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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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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?

My experience does not differ.

If they do use that term, what do they mean by it?

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.

I will investigate the construction of anxiety as mental disorder in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and biomedical psychiatry.

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.

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.

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.