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Notes -
Moving this to a top-level comment, since the point seems generally applicable.
Previously, a conversation about "Cultural Marxism" vs "Marxism".
@Eetan
There's a point of view from which the point of Scientology is to allow someone to rid themselves of the Thetans that cling to them, becoming "clear" and unlocking the supernatural powers that are every human's true birthright. There's another sense in which the point of Scientology is to scam people into placing everything they have and are at the mercy of a vast, highly scalable scam so systemized that it outlived its creator and arguably now runs itself. Both of these could be, potentially, valuable ways to understand and discuss Scientology, but it's important to understand the distinction between them.
When talking about groups and how they relate to each other, I think it's not terribly useful to argue over whether two groups are, in their immutable essence, related or not related to each other. I think it's much more useful to lay out one's own understanding of the salient connection or separation between the groupings under discussion. It seems evident to me that you believe Marxism and Wokeism share no relation, because Wokeism has discarded too much of Marxism's theory and practice. I can readily concede that this is a coherent view to hold, if one thinks that the specific elements of theory and practice are the core of Marxism, rather than the periphery.
On the other hand, it is not obvious to me that wokism is any less aimed at producing radical social change than Marxism is. Certainly it seems to me that it has succeeded in changing society quite radically in the short time it's existed as the current, coherent, legible ideology. Certainly the Woke themselves would not agree with your description, so why should we presume it on your say-so?
When Wokeists get their way, Billionaires and the corporations they control throw their unquestioning support behind Wokeism, providing a great deal of social, political, and economic power behind, for example, large-scale lawless political violence. The fact that CHAZ enjoyed de facto corporate sponsorship did not make its actions any less radical. The capitalists can, in fact, sell Revolutionaries the rope to hang them with, and can even help them tie the nooses. Nor is cooperation between Billionaires and radical leftists a novel development; rich people have attempted to cooperate and support radical socialist utopianism many times before. Some of them actually moved to the USSR.
When Marxists got their way in one situation, which itself contradicted Marx in numerous ways, some billionaires got expropriated. That does not prove that one attempt to implement some elements of Marxism while discarding others is fundamentally different from another attempt that implements and discards a different selection of elements. What we actually have, as with Scientology above, is an open question of which elements of Marxism are core, and which are periphery. You and I can have differing opinions on the answer to that question.
In my view, Marx's theories are of roughly equivalent value to Scientology's theories about Thetans. Labor theory of value, scientific materialism, class analysis and so on are more or less fiction, and are not load-bearing to Marxism as an effective ideology. Ideologies, I think, are best considered not by their stated aims, but by what they actually produce. Marxism is quite bad at producing Materialist Utopia, but it's fantastic at generating and prosecuting class warfare, thereby accumulating power to Marxists themselves. It's a system for building an army unconstrained by the humanizing effects of tradition and civilization, and putting oneself at the head of it. It does this by telling people a lie about their lives, that the misfortunes and tragedies that beset all humans are not simply the nature of human existence, but are instead are intentional harms inflicted by bad people on good people, and that if the good people band together and remove the bad people from power and possibly from existence, all their problems can and will be resolved.
Marx's theories about the identity and characteristics of the good people and bad people, how to remove them, what to do once they're removed and so on do not, in my view, actually matter. Marx was not a scientist in any meaningful sense of the term. His factual claims about what his ideology was supposed to achieve have either been falsified or proven themselves unfalsifiable. What makes Marxism relevant is not its blueprint for building a better world, but rather its blueprint for burning down the existing one, and it is from this perspective that its similarities to Wokeism emerge. Wokeism adapts Marxism's core lie to a wildly different cultural context, where its original claims would be laughably irrelevant. The proletariat never actually mattered, which is why Marxist revolutions were executed in countries with no proletariat to speak of. Categorizing society into oppressors and oppressed and relentlessly framing all social issues according to these categories, on the other hand, is actually how both the Marxist and Wokeist systems work.
Perhaps the model I describe above is wrong, and some doctrinaire Marxist model is correct; that's at least potentially a productive conversation to have. What's necessary, though, is an understanding that the groupings are something we're generating as a tool, not a brute fact of the universe. I draw connections between Marxism and Wokeism and progressivism not because people did one and then the other, but because I believe there's actually important parts of the ideology that the later has drawn and continues to draw from the former.
Sure. So what's the relevant differences between Marxists and Wokeists that I'm missing here, and how should people like me play them to our advantage?
I observe that the Wokeists do in fact claim to be Marxists quite frequently, claim to know quite a bit about Marx, and often frame their critiques in terms of Marx's ideas. So right off the bat, we have a factual disagreement.
I observe that, doctrinal disputes aside, Marxism remains eminently relevant to the whole of Progressivism. As long as they keep quoting and teaching him, and as long as they keep building their ideology around the scaffolding he provided, I think it's reasonable to take them at their word that he's relevant to them, and hence to those who oppose them.
If you disagree with my understanding of the facts, we could go look at some actual evidence, of which I'm confident that there's no shortage. If you concede the above, I'm not sure how your critique makes sense.
This has not been my experience. Can you provide some examples?
I certainly don't think what I've written above can be summarized in such a way. Have I provided you with a fresh perspective?
@aaa here
It appealed very much to intellectuals, academics, journalists, and other elites, and I'd argue appealed to such people much more consistently than it did to the lower classes.
Communism was not basically illegal in the US. It was suppressed to a limited and ineffectual extent for brief periods that manifestly failed to eradicate it from elite strongpoints, academia among them. I've no doubt that formal structures for organizing working-class people were predominantly staffed by working class people; I would be surprised if it were otherwise. On the other hand, Communist penetration of multiple Western governments didn't happen at the behest of steelworkers and teamsters. Stalin was an academic before turning to revolution full-time. So was Lenin. So was Marx.
Heirarchy, tradition, law, economics, justice, ethics, morals, etc. Ideas along the lines of "Social justice" or the cultivation of a "revolutionary conscience" recur with monotonous regularity, because the fundamental logic of Progressive Materialist revolution demand such innovations.
Your examples seem fairly bimodal to me, in a way that is quite telling. I observe a significant difference between honoring God above one's father and mother, and honoring the state or one's auditor above one's father and mother. Neither Christianity nor Judaism seem to encourage this.
For example: immigration depresses the cost of labor to the detriment of workers, a diverse workforce makes unionization efforts harder to achieve, the push of careerism on women is the capitalist sistem seeking to exploit them further. On the other direction: the lower classes are often the most bigoted (more homophobic, transphobic, sexist, etc).
Any strong ideology will seek to change hierarchies, the law and ethics to match its own. Also I don't think SJW can be considered materialist.
For there to be a difference god would have to actually exist and participate in human affairs, but it doesn't so in practice it's just a stand in for a human institution.
Isn't the story of Abraham and Isaac similar enough?
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It's a mistake to think that in Marxist theories(which to be clear, are bullshit, they're just not self-contradictory on this specific reason) "the working class" or "the proletariat" have the same meaning they do in conventional english- they both basically mean "anyone who is employed rather than being idle rich or a business owner or a charity case or a professional criminal". So lots of managers, teachers, professors, consultants, etc are all working class and lots of quite poor people are not proletariat because they do not support themselves through employment.
It's true that Marxism is very unpopular among actual blue collar workers. It's also true that its support is, by its own definitions, overwhelmingly working class and proletariat because academics and hr managers and activists working for NGO's are all employed by someone.
My understanding is that Marx himself argued that the industrialized society of his own place and time was a necessary precondition for the emergence of the Revolution. Industrializing societies like Russia shouldn't have been developed enough to pull it off, much less agrarian societies like China, Vietnam or Cambodia. But this is my whole point: much of the theory was was not load-bearing in any meaningful sense. It could be and was discarded whenever it got in the way. That later Marxists have given themselves license to discard any part of the theory they find inconvenient is my entire point.
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Beautiful rhetoric. Still: no, «wokeness» is substantially different from «Marxism», The Thing you oppose and which had been partially incarnated in their shapes predates both, and it is far from obvious that you will accomplish anything of worth with this line of argument.
You are approaching this instrumentally, starting from your own intents and purposes rather than essences of things. Wokes are «similar people», they are posing danger to your values that's of a nature similar to the Marxist menace, and their own chosen labels are not nearly as toxic as «Marxism» or «Communism», so you do what they do with Fascism and every right-wing movement and idea they want to see dead, spreading the reputation-killing poison wide – and thin. It may work to an extent, with audiences already receptive to overarching critique of left-wing ideologies; but really this is a tactic for the side that has the higher ground and can dictate terms of engagement.
Leftism is vast; one doesn't have to be a «doctrinaire Marxist» to appreciate this fact. It's more of an intellectual ecosystem than a doctrine, or an entire class, like «Mammalia» (I wonder: if reptiles had class consciousness, would they assume that foxes and hares are on the same side?) and most elements of the ecosystem are more concerned with internecine sectarian conflicts than with an organized front against aliens. Leftists are aware of having even more irreconcilable external enemies, of course, and constantly seek to form a united front, with varying success. Sometimes, the combination of those drives causes the entire system to evolve and reinvent itself. When they deprioritize Marxism, it is natural to suspect this to be a tactically expedient, insincere rebranding. But when your allies scream that Marxism is dead and this new Thing is not it – you'd do well to check if you aren't tilting at windmills, while the giant, having shed its skin, is safely plundering the town behind your back.
The Thing has always had two morphs – the more populist and the more esoteric, Wycliffe's brand of proto-socialism and Cathars, Conjuration des Égaux and mainline Jacobinism. In the last century Marxism, too, had explicitly diverged into two very distinct schools, loosely speaking, Lenininst (Bolshevik, Stalinist, Maoist, whatever) and Trotskyist (the real structure is far more complex, with the Anarchist tradition, Western clubs etc. participating in the horizontal meme transfer). The former has seized much of the globe (and a sliver of its wealth) though the combination of brutally enforced party discipline centered around personalist leadership, severe political-military fusion, appeal to the lower classes and unlimited opportunism. Its last significant bastion is the People's Republic of China. The latter has spread, rhyzome-like, through the intellectual classes of the developed world. They are so different as to make the common moniker of Marxism inapt; and all evidence one needs to see this is the fact that America with its violent immune reaction to Communism proved to be a fertile soil for rapidly speciating Ivory Tower doctrinaires. Wokeness is a product of their unholy aggregation on the basis of American identity politics and race issues; and while obnoxious, it's an inherently crumbly substance – little in common with the steel edifice of Bolshevism that proved to be the apex predator in the competitive world of 20th century totalitarian systems.
Crucially, though, I think you are wrong about the potential of wokeness. It is a diminished strain, not in some moral sense but in the sense of its motive power. It promises no salvation and doesn't have alluring intellectual content. It's a slightly more respectable elaboration of anarkiddies: shock troops and unwitting expendables of The Thing. Like an inactivated vaccine, it is unlikely to kill the host by itself, and indeed may inoculate the body politic instead. It's a historical tangent, a red herring.
The problem with attacking Wokeness as Marxism is that not only is Marxism dead in the West, but Wokeness may be discarded just as well, and the Thing, ever protean, will again reform behind your back, even appropriating convenient parts of your rhetoric and sounds of your voice.
This is why I think more people should read Shafarevich's Socialist Phenomenon and learn to see The Thing as such.
In a more conspiratorial/whimsical mood, 2 years ago [revisited]:
One day I should translate the whole piece, and do it well.
I think that Wokeism and Marxism are both branches of Progressivism, which is the ideology of the Enlightenment. I maintain that as long as Progressives are still explicitly basing their worldview on Marx, it's silly to pretend that they're not doing so. Whether pointing this out will accomplish anything... well, let's see, shall we? If Wokes insist on loudly associating themselves with one of the worst ideologies the world has ever seen, why not hammer them for it?
Am I?
The Enlightenment: "Through reason, we know how to solve all our problems. Therefore, unsolved or imperfectly-solved problems are the fault of specific people with names and addresses."
Marxism: additional detail about who the specific bad people are, how to identify them, organizational tactics for overthrowing them.
Wokeism: As Marx, with some of the specific detail about classes swapped around.
...For now, and less every day, I think. But that leads into disagreements in how the two of us assess the current situation and the likely trajectory of the future. If I've understood you correctly, you think an anglo Globohomo singleton is the likely outcome, while I think the West abruptly deconstructing itself is more likely. Much of that disagreement comes down to questions of the sources and nature of social fragility that are probably not appropriate here. "Cheer up, Judgement Day is closer than you think," to put it flippantly.
To be clear, I don't think that, say, their abandonment of the Proletariat is a tactical, temporary move. They really have ditched large sections of Marxist theory for good. What they haven't ditched are the parts that reliably produce huge mountains of skulls in the specific way Marxism does: year-zero revolution, the tyranny of "reason", its inevitable breeding of corruption and finally the desperate, inevitable search for "wreckers".
This is good advice, but are these specific people even my allies? The "Right" has no shortage of thralls to the Enlightenment, adherents to Reaganism, tax hawks, those deeply concerned about the deficit or the Dow-Jones to the exclusion of all else, to gesture at one loose axis. The Right likewise is an ecosystem, and one of the current challenges is what one's values and priorities should be, and how one organizes an effective coalition around them. What's the Giant, and what's the city? What must be fought, and what can be sacrificed? The economic model is the primary difference between Marxism and Wokism, and economics is, to me, one of the least interesting and important issues in play.
...How much of this difference is simply down to the nature of a pre-revolutionary mass? Is this terribly different from what Bolshevism's precursors looked like, in the years well before open warfare forged the movement into what it became? You've posted excerpts talking about how the early anarchic murderers were greeted with open, sympathetic arms by the Russian elites at the time, how their "critique" of Russian society was swallowed whole by the educated and the thoughtful. Suppose some variance in actual leadership; had the Russian government embraced the moderate end of the revolutionaries and zealously attempted to reshape society according to their dictates, how might things have gone?
If Trotsky had purged Stalin, do you think things would have gone significantly differently?
People used to think swarming locusts were a different species from normal grasshoppers. Then we discovered that they're the same critter, and environmental conditions trigger a complete behavioral and even physical transformation.
If I'm understanding your taxonomy correctly, western intellectuals like, say, Chomsky would be examples of what you label the "Troskyist" branch. Only, Chomsky and his set did in fact carry water for multiple contemporaneous Leninist implementations, Cambodia and Vietnam among them, well past the point where such support was a source of acute embarrassment. This same class was backing Chavez in Venezuela as recently as the late 2000s. It seems that we've got a group that's willing to shoot people in their own country, and a group that's willing to support shooting people in a different country until it looks so obviously bad that it starts threatening their good name in their own country, where such shooting is obviously impractical. It's not obvious to me that these people are actually different in any important way. And sure, such people are very unlikely to actually implement the shooting in their own country, or to long survive such shooting. But they observably maintain cordial relations with what appear to me to be the actual proto-lenins and -stalins. Who's to say they aren't simply the Bukharins of a later age?
...So you think that Wokeism is a small tentacle of the Thing, and I think it's something more approaching a head or an arm. How much of this disagreement is over definitions? BLM is pretty obviously spent as a movement, but I think we'd agree that the Thing is more dominant than it was a few years ago, despite BLM's precipitous decline. So what is the core of the Thing, in your view? What is its essential form and nature, from which the morphs spring? Mine is the description of the Enlightenment delivered above. I think Enlightenment ideology requires a social gradient to operate, with class conflict being its method of operation. Do you see that description as sheddable skin?
I hold that we cannot solve all our problems, that some misfortunes must be accepted, even embraced. I do not think this is a voice that the Thing can productively mimic, not as a tradeoff made with other peoples' lives, but as a tradeoff made in my own life. ...Perhaps this description is not sufficient, but I remain confident that for those that understand it, differences are evident almost immediately.
Soon, one hopes.
Wokism, Marxism, and Progressivism are all collectivist ideologies. The Enlightenment was very much individualist in contrast. Perhaps if Progressivism’s collectivism were replaced with individualism, we might have something resembling Enlightenment. But without this substitution, I reject the descendent relation.
The French Revolution seems pretty collectivist, and it, its progenitors and descendents alike all seem to have considered themselves staunch disciples of the Enlightenment. Nor were American Enlightenment titans like Jefferson able to reliably identify heresy in advance. So on what basis do you claim individualism as the distinguishing mark of the Enlightenment tradition?
I often come across people willing to explain why, by their personal standards, this or that ideology is excluded from their understanding of the Enlightenment. What I'm looking at is an explanation that would satisfy Progressives themselves. My whole argument is that people regularly arrive at Progressive ideology through engagement with Enlightenment ideals. I'll readily agree that not all people do, but Progressivism itself certainly seems to have arisen in this way, as Progressives themselves will tell you.
Compared to what? Where's the individual under Louis XVI? He has no vote, no gun, no power. Universal suffrage is the most individualist concept there is.
And people arrived at enlightenment ideology through engagement with christian ideals. You attempt to clear a high bar before claiming that wokism and marxism are related, then you revert to the thinnest, most circumstancial and superficial similarities for also condemning the Enlightenment. By this extremely loose standard, every ideology, even, presumably, yours, can be tarred.
The Enlightenment does believe that societies can be improved, true, and that the sky is blue. There end the similarities with Marxism/Wokism. It does not view every interaction through the oppressed/oppressor lens, nor require the upending of society, nor defend genocide.
Compared to the ancien régime. It seems obvious to me that a tyranny actively attempting to root out and destroy anything not identical to itself is more collectivist than a sclerotic monarchy.
That was indeed the theory, was it not? But what was the result? Did the "individual" have vote, gun, power under the Reign of Terror, or did those accrue to the Committee of Public Safety and its thugs? Did he have them under Napoleon? Likewise, I'm given to understand that the USSR had "universal suffrage".
This is the distinction between sequence and descent, though. The Enlightenment was explicitly a departure from the Christian tradition. Most of its branches outright repudiated Christianity, and explicitly embraced atheism, the supremacy and sufficiency of human reason, and the overthrow of tradition and superstition.
The Enlightenment attempted to supplant Christianity, in the same way Christianity supplanted Paganism. That it has not entirely succeeded is, in my view, entirely down to the disastrous results it delivers with monotonous regularity. Those results were held at bay in the anglosphere, where the local forms of Christianity resisted effectively for a century or two longer than elsewhere, but now that it's reaching its full flower even in the anglosphere, its results begin to take hold here as well.
Belief in the supremacy of human reason and the infinite perfectibility of man are not thin, circumstantial, or superficial similarities. They're two of the three ingredients for the best-known recipe for giant piles of skulls, and they're two of the core tenants of Enlightenment ideology. The final ingredient is class warfare, which appears to spontaneously arise from these two unless it is actively prevented.
I rather doubt it. I think the history of Christian societies stacks up quite favorably to anything the Enlightenment has produced.
The Enlightenment holds that Human reason can solve all our problems. The corollary which pops up over and over again is that if problems aren't getting solved, it must be someone's fault, since our reason is infallible. This does in fact lead to the oppressed/oppressor lens, the upending of society and genocide.
I get that moderates, liberals and old-fashioned conservatives have a great deal of reflexive affection for the Enlightenment. I get that it's a core part of our secular religion. I still maintain that the Progressives have a strong claim to be its true heirs, and that in any case its predictions have been falsified. Where we are is where we were always going to be, because this is where the Enlightenment leads.
I don't see the connection with individualism/collectivism. You appear to classify those regimes on their boringness.
He did get it. And well, one of the corollaries of his newfound powers early on was that his political career might end with his head in a basket. With great power comes great responsibility.
Napoleon was popular for a long time, even in neighbouring countries. He was more of a presidential figure, ruling with the consent of the people.
But I'm not here to judge the common man's taste for war and occasionally chopping off heads, just pointing out that he was far more powerful than he had been.
Charitably considered, those beliefs are trivially true. Why do we even bother discussing anything if faith is supreme? Do you believe man has achieved a state of imperfectibility?
I disagree, on the weight of evidence of improving indicators a la Better angels of our nature. You always write these blanket reactionary condemnations, but what's your model christian society ? Theodosian Rome, pre-civil war England, mid 19th century papal state?
Do you see the difference between the two accusations ? Marxism/wokism share the same talking points. Then when you get to the enlightenment, you inject your own reasoning and say it somehow leads to those talking points. "In fact", the latter is a far more tenuous connection, and I, enlightenment acolyte, reject your conclusions.
Prior to the Revolution, France recognized three estates. Post revolution, it recognized one, The People, The Public, and was ruled by dictators wielding power in the public's name. When a "committee of public safety" dictates the correct way to for all citizens to think and act, and begins jailing or executing anyone who steps out of line, is this not collectivism, in the "opposite of individualism" sense?
Did he get it in the Soviet Union as well? If not, how was the Soviet Revolution materially different from the French Revolution? It seems obvious that by your argument, the average Russian was more powerful under the USSR, and quite possibly richer as well. Is this the claim?
How? Would you mind elaborating, particularly on what you see as a charitable interpretation of the Enlightenment's claims would be?
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That utopia can be achieved, on earth, by human hands.
If this is the end state, immanentizing the eschaton, etc. Nothing is off the table. Most disagreements seem to be on the method.
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I'm open to different names, but Marxism is by far the most common recent feature of an ideological thread that perhaps can most precisely be called "oikophobia" in the West. What (if anything) binds the left-anarchists, the liberals, the progressives, the communists, the gender-freaks, the black nationalists, the identity politics etc. together? In my view, it is one and only one simple idea, that one's own culture is "the bad guy". All the rest of the theory is just window dressing, call your own people "running dogs of capitalism" or "shitlord colonizer ciswhites", the story is still "US/Europe/Western Civ = bad".
One one hand, it's a necessary part of any healthy society, to critique itself and try to improve. On the other, it's hard to take advice from people who hate you.
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This didn't really apply to countries where Marxist-Leninist parties were actually mass movements. The anglo countries where Marxism remained fairly fringe, perhaps, but in France/Italy/Finland where Communist parties regularly polled 20%+ their support came in great numbers from the working class, as can be seen, for instance, when looking at electoral numbers at ward level (corresponding specifically to working-class districts in cities etc.) Once M-L parties got established, their leadership tended to come from the working class as well, as I recounted here.
At least for the Finnish party, about which I've read a fair bit, up until the 60s the party had remarcably low currency among the intellectuals, academics and journalists, and what "gentleman Marxists" there were were often targets of suspicion for revisionism. Until there was a turn towards the New Left in the 60s one didn't see university-educated people in the Communist Party in great numbers, and this New Left turn ended up launching a process that led to the party essentially dropping Marxism-Leninism, first de facto and de jure. (A part of this New Left class later turned towards orthodox Marxism-Leninism but that's another story.)
The whole debate about whether wokeness is Marxist or anti-Marxist or whatever is basically impossible until we have a firmer definition of wokeness than what we currently do. As far as I've seen, most definition of wokeness are essentially "progressivism expect too much for me" or "progressivism expect authoritarian". The first one is always necessarily subjective, and authoritarian progressivism is hardly something invented by Marx, as evinced most famously by the process of the French Revolution.
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It's difficult to argue that the armies of historical civilizations, with deep traditions - pick any, mongols, romans, etc - were humanized? Peace and kindness and love over war and hierarchy and conquest isn't trad - it's the creed of progressives, albeit often poorly followed.
It's neither. No-one except the most radical ever espoused universal peace and kindness and love. Even Jesus, the lamb, drove the moneychangers out of the temple with scourges, and "came not to bring peace, but a sword." The question where the parties differ is who gets the peace-and-love, and who is consigned to the war-and-death. And as for hierarchy, that's sort of an orthogonal third quality that can come with either peace (as in leveller/quaker/anarchist dreams) or violence (the cossack/cowboy/yeoman tradition)
Huh? This is a universal belief today. It's mocked in the 'duude hippie universal love' sense - but 'fundamentally, we should be kind and good to everyone' is, like, a moral tenet most agree on. If I asked random people around me IRL if that's a good thing, they'd say "yes". The more conservative might add "but that's very difficult, and we can't go too far", and the more leftist might say "except for the NAZIS" (who are, of course, bad for breaking that premise, tolerate intolerance, w/e), but most agree on it in a significant sense. It relates to everything from antiracism to global development aid to christianity to why those hippies thought 'whoa love everyone' when they took acid (indigenous acid-doers have visions of their idiosyncratic practices when they do psychedelics), to one's day-to-day life where the economy, school, welfare, are justified by 'benefitting everyone'.
Peace and love to ISIS? To Putin? To Boko Haram? To "January Sixthers"? To Transphobes? To Pedophiles? To Conversion Therapists?
You don't have to scratch the surface too hard to find people who even baked-out old hippies don't extend "universal peace kindness and love" to. The question is, where do you draw the line?
Universal in an approximate sense, sure, but it's present
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I disagree. Read their writings, their poetry, their histories, examine the events of their time. They understood good and evil, virtue, honor, malice, human weakness. They were often concerned with the good life and how to secure it, and their execution was by no means the worst humans have done.
This is certainly the Progressive claim. And then there's the actual history, where Progressive attempts to implement the purest form of their vision have consistently resulted in some of the most concentrated evil and human misery the world has ever seen. Properly freed from tradition and hierarchy, truly Progressive societies have not demonstrated a solution to war, nor to hierarchy either, and it is not clear to me that attempting to eliminate hierarchy in particular is even possible, much less desirable.
This is not to claim that Marxism or Progressivism are Pure Evil, because they are not. Humans generally are not good producing anything pure. The fact remains that straight tabula-rasa year-zero Progressivism has a considerably worse record than any ideology currently in play, and judged by a balance of outcomes versus remaining influence versus length of influence, it's by far the most extreme outlier I'm aware of.
It is more or less necessary depending on circumstances. Cossacks and cowboys had very little hierarchy. Some versions of yeoman farmers didn't have much more.
Is hierarchy measured by number of layers, or by the influence the layers exert? I would bet most Cowboys and Cassocks who lived and worked together had a "boss", and I'd bet that "boss" had a whole lot of say on how things went. I'd bet, depending on the size of the group, there was even a fair amount of hierarchy below the boss. If your whole life revolves around working together, and that work is done under more or less explicit chain of command, I'd say you have "a lot" of hierarchy even if the hierarchy is only a few or even one level tall.
Yes, but at the same time if "exit" is easy (or at least not significantly harder than non-exit, b/c let's be real cossack life in any circumstance wasn't a picnic), and if the hierarchy is in many respects directly-answerable to the group (e.g., the election and deposition of Cossack "hetmans") or a function of ill-defined "prestige" or respect, then that hierarchy may sit comparatively lightly on one's shoulders.
Of course all this is theoretical, and I'm not a cossack or cowboy so if I'm blowing wind feel free to disregard.
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I'm not conflating good and humanized here. Ancient civilizations both had deep and profound traditions, and also slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people for no conceivable progressive reason, for glory and conquest and just mere power. But marxism is less violent, in both ideology and implementation, than - easiest demonstration - the mongols, or some of the wars of ancient china.
Post-WW2 society does seem to have less war than ancient societies (... althouhg that's a weak claim, "post ww2", ww2 was recent!) - which is perhaps related to 'the glory of conquest and war' being a value modern progressives despise, which was not true in the past.
Why must the reasons be "conceivably progressive"? Romans believed that their sociopolitical system was the best, and the more of the world it ruled the better everything would be. Progressive polities likewise believed that their sociopolitical system was the best, and the more of the world it ruled the better everything would be. Sure, the "everything" that "would be better" was based on different values, but why should we concede that International Socialism was a more worthy goal than "Rome Eternal"? The Romans appear to have been self-aware of the Pax Romana; I'm not aware of an equivalent Pax Sovieta or Pax Franca. The Enlightenment did not derive the blessings of peace and prosperity or The Good Life from first principles, and they manifestly sucked at actually securing them.
What justifies this choice of dates? Progressivism's first real play was the French Revolution, which resulted in some of the largest wars the world had ever seen. Progressivism's next real play was the Russian Revolution, which was pure hell on earth and helped sow the seeds of WWII itself. Further plays resulted in multiple genocide-analogues post-WWII. The Soviets were no strangers to Glorious War and Conquest. Neither were the Chinese, or the Vietnamese, nor the Cambodians, nor Che and Castro, nor many others besides.
The first poem from your link:
...To be clear, your argument is that such sentiments have no analog from, say, The Great Patriotic War? Such a claim seems entirely unsupportable, but perhaps you'd like examples?
We're talking past each other tbh, and it's probably my fault - I don't really know how this is a response to my point, or where exactly we disagree. I was arguing you seemed to be claiming progressivism was somehow more violent or brutal in a way 'untethered by tradition', and my response is just that 'both progressivism and traditional societies have been quite violent, and violence = bad seems somewhat progressive'. I'm not saying progressivism is better, or that WWII didn't involve patriotism. And I did note that the 'actually reduced war' claim was a weak one - the stronger claim is the progressive claims 'war is bad and there should be less of it', even if he follows through on it poorly, while many trad societies do not claim that, and indeed had violent wars. This isn't saying that progressives are better ... just that your argument has a bit of progressive in it.
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I believe the perspective FC is coming from is one in which it is understood that the basest level of human interaction is, as nature, red in tooth and claw. "Might makes right" isn't a moral precept, it's a factual description of the most primitive level of homo sapiens social organization. Government began the first time the strongest, quickest guy in the social unit said "Do what I say or I'll fucking kill you."
There's a fantastic scene in Wildbow's current serial Pale, in which a red-tribe-y combat sorcerer finds himself trapped in a realm in which, as a fundamental Law, violence is not permitted.
Violence is always an option. And as an option, it often sucks, even when you win. Much of hierarchy, and tradition and civilization is just scaffolding to reduce how often we actually resort to direct violence to resolve disputes. "Peace, kindness and love" are nice ideals, but they don't actually offer a useful alternative method of dispute resolution. This issue is made stark when we talk about ideologies like Marxism, whose action plan is essentially:
Tear down all existing social order, traditions, civilization and mores.
???? (Something magic happens).
Utopia.
When we tear down all that scaffolding, we don't unleash the World Spirit/Planet Ghost/Friendship is Magic. We actually just revert to the oldest, default paradigm, violence. Will to power. Trial by combat. And so Marxists always end up with Stalins and Pol Pots and Raz Simones (notice how it took him less than 24 hours to reinvent the first human civic tech, Monopoly on Violence?)
To the extent that it's a revolutionary ideology, Woke will have the same problems. To the extent that it's not a revolutionary ideology, but just window dressing on liberalism, progressivism can dodge that same problem.
Marx and his disciples very explicitly embraced violence as their mechanism for ushering in the new world. Genocide-analogs were not a failure mode, but very much an explicit part of Marxism, and a part carefully retained when even supposedly-"core" ideas like the Proletariat were discarded. It's difficult to determine which current leftists are lying to themselves about this fact, and which are merely lying to everyone else; the persistant refusal to simply abandon the old blood-soaked monster leaves me deeply skeptical of the existence of a third variety. Marx offers an excuse for lining people you don't like up against a wall. If that's not what you're interested in, why is he still relevant?
He really is not all that unique in this. Hell, you don't even need a fancy theoretical justification for doing this - people in the 20th century got the ol' blindfold-and-cigarette treatment all the time just for insulting whoever happened to be in power in their country.
Marx offers intellectuals a justification they can accept in place of base human will-to-power (which they think themselves to have transcended). Same reason Christian theologians twisted themselves into knots justifying war against the infidel; they had both a desire (or need, depending on where one stands) to wage war, a desire/need to not believing themselves to be in violation of moral precepts/self-conceptions which would normally deem such acts as evil.
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The ability to do violence is the only truly inalienable right.
It means that violence is intrinsic to the human experience, ineradicable (and thus inalienable). All practical rights rely for enforcement on the assumption that the people can enforce them with violence if necessary. It is this principle that underwrites "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another". The basic rights, of self-defense, of self-determination arise from this ancient right. All others are based on it, at some abstracted distance. A right is a principle that is morally correct to defend with violence. What is "revolution", but an appeal to the most ancient and basic of all rights? The Last Argument of Kings is the last argument of every man.
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It’s inalienable in the sense that you can’t take it away from someone. As long as I have arms, legs, teeth, I can use violence.
It's not about that. The point is, your right to do violence is the only truly inalienable right you have. No one can take it from you except by killing you.
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