site banner
ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   46001 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

106
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

"Cultural Marxism" seemed like a perfect label to me. My immediate reaction to the phrase, which I'm not sure is wrong, was that it took Marx's theory of class conflict, and applied it to cultural conflict. That was it's obvious, plain reading to me.

that it took Marx's theory of class conflict, and applied it to cultural conflict

What does this mean? It's not marx was the first person to come up with "different cultural groups have conflicts". What specifically from "marx's theory of class conflict" is present in today's cultural conflict that wasn't in any other cultural conflict?

Now, of course they are related in that both are progressive. But the "marxism" part is a total distraction, "gender ideology" is about as marxist as a republican is

It's not marx was the first person to come up with "different cultural groups have conflicts".

But people in academic fields like sociology or gender studies who use terms like "Cultural Marxism" or "Conflict Theory" tend to talk as if he did, or as if he formalized it somehow. Presumably because of a tendency towards a narrative where sociology is an advancing discipline of people building on prior ideas, coupled with Marxism having high status in academia (especially at the time) so people wanted to portray their own work as a descendant of it. Here's the second Google result if you search "conflict theory":

Understanding Conflict Theory

Conflict theory states that tensions and conflicts arise when resources, status, and power are unevenly distributed between groups in society and that these conflicts become the engine for social change. In this context, power can be understood as control of material resources and accumulated wealth, control of politics and the institutions that make up society, and one's social status relative to others (determined not just by class but by race, gender, sexuality, culture, and religion, among other things).

Conflict theory originated in the work of Karl Marx, who focused on the causes and consequences of class conflict between the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production and the capitalists) and the proletariat (the working class and the poor). Focusing on the economic, social, and political implications of the rise of capitalism in Europe, Marx theorized that this system, premised on the existence of a powerful minority class (the bourgeoisie) and an oppressed majority class (the proletariat), created class conflict because the interests of the two were at odds, and resources were unjustly distributed among them.

And then, the narrative goes, others built on Marx's insight by extending this idea to other groups:

Many social theorists have built on Marx's conflict theory to bolster it, grow it, and refine it over the years. Explaining why Marx's theory of revolution did not manifest in his lifetime, Italian scholar and activist Antonio Gramsci argued that the power of ideology was stronger than Marx had realized and that more work needed to be done to overcome cultural hegemony, or rule through common sense. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, critical theorists who were part of The Frankfurt School, focused their work on how the rise of mass culture--mass produced art, music, and media--contributed to the maintenance of cultural hegemony. More recently, C. Wright Mills drew on conflict theory to describe the rise of a tiny "power elite" composed of military, economic, and political figures who have ruled America from the mid-twentieth century.

Many others have drawn on conflict theory to develop other types of theory within the social sciences, including feminist theory, critical race theory, postmodern and postcolonial theory, queer theory, post-structural theory, and theories of globalization and world systems. So, while initially conflict theory described class conflicts specifically, it has lent itself over the years to studies of how other kinds of conflicts, like those premised on race, gender, sexuality, religion, culture, and nationality, among others, are a part of contemporary social structures, and how they affect our lives.

It's really hard for me to believe you don't know what it means. it's not 2010 anymore.

Yes, Cultural Marxists didn't come up with

"different cultural groups have conflicts" because Marx didn't come up with "different economic groups have conflicts"

What specifically from "marx's theory of class conflict" is present in today's cultural conflict that wasn't in any other cultural conflict?

The idea that we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.

The idea that we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.

This is the point - both are progressive, in that both want to liberate the tired masses or oppressed people. But the idea that's specifically "marxist class conflict", as opposed to generic progressivism / universalism, is misleading.

No it's not.

MLKs "I have a dream" is generic progressivism.

"Girls can do whatever boys can" feminism is generic progressivism.

"Racism = prejudice + power", and "patriarchy" are Cultural Marxism.

Clearly "i have a dream" and "girls can freaking do everything" are more wholesome than "racism = prejudice + power". Marxism, however, isn't when you suggest a particular group of people are bad, or that a particular group have to be fought against, or that one particular group is harming another particular group. It isn't even when you do that in a left-wing way. Was the french revolution culturally marxist?

So, what specifically about "racismprejudicepower" and "patriarchy" are more like marxist / class conflict than a generic mix of "progressive" and "not wholesome"?

Marxism, however, isn't when you suggest a particular group of people are bad,

Yeah, because like I already said, Marxism is when you suggest we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.

I gave you a definition, and I gave you examples proving this is not about generic progressivism. Why do you keep claiming that it is?

This is just Jordan Peterson's idea of what Marxism is, based, apparently, on reading a political pamphlet. Marxism is a critique of political economy, or an analysis of capitalism. One of the intermediate conclusions is indeed that capitalism requires a class division (or, that it is constituted in a social division of ownership). Further conclusions are that this actually limits productive capacity for example, and should be abandoned for the sake of scientific planning of the economy.

This is of course wrong, I'm just pointing out that wrongly interpreting a relatively small part of his ideas, abstracting it away from its foundamentally economic context into a completely generic "oppressor-oppressed" framework, is intellectually lazy and plain wrong. It is wrong because the moralistic dimension is unimportant to the actual intellectual content, and this approach is what set Marx apart from the myriad of other socialists at the time or before him.

Feel free to disagree with the idea, but I don't see any honest way to blame it on Peterson. We have several published writings of people calling themselves Cultural Marxists, which explain that this is what Cultural Marxism is, and predate Peterson by decades.

More comments

I mean ... let's say I said that abolitionsim is marxism. It suggests we live in an exploitative system (slavery), where people are divided into classes (free men and slaves), one designated the oppressor (owners), the other designated the oppressed (slaves). White nationalism? Cultural marxism. Exploitative system (ZOG), divided into classes (jews and goyim), one designated the oppressor (jews), the other designated the oppressed (goyim).

I don't think these are marxism! Yet they fit your definition about as well as patriarchy does.

Yes.

Feel free to disagree with thiis categorisation (but provide arguments when you do so), but don't pretend you don't understand it, or that it's an attack on generic progressivism.

More comments

This reminds me of endless discussions around the term woke which was first adopted by woke crowd as a positive label and suddenly overnight it turned into right-wing slur "somehow". As for cultural Marxism, this was also something adopted by the left. Just one example, in this paper named Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain. And from the "praises" of the paper it is obvious that Cultural Marxism term was viewed at the time in positive light. Here is one example:

“Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain fills an especially acute need in the contemporary reassessment of the social roots and cultural contexts of avant-garde academic movements. . . . Dworkin assembles a convincing historical narrative of how a seemingly provisional reaction to the crisis of British welfare capitalism in the post-war period developed into a coherent and compelling subtradition of European Marxist social theory. . . . Dworkin’s new study manages to both creatively historicize a familiar—yet often misunderstood—recent academic and political formation as well as raise pressing methodological questions that cross the major disciplines of the human sciences.” — Alex Benchimol , Thesis Eleven

Cultural Marxism itself is a cornerstone of Western Marxism, a branch distinct from Marxism-Leninism. It has to be understood that Marxism itself is by definition not static but dialectical philosophy that "evolves" until socialism leads into utopia - that is the "permanent revolution" concept: as soon as powers at be settle down creating their own power structures with their own contradictions, the revolutionary wheel has to turn again to revolt in order to resolve those contradictions. As soon as history uses the revolutionaries to move forward into progress, it discards them.

Specific cultural part was developed especially by Antonio Gramsci, who investigated why revolutions in late 1910s and early 1920ies failed in the west. His conclusion was that the main obstacle was so called cultural hegemony. He focused on the dialectical opposition of so called base/infrastructure vs superstructure in cultural and not only economic production. It is culture created by superstructure that reproduces capitalism and gives rise to so called "structure" to society. And in accordance with Marxist ideology the society reproduces the structural ideas, which create the society which create the idea and so forth. You may have heard of some of those "structures" and related theories - that were developed by later Critical Marxist or Identaritarian Marxists - here in CW thread: patriarchy, white supremacy, cisheteronormativity and so forth. That is the relevance of Cultural Marxism to gender.

Well, how close to the American Right are your political sympathies? There's a whole cluster of memes that primes people like me towards the interpretation I suggested, but they are all fairly left-associated: US right-wingers are approximately seen as the tribe of Big Tobacco/scammy door-to-door salesmen/pouring toxins into the environment/exorbitant medical bills on the one hand and Jesus Camp and creationism in school on the other, and perceived to immediately decry any attempt to make the US more like a "normal civilised European country" in those regards as creeping communism.

(To be clear, I'm well aware of your definition and think it makes sense - after all, that's basically how the academic drivers of the ideology interpret it themselves. It's just that I really don't think the optics work, because for a lot of would-be allies "fighting against Marxism" sounds like standard code for "fighting against a large number of things that I strongly wish for")

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats