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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   32620 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?

When asked for his thoughts on Hegel, Wittgenstein replied, "Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different". There is of course a time and a place for both. But my preferences lean towards the latter.

Certainly, the popularity of anti-capitalist rhetoric in woke circles gives it a superficial similarity to Marxism proper. Certain people in those circles may even profess to be Marxist. But we can't always take what people say at face value. It's more important to analyze what they actually think and do. Conveniently, Marx himself provides an example that can be used as an analogy. He and many of his immediate intellectual descendants said that Marxism was "scientific". Is Marxism actually a science? They certainly called it one. They certainly wanted it to be one, since the name "science" bestows a veneer of intellectual respectability upon whatever it adorns. It's easy to find certain similarities between what Marx did and what scientists do; to at least some degree he engaged in a process of hypothesis formation and attempted to measure those hypotheses against empirical evidence. He revised his thinking as new data came in. But in spite of all this, Marxism is still not a science, because in its essential properties it differs from what makes a science actually be a science. The whole enterprise is crucially dependent on ethical and non-empirical propositions.

My position is that you simply have to examine individual leftists on a case by case basis to determine if they're actually Marxist or not; it can't be assumed just because of their adherence to feminism or anti-racism or any other leftist position. There are undoubtedly some genuine Marxists among today's leftists today, but I'm quite convinced that they're a minority. If, after a careful accounting of someone's politics, their revealed preference is for a world that is essentially similar to what we have now, except with more women CEOs and more government financial assistance for non-whites, that's not Marxism. That's liberal capitalism with some of the money shuffled around.

As a general note, I find considerations regarding provenance and genealogy to be largely irrelevant to this debate. It has been sometimes argued that Western science grew in some essential manner out of Christianity; science as beginning with the conviction that the divine creation was imbued with a rational order that was intelligible to man. Supposing that were true, does that mean that science is Christian in some essential sense? It seems plain to me that science is neither Christian nor non-Christian, regardless of its origins. Origins certainly can be relevant, but not in every case.

He and many of his immediate intellectual descendants said that Marxism was "scientific". Is Marxism actually a science? They certainly called it one. They certainly wanted it to be one, since the name "science" bestows a veneer of intellectual respectability upon whatever it adorns.

Marxism would have been a science by the standards of the 1800s because the standards of the 1800s were pretty sloppy. It's not until you get to Karl Popper's idea of Falsification in the 1930s that we get the more rigorous definition of science we have today. And then Popper quickly applied the idea of falsification to Marx (among others) to distinguish his pseudoscience from the actually useful science being done in other fields like Physics.

It's easy to find certain similarities between what Marx did and what scientists do; to at least some degree he engaged in a process of hypothesis formation and attempted to measure those hypotheses against empirical evidence. He revised his thinking as new data came in. But in spite of all this, Marxism is still not a science, because in its essential properties it differs from what makes a science actually be a science. The whole enterprise is crucially dependent on ethical and non-empirical propositions.

As bad as the naming of "exploitation" is in Marxism, it's still a theory derived from earlier economic theories, that predicts that removing capitalists will result in workers being better off via keeping their "surplus value" that capitalists were taking from them. But it wasn't the result of empirical observation. It was a logical deduction from the Labour Theory of Value, but LTV was disproved towards the end of Marx's career. Similar happened to Marx's theory of history. The failure of Marxists to respond to empirical evidence, by ignoring it, adding epicycles, or abandoning any pretext of caring about empirical evidence by switching to ideas like critical theory, is why it became a pseudoscience.

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