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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?
Socialists argue strenuously on this point primarily for one of three reasons:
A. Cognitive dissonance. One of the central tenets of the socialist religion is the claim that they and only they, by definition, have the nous. Similarly, all others, by definition, lack the nous. Therefore, a socialist literally cannot process a situation where a non-socialist presents facts about socialism because a non-socialist cannot, by definition, have that knowledge. Hence we recently saw:
B. Purity spiral. As a rule, there can only be one true socialism, and true socialists are duty-bound to eliminate all pretenders, or else their project will never be completed. Thus, some reactions against the idea are just socialists doing their usual infighting.
C. PR. Since ancient times, literally in the original 'mysteries', socialists have sought absolute message control about themselves and seek to eliminate disfavorable facts. Some socialists view a connection between modern, cultural Marxism and doctrinaire, Marx-and-Engels Marxism as a potential vulnerability, and so attack the association wherever it appears.
An additional reason is that wokism and such has to this point "won" the culture war. Marxists are not the only ideologs who seek to take credit for social justice as a successor movement to liberalism, you see this with Christians (particularly in some denominations such as Methodists), capitalists (there's decades of writing about how responsible capitalism requires this sort of thing culminating in ESG), and especially neoliberals. It's natural that older, more dysfunctional intellectual traditions would try to extend claims over their successor movements.
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I don't disagree with you, but I just want to point to a better analogy for SJW in the Marxist paradigm.
Specifically, it's gnosticism. The wokes are cathars. Literally etymologically comparable- gnosticism comes from gnosis, meaning (hidden)knowledge, while woke refers to being awoken and realizing truths that most are blind to. But also just fundamentally- woke ideas are pretty far from orthodox Marxism(which is pretty clear about cultural ideas being of secondary importance/solved by economic ideas) and I have a post below about how you can square the circle with their obvious descent by realizing the woke view of the kyriarchy is as an opiate of the masses. A demiurge deceiving the masses, if you will. I had this realization reading your post and it's kind of blowing my mind right now. Wokes have cathari initiates who help allies advance through no personal effort(seriously, there's a pretty big division in SJW culture as to how much effort is expected from people who agree with them).
History never repeats, but it does rhyme.
Right, yesterday I referenced James Lindsay, who goes into great depth pointing out the explicit parallels between modern post-Marxism/“woke”/critical theory on the one hand, and Gnosticism on the other. I think the influences and similarities are unimpeachably obvious. Wokes very much do treat “society” as a demiurge to be defeated by an initiated majority of ensouled, elected individuals who have achieved varying levels of gnosis. The end goal being to reclaim Eden - an anarchoprimitivist, purely-egalitarian utopia.
(this comment is equally relevant to @hydroacetylene and @ChickenOverlord)
There is a surprising amount of literature out there showing the direct, continuous relationship between the modern socialist religion and the ancient one. You can see a previous comment of mine for a partial summary of The Socialist Phenomenon, which discusses the continuity of practice and belief through ancient and medieval groups. There are plenty of more modern, academically rigorous sources (e.g, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition by Magee; Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern times by van den Broek and Hanegraaff; etc.)
I wish I could make people read that fucking book (or any of those books). Even just the people here. If I could send mottizens copies without anyone breaking opsec, I would do so free of charge.
I'm not a theist but our society is clearly locked in a religious, spiritual conflict with the latest flavor of that most despicable and ancient of Mesopotamian religions. This conflict has material harms, but they cant be addressed until people recognize it for what it is. I wish there were a way to communicate this fact to the average person but I don't think anyone has cracked the code yet.
The oldest of the Mesopotamian religions is either Judaism or Zoroastrianism, which, disagree with them though I might, are clearly less harmful than Islam.
Mediterranean may have been a better word.
In any event, I think the socialist religion pre-dates Judaism. I refer to the religious socialists as the Identicals; as the core purpose of their faith is to make everything (thought, matter, etc.) identical, not just with eachother, but with god. The Identicals can be traced before 500BCE, with clearly developed religious and philosophical currents in the OG "mysteries," Thales of Miletus, and also in the century or two after, in Pythagoreanism, general mysticism/syncretism/esotericism in the eastern half of the Med, Gnosticism, early Hermetic writings, etc.
Judaism on the other hand, is just a bit later, but not by much. Somewhere after 500BCE, Yahwism becomes monotheistic and then becomes Second Temple Judaism. However, certain currents of Judaism I think are rather indistinguishable from the Identicals. The more I understand the history of Kabbalah, the less distinction I see between it and any of the other esotericism and gnosticism of the same time and place.
Taking a bit of a tangent, I would like to ask your input on the most effective name for this religion. Socialism? the Identicals? Gnostic Praxis? Political Gnosticism? 'Oh my god, those Egyptian Hermeticists really were up to something!'?
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My biggest qualm with folks claiming that Wokism and Gnosticism are the same/similar ideologies is that the Gnostics despised the body (and material reality generally). Woke types tend to be obsessed with this material reality only (and most don't believe that there is anything outside of this life/material existence).
To add to @Hoffmeister25, I know absolutely nothing of gnosticism and had a hard time parsing this post since despising material reality is to me one of progressive's defining qualities. They're frequently hardcore constructivists who'll outright deny the existence of an objective reality altogether.
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The truly committed wokes do despise the body and material reality. What do you think transgender stuff is? The critical fat studies people are the same - you see a lot of talk about “life in a fat, marginalized body.” Like yeah, there’s some tension there with the “fat acceptance”/“healthy at any size” stuff, but the latter is basically the short-term stopgap solution (reducing/eliminating feelings of shame and otherness as a result of living in a disfavored corporeal form) but the transhumanism is the long-term vision. The abolishment of unchosen bonds includes unchosen bodies.
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I think you kind of miss the point. The people arguing that modern SJW ideology is descended from Marxism aren't wrong, but they are wrong when they think it's a direct and coherent lineage, and especially when some people seem to think that it's part of some grand master plan laid out by Gramsci and the Frankfurt school. (Or, going deeper down certain rabbit holes, a grand master plan by George Soros and Da Jooooooos!) Frankly, I think it is all fundamentally about resentment of the have nots against the haves, and this is essentially a parallel development. Marx built an entire economic theory around it, but without Marx, we'd still have people agitating for redistributive efforts and cutting down the tall poppies; they'd just use different labels.
Thus, arguing about whether "Cultural Marxism" is a thing or whether it's "really" Marxism seems pointless to me. Yes, "cultural Marxism" is a thing whether you call it that or something else; are "Cultural Marxists" actually trying to bring about a revolution of the proleteriat and the True Communism That Has Never Been Tried? Mostly not.
Most people (rightists and leftists) don't actually think about this very deeply the way us Motteian nerds do. The average SJW, including, I would wager, the chick who drew that "Kyriarchy" cartoon @FCfromSSC linked to, and the average right-winger railing about "cultural Marxism," cannot actually articulate what Marx espoused except in very general terms. The New Atheist/Christian analogy is apt; you're right that New Atheists smugly declaring they know the Bible better than the Christians they're arguing with were very obnoxious, but they were frequently correct.
The problem with the "Cultural Marxist" label is that it just reads as a cheap low-effort pejorative. "Commie" is still a dirty word in America, and calling SJWs "Cultural Marxists" reads as "Hurr hurr you commie!" It reminds me of right-wingers claiming every Democratic president ever was actually a communist.
There is of course a visible shift happening now where the left is using the same tactics to call every conservative "far right" and every Republican a "fascist." Boomerang back to conservatives claiming Nazis were actually leftists.
It's sloppy thinking all around, and while @FCfromSSC wrote a very thoughtful post tracing the lineage from Marx to Everyday Feminism, most critics don't and can't. (Freddie DeBoer, everyone's favorite anti-woke actual Marxist, is constantly driving himself crazy(er) trying to explain how everyone on the right and the left is Wrong About Everything.)
The people who fit this description in the strongest sense believe that the Cultural aspect has superseded the OG economic analysis of Marx; mostly they probably don't think about that at all, or maybe endorse some sort of MMT in which debt doesn't matter and therefore needn't stand in their way. Not sure how much they think about their desired end-state either, but my impression is that it looks less like a dictatorship of the proletariat and more like a dictatorship of them personally -- maybe we can switch the name to "Cultural Stalinism"?
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What of the march through the institutions, the endless attempts at entryism?
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The Frankfurt school brings a memeplex that the solution is obvious, and those in-the-know just have to keep reiterating why the problem is bad until people come around.
But it's also postmodern and Gnostic. The one unifying agreement is that everything is white cis-hetero patriarchal capitalist—our modern Yaldabaoth. That Everyday Feminism comic is reminding you that even if you think that you have gained knowledge and escaped, you probably haven't. There's always more work to do.
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What exactly do you mean by this? If there isn't a direct and coherent lineage, why can I literally draw a straight line from Marx to Gramsci to the Frankfurt School to people who self-labelled as Cultural Marxist to Critical Theory to all the stuff that people complain about when they talk about SJWs? If that's not a direct and coherent lineage, what is?
How is that my problem? Maybe they should have picked a better name?
https://music.ishkur.com
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music discusses various ways that music genres grab ideas from other music genres. Or enthusiasts take a particular element from one genre and put it front-and-center into new tracks, making it distinctive enough to be its own genre. Calling this process "direct and coherent" would overstate things.
Same process here.
(I suppose that "Cultural Marxism" is roughly equivalent to the hearing "Oh, you listen to disco?", back in the day.)
In another comment, somewhat to my surprise actually, I've found and linked that a woman who was unironically using the term "cultural marxism" to describe her own ideas back in the '80s, has recently published a book about Critical Pedagogy. If you follow the likes of Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, you'll see that Critical Pedagogy is a decent chunk of what they're raging against. I don't know about you, but "written by literally the same people" is hard to beat in terms of "direct and coherent lineage" in my book.
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I'm saying the average SJW/woke posting BLM flags and talking about trans rights is not a "cultural Marxist" in a coherent manner and literally wouldn't know what you mean by calling them a Marxist (or they'd laugh at you because they kind of know what Marxism is and don't consider themselves to be one). You can argue their ideas are influenced by Marxism, which is true, but true in the same way we all swim downstream of Marxism, Christianity, and all the other memeplexes in our culture. I'm saying calling them "Cultural Marxists" is only very vaguely accurate and not very useful except as a boo word. (And of course boo words are pretty useful as rhetorical devices, but annoying to people who actually pick apart what words mean.)
If by "they" you mean the people who actually call themselves Cultural Marxists, obviously they wouldn't contest the label, but they are a small percentage of the people you typically attach it to.
What do you mean by "lineage" then? I'd say that by definition it must include people from who woke SJW BLM-flag-posters derived their beliefs.
I mean people who used to call themselves Cultural Marxists. Some of them still hold on to the label, others seem to have moved on. In any case a lineage, the way I understand the term, exists, and is direct and coherent.
Maybe it's my bubble, but most of the SJW BLM-flag-posters I know are liberal Christians/former Christians, the sort who if they go to church at all anymore go to one with rainbow flags, or a UU congregation. They would argue passionately that their beliefs are derived from Christianity and what Jesus taught, and I don't think that is less accurate than saying their beliefs are derived from Marx. (There has long been a strain of liberal Christianity arguing that what Jesus preached was in fact a sort of proto-Marxism.) That many traditional Christians would vehemently argue otherwise is no more relevant than Freddie DeBoer saying they aren't "really" Marxists.
My point here is that calling a woke trans rights activist a "Cultural Marxist" is not much different than calling a MAGA a fascist.
Are you talking about individual people who literally called themselves Cultural Marxists, or are you claiming the entire movement (for some value of "movement") used to call itself Cultural Marxism? Because there might be some of the former, though I don't know who you are referring to, but if you mean the latter, no, I don't think there is some single coherent movement that used to be known as "Cultural Marxism" and has now relabeled itself BLM, woke, trans rights, etc.
Well, this is getting a bit confusing because when 4bpp tried conflating "wokness" / Cultural Marxism with LGBT rights, I was the one that had to point out he's making a mistake. So I'm not sure why this point is directed at people who want to use the term "Cultural Marxism" rather than the people who are dissuading from it's use.
I hold that trans activism is Cultural-Marxism-agnostic, but that there is a strand inside it, that traces it's lineage to Cultural Marxism. Or are you saying that when the WPATH name drops "intersectionality", "power and privilege", or "minority stress", those ideas are derived from Christianity?
Trans rights is a broader term that includes non-Cultural-Marxism-derived ideas, but if we go with Queer Theory, BLM, and "woke", all of it sprouts from "Critical Theory" which is the politically correct (for now) term for what was once known as Cultural Marxism. If you don't want to call it Cultural Marxism anymore, I'm ok with that, but the idea that there isn't a direct and coherent lineage from ideas commonly known as "woke" to Critical Theory and from there to Cultural Marxism seems just flatly wrong to me. I'd even be willing to bet that even your friends who swear they got those ideas directly from Jesus, took some kind of a Critical Theory course at some point in their lives.
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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.
In an American context referring to 'liberal Christianity' pre-Roe v Wade ranges on a narrow spectrum from potentially misleading to flat out false. The clearest throughline is from churches opposed to eugenics and churches teaching socially conservative doctrines today, and these weren't particularly present on the segregationist side- indeed, the largest, the Roman Catholic Church, excommunicated members who engaged in segregationist advocacy.
It's better to say that Christianity's discomfort with racial inferiority aligned with liberal activists. There were Christians on both sides, but the civil rights movement was much more religious than the segregationists- and it's notable that many of the segregationists had a change of heart when they found Jesus later on in life(yes, racism was now deeply unfashionable, but Christianity coincided with repudiation of racism in most of these cases).
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