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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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It's really hard for me to believe you don't know what it means. it's not 2010 anymore.

Yes, Cultural Marxists didn't come up with

"different cultural groups have conflicts" because Marx didn't come up with "different economic groups have conflicts"

What specifically from "marx's theory of class conflict" is present in today's cultural conflict that wasn't in any other cultural conflict?

The idea that we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.

The idea that we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.

This is the point - both are progressive, in that both want to liberate the tired masses or oppressed people. But the idea that's specifically "marxist class conflict", as opposed to generic progressivism / universalism, is misleading.

No it's not.

MLKs "I have a dream" is generic progressivism.

"Girls can do whatever boys can" feminism is generic progressivism.

"Racism = prejudice + power", and "patriarchy" are Cultural Marxism.

Clearly "i have a dream" and "girls can freaking do everything" are more wholesome than "racism = prejudice + power". Marxism, however, isn't when you suggest a particular group of people are bad, or that a particular group have to be fought against, or that one particular group is harming another particular group. It isn't even when you do that in a left-wing way. Was the french revolution culturally marxist?

So, what specifically about "racismprejudicepower" and "patriarchy" are more like marxist / class conflict than a generic mix of "progressive" and "not wholesome"?

Marxism, however, isn't when you suggest a particular group of people are bad,

Yeah, because like I already said, Marxism is when you suggest we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.

I gave you a definition, and I gave you examples proving this is not about generic progressivism. Why do you keep claiming that it is?

This is just Jordan Peterson's idea of what Marxism is, based, apparently, on reading a political pamphlet. Marxism is a critique of political economy, or an analysis of capitalism. One of the intermediate conclusions is indeed that capitalism requires a class division (or, that it is constituted in a social division of ownership). Further conclusions are that this actually limits productive capacity for example, and should be abandoned for the sake of scientific planning of the economy.

This is of course wrong, I'm just pointing out that wrongly interpreting a relatively small part of his ideas, abstracting it away from its foundamentally economic context into a completely generic "oppressor-oppressed" framework, is intellectually lazy and plain wrong. It is wrong because the moralistic dimension is unimportant to the actual intellectual content, and this approach is what set Marx apart from the myriad of other socialists at the time or before him.

Feel free to disagree with the idea, but I don't see any honest way to blame it on Peterson. We have several published writings of people calling themselves Cultural Marxists, which explain that this is what Cultural Marxism is, and predate Peterson by decades.

I'm blaming Peterson for popularizing a very shallow reading of Marx, not the concept of cultural Marxism.

Why blame him instead of the Cultural Marxists themselves?

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