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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21704 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Oh, I'll happily grant that the term 'cultural Marxism' has referents. When someone like Joy Pullmann says 'the cultural Marxists', I know who she means and what they believe. (...)

By contrast, most of the people identified as cultural Marxists don't claim to be cultural Marxists. In fact, they mostly decry the term and claim that it's a conspiracy theory.

There's two problems here. Like I mentioned earlier, we've had at least a decade, maybe more, of left-wing academics writing rivers of text on "neoliberalism". No one identified themselves as neoliberal at the time, the mish-mash of ideas attached to the label often contradicted the beliefs of people who may have at one point identified as neoliberal, or were even self-contradictory in themselves. None of this stopped a huge amount of papers on the subject being published in peer-reviewed journals, so I don't see why we should be treating "Cultural Marxism" with a higher amount of rigor.

But the bigger problem is that there were people identifying as cultural Marxists. That excerpt I quoted was Emily Hicks writing about how to combine Marxism with feminism, and her answer was: cultural Marxism. Again, at that point what more do you want? You can say the term is outdated, you can say the whole thing was a marginal niche at the time, but what you cannot say is that it's a strawman conspiracy theory.

Now, back to OG Marxists, if the goal is to enforce a distinction between Marxism and the-ideology-that-shall-not-be-named, I'm happy to go along with that, but enforcing a distinction is not the same thing as denying it's existence, or that it at one point used the label "cultural Marxism" as a matter of historical record.

I didn't say that it's a strawman conspiracy theory, so, well, good?

I think that 'cultural Marxism' is not a helpful label or one that illuminates the political trend that we're criticising, and I think that the widespread use of the term has more to do with a need to associate the trend in question with a historical villain than anything else (that is, what I termed 'a bugaboo' - 'Marxism' is a spooky word).

I like to use 'social justice politics' or 'progressivism' when I need to be more neutral, and I'm not above just using 'wokeness' when I think that word's not going to alienate my audience, and that seems to work fine for me. 'Cultural Marxism' just introduces too many inaccurate or confusing associations for my liking.

Now that said, yes, there were people who identified as 'cultural Marxists', and I'm happy to call them cultural Marxists. But those people are not who we mean when we talk about cultural Marxism/wokeness/SJ politics, so I don't find them that relevant to the use of the term today.

For what it's worth I am also quite happy to discard the term 'neoliberal'. I absolutely roll my eyes at and downgrade the reliability of any activists who start talking about 'ascendant neoliberalism' and the like. So let's just throw both of them out. The worthlessness of 'neoliberal' as a term doesn't rescue 'cultural Marxism'.

I think that 'cultural Marxism' is not a helpful label or one that illuminates the political trend that we're criticising

Oh, I don't necessarily disagree with that, for me it's mostly a question of preserving the historical record.

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