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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Moving this to a top-level comment, since the point seems generally applicable.

Previously, a conversation about "Cultural Marxism" vs "Marxism".

@Eetan

Not similar at all. Aim of Marxism is indeed radical social change, while aim of wokeism is preserving society as it is, only with more rainbow flags and transgender toilets.

There's a point of view from which the point of Scientology is to allow someone to rid themselves of the Thetans that cling to them, becoming "clear" and unlocking the supernatural powers that are every human's true birthright. There's another sense in which the point of Scientology is to scam people into placing everything they have and are at the mercy of a vast, highly scalable scam so systemized that it outlived its creator and arguably now runs itself. Both of these could be, potentially, valuable ways to understand and discuss Scientology, but it's important to understand the distinction between them.

When talking about groups and how they relate to each other, I think it's not terribly useful to argue over whether two groups are, in their immutable essence, related or not related to each other. I think it's much more useful to lay out one's own understanding of the salient connection or separation between the groupings under discussion. It seems evident to me that you believe Marxism and Wokeism share no relation, because Wokeism has discarded too much of Marxism's theory and practice. I can readily concede that this is a coherent view to hold, if one thinks that the specific elements of theory and practice are the core of Marxism, rather than the periphery.

On the other hand, it is not obvious to me that wokism is any less aimed at producing radical social change than Marxism is. Certainly it seems to me that it has succeeded in changing society quite radically in the short time it's existed as the current, coherent, legible ideology. Certainly the Woke themselves would not agree with your description, so why should we presume it on your say-so?

When Marxists get their way, billionaires are expropriated. When wokeists get their way, billionaires are richer and more secure than ever before.

When Wokeists get their way, Billionaires and the corporations they control throw their unquestioning support behind Wokeism, providing a great deal of social, political, and economic power behind, for example, large-scale lawless political violence. The fact that CHAZ enjoyed de facto corporate sponsorship did not make its actions any less radical. The capitalists can, in fact, sell Revolutionaries the rope to hang them with, and can even help them tie the nooses. Nor is cooperation between Billionaires and radical leftists a novel development; rich people have attempted to cooperate and support radical socialist utopianism many times before. Some of them actually moved to the USSR.

When Marxists got their way in one situation, which itself contradicted Marx in numerous ways, some billionaires got expropriated. That does not prove that one attempt to implement some elements of Marxism while discarding others is fundamentally different from another attempt that implements and discards a different selection of elements. What we actually have, as with Scientology above, is an open question of which elements of Marxism are core, and which are periphery. You and I can have differing opinions on the answer to that question.

In my view, Marx's theories are of roughly equivalent value to Scientology's theories about Thetans. Labor theory of value, scientific materialism, class analysis and so on are more or less fiction, and are not load-bearing to Marxism as an effective ideology. Ideologies, I think, are best considered not by their stated aims, but by what they actually produce. Marxism is quite bad at producing Materialist Utopia, but it's fantastic at generating and prosecuting class warfare, thereby accumulating power to Marxists themselves. It's a system for building an army unconstrained by the humanizing effects of tradition and civilization, and putting oneself at the head of it. It does this by telling people a lie about their lives, that the misfortunes and tragedies that beset all humans are not simply the nature of human existence, but are instead are intentional harms inflicted by bad people on good people, and that if the good people band together and remove the bad people from power and possibly from existence, all their problems can and will be resolved.

Marx's theories about the identity and characteristics of the good people and bad people, how to remove them, what to do once they're removed and so on do not, in my view, actually matter. Marx was not a scientist in any meaningful sense of the term. His factual claims about what his ideology was supposed to achieve have either been falsified or proven themselves unfalsifiable. What makes Marxism relevant is not its blueprint for building a better world, but rather its blueprint for burning down the existing one, and it is from this perspective that its similarities to Wokeism emerge. Wokeism adapts Marxism's core lie to a wildly different cultural context, where its original claims would be laughably irrelevant. The proletariat never actually mattered, which is why Marxist revolutions were executed in countries with no proletariat to speak of. Categorizing society into oppressors and oppressed and relentlessly framing all social issues according to these categories, on the other hand, is actually how both the Marxist and Wokeist systems work.

Perhaps the model I describe above is wrong, and some doctrinaire Marxist model is correct; that's at least potentially a productive conversation to have. What's necessary, though, is an understanding that the groupings are something we're generating as a tool, not a brute fact of the universe. I draw connections between Marxism and Wokeism and progressivism not because people did one and then the other, but because I believe there's actually important parts of the ideology that the later has drawn and continues to draw from the former.

Actually existing Indians well understood differences between European colonialists and played them for their advantage as they could.

Sure. So what's the relevant differences between Marxists and Wokeists that I'm missing here, and how should people like me play them to our advantage?

I do not get why boomer conservatives insist on pushing "Marxist" straightjacket on everything, why they insist calling "Marxist" people who know nothing about Marx and never claimed to be Marxist.

I observe that the Wokeists do in fact claim to be Marxists quite frequently, claim to know quite a bit about Marx, and often frame their critiques in terms of Marx's ideas. So right off the bat, we have a factual disagreement.

I observe that, doctrinal disputes aside, Marxism remains eminently relevant to the whole of Progressivism. As long as they keep quoting and teaching him, and as long as they keep building their ideology around the scaffolding he provided, I think it's reasonable to take them at their word that he's relevant to them, and hence to those who oppose them.

If you disagree with my understanding of the facts, we could go look at some actual evidence, of which I'm confident that there's no shortage. If you concede the above, I'm not sure how your critique makes sense.

If you asked woke activists about Marx, 90% would answer "What is Marx?" and 10% would say "Fuck this white racist colonizer".

This has not been my experience. Can you provide some examples?

Is it their childhood programming that taught them that Marxism is the worst thing in the world, and all bad things must be Marxist?

I certainly don't think what I've written above can be summarized in such a way. Have I provided you with a fresh perspective?

@aaa here

They don't, communism appealed very much to the working class.

It appealed very much to intellectuals, academics, journalists, and other elites, and I'd argue appealed to such people much more consistently than it did to the lower classes.

You may not see this because communism was basically illegal in the US, but where it did exist the parties were staffed by working class people and that's where they received votes.

Communism was not basically illegal in the US. It was suppressed to a limited and ineffectual extent for brief periods that manifestly failed to eradicate it from elite strongpoints, academia among them. I've no doubt that formal structures for organizing working-class people were predominantly staffed by working class people; I would be surprised if it were otherwise. On the other hand, Communist penetration of multiple Western governments didn't happen at the behest of steelworkers and teamsters. Stalin was an academic before turning to revolution full-time. So was Lenin. So was Marx.

What would that be?

Heirarchy, tradition, law, economics, justice, ethics, morals, etc. Ideas along the lines of "Social justice" or the cultivation of a "revolutionary conscience" recur with monotonous regularity, because the fundamental logic of Progressive Materialist revolution demand such innovations.

All strong ideologies "attack the family" to some degree:

Your examples seem fairly bimodal to me, in a way that is quite telling. I observe a significant difference between honoring God above one's father and mother, and honoring the state or one's auditor above one's father and mother. Neither Christianity nor Judaism seem to encourage this.

It's a system for building an army unconstrained by the humanizing effects of tradition and civilization

It's difficult to argue that the armies of historical civilizations, with deep traditions - pick any, mongols, romans, etc - were humanized? Peace and kindness and love over war and hierarchy and conquest isn't trad - it's the creed of progressives, albeit often poorly followed.

Peace and kindness and love over war and hierarchy and conquest isn't trad - it's the creed of progressives

It's neither. No-one except the most radical ever espoused universal peace and kindness and love. Even Jesus, the lamb, drove the moneychangers out of the temple with scourges, and "came not to bring peace, but a sword." The question where the parties differ is who gets the peace-and-love, and who is consigned to the war-and-death. And as for hierarchy, that's sort of an orthogonal third quality that can come with either peace (as in leveller/quaker/anarchist dreams) or violence (the cossack/cowboy/yeoman tradition)

No-one except the most radical ever espoused universal peace and kindness and love

Huh? This is a universal belief today. It's mocked in the 'duude hippie universal love' sense - but 'fundamentally, we should be kind and good to everyone' is, like, a moral tenet most agree on. If I asked random people around me IRL if that's a good thing, they'd say "yes". The more conservative might add "but that's very difficult, and we can't go too far", and the more leftist might say "except for the NAZIS" (who are, of course, bad for breaking that premise, tolerate intolerance, w/e), but most agree on it in a significant sense. It relates to everything from antiracism to global development aid to christianity to why those hippies thought 'whoa love everyone' when they took acid (indigenous acid-doers have visions of their idiosyncratic practices when they do psychedelics), to one's day-to-day life where the economy, school, welfare, are justified by 'benefitting everyone'.

This is a universal belief today.

Peace and love to ISIS? To Putin? To Boko Haram? To "January Sixthers"? To Transphobes? To Pedophiles? To Conversion Therapists?

You don't have to scratch the surface too hard to find people who even baked-out old hippies don't extend "universal peace kindness and love" to. The question is, where do you draw the line?

Universal in an approximate sense, sure, but it's present