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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29662 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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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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