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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4067 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 29, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Can anyone recommend a left-wing analysis of how economic Marxism* seemingly got supplanted by "woke" or "bioleninist" Marxism in the U.S.? I'm interested in learning (1) what caused the shift, (2) a history of the shift itself, and (3) how economic Marxists view this change (i.e. how would they describe the phenomenon in Marxist language).

  • There's probably a better term for this, but I don't know it. I'm referring to labor union/working class Marxism that seemed to dominate for most of the 20th century.

Late, and there are some pretty good answers/theories from other commentors, but I will give my own highly abridged explanation. I have some more lengthly explanations I posted on Reddit that hopefully I can dig up later.

  • The failure and the atrocities that arose and were revealed to the West in the latter half of the 20th century. Especially the Cultural Revolution in China, Khrushchev's Secret Speech and other USSR atrocities. This dampened a lot of support for orthodox Marxism and its derivatives.

  • Liberal/social democracies actually did a pretty good job of give their workers a decent quality of life, especially when compared to USSR (i.e. Marx was wrong). Which made economic/orthodox Marxism and revolution unattractive to the working class.Marcuse in particular complained about this constainly as a barrier to revolution (and influenced the pivot from the workers to the students, academia and the disaffected social groups as the new vanguard of the revolution.

  • Frankfurt School and neo-Marxists, including figures like Marcuse (who was an academic rockstar), Horkheimer etc grew incredibly popular in academia as an alternative to orthodox Marxism (the foundation of the New Left).

  • Social liberalism is far easier to subvert with "social Marxism" than economic liberalism is to subvert with economic Marxism. Aided by the postmodern revolution in academia and the obssession with manipulating language.

I can only talk about Europe, but this may explain some of what was also seen in the US.

The collapse of the USSR was a major thing for many of the extreme left, even if they were not tankies. There was no anti-capitalist superpower that would indicate “to see that it is possible, even if we disagree with the Soviets, it is not the US.” But when the USSR collapsed and Anglo-Saxon liberal capitalism seemed victorious forever - it was the age when it was possible to write books titled "The End of History" not ironically - the extreme left had a little crisis.

Tankies, of course, had the worst problem, because their ideological northern star, which financed not a few groups, just imploded. They scattered themselves into the wind and washed out in all sorts of strange places. But even non-tankies had to reassess and find out if their ideologies were blindfolds in the post-historical era, and if they hadn’t better switch away from the prole revolution for something they could really work on. (Whether it was a tactical regression with the intention of continuing to start a revolution in a more appropriate time, or a wholesale change of ambition and reconciliation with broad capitalism, varied.) In addition, when literally Moscow-guided and funded parties disappeared, the Overton window shrank and suddenly being a Social Democrat with some strange ideas about gender would be enough to put you in the vanguard and get a radical chic.

Some of this was the reinforcement and continuation of existing trends. Eurocommunism and the Third Way began in the 1970s, which moved the left wing from the Soviets and orthodox Marxism. The New Left basically dates back to the 1960s. But I am quite convinced that the collapse of the USSR opened ideological-ecological niches on the extreme left, which were quickly filled with identity politics. No collapse of the USSR and identity politics probably still plays the second violin for the old class struggle analysis.

(I am not sure why there was not much to be attached to Maoism and the PRC. Higher cultural barriers? The CCP has always been less interested in exporting the revolution than the Bolsheviks, and China had a much smaller presence on the world stage before Xi took the helm. Or perhaps it was expected that the PRC would either fall similarly - on 4 June 1989, it was also just a few years before the 1990s - or it would open up and reform when it joined the WTO.)

That all makes a lot of sense, especially the point about the shrinking of the Overton window.

I'm obviously not read up on the theory, but my vague impression of Maoism from reading Chinese history and spending sometime over there as a student is that Chinese Communism and Maoism were never really intended to be universal ideologies, hence the "with Chinese characteristics" qualifier. It always seemed to me that Maoism was merely a tool to seize and maintain power rather than an evangelical quasi-religion like Marxism-Leninism. This would neatly explain all the weird contradictions in Chinese Communist thought and why each leader is easily able graft on their own "thought" to that ideological chimaera.

I think "seemingly" may be doing a lot of work there. While certainly not universal, a lot of the people (most?) I've encountered on- or off-line who are outspoken about their left-leaning beliefs are pretty strongly anti-capitalism and talk about economic issues a lot. That is, looking for why there are fewer economic Marxists might be the wrong question; you should be asking why you don't hear about them and their beliefs. The generally proposed answer is that the Culture War is an intentionally imposed distraction from real economic issues, but that doesn't really answer the question (imposed by whom and by what mechanism, for instance).

Thanks, this is something I hadn't considered.

The generally proposed answer is that the Culture War is an intentionally imposed distraction from real economic issues, but that doesn't really answer the question (imposed by whom and by what mechanism, for instance).

What's your opinion on this? It gives me flashbacks to discussing politics in college where it was always "They" and "The Capitalist" and "The System" and "They" who were implied to be conspiring to prevent regular Joes from developing class consciousness, but I never got any clear explanation when I pressed for more detail. I freely admit that this is probably an uncharitable take though. Is there a steelman for such a conspiracy/prospiracy?

I think the usual claim is that all media companies are owned by rich people with a vested interest in exercising their editorial control to limit talk of class consciousnesses.

The coverage of Occupy Wall Street was probably the place I can recall where this was most blatant, where working class solidarity got to be big enough a news item that the news media couldn't completely ignore it, but instead did everything they could to downplay it and not talk about the goals of the protests. Even so, the protest managed to have one meme that was too good/pithy for the media to completely suppress, the idea of the "1%" vs. the "99%", which is a pretty concise message of working class solidarity, although Sanders's focus "billionaires" may be a clearer version of that message.

The Toxoplasma of Rage should probably also be considered: that is, you don't need a secret cabal pushing Culture War items, modern (social) media structurally encourages Culture War content because it maximizes engagement=ad money.

The transition to a service economy.

Less factory work, and more of it offshore and insulated. Increased credentialism and changing costs to education. The trailing effects of three decades of suburbanization hollowing out cities. Union socialism was on the wane even before Thatcher. Combine this with the economic and strategic prosperity of 90s America and socialism looks pretty unappealing.

I really don’t think social justice has much ideological continuity with Marxism. There was very neoliberal lull in the 90s and 00s until the crash made “eating the rich” cool again. Identity politics didn’t get nearly as much traction from that. I know some commenters are going to point to Cultural Marxism and the obvious alliance of woke and socialist activists. But I’m convinced that this is convergent evolution. Both economic and cultural Marxism want to be framed as counter-establishment. Sticking it to the Man, as it were. (See also certain elements on the far right—the kind of things that people cite as horseshoe theory.) That leads to common cause where SJWs try to make themselves palatable to tankies, and vice versa.

No idea what the credentialed Marxists would say about this.

It’s likely the CIA is involved in some way. Consider that they boosted up abstract expressionism, which (inadvertently?) reduced the power of regionalism. They then boosted atonal composers and 20th century classical music forms over Bach/Mozart etc through the Congress of Cultural Freedom. In 1953, the CIA founded Encounter Magazine which was an anti-Stalinist Left publication (thanks Bill Kristol’s Dad!). We like to think the intelligence agencies have gotten less powerful over these decades, but this is certainly false — we have gotten easier to control, the surveillance and technological state makes it easier to influence people. They are spying on us through all of our phones and computers. Whoever got the DSA to go full-send on the feminized IdPol stuff probably got a raise.

What?

You think the CIA managed to install idpol…why, exactly? Cui bono? I guess dismantling Marxism fits with their goal, but goodness, they took their sweet time.

The best evidence you’ve got is copying from the wiki article on abstract expressionism, specifically the Cold War section. It cites a single book (dead link) and a quote from a former CIA spook, who I’m sure has no incentive whatsoever to inflate its impact. I notice you stop right before the paragraph where it argues against this theory.

What’s the best example of domestic CIA interference after the Iron Curtain fell, and how does it compare to redirecting half the Democratic Party?

Sadly the CIA does not publish what they do, so our best guess is to extrapolate from past actions. The CIA doesn’t even tell congressional oversight members what they do, despite that being illegal. Multiple CIA directors have simply lied to their congressional overseers. The intelligence services are so omnipotent that they have a backdoor in all of our devices and we only learned about this from whistleblowers. This should clue us in to their power and range of activity. It would be foolish to think that, despite knowing their breadth of activity from the 50s to the 80s, and despite knowing they have grown in power and funding since then, that we ought to conclude they are not involved in social movements simply because we lack evidence. Because no, we will never have evidence. Journalists who seek to obtain such evidence are spied on.

So first, the CIA boost of modern art is widely agreed upon. Plug those terms into google scholar and you should be able to find that. You can read articles written by MOMA and Guggenheim talking about this.

But cui bono? I think two things. It completely neuters the left from doing anything but lobbying for diversity. The left can’t even accomplish unionizing anymore. Literally 100 million hours of leftist cognitive labor have been spent on questions related to gender and sex. Second, the diversity acts as a justification for America to become de facto world power. There were intelligence briefings leaked about this: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1429188218424078338

The second reason is important, because the CIA needs to motivate its own recruits to fulfill its mission. Intelligence agency recruits come from Ivys and many of them truly believe in IdPol, so casting America as the globohomo superpower is necessary to capture and retain intelligent employees.

Consider that our involvement in Syria was hardly as criticized as in Afghanistan, because by then “Assad” began coding anti-IdPol. Finally, our involvement in Ukraine is beloved by the Left, because Russia firmly codes anti-IdPol. Russia is anti-gay, anti-democracy, etc.

The most interesting explanation along those lines is that it dates from the PMC increasing investment in the stock market. Mutual funds, 401ks, etc. All of that really started getting emphasized in the 90s. This investment aligned the PMC with capital, rather than labour. So the political beliefs shifted to something which capital could support, could pretend to be the good guys. Also labour could be weakened and outsourced, and this would be morally okay because of the their newly questionable beliefs.

401ks are a massively underappreciated piece of social engineering. They were a genius move on the part of capital to defend their interests.

I don't know that he's ever done an analysis of this, but your question makes me think of Brian Leiter. As of right now, the top headline on his blog is "Class, not diversity." He's an interesting case of an unapologetically hard radical (really, he's a genuine communist I think) who is deeply anti-woke, who regards postmodernism and all its children as horribly distracting from the Marxist project. It's one of those rare cases where a genuine scholar appears to have actually noticed the modernism of Marxism and the postmodernism of wokism are not compatible, and then actually disavowed the postmodernist stuff.

Unfortunately that only really answers (3), but you might be able to dredge up more on (1) and (2) by trawling his site a bit.

Thanks, this looks really interesting.

There's probably a better term for this, but I don't know it. I'm referring to labor union/working class Marxism that seemed to dominate for most of the 20th century.

This probably answers it: the decline of unions are probably largely to blame

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