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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".
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?
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?
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?
How can Feminism "return" to Marxism, when it never had anything to do with Marxism in the first place?
Where does the idea of "Late-stage Capitalism" come from? What are the other stages?
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?
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 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 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 economic model as a 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".
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 I do agree that actual Marxists have been influential in those 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.
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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.
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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?
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:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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".
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Wait, was this meant to be a reply to something in the "Cultural Marxism" thread a couple of top-level posts down?
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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.
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My experience does not differ.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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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