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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28496 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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You might find this interesting - if not for the purpose of developing effective propaganda, then at least for your own edification. It has a bit of a bibliography for further reading.

John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism:

So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals. Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs, John Roemer, Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.” Of course, this was not a capitulation to the old-fashioned “classical liberalism” of the 19th century, it was rather a defection to the style of modern liberalism that found its canonical expression in the work of John Rawls.

If one felt like putting the point polemically, one might say that the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism.

Thank you for the link, it is an excellent pointer to further reading about "what happened to the Marxists."

Is Yvette Falarca a liberal?

Would you agree that there are now large groups of communist thugs in America, with institutional support and cover, committing organized violence against their perceived political enemies? Would you agree that these communist thugs are engaged by the police and the justice system generally much less than we would expect for a random person committing the sort of violent crimes they routinely commit?

Would you agree that most of these thugs originate, directly or indirectly, from the higher education system? That is, they were students or employees of the higher education system, or they received their ideology from students or employees of that education system?

...And if you don't agree with the above, would you agree that hypothetically, if the above were the reality of the situation, it would be a case of communists converting to "liberalism", only for their "liberalism" to recapitulate communism?

Is Yvette Falarca a liberal?

Based on the details of her criminal record, she doesn't appear to be.

Would you agree that there are now large groups of communist thugs in America, with institutional support and cover, committing organized violence against their perceived political enemies?

I think that Antifa would qualify as such, yes. My impression is that lately they've been less active in terms of large public actions than they were during the height of the Trump years, but maybe I just haven't been paying attention as much.

Would you agree that these communist thugs are engaged by the police and the justice system generally much less than we would expect for a random person committing the sort of violent crimes they routinely commit?

Yes.

Would you agree that most of these thugs originate, directly or indirectly, from the higher education system? That is, they were students or employees of the higher education system, or they received their ideology from students or employees of that education system?

I don't know. That's an empirical question that I don't feel prepared to answer. Determining the causality of large-scale social and historical phenomena is always a tricky business.

Generally, I'm in a position where I want to believe in the capacity of cultural production and academic thought to have impacts outside of their own provincial spheres, but I don't know if the evidence actually supports such a claim.

The author of the linked post may be suffering from a bit of myopia. He gives a historical account of certain trends within analytic philosophy departments. But you can certainly still find people in non-analytic philosophy departments, people in non-philosophy departments (English, sociology, the menagerie of "Studies", etc), and people outside of academic altogether, who call themselves Marxists. (Of course, the authenticity and seriousness of such commitments are always open to questioning.)

Based on the details of her criminal record, she doesn't appear to be.

Then where did she and the infrastructure supporting and defending her come from? IIRC, she's a lifelong academic.

I don't know. That's an empirical question that I don't feel prepared to answer. Determining the causality of large-scale social and historical phenomena is always a tricky business.

I'd agree that it's a tricky business, but it seems to me there's no way to avoid engaging with that business. Further, it seems to me that we've been engaging in that business routinely more or less forever. I engage in that business every time I consider an argument about strutural racism or sexism or colonialism or any of the other basic arguments of the progressive worldview. I reject the progressive arguments not because the question is too nebulous to draw a conclusion, but because I examine the evidence and draw conclusions. It seems to me that the sort of uncertianty you describe seems to pop up when the sort of critique that is usually applied by progressives is instead turned on them, and it seems to me that it pops up even when those applying this critique to progressivism have much, much better evidence to support their critique than the progressives generally do.

For an example, it is routine in our society to attribute violent crime rates to socio-economic factors, and to claim that these violent crime rates can be increased or decreased by various policy interventions. Well, we just witnessed an extremely powerful cluster of policy interventions, and we can observe that it was immediately followed by the largest change in violent crime rates ever rigorously observed. And yet when I suggest a causative linkage, the same people who have spent years telling me that I should take the impact of socio-economic factors on the crime rate more seriously suddenly start claiming that the whole issue is an impenetrable fog, and real knowledge is simply impossible.

Likewise in this case, I observe that there's a long and quite sordid history of involvement in communist activism on the part of Academia, that academia seems to be ground-zero for the current crop of communist thugs, and that academia takes public steps to organize and defend their thuggery. I'm not sure where the uncertainty is coming from, or how we might reduce it. Would an analysis of association between Antifa and Academia be sufficient?

Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs, John Roemer, Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.”

Oh, how the turn tables. Where is all that "liberal egalitarianism" now, in the era of "only white people can be racist"?

They got eaten by the actual Marxists.

Well, the twist is that the "actual" Marxism came from a lot of the people that were just described as having converted to liberalism.

Because Marxism was always bullshit.

That's a bit low effort and antagonistic, so even though the message is perfectly fine, the form might get you modded.

In any case I don't follow. If they converted to liberalism how does Marxism enter into it? Or are you saying their conversion was bullshit, because they were Marxist?

As @Primaprimaprima observed, once they stripped away the bullshit, all that was left was old-fashioned "spirit of '89" style revolutionary leftism. Turns out that the ideas that make Marxism distinct and for lack of a better word "marxist" are all bullshit.

Thinking of it like a Git repo, they returned thier ideological branch to an earlier liberal state by reverting Marx's committs. But the master branch being run by [current year] progressives still includes them.

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