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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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the actual academic, theoretical basis for the constellation of ideas popularly called wokeness is explicitly Marxist and was conceptualized by self-identified Marxists. These Marxists - who, again, are not subtle or covert about their Marxist analytics framework - then cultivated and recruited a legion of protégés and catspaws to populate a vast network of entities, both public- and private-sector, to institute this ideology on a mechanical policy level.

Wellllllll....it depends on how you do the intellectual history. If we're doing the 2015-move and blaming the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer et. al.) for this, then the theorizing is at least as much Freud as Marx, and the Marx that's left in there is a pale shade of the original; a double-distillate by way of Gramsci and Lukacs.

In fact, Frankfurt school critical theory had to fight for acceptance on the left in the 60s because it notably did away with the basic analytical assumptions that lay at the heart of standard Marxian analysis: first, that economic relations are prior to cultural or ideational ones, and second, that market production must necessarily destroy political domination of the proletariat through overproduction and repeated, escalatory crisis, from which the proletariat would arise victorious.

Without those two things, what they had left from the Marxian analytical tradition was...an over-developed theory of "classes" trapped in dialectical conflict by some quasi-Hegelian "historical process," a taste for describing that conflict in overwrought terms (though that might just have been the German romanticism in the metaphorical air), and a general dislike for modern capitalism (even as they had lost their foundational mechanism for criticizing it).

As you can see, there's not much substantive there; what's left is a general framework which got filled in through some mish-mash of Freud (see, e.g. Marcuse's Eros and Civilization), and a bric-a-brac of pet theories about the rise of Nazism focusing on culture, psychology, sociology, and sex to the exclusion of the analysis of political, legal, or economic structures (e.g. Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychosis of Fascism; Adorno's Authoritarian Personality, Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure, etc., but c.f. Neumann's Behemoth).

So yeah, there is a line between Marx and the intellectual movements that kickstarted modern wokism. But the Marxism is just part of the analytical framework, and not at all part of the substantive analysis. The vast majority of the problem lies in a lot of 20's and 30's-era anthropology and psychology work (and the weird, weird philosophical work that went along theorizing about the nature of social scientific research in the first place). Through all of this I'm mostly following Martin Jay's line in The Dialectical Imagination.

Of course, this sort of deep theory doesn't really shed much light on the actual current-day goals or practices of woke and woke-aligned movements and scholars. The whole question is kind of supercilious; when they're changing the APA guidelines to make anything other than immediate affirmation of any kid's self-proclaimed sex- and/or gender-changes tantamount to abuse, does it really matter whether they're doing it out of a Marxian view that capitalist production necessarily recapitulates itself in sexual domination, or a Freudian attempt to liberate pure Eros from the constraints of das Genitale? Either way, you still have to answer the question of what to do about it.