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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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but they are wrong when they think it's a direct and coherent lineage

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?

The problem with the "Cultural Marxist" label is that it just reads as a cheap low-effort pejorative.

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.)

(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.

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.)

How is that my problem? Maybe they should have picked a better name?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I mean people who used to call themselves Cultural Marxists. Some of them still hold 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.

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.

My point here is that calling a woke trans rights activist a "Cultural Marxist" is not much different than calling a MAGA a fascist.

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?

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.

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.