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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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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 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.