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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?
Coming from a Christian mindset, social justice is simply one of the many things Jesus would engage in during his time here on earth. People want to appropriate social justice to whatever philosophical ideology suits their worldview, and I just don't understand it. "Do the needful" comes to mind.
Im afraid i have to disagree. Partially for the reasons @ThisIsSin describes below, but more so because the entire theory and praxis of "Social Justice" revolves around tearing people down and promulgating individual injustices in the name of some greater good. I do not get the impression that Jesus would've been down with that at all.
Jesus explictly tells us that he doesn't hang out with whores, sinners, and tax-collectors (ie those who collaborate with the occupying regime) because he thinks that it is totes ok to be whorish, sinful, or a collaborator. He does it because it is the sick who need a doctor the most.
Would you say that ending police brutality fits into this praxis? Would you say that ensuring low or no-cost healthcare for everyone fits into that praxis? Wouldn't these issues be something where Jesus would take the side of minority group?
Yes, and I would consider that to be an example of intersectionality. He's bringing everyone in from all walks of life and instructing them on not only how to become better people, but to follow Him in all that they do.
The theory is "reducing police brutality" the praxis is replacing the brutality of the police with the brutality of the mob.
Social justice warriors do not seek to reduce or mitigate the violence inherent in the system (just the opposite in fact) they seek to redistribute it.
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The more I think about this the more I fundamentally disagree with this. Jesus accommodated every social standard of the day except for the ones he was explicitly sent to overturn [almost like trying to overturn others would be counterproductive in this regard]. You can see that by how He talks to women at fountains; but in other instances interacts and employs other women very, very differently (which then creates problems because you get selfish traditionalists going "haha Jesus patrolled thots lmao, I'll do the same thing to women I meet and claim it's correct because Jesus", and then 20 years later wonder why they can't get young families to come to their Church any more).
Yes. If Christianity isn't social justice enough, then social justice can/will be added to Christianity to fill that void if the Church isn't prepared to deal with that. This is why young men went tradcath; they perceive (correctly) that Catholicism is the most alien to their sociopolitical adversaries and this is just a reaction to social [in]justice that targets them (for the same reasons that everyone on the losing side of oppression seems to become Christian for some reason, almost like that's by design; despite what Medieval mythology might have you believe Christianity really isn't meant for people who see themselves as winners, and those young men are eventually going to leave the Church because of that- it's exactly the same thing where [young women] SJWs are burning down their own churches in its name and forcing everyone out, as they simply want to win harder as is human nature to do).
Moral superiority is one of the rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy (usually labelled as "security"). It's a thing most human beings have a psychological need for; evidenced by the emotion of disgust being universal to all cultures.
Some people are moral mutants and don't need that to function correctly (and can do things like answer "no" when the question of "aren't you just violating moral X for selfish reasons?" comes up, and be autistically/childishly 100% honest when doing so), but those mutants tend to fail to understand that moralfaggotry [I don't have a better word for this, sorry] is of vital importance for everyone else. This is part of the "struggle" that some philosophers and political thinkers talk about; I think one of them wrote a book with that title. It's a biological holdover, and you need some of it for social cohesion; most of what we see as traditional Christian morality is just playing to biological strengths anyway, so it makes having those morals both easy and as productive as you could make an emotion whose purpose is fundamentally destructive/self-preservatory.
[No, I haven't actually read the Screwtape Letters yet.]
Where you start to get problems is basically just the midwit meme where they're able to recognize "wait, all this moralfaggotry is fake!" (usually accompanied by "only God can judge me"/"in this moment, I am euphoric, ...enlightened by my own intelligence", which is why everyone else thinks [and 99% of the time, correctly] it's just people doing it for selfish reasons) but not capable of recognizing why it exists, or who it exists for, in the first place.
Interesting. What do you think of the times that he heals people -- people he knows to be sinners, unclean, or undesirable -- or when he calls Matthew, a tax collector, someone who at the time people viewed as an "elite" to follow him?
Jesus healed sinners and the demon-possessed with the instruction to sin no more. His miracles weren’t meant to be a blank check to go out to continue to sin. (“A wicked generation looks for a sign”, says Jesus from Matthew 16.) That’s a big difference. Today’s social justice calls on people to tolerate and not change their ways, but Jesus calls on people to be loving. And sometimes being loving means calling on people to repent of evil and change from their sinful behaviors. God does not tolerate evil. He patiently waits, but there will come a day of the Lord where He will no longer wait.
As for Matthew the tax collector, he was by no means an elite. He may have gotten rich but only by cooperating with the Romans against his own people, much like the Jewish Councils in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere occupied by the Nazis. There was no mistaking who the ruling class was at those times; the film The Pianist also depicts them a little bit.
SJWs also call on people to repent of evil and change their ways; they just have a different idea of what constitutes evil. Transphobes, homophobes, xenophobes, racists, sexists, capitalists, Republican voters, gun owners, climate change denialists, etc. are all being asked to “go forth and sin no more” by abandoning their previous beliefs and behaviors and becoming SJWs themselves. By 2020, BLM activists thought the day of reckoning had finally arrived, and they declared, “We are done waiting.” (PDF)
Basically, I think you’re missing that SJW’s tolerance only extends to the in-group, which in some ways is not totally far off from Jesus’ own teachings. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” vs. “You brood of vipers,” and so forth.
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I certainly agree with that. But the issue then, as with many others in the Christian ethos, is what does constitute sin? A traditionalist perspective is going to pull from orthodox teachings about sin, whereas a more liberal approach would involve understanding and analyzing the cultural context of the scripture that proports to declare something is a sin, and also through the lens that the Bible is the inspired word of God, written by people who were imperfect and may have embellished, editorialized, or understood God in a different perspective, while still viewing it in an overall authoritative light.
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Re Matthew: this is an excellent and often unapprecied point.
The reason being a "tax collector" was seen as dirty/dishonorable job was that it often meant that you would be working against your own friends, family, community, etc... on the behalf of a distant and foreign power. It's only natural for people to have an issue with that and view you with suspicion as a result.
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One of these days I'm going to effortpost on anthropology of actual rad trads(who are not a very online demographic, and may have local gender skews but on the whole don't have a particularly cartoonish split- and who also exist within an existing framework of conservative and self-consciously orthodox Catholic movements) and compare to DR twitterati tradcaths(who it seems are mostly trad Catholic in the sense that the church to which they do not go is in Latin). But for now- these are two different demographics(not to say no overlap) and I suspect the DR twitterati tradcaths aren't so much lashing out at liberalism as they are attracted to something(probably very obviously western, growing, and real world reactionaries with a white majority who are also very cool looking and sounding with all the incense and chanting and whatnot) and just not sold on having to change their lifestyle. I think a tell tale of these being largely different groups of people is that the twitterati tradcaths are so likely to be sedevacantists, which is a fringey position viewed by most actual irl rad trads as a collection of cults with serious skeletons in their closets led by madmen with possibly-invalid sacraments(IRL sedevacantists are not a very large number of people, and nor are Williamson's followers. Reactionary families attending SSPX or fully regular Latin masses will happily associate with each other, but shun sedevacantists/followers of Richard Williamson).
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