FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
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User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20d ago
the flair of the person he's asking is "Can Marx explain the used panties market?"
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
23d ago
Lenin and Mao did not do that while building up their movements. Both were always clear that their goals required a violent seizure of power, followed by a violent purge of society.
And yet, both existed and recruited from a far larger ecosystem that, in fact, mostly pretended that the ideology was all about peace and love, the brotherhood of man, and gradual, incremental, painless reform, while turning a blind eye to the radicals in their midst. The Russian Revolution was a coalition effort with numerous moderate voices, and then the small minority of Bolsheviks seized control.
In the same way, we currently have no shortage of Progressive voices arguing in the clearest possible terms that their goals require violent seizure of power and a violent purge of society. And Blue Tribe steadfastly refuses to police them, and has for decades, even as they've made serious attempts to make good on their theory.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
24d ago
The distinguishing characteristic of communism is not that it critiques society. It's that it seizes state power and uses it to commit mass murder in order to radically reorder society, with the murderers being at the top of the new order.
True, but building up a cadre willing and able to implement that plan requires significant preparation, and during that preparation the naïve will claim the ideology is all about peace and love, the brotherhood of man, and gradual, incremental, painless reform.
Neither the Frankfurt School nor Social Justice activists, despite their faults, desire that.
This man saw a political opponent murdered in front of him, and his instinctive reaction was to begin dancing and cheering in exuberant celebration. Why do you think he did that?
We've already seen Social Justice lead directly to the celebration and implementation of large-scale, lawless, organized political violence, including cold-blooded murder. We've already seen Social Justice lead directly to both the attempted removal of policing, and also the draconian and illegitimate use of police powers against dissenters. The (surviving) previous generation of violent Marxist radicals got tenure, and are considered luminaries by their intellectual progeny.
Social Justice academia is overrun with arguments for the necessity and inevitability of Revolution. Social Justice culture, likewise, is typified by a totalizing model wherein the forces of oppression permeate every facet of society and only a complete leveling and reconstruction can deliver a truly just society. We've had a decade to observe how these cultural assumptions interact with our society's formal and informal power structures, and the answer seems clear to me: they aim to amass and wield absolute, unaccountable power without limit or restraint, and more "moderate" forms of Progressive culture are set up to pointedly ignore, cover for and enable the harms they cause.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
24d ago
My understanding, roughly, is that classical Marxism, to the extent that it acknowledges patriarchy as a concept at all, holds that patriarchy and gender-based oppression are downstream of economic class.
If there's a difference between our understandings here, I'm not seeing it. So far, so good.
Today I don't think there is an ideologically coherent 'mainline Feminism'.
I would disagree quite strongly. The terms "Patriarchy", "Sexism", and "Misogyny" seem like stable, highly politicized tokens of a highly coherent ideological structure. Likewise "reproductive rights", "women's rights", "women's safety", etc, etc. There can be lots of disagreement over lots of things, even very important things, without an absence of a unifying foundation. As you say:
If I were to generalise, I would say that what makes a person or position 'feminist' today is 1) it is primarily interested in the position of women in society, and 2) it holds that women, as group or class, are in some way disadvantaged, and some sort of collective action is necessary to ameliorate those disadvantages.
..To which one might add additional precision: women as a class are seriously disadvantaged due to the nature and structure of society, and this sum of disadvantages can only be resolved by fundamentally deconstructing and rebuilding the nature of society. Patriarchy in Feminist ideology is isomorphic to Capitalism in Marxist ideology, in much the same way that the Greeks worshiped Ares and the Romans worshiped Mars.
Within that broad heading, there are both Marxist and non-Marxist feminists, and the line can be blurry. Moreover, because Marx is such a massively influential figure in the history of sociology, philosophy, etc., if you search for traces of Marxism in almost any school of social analysis, you're going to find some.
bell hooks is my go-to central example of modern Feminism as an ideological structure. Googling "bell hooks on Marx", first result:
The Black Marxist Feminism of Bell Hooks
This book explores bell hooks' trajectory of work and cohesiveness of thought about the meaning and meaningfulness of black womanhood in terms of a Black Marxist feminism, which uniquely confronts the dimensions of feminism and womanism; the relations between the secular and the religious; the problems of gender and sexism; and the structural and systemic issues of oppression, domination, white supremacy, and capitalism. In making sense of black womanhood in its philosophical, social, cultural, institutional, and historical complexities, hooks' Black Marxist feminism constructs an intersectional theory about what hooks describes as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In this sense, hooks' Black Marxist feminism conceptualizes the ways and means by which white supremacist capitalist patriarchy imposes intersectional predicaments upon black womanhood, drawing foundationally on Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, working within the purview of a host of Marxisms in Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Karl Kautsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and Georgi Plekhanov, and speaking to the Marxist proclivities of Cedric Robinson, Cornel West, Charles W. Mills, James H. Cone, Stuart Hall, and Angela Y. Davis.
Okay, but this is commentary about bell hooks, not hooks herself. So let's skip several repeat results, and we find:
Challenging Capitalism and Patriarchy: An Interview with bell hooks (apparently republished from "Third World Viewpoint" via the Espresso Stalinist). Pertinent Excerpts:
...I think that what we see globally is that there have been incredible struggles to combat capitalism that haven’t resulted in an end to patriarchy at all. I also think that when we study ancient societies that were not capitalist we see hierarchical systems that privileged maleness in the way that modern patriarchy does. I think we will never destroy patriarchy without questioning, critiquing, and challenging capitalism, and I don’t think challenging capitalism alone will mean a better world for women...
...I think that strategically, we have to start on all fronts. For example, I’m very concerned that there are not more Black women deeply committed to anti-capitalist politics. But one would have to understand the role that gender oppression plays in encouraging young Black females to think that they don’t need to study about capitalism. That they don’t need to read men who were my teachers like Walter Rodney, and Nkrumah, and Amilcar Cabral.
I think that as a girl who grew up in a patriarchal, working-class, Black, southern household there was a convergence of those issues of class and gender. I was acutely aware of my class, and I was acutely aware of the limitations imposed on me by gender. I wouldn’t be the committed worker for freedom that I am today had I not begun to oppose that gendered notion of learning that suggests that politics is the realm of males and that political thinking about anti-racist struggle and colonialism is for men.
I’m very much in favor of the kind of education for critical consciousness that says: Let’s not look at these thing separately. Let’s look at how they converge so that when we begin to take a stand against them, we can take that kind of strategic stance that allows us to be self-determining as a people struggling in a revolutionary way on all fronts...
Absolutely. I think Marxist thought–the work of people like Gramsci–is very crucial to educating ourselves for political consciousness. That doesn’t mean we have to take the sexism or the racism that comes out of those thinkers and disregard it. It means that we extract the resources from their thought that can be useful to us in struggle. A class rooted analysis is where I begin in all my work. The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women’s studies classes and said, “Black women have always worked.” It was a class-biased challenge to the structure of feminism...
Absolutely. In my newest book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, one of the big issues I deal with is the degree to which capitalism is being presented as the answer. When people focus on the white mass media’s obsession with Louis Farrakhan, they think the media hate Farrakhan so much. But they don’t hate Farrakhan. They love him. One of the reasons why they love him is that he’s totally pro-capitalist. There is a tremendous overlap in the values of a Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam and the values of the white, Christian right. Part of it is their pro-capitalism, their patriarchy, and their whole-hearted support of homophobia.
Farrakhan’s pro-capitalism encourages a kind of false consciousness in Black life. For example, you have a Rapper like Ice T in his new book, The Ice Opinions, making an astute class analysis when he says that “People live in the ghetto not because they’re Black, but because they’re poor.” But then he goes on to offer capitalism as a solution. This means that he has a total gap in his understanding if he imagines that becoming rich within this society–individual wealth–is somehow a way to redeem Black life. The only hope for us to redeem the material lives of Black people is a call for the redistribution of wealth and resources which is not only a critique of capitalism, but an incredible challenge to capitalism.
I would not generalize that modern, mainline feminists consider their critique to be a refinement of Marxism.
Would you say bell hooks considers her critique to be a refinement of Marxism? For the many, many feminists who draw on bell hooks as an inspiration, and who likewise employ formulations about Capitalist White Supremacist Patriarchy and Late-stage capitalism, would you say that they also appear to consider their critiques to be a refinement of Marxism?
...In any case, we apparently agree that there are Marxist feminists, and I hope I've demonstrated that these are often central examples of most workable definitions of "feminist". Can you provide some clear-cut, central examples of prominent Feminist theorists or intellectuals who are not Marxists?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
24d ago
I'm saying that it's a mistake to identify the critical theory of wokism with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. The major figures of the Frankfurt School would reject wokism--ideologically and aesthetically, and in particular its focus on consumerist identity.
Would it also be a mistake to identify the socialist theory of Trotsky with the Socialist theory of Stalin? (Or that of Kamenev and Stalin, or Zinoviev and Stalin, or Bukharin and Stalin, or...)
...I submit that Marxism is best understood as a bundle of critiques of society emerging from a particular worldview. Beyond those worldview-clustered critiques, Marxism contains no actual, gears-level insight or plan for fixing society beyond "amass absolute power and use it tear down this society and build a much better one in its place". If you are tracking ideological descent, you should track it through the worldview, the critique cluster, and the prescription of amassing and wielding absolute power. These are the constants of Marxist thought.
The non-gears-level theoretical confections layered atop by Marx and his feuding successors are best understood as superstructure, epiphenomena. Lenin gutted much of Marx's own theoretical constructs to carry out the Russian Revolution, and no one cared because he maintained the constants of perspective, critique, and seizure of power, and he won. The Russian Revolutionaries who followed him themselves contained great diversity of thought and and many beautiful theoretical elaborations, until Stalin culled them all by hueing to the constants of Perspective, Critique, and seizure of power, and no one cared because he also won. Mao likewise diverged greatly from Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and yet he stuck to the basics, and he also won and so was recognized, at least initially, as a Real Marxist.
Consider the idea that Marxism does not actually contain actionable insight into the human condition or the proper ordering of a peaceful, prosperous society. Because of this lack, people attempting even minimally to engage with the human condition or build such a society in the real world quickly find themselves having to make shit up. Then if their improvisations work, they must have Really Understood Marx, and if they fail, clearly they were heterodox and benighted, at least by everyone within reach of the winner.
You may be correct that all the Frankfurt School and modern Social Justice share is a rhetorical commitment to communism, and you may be correct that in both cases, that commitment is fake. When in the history of the ideology has it been otherwise?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
24d ago
Yes, and that is why the people we are calling Cultural Marxists have engaged in a protracted and highly public campaign to, among many other things, put black people in charge of art, universities, and "etc". Surely you are aware of this campaign, the explicit arguments forwarded for its necessity and its many notable and expensive foibles?
What is your actual argument here? You appear to be quoting newspaper headlines as examples of ridiculous things that obviously haven't happened.
The motte is Marxists caring about culture, which obviously they have done throughout history. The Soviet Union is just one famous example.
The bailey is the much less defensible claim that "wokism is the bastard child of communism" - this kind of 'cultural Marxism' is a much larger, more complicated narrative about how intersectionality, modern progressive thought, etc., derive from a complex chain of descent from Marxism.
This claim comes around with some frequency, and has always left me quite confused as to where exactly such a view emerges from.
From your understanding, what is the doctrinaire Marxist view on, say, feminism as an ideological/philosophical system?
My understanding is that doctrinaire Marxism had no room for Feminism as such; class conflict was the problem and the solution, and the future classless society would provide seamless, perfectly egalitarian solutions for existing conflicts between the sexes with no need for further analysis or theoretical constructions. My impression of the attempts to implement Marxism likewise believed this, even as they often implemented, for example, what from a feminist perspective would be considered large-scale rape culture, exploitation and repression of women in their societies.
Likewise, from your understanding, what is the mainline Feminist view of Marxism as an ideological/philosophical system?
My understanding is that mainline Feminists consider Marx enormously influential to their critique of society and its discontents, but believe their ideological/theoretical model is an application and refinement of Marxist social critique, and that as a refinement, their movement's distinctive perspectives and prescriptions should be prioritized over the older, cruder, pure-class-conflict marxist view.
It seems to me that the above two descriptions are accurate for central examples of Doctrinaire Marxist and Feminist thinking respectively, and that both the fundamental relationship and fundamental conflict between them is undeniable. This old comment provides concrete examples of the phenomena both from popular appeals to academia, and from within academia itself; I'd be interested in whether you think I'm engaging with a Motte and Bailey there, and if so how. The dénouement to that post seems evergreen:
It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism. It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly. I think the above position can be defended unassailably by looking at the academic output that constitutes the headwaters of the Social Justice movement. I think that those who argue that the obvious, inescapable ties between Social Justice theory and Marxism are some sort of hallucination or sloppy categorization are either woefully uninformed or actively dishonest. To those who have advanced such arguments in the thread on the subject below, I offer an invitation: assuming the above examples are insufficient, what level of evidence would satisfy you? How many papers from how many journals do you need to see? How many quotes from how many prominent figures within the modern social justice movement, and the people who taught them, and the people who taught them, and so on? How far back do we need to go to satisfy you? How deep do we need to dig to bring this question to a conclusion?
(And it's a genetic fallacy anyway, but that's a whole separate issue. Suffice to say that I think wokism is wrong, but it's wrong because it's wrong, not because of this or that historical antecedent.)
I would disagree. New Ranch Marxism goes wrong specifically because it retains many of the distinct errors of its progenitor.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
29d ago
My point is that "it's okay to assassinate people, but they have to be evil" is a belief that's held by approximately nobody.
I disagree, but am intrigued. Huge amounts of entertainment hinge on this norm. lots of history hinges on this norm. Radicals openly advertise based on this norm.
All the people who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk would never say that.
What would they say, in your view?
I agree that not all equivalences are created equal. Things can be similar in some ways and different in other ways, and whether their similarities or differences should be focused on is dependent on the situation.
That being said, while you've made it clear that you strongly disagree, you have given little explanation as to why, and you appear to have ignored the arguments I put forward.
You ask:
And the answer seems obvious to me: Flags defend ideas by their very existence, because the purpose of a flag is to serve as a physically-tangible token of loyalty to an abstract idea. Again I ask you, if a flag does not exist to support the ideas associated with its symbolic content, for what other purpose do humans make, carry and wave flags?
If I put up a flag, that is obviously a message. I'm putting the flag up because I want to send a message! I'm broadcasting that message because I want other people to receive it! If this were not so, what other purpose does putting the flag up serve?
You do not speak for "all reasonable people". I think I am a reasonable person, and I will happily argue in an open debate what messages specific flags intend to say, because I perceive many flags to obviously hold such messages.
This flag means "Our willingness to live in peace with you is dependent on your respect for our personal liberties. If you cannot leave us in peace, we will defend ourselves from your encroachment."
This flag means "We support sexual minorities in their struggle for recognition and acceptance in society, and we oppose those who object."
Now, you could take the same rainbow flag, and say that to you it represents Christian Theocracy and the need to minimize and punish sin through the powers of the state, since the rainbow was God's symbol of peace with mankind after the flood. But the problem is that you would be the only person using the rainbow flag that way, and everyone else would still be using it to symbolize LGBT pride, and so the message people would actually receive is the pride one. In the same way, you could invent a novel definition for some common word, diametrically opposed to the common definition, and then insist that your definition takes precedence, but that would be stupid and counterproductive and most people would just assume you were trolling.
And yet, people make such inferences commonly, you will not be able to stop them from doing so, and communication requires accepting this reality and working around it.
What do you actually want here? I'm not even sure I want to argue that you're wrong, but what is your point? You seem to be objecting to the fact that humans in groups naturally coordinate together to create and maintain Overton windows, punishing those who fall outside them. Humans obviously do this, and there are obvious downsides to them doing this. It seems to me that humans generally perceive the upsides of such behavior to outweigh the downsides, and I do not think any meaningful number of them will ever agree to coordinate the opposite behavior in any consistent fashion. You can dislike this fact, but I'm exceedingly skeptical that you can change it, or that I'd even want you to succeed in doing so.
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