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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   32622 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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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".

Having previously identified the socialization and naturalization of inequalities, we now look at the influence of capitalism. Although patriarchy pre-existed it - many societies were already characterized by a sexual division of labour, gender-based violence, or gender norms often privileging the male - the specific contribution of capitalism was undoubtedly the institutionalization of the devaluation of women and their work. The devalued or even unpaid domestic work, the concept of the “housewife” that accompanies it, as well as professional segregation, have their origins in the era when capitalism gradually replaced the medieval feudal system. They are thus not, as we often hear, the remnants of a dark and barbaric medieval era, but rather constitutive of the first phase of capitalist accumulation which, as we shall see, led to a phenomenal regression in the status of women.

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?

The dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background that models gender difference on class relations. The relation between manager and worker is not just one of “difference.” The manager and worker are situated within a system of social relations that unequally distributes money, power, status, etc. Likewise, men and women aren’t just “different,” but are categories of persons – like manager and worker – that are defined in terms of social relations that position them in a complex class/race/sex hierarchy. Given this background to the dominance approach, it is useful to consider a bit of the history of the relation between Marxism and feminism.

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?

This article argues that modern imagery of the Black female body exists in opposition to sexual health and sexual rights by focusing on existing representations of Black female eroticism as a legacy of colonialism. It addresses Black feminist thought on the history and contemporary use of the Black female body and offers a human rights perspective on uses of the Black female body within patriarchal capitalism.

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?

Contemporary feminism is currently at a crossroads, facing a concerted onslaught from both neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. While these ideologies are inherently different—neoliberalism often appropriates feminist language to serve capitalist ends, and neoconservatism typically attacks feminist principles—they similarly reinforce the traditional role of families as providers of welfare. This crisis of alienation in feminism is characterized by three key factors: the gender divisions brought about by feminism’s shift to identity politics, the obscuring of feminist critique of capitalism by the spread of commercialization, and the instrumentalization of feminism in politics. These challenges have resulted in increased class antagonism and the further marginalization of lower-income women, reinforcing one another. To address this multifaceted crisis, a return to Marxist thought is deemed necessary for women’s liberation.

How can Feminism "return" to Marxism, when it never had anything to do with Marxism in the first place?

Anxiety disorders are one of the most prevalent mental disorders globally, and 63% of those diagnoses are of women. Although widely acknowledged across health disciplines and news and social media outlets, the majority of attention has left assumptions underlying women's anxiety in the twenty-first century unquestioned. Drawing on my own experiences of anxiety, I will the explore both concept and diagnosis in the Western world. Reflecting on my own experiences through a critical feminist lens, I will investigate the construction of anxiety as mental disorder in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and biomedical psychiatry.

Where does the idea of "Late-stage Capitalism" come from? What are the other stages?

The term “late capitalism” regained relevance in 1991 when Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson published Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Drawing on Mandel’s idea that capitalism has sped up and gone global, Jameson expanded his analysis to the cultural realm. His argument was that late capitalist societies have lost their connection with history and are defined by a fascination with the present. In Jameson’s account, late capitalism is characterized by a globalized, post-industrial economy, where everything – not just material resources and products but also immaterial dimensions, such as the arts and lifestyle activities – becomes commodified and consumable. In this capitalist stage, we see innovation for the sake of innovation, a superficial projected image of self via celebrities or “influencers” channeled through social media, and so on. In this time, whatever societal changes that emerge are quickly transformed into products for exchange. Unlike those who celebrate postmodernism as replete with irony and transgression, Jameson considers it to be a non-threatening feature of the capitalist system in contemporary societies.

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?

Much of this discussion about historical uses of "cultural Marxism" in the literature is irrelevant, or at least to me. If the name had never been used before and was invented yesterday, then I would think it a very good description of the ideology that we might clumsily refer to as wokism, critical theory, SJWism, etc. I suspect that the name has likely been reinvented multiple times by different people with no idea of its historical use, because it succinctly captures the basic idea--Marxist style analyses but with economic categories substituted with cultural categories. No other name is so accurate while also being easily understood.

It helps that most cultural Marxists are also, at least implicitly or vaguely, economic Marxists. They seem to assume that something approximating economic Marxism will be the downstream consequence of their cultural Marxist project, though they don't forefront it in their rhetoric. More concretely, cultural Marxists are anti-capitalist, at least in principle, even while often living comfortably within a quasi-capitalist system. Their general idea seem to be something like using capitalism to destroy capitalism from the inside, and a big part of that is pushing cultural Marxism to undermine the foundations of capitalism. The "late stage capitalism" talk is related.

Orthodox Marxists seem to regard this as folly. In their view, the cultural Marxists have been captured by and are now unwittingly serving their enemies. They may talk in Marxist-like rhetoric and language, but they divide the people and strengthen capital with their frivolous social status games.

The name "cultural Marxist" is a really good name. I don't care if orthodox Marxists like that association.

I think the problem is that the meme of calling things "cultural Marxism", while useful in persuading some people, is also a bit of a self-own by right-wingers because it can turn off people who care about a higher level of intellectual rigor than calling their opponents names. The term is historically imprecise. Leftism, feminism, the struggle for racial equality, blank slatism, and so on all pre-date Marx and would exist even if Marx had never existed, and I see no reason to think that without Marx, they would not eventually have developed militant dogmatic offshoots that are similar to today's SJW ideology. You can already see a large fraction of the modern leftist ideology in the French Revolution, thirty years before Marx was born. Marxism is a specific type of leftism. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that 99% of the people who use the term "cultural Marxism" have never read a page of Marx. So why use this term? Why not come up with an equally potent one, but one that is also more accurate, so that it does not seem weird to people who know a lot about history?

Now it is true that much of the modern left in the West, in its specific form, derives from the New Left of the 1960s, which was in many ways a reaction by actual American Marxists to the traumatic realization that Stalin's USSR was a horrific society that practiced atrocities on a mass scale, and was also maybe in some ways a reaction to the realization that economic leftism had little chance of succeeding in America's prosperous society - hence, as a consequence, the left shifted to emphasizing the struggle of the Third World against imperialism, of black people against oppression in the US, of women against oppression by men, and so on. But this shift happened almost 70 years ago. I am not sure that today's SJWs can really be described as Marxist in any other than a tangential way. There are still genuine Marxists around... there are entire subreddits full of them... but they make up a pretty small fraction of modern Western leftists.

was also maybe in some ways a reaction to the realization that economic leftism had little chance of succeeding in America's prosperous society

This was far more of a factor than any shock about Stalin. Remember, they switched to supporting mao and the Khmer Rouge right after, so it's not like a few famines and executions upset them.
The whole point of third world maoist new leftism was that the working class of Western countries had betrayed the revolution and were now class enemies just like the capitalists. The French like Sartre and Fanon* made this explicit, the weathermen and the rest of the "days of rage" gang followed, and ultimately we got "Settlers: the myth of the white proletariat" calling for the extermination of oppressor races.

This is also the answer to the question "why do they love Haitians so much", which I've been meaning to post cites for.

Leftists sneering at people for noticing this while they literally have "read Settlers!!!" in their twitter bios is one reason I've moved from thinking debate is possible and healthy to a completely exterminationist stance.

* "Sartre began to argue that the European working classes were too apolitical to carry out the revolution predicated by Marx, and influenced by Frantz Fanon started to argue it was the impoverished masses of the Third World, the "real damned of the earth", who would carry out the revolution"

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