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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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I think the "Cultural Marxism" discourse on the Motte tends to go down rabbit holes due to arguments about the meaning of words. The core facts are:

  • The thing that right-wingers are talking about when they say "Cultural Marxism" is real, is broadly on the left, and is bad viewed from both a liberal and a conservative perspective.
  • The thing changes what it calls itself frequently in order to avoid being named by its political opponents. (See Freddie de Boer).
  • At some point in the past, some but not all of the people doing the thing called it "Cultural Marxism", but they stopped when right-wingers started using the term.
  • Some, but not all, of the people doing the thing consider themselves Marxists. Almost all the people doing the thing agree that it rejects certain tenets of orthodox Marxism, they just disagree on whether they reject enough to make them a continuation of Marxism, or to make them something else.
  • The orthodox Marxists that still exist (including Freddie) are very clear that they do not consider the thing to be Marxism. Mostly, they hate it as much as we do.
  • All the people doing the thing are influenced directly or indirectly by Marx, but that isn't saying much because everyone (including his opponents) is influenced by Marx. In most cases this line of influence passes through Gramsci.

The argument about whether or not "Cultural Marxism" is really Marxism is analogous to the argument about whether Mormons are really Christians, and is equally unproductive. From the perspective of outsiders using the word to attack something we dislike, the more interesting question is whether thinking of "Cultural Marxism" as a form of Marxism helps or hinders our efforts to defend against it. *

From a liberal perspective, "Cultural Marxism" and orthodox Marxism are bad for sufficiently different reasons that lumping them together makes you dumber. In terms of epistemics, orthodox Marxism claims to know things which aren't true, whereas "Cultural Marxism" wrongly accuses its opponents of knowing nothing. In terms of political impacts, orthodox Marxism rejects individual action because it might lead to economic inequality, whereas "Cultural Marxism" tries to prevent effective collective action by saying it is impossible until we have all completed therapy for our internal systems of oppression. I oppose using the term "Cultural Marxism" because orthodox Marxists, most "Cultural Marxists", and intelligent liberals all agree that "Cultural Marxism" is not a subset of Marxism, so the word is misleading.

From a cultural conservative perspective, both "Cultural Marxism" and orthodox Marxism are godless, anti-cultural, and anti-us, and lumping them together is harmless. I think this is a bad case of outgroup homogeneity bias, but I understand where the cultural conservatives are coming from.

FWIW, I call the thing "Wokism"

* In the Mormon analogy, it is logical for anti-Christians to think that Mormonism is Christianity regardless of the theological arguments because they oppose it for the same reasons.

I think this is largely correct, yes. We're dealing with a problem of shifting labels - some small number of people have used the term 'cultural Marxism' to self-identify, but almost none do today, the term 'cultural Marxism' today is used extremely broadly to identify ideas or movements with nothing or almost nothing in common with classical Marxism, and ultimately I think it's become a term that obfuscates rather than illuminates. The term 'cultural Marxism' does not reveal anything useful about the people it is applied to.

I don't think I quite agree with the debate about Mormonism and Christianity, because that usually is couched in specific claims about what 'Christianity' means, and what's required for something to be meaningfully 'Christian'. The facts about Mormonism aren't particularly in dispute - Mormons sincerely claim to be followers of Jesus, but they are outside what all historical Christian creeds would have regarded as the bounds of orthodoxy. The issue at hand is simply whether or not one accepts those historical creeds as authoritative.

The argument about whether or not "Cultural Marxism" is really Marxism is analogous to the argument about whether Mormons are really Christians, and is equally unproductive.

So, first of all thank you for outlining the "core facts", because I pretty much agree on every point, and I don't know if I'd manage to list them in such a detached way, but I do kind of disagree that this is the crux of the issue, and what people here end up fighting over. I explicitly stated that I'm perfectly happy to say The Thing is not Real Marxism, that it is in fact a perversion of the real thing, The Last Jedi of Marxism, a CIA op to co-opt it, and make it serve capitalism instead. I'm entirely fine with all of that.

But if we map the arguments we've heard here, and in the other thread, to your analogy, we'd be getting things like "the Church of Mormon is a myth!" or "I'm a Christian, and if there was such a thing as Mormonism, I think I would have heard about it". It sounds like blanket denial, even as the other side is pointing at church buildings and the missionaries standing on the street corner.

Yes. In this model, there absolutely are missionaries wandering around with magic underwear under their cheap suits calling themselves Latter-Day Saints and insisting that there are no Mormon Christians and that the word "Mormon Chrisitan" is a Satanic dog-whistle. And in ten years' time they will be saying that "Latter-Day Saints" is a dog-whistle too.

But the debate among Motteposters appears to be about whether "Mormon Christians" are Christians.

But if we map the arguments we've heard here, and in the other thread, to your analogy, we'd be getting things like "the Church of Mormon is a myth!" or "I'm a Christian, and if there was such a thing as Mormonism, I think I would have heard about it". It sounds like blanket denial, even as the other side is pointing at church buildings and the missionaries standing on the street corner.

I can think two better mappings. The crux that makes it different from most of other is that "cultural marxism" is a descriptive term that was never widely used as ingroup denominator, though it makes sense as theoretical construction.

During the George W. Bush years, many leftists here in not-the-US drank all the US leftist messaging about then-political enemy of American Evangelical Christians without much critique. Some people honestly think the US teeming with sex-crazy corrupt religious religious cultists called "Evangelicals", lead by nightmarish ministers who look something that crawled from 1st season of True Detective and Witchfynder General, who are generally corrupt and fully intend to subjugate women and instill visions from Handmaid's Tale.

If I thought it would matter, I could say things like "I have met Evangelicals, they are different from us bu not like the media portrays" or "if there was a conspiracy to turn Handmaid's Tale into reality, I would have heard about it" (and be not believed).

Another example: Patriarchy, as defined by feminism. Yes, there have been social and cultural organization models where men had more rights than women. Yet also the strong forms of "patriarchy" as an all-encompassing cultural force that must fought everywhere, all the time, that both needs to eliminated in our minds to remove hurtful notions and social expectations and also in the social world to remove privileges and old boys networks by setting up quotas ... yeah, we do get arguments lke "patriarchy is a myth" and "I am a man and if there was such a thing as patriarchy that supports me with my career, I think I would have heard about it".

If I thought it would matter, I could say things like "I have met Evangelicals, they are different from us bu not like the media portrays" or "if there was a conspiracy to turn Handmaid's Tale into reality, I would have heard about it" (and be not believed).

That doesn't work. If we map that back to the debate on Cultural Marxism, it would end up looking like "I've met Cultural Marxists, they're not saying what you're accusing them of". No one here is saying that.

yeah, we do get arguments lke "patriarchy is a myth" and "I am a man and if there was such a thing as patriarchy that supports me with my career, I think I would have heard about it".

Ok, but that's just a direct denial of Cultural Marxism having existed, and I'm quite prepared to argue the other side of the position (see here), and that just means the "core facts" from MadMozer's post are actually under dispute.

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