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Notes -
Suppose there is a person who is very concerned with social justice. They believe that racism and sexism are among the most serious problems facing our society, they are deeply committed to battling the kyriarchy hydra. They are interested in cultural critique, in sociopolitical theory, and have educated themselves extensively on these subjects. In my experience, such people are not particularly rare, and probably most people commenting here will have encountered several of them.
Based on you experience, how likely is such a person to be familiar with and use the term "late stage capitalism"? My experience would be that it is very likely; does yours differ?
If they do use that term, what do they mean by it?
Why does the kyriarchy hydra in the linked comic have a "class" head, and why is that head resolved into "economics" in the last panel? What sort of economics do you suppose the author intended?
That comic is from the website everydayfeminism. If I search that website for references to "capitalism", I get many, many hits. How many of those hits do you suppose involve discussion of Capitalism as a positive force in the world, versus a negative force? Why should that be?
....I've just searched "Patriarchy and late stage capitalism".
Judging by this excerpt (or the article as a whole, I'm not your dad), what general branch of political philosophy do you think has formed the author's worldview?
What do you think the author means when she says that "the dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background"? What does it mean to "model gender differences on class relations?" Why do you suppose the author spends so much of their paper discussing Marx? Why does she believe that "Socialist feminism involves a commitment to “the practical unity of the struggle against capitalism and the struggle for women’s liberation." Why is she interested in a struggle against Capitalism, and where does Marx come in to this struggle?
Where is this idea of "Patriarchal Capitalism" coming from? Do you think the author developed it herself? If not, how did she come by it?
How can Feminism "return" to Marxism, when it never had anything to do with Marxism in the first place?
Where does the idea of "Late-stage Capitalism" come from? What are the other stages?
How can Marxist analysis "expand into the cultural realm"? If the term "late stage capitalism" were related to attempts to expand Marxist analysis in this fashion, would the prevalence of the term be some level of evidence for the memetic spread of this expansion?
...In my younger days, this is the point where I would drink several cups of coffee and spend the next twelve hours pasting the first paragraph and a few pertinent questions for every one of the first five hundred search results in the fifteenth tab in my brave window and then wrap it up with six solid pages-worth of compact, four-letter obscenities, but I'm older and I have kids now and my back hurts, so let's not do that.
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?
Or maybe I'm totally wrong. Let's run with that. If I'm wrong, if the above is the wrong approach, why is it wrong and what would be better?
You're not wrong that the left-progressive memeplex draws a lot from Marx. However, as someone with some training in intellectual history, I would insist that really modern progressives have a pretty-attenuated relationship with Marx. They tend to directly interface more with more recent thinkers who have fairly radically-expanded the Marxian canon from its original roots: e.g. the Critical Theorists and Fanon incorporated Freud, Friere incorporated both Fanon and Rousseau/Dewey, all incorporated their own original insights, and so on. So yes, its "Marxist"...but there's an awful lot of elaboration in there, to the point that it's really unclear what Marx himself would think of it, or whether he would even recognize it if you could unearth and revive him. One analogy might be that modern progressivism is Marxist in the sense the orthodox Marxists were Hegelian. Like, where's the Marxism in the proliferation of radically-divergent sexual mores among the professional classes and capital-owning bourgeois classes? I could buy it if you were talking about the broader left-socialist tradition, referencing important contemporaries of Marx who time has rendered more obscure like Fourier and Robert Owen, but not Marx. In a lot of ways, modern leftists insist they are in a Marxian tradition as much to gain the cachet associated with asserting a famous genealogy than they do because they really care about and have deeply drawn from Kapital etc.
But all this wrangling over the intellectual history (which is incredibly rich and complicated and admittedly fun to wrangle over) aside, if you're seeking to understand and grok modern leftism you're not going to do it just by looking at Marx. And if you want to combat modern leftism you're not going to get very far just by calling it "Marxist." I don't think modern progressivism is an intellectual movement; not really. It, at least as it manifests in its politically-relevant common outbreaks is a morality, a teleology, an zeitgeist; a system of unfalsifiable, unquestioned assumptions about virtue and value that people feel more as vibes, aesthetics, and a priori interpretive lenses than they do as rational arguments for any particular falsifiable theory. It's not any rational system of thought that turns a completely normal list of basic life tasks...and turns it into icky ragebait with the addition of "...for a husband and family" to the end of each of them. Marx is a lot of things, but he's not that, and to the extent his thought has been absorbed into it, it's part of a lot richer inheritance including deracinated, desacralized protestantism, and the same leveller impulse that even appears in some of the wilder parts of the Christian tradition (such as, famously, Christ's admonition to forsake family and wealth to follow Him, the Diggers, Waldensians, early-church communes described in parts of the Book of Acts, and a lot of the religious movements Engels was banging on about in "The Peasant's War in Germany"). And if you want to address it, you need to do so on its own level - catechism of the young, and evangelization (or de-conversion) of adults where possible.
Except in the sense that Hegelianism means something more specific that Marxism isn't, a lot of what's wrong with Marc absolutely comes from an over reliance on Hegel. Marx was just another German working in a tradition of German historicism, but he took on a particularly Hegelian form of historicism that turned out to be congenial with generating evil outcomes.
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