all equal and shit. With no further theory. In other words they just don't like capitalism but have no ideology which they want to replace it with.

Since you've mentioned feminism so much, a useful distinction is that some Social Justice advocates who are into feminism are not Marxist Feminists, but instead Radical Feminists (which confusingly are two different things). The former is more popular in the US while the latter is more popular in the UK. Marxist feminists believe oppression of women is due to capitalism while Radical feminists believe it is due to gender roles imposed by men. And the former seeks to resolve it by abolishing capitalism while the latter want to abolish gender roles. This is basically the cause of the TERF wars. the Radical Feminist desire to abolish gender roles conflicts with the desire of trans people to uphold them, if not outright making trans people worse than the general population out of some sense that they are traitors, or even more entrenched in gender roles than anyone else. Hence TERF is a bit of a redundant term - it is incoherent to be RF and not also TE, and the self-proclaimed RFs that are pro-trans are only so as a consequence of something between burying their head in the sand and being bullied into silence. The Marxist feminists don't have that same ideological incompatibility, more likely to see Trans people as allies because they can rally them to the overthrow capitalism cause.

On the one hand, there is a faction of people who are doctrinaire Marxists, who consider themselves to be committed adherents to the cause and who are constantly overhauling their propaganda in pursuit of the same goal they've always hand - the formation of a permanent communist society. Sometimes this means playing the poor against the rich, sometimes the blacks against the whites, etc. I won't argue with that, I think it's true.

But in addition to that group, I think that anyone who thinks even slightly about society realises at some point that you have to start talking about groups and group interests. And it was Marx who formulated the great original theory of group interests. In that way I think Marx is to societal organisation what Nietzsche is to moral philosophy - he dominates the topic such that anyone who approaches that topic finds themselves discussing it in his terms. So feminists want to talk about the different and sometimes conflicting interests of men and women, and they cast around for suitable language to think about the problem in, and Marx's class conflict ideas come readily to hand. Likewise disabled people who want to talk about the deaf vs. the hearing find themselves thinking in terms of class and oppression. Or trans people talking about themselves in the language of gay liberation, despite the obvious conflicts - that language was in the water.

I've noted before that when the modern-day dissident right want to talk about the cultural dominance of the left, they often do so in leftist terms, talking about narratives and simulacra and manufacturing consent. Same thing. Those formulations come easily to mind because the left happened to be talking about them first. When I want to talk about nationalism and belonging, I end up with things like 'blood and soil' because that's the first place the mind goes and it's a good phrase.

I think if you're not careful, or if you're committed to the formalism that academia forces on you, this causes you to tangle up your original thoughts with previous movements. For example if you're an early feminist and you want to make waves, and you're already thinking in somewhat Marxist terms for the reasons given above, you're probably going to publish your articles in Marxist journals. They already exist, and they have a good readership, and your ideas are pretty compatible with the stuff they already want to take about. And this association keeps strengthening, and it becomes very difficult to find feminists who aren't Marxists, or so heavily associated with Marxists that it's hard to tell them apart. If you liked, perhaps you could think of this as 'directed' and 'grassroots' or something.

On a separate note, I heard somewhere that late stage capitalism referred to capitalism that has moved on from building things in factories to an economy that trades primarily in ideas and financial derivates. No idea if that's true or not.

Where does the idea of "Late-stage Capitalism" come from? What are the other stages?

I don't know for certain since I don't have the time nor resources to verify, but I do believe the ideas are a continuation from Deleuzes Societies of Control. The general idea late-stage capitalism is that capitalism controls us through various means, and there is some truth to that because of corporations we can't have any discussion we want on Reddit for example. The problem is the parasitic ideas of neomarxism has tagged along with it.

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