This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I know that maybe is a bit OT here, but I cannot wrap my head, after seeing communists argue on /r/wikipedia (that, as the wiki itself, is full of radical leftists arguing inside) about communism.
When I think how Marxism was gladly embraced by èlites in the West, and, after the fall of the URSS, the more anglocentric progressive one that took his side, it makes me think about the type of people that embrace it.
As Zagrebbi argue here https://salafisommelier.substack.com/p/a-robin-hanson-perspective-on-the Marxism is really the Platonic Realm of wordcellery!
All arguments, apart from being factually false, are reduced not on "policy" or "government", but on words, and how to define words, how to use words in a different manner, how words can be used in different ways, how different ideologies are different because "words" says so. A typical argument goes like this: "Communism is good because, unlike Fascism or whatever else, has a good objective. The objective is good because Communism say so. Different types of Communism are born from different interpretation of Communism, who are not all good (choose here if we are talking about Stalin, Social Democracy, Left Liberalism, Anarchism, Maoism etc) because they did not adhere to the ideal definition of Communism, and everyone who does not produce a good result has secretly bad objectives or it was a Fascist all along"
Obviously I am paraphrasing an hypotetical argument of an hypotetical communist, so I am really fighting against a non-entity here. But I saw enough debates that I could crystallise it in few phrases, and understand that the marxist galaxy today has been reduced to discussions about hypoteticals and fandoms, as if it was Fanfiction.net or Archive of Our Own. Gone are the immense volumes of marxist economy or revolutionary action, in autistic dissertation on good end evil. Or maybe not, and I do not have enough knowledge of historical marxist politics, maybe they were like this all along, but I refuse to believe that communists won for decades using this kind of reasoning.
It is not surprising why Wokism had an evolutionary advantage on post-URSS marxism. All of this autism is pretty ick, it works on Reddit but not on real life, because every normal person can smell with a bullshit detector that this lines are actively trying to scam you as a North African reseller on an Italian beach. Wokism is better as an ideology because it refuses, partially, to play words. Patriarchy and Europeans are not evil because machiavellian people have tried to derail the progressive project, and our objective is to clean it arguing that, no, whoever did something bad was actively trying to sabotage the Real Meaning of Patriarchy. No, they are evil because of biology/social constructs and they deserve suffering. Autistic screeching and wordcelism do not play well with modern political coalition and the Schmittian Friend/Enemy distinction, and they also makes the women have the ick and the supporters smells like Redditors!
Do you have a concise definition for "wokism" that you can share?
To be clear why I'm asking, I know I can read through Marx to understand Marxism, and even more, through criticisms of his works and even political actions based on his ideas. But there is no equivalent for "woke". Without a solid set of works to reference, the invocation of "woke" becomes a catch-all strawman for de jour leftwing politics, similar to "chud", "bootlicking", etc. for de jour rightwing politics. Useful for flaming; completely useless for having dialogues grounded in reason.
I'd say that the definition of woke is much better grounded than what leftist define as fascism or neoliberalism or even capitalism. It was beaten again and again including parallels with Marxism. Woke uses the same oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, marxist dialectic and interplay of Theory(Critical Theory) and Praxis (Activism) as old Marxist. They also use similar concept of consciousness as Marxists do with their class consciousness. The easiest way to make the parallel is that wokeness expanded on the concept of property/capital, which now includes other types of property that oppressing class possess. In the same way bourgeoisie possess the property of capital, white people possess the property of white privilege, men possess the property of male privilege and cishetero people possess the property of [cishetero]normativity.
But again, all these are high-level academic definitions and one can argue them. But this is far from the extent to which we are talking about. Wokeness is an ideology, even secular religion in similar way to let's say scientology. Woke people have their own ontology of what is man and a woman, what is justice, with their own prescriptions of how society should work with their own sins such as racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia or homophobia. On ground level woke people do not need to know the nitty-gritty details of how the ideology is developed. But it is the same with other religions - not all christians know bible passages by heart or know the main church doctrines. This does not prevent people to call them Christians as a useful descriptor.
To be fair, people who are violently anti-woke also have their own ontology of all of those things. Man is John Wayne, woman is kitchen appliance / baby incubator (/s).
I agree though, generally, that the parallels are there (re: the content of your 1st paragraph) - but they'll be there for literally any ideology that posits that classes in society are arbitrary and not meritocratic. What makes this distinct from Marxism, to me, is that none of these things are centrally defined. It's a consensus-driven ideology, not a top-down prescriptive ideology. And there's quite a bit of infighting as well, which elsewhere I point out, kind of prevents it from leaving the fringes of the leftwing. Does Nancy Pelosi give a shit about transgenderism beyond the token "statement from the office of"? She certainly doesn't fight against it, true, but I don't think she's ever been claimed as an "ally".
There definitely woke things which are centrally defined and driven, especially if it is implemented withing government. These are things like hate speech laws, various DEI labor requirements etc. Additionally even oldschool Marxist were constantly infighting, especially in power vacuum before some faction solidified their power: think about bolshevisks vs mensheviks or Stalinists vs Trockyists etc.
As far as I'm aware, most of these are (1) self-imposed by HR departments and not actual regulation and (2) falling out of favor. The regulation that I'm most aware of actually pisses everyone off, which is "Woman-owned businesses", where everyone just registers their wife as the proprietor of their business and simply acts as a hurdle for building more housing.
I've not heard this specifically referred to as "woke" yet, because "hate speech laws" go back at least a century in the West, and "woke" only goes back to ~2012 at the earliest. Speech laws in general are abused by both leftwing and rightwing movements (in my personal opinion, I guess).
DEI measures have indeed made their way into government policy, they're not just being self-imposed by HR departments.
For example, in my country (Australia):
"Noting that the gender pay gap remained significant, the government announced a $1.9 billion package to improve women’s economic security. The sum takes in $1.7 billion over five years for increased childcare subsidies, as well as $25.7 million to help more women pursue careers in science, engineering and maths."
"The package also includes $38.3 million to fund projects that assist women into leadership roles."
https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/childcare-subsidies-make-up-half-of-new-spending-for-women-20210510-p57qjk
Some quotes from the relevant budget statement:
"The Government’s Boosting Female Founders Initiative provides co-funded grants to majority women-owned and led start-ups, and facilitates access to expert mentoring and advice. The Initiative, announced in the 2018 and further expanded in the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statements, provides $52.2 million in competitive grant funding plus $1.8 million in mentoring support. The program commenced in 2020, with round one of the Initiative providing approximately $11.9 million in grant funding to 51 successful applicants. Round two closed on 22 April 2021."
And:
"To further grow the pool of women in STEM, the Government is investing $42.4 million over seven years to support more than 230 women to pursue Higher Level STEM Qualifications. These scholarships will be provided in partnership with industry, to build job-ready experience, networks and the cross-cutting capabilities to succeed in modern STEM careers. This program will complement the Women in STEM Cadetship and Advanced Apprenticeships Program announced in the 2020-21 Budget, which targets women to enter industry-relevant, pre-bachelor study."
And:
"The Australian Government is committed to supporting more women into leadership positions and to further closing the gender pay gap. The Government is providing $38.3 million over five years to expand the successful Women’s Leadership and Development Program. This builds on the $47.9 million expansion to the Program announced as part of the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statement. This program funds projects such as Women Building Australia run by Master Builders Australia to support more women into building and construction. These initiatives form part of the Government’s response to increasing gender equality, extending leadership and economic participation opportunities for Australian women, and building a safer, more respectful culture."
https://archive.budget.gov.au/2021-22/womens-statement/download/womens_budget_statement_2021-22.pdf
That's from the 2021-22 budget statement, and the 2022-23 budget was no different:
"Further measures in the Budget are focused on helping women into higher-paying and traditionally male-dominated industries. To boost the number of women in trades, the Government is investing $38.6 million over 4 years from 2022‑23. Women who commence in higher paying trade occupations on the Australian Apprenticeship Priority List will be provided additional supports, such as mentoring and wraparound services."
And:
"The Morrison Government is making a further investment, building on the success of existing initiatives to improve leadership outcomes for women, by providing an additional $18.2 million for the Women’s Leadership and Development Program."
"This includes $9 million from 2023-24 to 2025-26 to expand the successful Future Female Entrepreneurs program to develop and grow women’s core entrepreneurial skills. Funding will continue the successful Academy for Enterprising Girls (10-18 year olds) and the Accelerator for Enterprising Women, expanding it to include all women aged 18+, as well as adding a new Senior Enterprising Women program."
"To support women facing unique barriers to leadership and employment, the Government is also investing $9.4 million to expand the Future Women’s Jobs Academy and to support gender balanced boards."
https://ministers.treasury.gov.au/ministers/jane-hume-2020/media-releases/2022-23-budget-boost-support-australian-women-and-girls
You can undoubtedly find more of this in the recent budget statements. Governments love boasting about how much public money they have funnelled into gender and racial equity initiatives, and many of them cannot so easily be circumvented by those disfavoured by the policy since things like "the desire to become a tradesperson" is not transferable to your wife. In addition, I don't think this is a good argument:
The notion that blocking single men from accessing that benefit would have no distorting effect is a bit peculiar, especially in a society with a significantly delayed age of marriage and where many people spend significant portions of their lives outside of a romantic dyad. In this context, if men have to meet the criteria of having procured a wife to secure a benefit for themselves, it's certainly not irrelevant.
Late to the party I started, but spending money to incentivize a change in outcomes in my opinion is categorically different then legally enforcing those outcomes, and the latter is what I interpret to be the modern form of "DEI" that most people (especially on this forum) rail against.
i.e. if you want more women in leadership roles (regardless of motivation):
the former is not strictly DEI imo, whereas the latter is.
If your position is that we do not as a society need to incentivize any change in outcomes (e.g. because you already believe we're perfectly egalitarian), then fine. But to paint it is as DEI is imo aggressively retroactive because the west has a century of history of programs that attempt to bring about positive social change through funding, but the phrase DEI only recently came into the lexicon.
Fashionably late, I would say.
I'm only relying on the example of "DEI" provided in your original comment. Unless DEI encapsulates "spending money to incentivise a change in outcomes" (in a discriminatory way I might add), why would you include "Women-owned businesses" as an example of a DEI initiative? Is there a law mandating that women-owned businesses must be X% of businesses? AFAIK most of the benefits that women-owned businesses receive involve preferential access to funding and grants and so on, but they don't amount to an explicit mandate that women-owned businesses must be 50% of the businesses in a given field.
Unless that actually exists and the situation is even more ridiculous than I initially thought (I seriously hope this is not the case but won’t rule it out), or unless your opinion is that it must be in the legislation to qualify as DEI, which seems overly pedantic as to how the incentive should be implemented, I find the statement you've made here to be in conflict with your previous ones.
I would think they are both DEI due to their shared objective of achieving representation for "marginalised groups" and that most people would consider them such. DEI isn't defined by a hyperspecific set of actions so much as it is by a loose set of beliefs and objectives IMO.
This reasoning is quite odd, to say the least. The concept of social programs is an old one, however that doesn't mean that the word "DEI" can't be used to refer to a set of (largely discriminatory) social programs that attempt to bring about social change through funding based on a specific ideological outlook, within a certain cultural context. Just because something can be defined as part of a broader phenomenon does not mean it can't also be specifically singled out for its peculiarities.
And even if DEI-like things existed before the term was coined, I don't necessarily think a term being retroactively applicable inherently makes it invalid. If that was so, a large swath of terms used within scholarship to define systems of social organisation that have been around since forever would need to be thrown out.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not the person you asked, but try this:
Wokeism is an ideology/secular religion dedicated to righting social justice wrongs. The fundamental theorem is people who are doing well must be exploiting the people doing poorly, somehow. Above all else, one must identify the underdog in any dynamic and side with them.
More options
Context Copy link
Personally, I think that it’s an identitarianism form of Marxism. The idea being that those at the top of the hierarchy got their wealth, power, and positions by exploiting those who are not in the dominant group. So in the West, white people, particularly white men, got everything they have from either past theft and exploitation or current theft and exploitation. And thus the belief suggests that the way to solve this injustice is to take from those who have and give it to those who don’t.
FWIW, the opposite extreme ideology is easily dismantled as well: that the West in perfectly meritocratic and there is no need to study or even acknowledge power structures that affect and influence socioeconomic conditions. I suppose I could call this "right-wokism" and attack it as a strawman.
Woke, when I was first introduced to the concept from a leftwing perspective, would be the middle ground: an acknowledgement that arbitrary[1] power structures exist that continue to exacerbate adverse socioeconomic conditions. To be "awake", or "aware" of those power structures. It wasn't a call-to-arms, but more of a sly-wink of "Hey, be kind to one-another, because things don't have to be this way."
But now, woke as it's used from a rightwing perspective, is an extremism as you've described: that all socioeconomic conditions are due to perverse power structures that benefit only white men (self-victimization), and they are therefore thieves and exploiters.
My personal take, before anyone tries to paint me as a believer of a specific ideology, is not necessarily that government needs to play the role of dismantler of those power structures, but that it definitely should not continue to enable them to fester as open wounds in the social fabric of our society. E.g. don't test nuclear bombs near the indigenous peoples, but maybe also don't shoehorn social justice concepts into every bit of middle school curricula (just read a link from the Freddie de Boer post linked downthread).
[1] arbitrary, in the sense of an opposite of meritocratic
I know you said it is a straw man, but does anyone on the right actually believe approximately this? I feel like it would be more common on the other side to believe that the West was meritocratic, and should be meritocratic, but that overt and covert affirmative action is distorting things and making it harder for truly meritorious people to rise to their rightful place at the top.
I actually think that United States has already hitched itself to an economic system (capitalism) and a political system (classical liberalism) that by their nature tear down power just by existing.
In a truly free market capitalist system, a tiny start up can eventually topple a huge, established company. Competition and firms going out of business makes the system as a whole resilient, but at the cost of the fragility of individual firms. Just look at what the discovery of FM radio technology did to the AM radio giants of old.
That's incredibly upsetting if you're at the top, and don't want to eventually have your firm go out of business. This is why so many firms try to kick down the ladder, and eliminate fair competition through regulations and laws that make it harder for a new competitor to enter the fray and take them down.
I think that the hard part is getting all strata of society to embrace the creative destruction of capitalism. Most people are economically illiterate, and easy targets for bad economic thinking.
The criticism from leftists is that:
does not square with:
Either humans are capable of toppling non-meritocratic structures (e.g. ladder-pullers, by your example) in "free" market societies by design, or there is a "tragedy of the commons" and it's a first mover's race to the top that devolves to oligarchy or feudalism. My take is that there is no such thing as a "free" market, just like there is no such thing as objective absolute individual liberty. "Free" tends to be defined by whoever happens to be winning the market at that point in time. To that point:
are we going to ignore things like cartels and monopolies that exist in absence of regulations and laws? I'm willing to cede that there are bad actors who rent seek through regulatory capture, but are you willing to cede that there are bad actors that rent seek through market capture?
I certainly accept a weaker version of this claim.
We could talk about "really existing free markets" if you want, in opposition to the made up models of economists. Even so, my assessment is that above a certain threshold of "freeness", really existing free markets tend to do better than centralized or relatively unfree markets.
I'm not an anarchist - I don't think we should have no laws.
Ideally, I think we should have the minimum number of regulations and laws necessary to prop up a functioning and trustworthy market, along with things like pigouvian taxes and legal nudges to help the market avoid market failures.
I do think a lot of cartels and monopolies are only able to exist because they're propped up by government in various ways (i.e. drug cartels can often only exist because drugs are illegal, American tech monopolies in Europe are given a boost by EU regulations being so onerous it is hard for a small European tech company to comply, etc.) But I'll grant that some forms of these are not directly or indirectly propped up by government, and I'm not against light touch, effective regulation that minimizes the damage to society without radically limiting the speed of growth and innovation.
Agreed. Something something Boris Yeltsin visits an American grocery store.
Agreed.
Agreed.
I guess the nuance is what requires the most attention right now. On the regulatory capture side, probably healthcare. On the market capture side, to be "on-topic", maybe Visa / MasterCard - although regulation certainly plays a role there, their competitive moat is network effects. It'd be a bummer to see my "credit card rewards" kickbacks disappear, but I also know that all of my purchases are 1-2% more expensive (at least) because Visa and MasterCard have to have their cut.
One silver lining to rising costs of things is that I'm seeing more and more shops explicitly showing their payment processing fees, and offering discounts for cash again.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There have been various attempts at defining "wokism", but for me the distinguishing characteristic is the set of tactics it employs and not just its goals.
Standard "wokism" is progressive or left-wing politics (often, but not always identitarian) plus anti-liberal tactics like deplatforming, ostracism, cancelling, refusing to explain oneself or try to convince one's opponents, etc.
There's two issues with this definition.
The first, is that certain woke tactics are technically within the realm of acceptable behavior. I dislike the tendency of "woke" people to break up friendships when they learn someone is a Trump supporter, but I also think people should be free to associate or not associate with whoever they want to, so I can't really point to them doing anything exactly wrong when they do that.
The second, is that such tactics aren't unique to progressives or the left. That's why I've seen a few failed attempts to rebrand some aspects of Trumpism as "right-wing wokism." Certainly, I'm no fan of Trumpism, and some of it is that it is not the committed, little-l liberal alternative to wokism, but just another anti-liberal form of identitarianism.
Pulling at this thread more - wokism isn't (strictly?) an ideology, but a set of tactics to bring about social change. I agree that many of these same tactics are being used - or have been historically used - by the right. And, might I add, for every tactic to bring about social change "the left" has that "the right" doesn't, there also seems to be one "the right" has that "the left" doesn't, e.g. evangelism.
That does make its comparison to Marxism interesting, though, if one views Marxism as an ideology to bring about revolutionary social change to end the class struggle under capitalism. But apart from self-described leftwing revolutionaries, I don't personally know anyone "woke" who desires revolutionary change rather than incremental change, because incremental change seems to have been working pretty well over the past ~60 years or so. Someone recently posted "capitalism, but nice" in this thread and that's pretty much the extent of "woke" that I experience. Otherwise we would just call them communists. But if we're saying that woke = communist then we're back to the original strawman position.
More options
Context Copy link
I think that people should be free to do a lot of things which are bad, even specifically bad for social cohesion. You're free to say "I don't like Jews, so I won't associate with this Jew". I would still call it wrong.
We need to distinguish "break up friendships for a bad reason" and "break up friendships for something we can prove is a bad reason". If someone refuses to associate with you because you're a Jew, that's wrong. If someone refuses to associate with you because he doesn't like your attitude, that's fine. If someone refuses to associate with you because you're a Jew, and he lies and says "I just don't like his attitude", this is still wrong, even if you have no way to prove he's lying without looking into his head.
I'd probably limit wokeism to identitarian politics as well. Nobody gets cancelled for saying they don't think the workers need to own the means of production.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sorry this is low-effort, but the fact that woke has become a catch-all is a bit of a symptom of the style of discourse it describes. See Freddie de Boer on this effect. You're asking a fair question though.
Freddie's post sounds like ravings of exhaustion from having to fight a broad and deep set of ideological concepts that all have shared roots in 20th century social liberalism (feminism, civil rights, etc.), and his solution is to pigeonhole all those ideological concepts into a single overarching theory that can be attacked directly without having to get into the weeds and nuances of any individual ideology. But also, he says that it's not his responsibility to perform this abstraction, but that all of these separate ideologies must bring themselves under a single banner? For his convenience?
I don't see the appeal of his writing, either. This is the only snippet I've read, but I've stumbled across his name.
Edit: I've read more of his writing. This post seems to be written in an intentionally exasperated voice.
Consider the following analogy. We're planning to go out to eat. You suggest a restaurant, but I say I don't want to eat there. You suggest a second restaurant, I also didn't want to eat there. You suggest a third, I shoot it down again. At some point, it's reasonable to demand that I either stop declining your suggestions, or provide some of my own.
This is where Freddie is with wokeness. He says "woke", they say that's not good label. He says "identity politics", they reject that too. He says "CRT", that's also not accurate. The article isn't an isolated demand that they label themselves, it comes after his attempts to label them have been rejected.
This is actually worse because the woke are not a monolithic entity. If they had a clear leader, they could be reasoned and negotiated with. But because they're diffuse with no set leadership, woke group A is under no obligation to respect any deals made with woke group B, and there's no incentive to come to any sort of consensus. They won't be punished for defying their boss.
I mean I have to say thank you, because this is my point entirely throughout this entire thread.
Ask 40 contemporary social liberals what their top 10 concerns are and you'll get 400 different things that should be addressed.
I'm not saying this as some defense of the movement. If I'm being honest, I'm frustrated by that as well because I don't feel like there's meaningful progress to the things that I think matter most.
It's greatest "strength" is also it's greatest weakness.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Who said it had to be a single theory? Freddie gave an example of teachers in California who want to make school anti-racist. What do we call that group? If you say CRT they will say it's an obscure legal theory not taught in high school, even when you read the supporting material and they straight-out say they are making policy decisions inspired by CRT.
There are several people out there who say there are not enough [insert non-white-male group here] in [industry, fictional story or type of art, etc.] and flat-out state that they are selecting for or wanting to select for said group. What is this group or idea called? Well it's certainly not "woke" because that word means nothing (yet somehow they know the meaning enough to parody it).
Whether all of these people have ever-so slightly different beliefs is irrelevant. The terms "Democrat" and "Republican" manage to lump enough concepts together to be useful as terms even if almost everyone in the set will disagree with at least one of the ideas/policies in the set.
Freddie is saying that it doesn't matter if they deny that they have a banner. If you're all standing really close to each other doing very similar things, you will be treated as a group even if you didn't come as a group. The exasperation is people are tired of the game where if you critique the idea they say, "What idea? I'm not suggesting anything other than being a decent person and teaching history!"
Freddie's title:
I guess maybe I'm being uncharitable by interpreting this as "Please associate with each other as a cohesive, organized political movement so I can attack the principles of your group rather than deal with the 17-headed hydra that is contemporary social liberalism". Maybe I shouldn't have use the term "single theory".
You and Freddie both are painting contemporary social liberalism as a monolith, with the implication that it's a coordinated effort with offices and political committees. Maybe there's a reason that it's so hard to wrangle these disparate movements together (and why they seem to cannibalize through debates on intersectionality):
This, but unironically.
Cherry on top:
I've actually seen the pendulum swing way harder in the past couple of years, with many more complaints of too many non-white male characters. It seems to be the consultants, focus groups, and corporate America that are guiding these decisions - not some National Wokism political action committee.
Not every social movement is equally amenable to a definition. The more top-down/theoretical/intellectual it is, and the less history it has, the more definable it is. Marxism in the immediate wake of Marx, for example, is easy to define: if you agreed with the empirical claims of Marx's writings and traversed more or less the same bridge from is to ought, you were a Marxist. On the other side of the spectrum, you have, say, early Vedism, with its decentralized networks of charismatic teachers, regionally delimited textual canons, abortive explorations of new spiritual/intellectual territory, and so on.
In general, successful top-down movements are more fractious than successful decentralized movements. Or at least, they're more likely to split on clearly defined intellectual lines. As the new movement acquires prestige, the pressure to maintain a united front against outside challengers weakens, and the internal "attention economy" becomes large enough to tempt intellectuals to carve out a niche for themselves within it by attacking or reformulating the orthodox tenets. One clue as to the nature of wokism is that its internal fractures don't look like this. On an intellectual level, there's barely any disagreement at all. Most infighting is along personal lines ("Are this person's sins bad enough to warrant cancellation?"), or "intersectional" lines ("Should Asians call the police/make a stink when they're mugged by black men?").
My tentative one-sentence understanding of wokism is that it's a vulgarization of strands of left-wing thought dating from the 60's and 70's, (including CRT). In turn, what differentiated that era of leftism from the popular Civil Rights Movement was its institutional base in academia, which insulated it from both the particularism inherent to real-world politics and from the low level of abstraction demanded by popular movements. I haven't studied CRT in any depth, so this is a weak point of my argument, but loosely speaking I think what happened is that it replaced the concrete grievances of the CRM with a quasi-metaphysics of oppression, with new jargon to match (e.g., demonizing "whiteness" and "patriarchy" instead of "white people" and "men").
The dominant/marginalized, oppressor/oppressed dyads were raised to a higher level of abstraction in three ways. First, whites/men/straights were made into categorical oppressors, so that in no situation could e.g. black people be said to be oppressing white people, even where the dictionary definition of "oppression" would strenuously disagree. Second, with the aforementioned exceptions, any disparity between groups defined in opposition to one another was held to be reducible to oppression (by definition). For example, if deaf people have a communication disadvantage vis-a-vis hearing people, it's because society has made a decision not to accommodate them, which is oppression. Third, and related to the previous two, oppression was transformed from something that is done to something that is -- the animating spirit of Western civilization. Nothing is untainted by it. No branch of government, corporation, small business, or seemingly innocuous interaction between two members of the oppressor/oppressed classes has ever been totally free of oppression. There may have been some attempts in the past to fix this state of affairs, and they were laudable, but paradoxically, they were also completely ineffectual: oppression is alive and well. In fact, the need to combat it is (permanently) more urgent than ever.
Fast-forward to ca. 2012. Proto-woke has virtually taken over academia, old-school racism is dead, the highest office in the land is occupied by a fellow traveler, university attendance is higher than ever, and social media has appeared on the scene. The time is ripe for the left's intellectual capital to be cashed in for political capital, and for them to go on the offensive. The doctrinal innovations of the academic left are distilled into a few slogans, like "Racism = Power + Privilege" (i.e., you are racist if and only if you are white), which are opportunistically weaponized against political enemies, and abused for petty reasons like earning victimhood points/attention in order to increase one's social status, or settling personal scores. The energy of the movement is sustained by bringing down high-profile targets, which in principle can be any representative of the "mainstream" (anything normal), even if (in non-woke terms) politically inert, or any person, organization or symbol that stands athwart progress. The academic jargon is imported into corpo-speak to help put a respectable face on tribalistic malice -- e.g., any anti-white policy can be defended in the name of "prioritizing underserved/historically marginalized communities" or whatever. Markers of tribal identity emerge, like blue hair and that childlike, anodyne style of art. Encouraged by the stipulated universality of "oppression", new groups clamor for protected class status, using woke jargon to make their case to varying degrees of success. Not every wokester can, or has to, advocate for every protected class equally -- for the most part, they advocate for their own, if they belong to one -- but they almost uniformly signal at least lukewarm support for each other's causes as they come up, and borrow legitimacy from a shared verbal and philosophical pool. Woke-internal conflict is rare relative to the size and effectiveness of the movement; when it occurs, it's largely reactive, prompted by news stories that pit one protected class against another. Despite wokism's immense reach, its conflicts are mainly litigated outside the public eye. Such conflict as happens has a low intellectual caliber, because no framework was previously developed for managing disputes between protected classes, and it's too late to develop one that won't immediately succumb to the Schmittian hurlyburly -- on an abstract level, it's just "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable wall?" The woke recipe for critique, its philosophical core, is reduced to cartoonish simplicity, while its real-world ramifications are determined by historical/political/biological/cognitive contingency -- as seen in the reactions to transgenderism vs. transracialism, and the irrelevance of "theory" thereto. (I'm sure there was some theorizing post hoc, but by this time wokeness had outgrown its dependence on theory.) Etc. etc. etc. In short, the thing that came to be called wokeness metamorphosed into a fully-fledged mass movement. "Defining" woke is a category error, because it became messy upon contact with the real world. It's like trying to define a person.
The above paragraph is meant to characterize "classical wokism", b. ca. 2012, d. 2024. (To be honest, I'm not sure how well it describes its heirs in 2025 since it's so much less visible now (unless you have an account on Bluesky, which I don't).) As time goes on, the ideas and organizational forms of the left will continue to change in ways that defy easy definition.
More options
Context Copy link
If we must say that there's 17 heads and name each of them, that's at least in the direction of what Freddie and I are saying. The complaint is that first they deny that there's anything there, then that it's a hydra, then that the hydra is good. And of course once the conversation is over they will return to acting like the people who cried hydra are responding to literally nothing. If people see sky blue and cyan and aquamarine together, they're going to call it blue. Ain't nobody got time to go one-by-one with 100,000 ever-so-slight variations on a theme, and if you demand they must they will simply refuse. Republicans have been successful in painting the progressive left as obnoxious, and young men are swinging right despite having many left-wing views.
No, the issue is that you think these are requirements. Central coordination is not required; the only thing that's required is reasonably definable goal that a noteworthy amount of people would agree with and are or would cooperate towards. Many movements don't have leaders, or if they do most of their own members probably couldn't identify them. Was GamerGate a movement? Tea Party? 99%ers? BLM? Are all of those words useless and should be dispensed with?
Well yes, the artists (generally left leaning) started doing it, and people noticed. Said artists will happily admit in a friendly environment that it was a conscious decision to increase representation - the idea that people empathize more with their in-group and this is a good thing (except for white men).
In other words, college-educated people.
I mean, all of these are deeply different examples of movements that can't really be compared, apples-to-apples:
The reason I bring those up is that I do judge those "movements" based on more than just "what they're about". The actual structure of the movement is just as important. That's why we care about grassroots movements more than ones bankrolled by PACs - we at least believe that the former represents the will of the electorate, where as the latter is just astroturfing.
Is the implication here that anyone with a college education is woke? I have a laundry list of counterexamples... My point is that profit-driven individuals and organizations probably overcalibrated to what they thought would sell to their target demographics, rather than some conspiratorial effort to inject woke ideology into our economy. I mean, the opposite probably happened in the 20th century where a certain concept of masculinity was sold to the masses, and we ended up with a John Wayne generation despite all evidence pointing to John Wayne being a pretty poor role model no matter your political tendencies.
GamerGate: Leaderless movement where some Republican strategist came along after it started and made some remarks suggesting he wanted to capitalize on it for political gain, which the left ran with to claim him as a mastermind of a Twitter mob. Side note: I like to compare this to claiming Putin controlled BLM because he supposedly had some trolls online try to fan it to increase fragmentation in America.
Tea Party: Fair that I don't remember how much central planning, but to my recollection there was no leader, more comparable to current Trump protests where they say they're protesting on X date, please come.
BLM: My point in this was that said group that co-opted it was irrelevant to it being a movement.
The will of the electorate is what I'm talking about. If you can define a "will" and a group that possesses that will, you have a group that you can discuss. Leaders are irrelevant for this purpose. BLM is a group with demands, and I can support or rebut its ideas because they are definable enough to discuss. If BLM came along and said, "We're not a group because we came here independently and we're not trying to do anything (this claim is only made when trying to dodge criticism)" then people are free to call bullshit. If they don't want to be named that doesn't stop anyone from coming up with a name for them. If that name sticks then the lesson here is to get better at PR rather than whining that you should be uniquely immune to needing PR. Control the message or you will be controlled by it.
No, the implication is that it's disproportionate. The consultants and the marketers believed that their view was correct (primarily morally and secondarily financially, and the former biases to believe the latter) and BLM in particular gave them the opportunity to sell it to their bosses as profitable. Again, conspiracy and coordination are not required, merely enough people doing a similar thing at a similar time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is just a baffling description of wokism. Wokism is all about political correctness, language policing, definitional games, etc. Changing the definition of 'racism' 'woman' etc.
Half the reason TheMotte is here is that Scott went viral a decade ago discussing Social Justice And Words, Words, Words.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
TIL. I find that there is something deeply ironic about a subreddit on Wikipedia. Like if I learned that Linux devs had weekly meetings on Microsoft Teams.
Only that I see only a single post which is meta ("how do I appeal a ban?"), while most other posts are simply "look at this cool WP article I found", so it is more like a bunch of Ubuntu users having a weekly Teams meeting.
I wish you would not do that. "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument." If we allow that kind of metaphor, we will also get "he went after her as fast as a Catholic priest would go after the altar boy" or "as stupid as a green card Trump supporter".
I agree that communism might seem to be defined circularly, and at times might be, but the same can be said of of the Christian claim that god is good.
Nor is it likely that any moral philosophy will fare much better. Personally, I am an utilitarian, but if someone goes "On a rather fundamental level, all matter seems to be made out of a few fundamental particles. Why should one configuration of these particles be better or worse than another one? You speak of utils, but so far these are so hypothetical that they make phonons look like real particles by comparison. Do you propose that we build an orphan collider to try to produce a few non-virtual utils, like we did with the Higgs?" then it is very unlikely that I will find an argument to convince them.
Of course, since the early 1900s communism has a bit of a "No True Scotsman" problem on top of that.
You claim that this circular reasoning something related to being on the autism spectrum? Do you have any citation for that? Or is posting on a text-enabled website like reddit instead of tiktok sufficient proof of autism these days? Did the APA update the DSM-5 again?
I think that with the fall of the USSR, most orthodox commies went the way of the dodo, mostly. In 1970 in Europe, you could definitely get laid if you signaled knowledge and support of communism. The texts people wrote about it were probably longer than what you would find on reddit, but I do not see how this is an argument that commies were less autistic. Today, Stephenie Meyer is probably inspiring more tokens of fanfiction per day than the work of Karl Marx.
I think that besides the fact that unlike Twillight, the dictatorship of the poletariat has been tried and found wanting, another reason is that the principal victim class for which communism claims to speak are no longer very sympathetic. In the times of Marx and Luxemburg, all you had to do to convince your friends of the worthiness of the cause was to take a stroll through the working class quarters.
But capitalism had mostly solved these extremely unpleasant side effects of the industrial revolution, at least in the first world. A member of the working class who has a TV set and uses it to watch Fox News is no longer someone who a saloon communist could mistake as a victim of capitalist oppression.
So the leftist middle class needed a new victim for whom they could claim to fight. Women. Ethnic and sexual minorities (except pedos, because everyone hates pedos). Victims of colonization. Of course, unlike Marx, they have much less of a master plan, a grand strategy, a theory of victory.
If affirmative action leads to equal outcomes, then historical wrong has been righted. If it does not lead to equal outcomes, then the historical wrong is even larger than previously thought and we need to put our hand on the scales even more.
But they are also much totally compatible with capitalism. Companies can cheaply signal their guilt and repentance by doing a few land acknowledgements, participating in pride month and hiring a few DEI candidates.
For the record, I think that they are less convincing an ideology than communism. In 1900, a communist could have appealed to my utilitarianism, pointed to the misery of the working class and convinced me that Marx's plan was better than ending up in a world where 1% own most of the stuff. By contrast, it seems pretty clear to me that from a utilitarian point of view, the optimal answer to racial discrimination is color blindness. And contrary to SJ, I still care about the overall distribution of wealth (because the utility a person can get out of it is roughly logarithmic, so one billionaire and 999 people without savings seems worse than 1000 millionaires). I mean, history shows that "murder all the rich people and take their stuff" goes extremely poorly, but I am convinced that we could raise the maximum income tax without stepping onto a slippery slope which ends with gulags.
Billionaires aren’t generally spending billions of dollars on material goods (maybe hundreds of millions); instead, they are making capital allocation decisions. Trying to tax billionaires is (I) distorting capital allocation and (ii) transferring capital from investment to consumption.
Not every capital allocation decision is beneficial. Housing in cities is famously supply-inelastic: if you increase the prices of houses by another factor ten, this will not result in much increase in the supply. If we magically prevented billionaires from investing in cities with high rents, I doubt that there would be bad consequences.
Or take the stock market. Nvidia has a net profit of 76G$/year and a market cap of 4T$, so it is worth about 50 years of profit. If there was less capital around to be invested, it might only be worth 2T$ instead, but I fail to see what would be so bad about that.
Some "capital allocation decisions" are actually better seen as consumption in disguise. When Bezos invested in Blue Origin, or Musk bought Twitter, that read to me as much as a consumption decision as some nerd buying Magic boosters. Sure, it is always possible that the cards will appreciate over time, but the real value for the buyer comes from the joy and prestige of ownership itself.
I think that it is good that people who for whatever reason are good with investing money have capital to invest, at least assuming the investments are done is broadly pro-social endeavors (which can be controlled through regulations to some degree). I do not however think that this is the only good use of money, and for example would be opposed to giving taxpayer money to successful investors so that they can invest even more.
Tiny probabilities of huge profits are what drive Venture Capital to take risks. If a Venture Capitalist sees a chance to spend $10 billion for 10% chance of $90 billion, they don't take that risk. If they see a 10% chance of $180 billion they probably do.
Nvidia is currently planning to invest $500 billion in new infrastructure over the next few years. If hypothetical Mvidia startup entrepreneur sees that and thinks they have a 20% chance of rising up to compete with them to also be worth $4T (average output $800b), investors will throw those dice and happily pay $500b. We end up with more competition and diversity, lowering prices for consumers. If taxes go up and Nvidia and hypothetical peers are worth $2T, the dice odds don't look so good and there's more of a monopoly (unless someone is so confident that they can compete with 40% odds.
For any marginal tax increase, the cost/benefit ratio for new competitors shifts and it requires greater odds and more monopolistic profits before you get more entrepreneurial competitors. This leads to more monopolies, higher consumer prices, and people working for megacorps instead of starting their own small businesses.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
French philosophers have entered the chat.
No, seriously, not only did existentialists sign petitions calling for the decriminalisation of sex with minors and asking for the release of jailed pedophiles, many prominent members of the French left were also pedophiles themselves. Michel Foucault made repeated trips to Tunisia so he could abuse boys. Simone de Beauvoir groomed many of her female students. It's wild they're still remembered fondly at all today.
France truly is the 4chan of philosophy. Everybody likes its memes, but few can stomach the environment which was necessary to produce them.
This is a notable quotable. Nicely done.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Exactly right, but I have to emphasise that was not merely an organic development, but quite literally what the Frankfurt School/Cultural Marxists/Critical Theorists (and later, the woke), advocate for as a deliberate and concious development of Marxism.
Herbet Marcuse's 1969 Essay on Liberation:
As for the lack of master plan - that's also true. Horkheimer said the point of Critical Theory was not to construct or develop a blueprint for a new society, but merely to tear down the existing society so whatever 'good' existed in the society would be liberated and form the basis for the new society. Their whole plant is basically deconstruct everything and the perfect communist society will somehow rise from the ashes.
A big problem with discussion Cultural/Neo-Marxism is that even when you describe or paraphrase their ideas accurately, people think you're being uncharitable, or making it up, or being conspiratorial, because they can't believe someone would actually support those ideas.
Marcuse then went on to deem the precept of tolerance invalid and advocated quashing any free marketplace of ideas (more complete analysis here), ostensibly to rid society of false consciousness. Many of the tactics he outlined are still present in the strategies of the modern-day left:
He strongly advocates for proselytising his personal belief and value system everywhere and suppressing points of view counter to it, all the while calling it "liberating tolerance". This is supposed to create a society free of indoctrination apparently.
Out of all the philosophers I have read, Marcuse has to be one of the most shameless. You really just have to plainly read critical theory to start hating it.
What! But there are so many lovely works of critical theory! Even Marcuse. "The Aesthetic Dimension" is a wonderful book, I always recommend it to everyone.
What specifically did you read that made you hate critical theory? I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything, I'm just curious what you read that caused you to form your opinion.
Have you ever read any Derrida? He has some beautifully poetic writing, his writings on art are a real pleasure:
(This is such a great closing paragraph because earlier in the chapter Derrida quotes Kant as saying "examples are the wheelchair of the mind", and then here in the final paragraph he again quotes Kant as saying "zum Beispiel eine Tulpe", and it's like, huh I thought you said examples were bad, but here you're giving an example, what's up with that eh? It's a really great mic drop moment. Because the whole chapter was Derrida taking Kant to task for his position that the frame/ornament(/example/footnote) has to be excluded from art proper, but Derrida's argument is that the picture can't be distinguished from the frame, so he finds a footnote in the Critique Of Judgement where Kant gives an example, so it's the innocent flower in the innocent footnote that brings the prohibition against the frame/ornament/example/footnote tumbling down and ahhh he was just so delightfully clever with stuff like this.)
I might read this + Derrida's Truth in Painting and get back to you at some (undefined) point in the future. There's never a reason for me not to read something new; I will try to be open minded when evaluating them. I can't say I've read a whole lot of Derrida myself.
These papers from Marcuse linked in this thread are some examples. Anything political the Frankfurt School or its descendant schools of thought wrote induces anything from disaffected ennui to downright hatred. But I won't go for that extremely low-hanging fruit here. It's just too easy to criticise.
A while back I looked at Eclipse of Reason by Horkheimer, which I didn't think was very good. It’s a rather dreary account of how instrumental/subjective reason infects everything, and metaphysics (or non-instrumental/speculative thinking) is increasingly crowded out in modernity. Horkheimer's issue with subjective reason seems to be this: Because positivism and subjective reason rejects objective morality, no goal can be objectively measured as being "better" than another goal - after all, "should" claims are not factual claims. As a result of this, science can be used as a tool to help achieve any goal (including ones Horkheimer would disagree with) and therefore this is bad and we should reject positivism. He claims it denies that principles of human morality are fundamental objective truths.
He states "According to formalized reason, despotism, cruelty, oppression are not bad in themselves; no rational agency would endorse a verdict against dictatorship if its sponsors were likely to profit by it." But formalised reason doesn't say anything is bad in itself because "bad" is a moral judgement. Reason can tell us what "is" and what "is not", it can't tell us what our social goals should be (though it can inform how we get to these goals). Moral judgements about "should be" are not intrinsic in the universe, they only exist in human cognition as a byproduct of our evolutionary circumstances. Ethical statements such as theft is reprehensible do not represent facts. Therefore, they are not truthful, and cannot be proven or disproven using reason. Horkheimer never really proves this statement to be wrong.
Though, that's not for lack of trying; he does make some arguments against subjective reason, and one of the arguments made is this: "How this dehumanization of thinking affects the very foundations of our civilization, can be illustrated by analysis of the principle of the majority, which is inseparable from the principle of democracy. In the eyes of the average man, the principle of the majority is often not only a substitute for but an improvement upon objective reason: since men are after all the best judges of their own interests, the resolutions of a majority, it is thought, are certainly as valuable to a community as the intuitions of a so-called superior reason. However, the contradiction between intuition and the democratic principle, conceived in such crude terms, is only imaginary. For what does it mean to say that 'a man knows his own interests best'—how does he gain this knowledge, what evidences that his knowledge is correct? In the proposition, 'A man knows. . . best/ there is an implicit reference to an agency that is not totally arbitrary and that is incidental to some sort of reason underlying not only means but ends as well. If that agency should turn out to be again merely the majority, the whole argument would constitute a tautology."
This is the kind of thing you would only say if you have been cosseted in an academic-philosophical bubble without reference to other fields. The answer to “how do people get their moral intuition if not through something objective" is that human moral intuition is a product of evolutionary adaptation and doesn't necessarily reflect something that is fundamentally true on a deep level. We intrinsically value certain things not because they have any deeper inherent universal value which can be confirmed by reason, we value them simply because the structure of our psychology tells us we should. Just because we think something "should be" doesn't mean there's any fundamental basis to that belief. Every human moral prior is, in fact, baseless. The is/ought problem can never be escaped, and as such morality can only be legibly defined via appeal to a general trend.
Horkheimer in fact seems to believe that moral judgements would entirely disappear without any dictates for what is objectively moral. "All these cherished ideas, all the forces that, in addition to physical force and material interest, hold society together, still exist, but have been undermined by the formalization of reason. ... We cannot maintain that the pleasure a man gets from a landscape, let us say, would last long if he were convinced a priori that the forms and colors he sees are just forms and colors, that all structures in which they play a role are purely subjective and have no relation whatsoever to any meaningful order or totality, that they simply and necessarily express nothing." But that isn't how that works. There's also the fact you can't really distinguish between "instrumental reason" and "reasoning about ends". Any "reasoning about ends" can itself be interpreted as a means to a further end. So any reasoning Horkheimer or anyone else does can never escape critique of its own instrumentality. Therefore, it’s not really clear what he sees as being eclipsed by what. It wasn't a very inspiring piece of literature.
Also, the way Adorno decided to write about music was definitely, uh, a choice. People joke he hated everything that wasn't Schoenberg for a reason. Hell, even Schoenberg himself could not stand the guy: "It is disgusting … how he treats Stravinsky. I am certainly no admirer of Stravinsky, although I like a piece of his here and there very much – but one should not write like that."
In general, I find that many philosophers from the analytic tradition had a habit of defending claims and properly defining terms so as to minimise uncertainty. There's often a more rigorous bent to their writings. But continental philosophy and particularly critical theory tries to accomplish no such thing. It's often extremely fluffy, terms will be so poorly defined that interpretations of their texts bifurcate depending on one's reading of them, and even once you've broken through the morass and divined several possible interpretations of their words, every single interpretation turns out to be endless navel-gazing that has become unmoored entirely from reality. It requires no checks or balances that anchor it to the outside world, everything is interpreted through their own internal framework that grants it legitimacy, and many of the conclusions they arrive at are premised on just... bare claims, which require basically no external substantiation to see if anything they've said actually holds. Much of it is worse than that in fact; it falls into the category of not even wrong.
Thank you for the thorough reply. I love getting to talk about this stuff.
Derrida's a heck of a place to start if you're not already steeped in the continental tradition. He'll rapid fire off references to 10 other books and expect you to be familiar with all of them. Not that I'm at all trying to discourage you or anything, just saying that it's normal if you find him frustrating. I only understand what he's saying about half the time.
The Marcuse book on the other hand is rather short and approachable.
I think appreciating the historical/personal context they were writing in helps contextualize their pessimism a little better. They were all communist Jews who legitimately believed that the world workers' revolution was on the horizon, and then they watched Stalinism turn their Marxist ideals into a hellscape, and they lived through Nazism and WW2, and basically they watched their entire world and all their hopes for the future collapse around them in a spectacularly dramatic fashion. That's the sort of thing that would put anyone in a sour mood.
You're right, I don't disagree at all. That's by design of course. In the early 20th century, Russell and Moore and their co-conspirators thought that Hegelianism had gone off the rails, and philosophy needed a new beginning that was self-consciously modeled after mathematical logic. That was the start of the analytic school.
Analytic philosophy was my first introduction to philosophy and I think that permanently shaped how my mind works. Or maybe my mind just already worked like that and analytic philosophy was a natural fit for it, idk. But I do feel that on some fundamental level my outlook will always be analytic in some sense. I'm perpetually annoyed at how, at times, continental philosophers seem to care nothing for running basic sanity checks on their sentences (are terms well-defined, am I making any category errors, etc) (although I'm always equally as sensitive to the possibility that this is just a misunderstanding on my part, or that my whole conception of how one should "evaluate" sentences is wrong in the first place).
But nonetheless here on TheMotte I end up talking more about continental philosophy, partially because that's just what I read more of these days, and partially because continental philosophers speak more directly to the types of culture war issues that we discuss here.
I get why you say this, definitely. But at the same time, continental philosophy is so wildly heterogeneous that it's almost impossible to make generalizations about it as a whole. It varies heavily from author to author, text to text. You really have to treat each text individually and take it on its own merits.
I was just talking about how difficult Derrida is, but ironically, I think he's actually the closest to analytic philosophy out of all the "big" continental writers. His concerns and methods are ones that analytic philosophers can appreciate, once you cut through all the verbiage. Like his Voice and Phenomenon for example, it's a nice short little book that addresses the question, "do we have privileged epistemological access to the contents of our own mental states?" That's a perfectly comprehensible and "classical" philosophical question, no issues there. And he does have arguments; they're perhaps a bit difficult to extract, and they're not the most carefully rigorous, but they're there.
Nietzsche won't bullshit you. (I think we can safely call him continental. He lived before the split of course, but like Hegel he's very strongly continental coded.) Reading Nietzsche is just such an amazing and wonderful experience. He doesn't provide too many arguments per se (and it would kinda go against his whole project if he did, because he's kinda doing a postmodern performance art deconstruction of the concept of philosophical argumentation itself, which is really not nearly as dumb and pretentious as it sounds, like seriously just read him trust me), but he doesn't need to give arguments because he just like, says stuff, in plain ol' honest terms, and you're just like "damn, that is so true... how did I never think of that before..."
But then of course you do just have the really hyper-weird shit. I wrote a post yesterday where I quoted some passages from Lacan's Seminar XX and, yeah I'll admit, it's fuckin' wild. You're justified in asking, how am I to take this as anything except the ramblings of a very unwell man who is on the verge of a psychotic episode? And I'll admit, I'm not sure how much of it can be defended "rationally". I can give basic definitions of the jargon terms like "jouissance" and "Other", but in terms of justifying why these specific words were put in this specific order and what it means as a whole, such that a sane person would be justified in believing it... yeah, that's tough. But that doesn't mean I can just throw it out, y'know? Something about Lacan's ideas and terminology resonates with me. I don't know what he's onto, but he's onto something. I can't argue anyone into walking that particular path, but I know that there are other people who are interested in walking the same path.
I wish there was more rigorous work done, both philosophical and historical, about how the analytic/continental split came to be and what it means. My current pet theory is that there really is just a certain strain of mysticism in continental thought, and as such it tends to attract people who are more open to mystical thought/experience, and this shows through in the texts, although most of them would strenuously deny this. It's not clear exactly why or how this particular mode of thinking caught on when it did in European philosophy, but multiple of the big "founding fathers" of continental philosophy did flirt with mysticism, to varying degrees of overtness, and this likely set the tone for what "personality type" would be attracted to continental philosophy going forward.
Kierkegaard had his own idiosyncratic brand of existential Christianity, that one is obvious. Magee's Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition goes into detail explaining how Hegel's thought was influenced by Hermeticism. And when Heidegger in What are Poets For? is saying things like:
it's kinda like, what are we even doing here? We're not even pretending that this is "philosophy" anymore. (Actually Heidegger rejected the notion that he was doing "philosophy", he said that what he was doing was "thinking", what exactly that means is up to interpretation.)
And Hubert Dreyfus had the chutzpah to say "oh Heidegger was just doing a philosophical anthropology, the 'unveiling of a world' just means how our social practices influence how we categorize objects, nothing unusual going on here". Come on man.
The result of collecting all these spacey wordcels in one intellectual space, and giving them the freedom to be as spacey as they want without much in the way of outside checks and balances, is a very strange and unique literature that freely transitions between philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, poetry, and religious experience, sometimes all within the same paragraph. They won't announce when they're "changing modalities", that's on you to figure out. You might find it frustrating, but you can't say it's not fascinating.
But anyway. In spite of all that. All continental texts are really different from each other and you have to take them on a case by case basis. There's been increasing analytic interest over the past couple of decades in doing analytic interpretations/reconstructions of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, Derrida, all the big names, figuring out what ideas are in there that can be extracted and pressed into a more easy-to-digest form. I wouldn't say there's anything like a "bridging of the gap" between the two traditions but the interest is there. It's not all bullshit.
Well it's the weekend for me, so I now have some time to respond to this:
I do get what they lived through, though I disagree with the entirety of their political bent and find the role they played in the spread of identity-Marxism and its promulgation into Western academia to be extremely harmful (my initial comment in this thread detailing Marcuse's "solution" for the West contained a very scornful remark about how he should have just stayed in Germany and let the Nazis take him; I had the good sense to edit it out because the second I wrote it I just thought "Jesus Christ").
But the lack of self-awareness more broadly in their political scholarship really gets to me. Their writings are full of the idea that "liberalism has failed before, therefore it can fail again; and we need to put in [authoritarian system] to maintain social order". The example they loved to use in all of their writings was the liberal Weimar Republic being usurped by the illiberal Nazi Party, and they used this to argue that the liberal system was obviously insufficient to guard against such abuses. Of course, when you're usurping a liberal system yourself and subverting it to your own ends, well, to use the Weimar Republic analogy, you need to ask yourself the question: Are we the Nazis? It's not as if most Nazis believed they were horrible people doing bad things, after all; they believed they were entirely justified, and their rationale for censorship and repression was undoubtedly similar. How do you know that's not what you're doing?
I will say I think the wars of the 20th century irreparably shaped philosophy, art and thinking in ways that seem to have been a net negative (to me at least). Things start getting very strange during the inter-war period, and then go absolutely wild post-war. This was a period where the idea of jettisoning virtually every vestige of the Enlightenment became vogue, and you can see that trend exemplified in many domains like political philosophy, architecture and art. There were thinkers who advocated it beforehand, but the early 20th century was the point where it spread like wildfire, and WW2 in particular resulted in a lot of the radical German left arriving on American soil; an environment without any antibodies to their memes. Ideals like liberalism and nationalism, the notion of reason and empiricism being desirable, as well as the rationalist neoclassicism of the era, were ravaged in the fire of the wars.
Nietzsche is good. I've had a gander at some of his stuff, though like the other commenter I half-think this is cheating. Thus Spake Zarathrusta threw me badly though and I've not returned to it since.
But in general I have the sense that much appreciation of continental philosophy actually primarily relies on vibes and not coherent sense-making. You read it, you feel like it is true or profound in some deep unarticulable way, and follow the author down the garden path for that reason alone. Some of what you've mentioned here about your engagement with continental philosophy seems to confirm that belief.
This is fair; continental philosophy is a very wide-spanning term that encapsulates a lot of very different philosophical traditions. Still, they have undoubtedly influenced each other and there is a lot of crosstalk, and that broad assertion about "continental philosophy" was just meant as a description of the general trend in my experience - not excluding of course that there is some continental philosophy I can and do actually enjoy.
Also, from your other comment further down in the thread:
I have you pegged as "flighty wordcel who is way too interested in austere, self-referential literature and art" and that's meant as a compliment. The profile of your interests isn't super typical here and it adds flavour and depth to the Motte, I don't like it much when people downvote them.
EDIT: removed a section
Oh, not sure why you removed the Paul Klee section, I was going to comment on it...
Klee was an artist, not a philosopher. Most artists are frankly not very good at talking about their own work. They tend to not actually be that knowledgeable about art theory, let alone philosophy in general. That's why they're artists and not philosophers.
The Klee stuff you quoted seemed pretty bad and uninteresting and I would have nope'd out after a few sentences.
When someone is actually trained as a philosopher, and their work is recognized as philosophy by other philosophers, you can take it on good faith that there is a method to the madness. I quoted that Heidegger comment about poets for example to give an example of one of his more extreme flights of fancy, but at the same time, it's undeniable that Heidegger was extremely well-versed in the entirety of the history of Western philosophy, and (at least some of) his work makes genuine contributions to legitimate philosophical problems. (His What is Metaphysics is interesting and approachable.)
Aaaaa what a tragedy! Zarathustra is a terrible book, it's easily the worst thing he ever wrote. I don't blame people for assuming that it's a natural starting place for reading Nietzsche though. He himself insisted from the day it was published to the day he died that it was his best work. I have no idea why. He was simply wrong about that. I can only assume that he was just trolling and trying to filter people or something.
If you ever want to return to Nietzsche, I would recommend Twilight of the Idols, Gay Science, and Genealogy of Morality in that order. I think that would give you a relatively balanced overview of his project and his main concerns.
Like I've been saying, you have to make judgements on a book by book, paragraph by paragraph basis. Almost all the specific books I've recommended throughout this thread are approachable and can be read like any other book, and they do make coherent sense, such that you could explain them to analytic philosophers without too much trouble.
And sometimes you get sentences that function on multiple levels, instead of adhering to a strict "semantic meaning vs vibes-based" distinction. So, for example, when Lacan says "woman does not exist;
Womancannot be said", you can "decode" this to get the "literal" meaning of "there is no single paradigmatic successful example that women can model themselves after, unlike how an individual man can aspire to be 'The Man' (people say 'you're the man, man' but they never say 'you're the woman, girl'); social expectations for women are perpetually and irreconcilably split between the Madonna and the whore". This is how many of his commentators interpret him, especially if they're writing a "Lacan 101" type introduction. But you can also choose to just let your mind run free with the poetic, vibes-based associations. I think some continental texts are very much intended to get your brain to trigger both modes of cognition at once.Thank you, I really appreciate that. Some number of downvotes is actually a good thing. If I only ever got upvotes, then that would mean I was just agreeing with the hivemind on everything and I wasn't saying anything that challenged people and made them push back.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Which half though?
I dug into Girard just a little bit because of his recent influence on important people and came away with a strong condemnation of his entire process as incredibly moronic and I can't understand why he's given the time of day by otherwise intelligent people. "People's desires are influenced by their perception of what is desired by others" is not exactly a novel contribution to human psychology.
I can, in contrast, understand why Marx has had the influence he has had, in terms of his writings and in terms of the mechanics of the rise of the USSR.
I read Russell's A History of Western Philosophy in my early 20s and that did not help me here. Continentalists seem to get very mad at Analyticals misrepresenting them, without themselves having a consensus about what was "really" meant by any given thinker.
Just read Nietzsche. If you don't get anything out of him then don't bother with the others. He represents the "continental mind" at its best.
Never heard of him.
Think of philosophy as being like one big internet argument. (It basically is that, quite literally. Many of the questions we discuss regularly on TheMotte are philosophical questions.) There has never been any time in history when someone made a forum post on a non-trivial political question and everyone thought "yep, that's correct, there's nothing to clarify or add, he simply got it right". At minimum, there will be a dozen replies telling the guy how he actually got everything wrong. Frequently, these posts will wade into interpretive matters -- asking for further elaboration or clarification on point X, asking if in this particular sentence he meant Y or if he really meant Z, asking if his arguments really support W or if that's really what he even wanted to argue for in the first place, etc. Undoubtedly you've seen this play out many times. This is just what happens when you discuss complex matters using natural language. So it goes for philosophy in general.
Think about how people still, after all these decades, can't agree over whether pro-lifers "really" believe that abortion is murder. I mean, they even say in very plain language that they think it's murder, and people still can't agree what such utterances "really" mean! Skeptics will say, well they can't actually mean that, because it's not consistent with their other beliefs/behavior, or their arguments clearly don't support that conclusion, so they have to mean something else. On and on it goes.
Sometimes the interpretive difficulties with a philosophical text are literally at the level of "I don't know what this sentence is saying". Typically they're more subtle than that though. There's a persistent interpretive difficulty with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for example over whether his metaphysics is a dual substance theory (two types of objects, appearances and things-in-themselves) or a dual property theory (only one type of object, but it has phenomenal and non-phenomenal properties). Kant was an unusually meticulous thinker, the CoPR is 800 pages of densely pedantic arguments, but on this one (rather fundamental) issue he simply never addressed it explicitly. When we're writing, we can't predict every question that every reader will ever come up with; sometimes we think something is perfectly clear even when it's not, or it just never even occurs to us to ask that particular question at all. I'm sure you can again think of many examples from your own experience.
That being said, although interpretive difficulties in natural language debates can never be entirely eradicated, some interpretations of a text are clearly better than others, and Russell was notorious for not being a particularly careful reader of the thinkers he profiled in A History of Western Philosophy. See this for example for a criticism of Russell's interpretation of Kant.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's entertaining for sure, but it's also self refuting nonsense that should never have been allowed to have social impact. Reading Derrida is a journey into the most high grade sort of masturbatory thinking about thinking that allows learned men to convince themselves that their worst urges are actually fine just because they're so clever.
Incidentally, that's exactly how it was received in France at the time, and correctly I think.
Sadly, we live in the world where these ideas are influential, and thus in the ruins of reason. I blame Americans and positivists.
What's the self refuting part, exactly?
What "worst urges" do you have in mind here?
Derrida's work in particular is relatively light on ethics and politics (depending on which period of his work you're talking about). He spends most of his time addressing relatively abstract and "classical" philosophical problems related to language, meaning, and knowledge.
Depends on who you're talking about I suppose? Lacan was a pretty big deal, it was front page news when his yearly seminar series finally concluded after more than two decades. He was a bit like the Jordan Peterson of his day, except culturally lauded instead of culturally shunned.
Post-structuralism is a Discourse.
The same ones we always have, power, sex, greed, take your pick.
What you're missing is the implications of those "abstract" and "classical" philosophical problems. Though these should be self evident now that this has been turned into political practice.
Psychoanalysis is a different can of worms altogether, that one France has always been in love with. It begets similar dismissal in broad society, but is treated more seriously than the amusement people had at the spats of Foucault, Derrida and their ilk.
Also, one must remind oneself that this is all within the normal level of consideration for intellectuals that France has, which has always been higher than average.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m really tempted to argue against your points on the merits, but I think it’s more important to talk about the rules. Particularly this one.
If you have to make up an imaginary hypothetical paraphrase for someone, that should be a warning sign. It should make you wonder if you’re getting things quite right. It’s certainly not a good reason to pivot into general-purpose bashing session.
This post looks a lot more like waging the culture war than understanding it.
More options
Context Copy link
This seems backwards. Do you think communism just popped into existence one day, fully formed and respectable, and brainwashed the masses into thinking that their goals are good because they say so? The fundamental ethos of communism, that it is unfair for the better-born to cash in on their innate superiority (and all the more so on compound interest from the superiority of their parents), evidently resonates with many across time and place - the ancient Christians, who steamrolled over the strength-is-beauty-is-justice pagan ethos of Rome, did not need mustache-twirling wordcels in high places berating anyone on their behalf to gain followers, nor did the French Revolution with its cries for égalité.
I fully understand how cosmically unfair it seems to rightists that Hitler and Stalin can kill masses of people on the same order of magnitude but only the latter gets a pass because supposedly his end goal is the virtuous one (and you can't at all relate to this assessment of it, leading you to conclude that it must be a wordcel conspiracy), but to that I can only respond, git gud. You are supposed to be the ones who celebrate natural excellence and letting the superior prevail; why do you then kvetch when your value system loses in the marketplace of ideas? You are not going to win with an argument to the effect of "wordcels are too good with words, it is unfair that they get to push communism and win" when you are trying to argue against the very premise of your own argument.
You don't think the Church Fathers were wordcels? You don't think Rousseau and Voltaire were wordcels? Revolution has always been a wordcel endeavour, for better or for worse, until it reaches the point where you need shape rotators to handle the finances and military logistics.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm going to take issue with both examples here, both nascent Christianity and especially the French Revolution had wordy intellectuals at the hearts of their movements. Robespierre wasn't just selling like, vibes man.
More options
Context Copy link
I am not exactly sure how Stalin "gets a pass". If you asked people to list the most evil leaders in world history, there's a high chance that they'd list Hitler first and Stalin second.
One could say that Stalin "got a pass" in the way that he probably died from natural causes (unless one believes that he was poisoned) while Hitler desperately committed suicide, but that's because Stalin won a war and Hitler lost one, not due to the perceived virtue of their causes in the eyes of others.
I figure the assessment is different in countries that fought directly against him. I've seen people in Stalin t-shirts, Stalinface parodies of the Andy Warhol campbell soup photo, and academics having a printed image macro with "you're just mad / cuz I'm Stalin on you" taped to their door, in Germany and various parts of the anglophone sphere.
Wait, are you saying countries which fought directly against Stalin are more charitable, or less?
Less. Stefferi is from Finland.
But…Germany also fought Stalin.
Surely there are some former East Germans somewhere in the country, too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's not like there's no history of Hitler being used in a jocular manner as well, considering the hundreds of Der Üntergang rant parody videos, including ones where Hitler's supposed complaint is a valid one.
The Untergang jokes (no umlaut!) all just use that one scene though, which notably depicts Hitler in a state of complete dissolution. It's basically impossible to take that scene as a signal that Hitler is deserving of respect - even if you put a valid complaint in his mouth, it is understood that an actual Hitler apologist could and would have picked any other depiction over that one.
And well, if ambiguously positive or unambiguously nuanced discussions are not enough to amount to "getting a pass" by your standards, consider the case of Lenin. In my assessment, he was actually by far creepier and more evil than his successor, more on the Pol Pot end of the scale of communist leaders, a sadistic enjoyer of violence for its own sake, while Stalin's paranoia and ruthlessness was more of an adaptation to the environment he was a creature of (that Lenin created to begin with). Yet, there is no shortage of mainstream depictions of him that could read as being a flawed but fundamentally good anti-hero (no doubt in part because of systematic ignorance of things he actually said and did).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Pol Pot had the best (worst?) numbers per capita, but by absolute amount of murders he is distinctly behind Mao, Stalin, and Hitler.
More options
Context Copy link
Wear a t-shirt gloryfying Stalin for a day, and then one glorifying Hitler on another, and compare the results.
I'm going to guess neither experiment is going to end well here. (I have, for what it's worth, seen a couple of "Adolf Hitler World Tour 1939-1945" shirts around, but have never seen a Stalin shirt.)
Even if we assume that the response would be considerably slanted towards the Hitler shirt getting the worse reception, isn't that quite nuts as a standard? The argument is that "Staling gets a pass", and if the standard of comparison for "getting a pass" is getting a better reaction than Hitler, pretty much everything ever gets a pass.
How? It only would be if Stalin played in a completely different league then Hitler, and the whole argument is that they're going head to head, so they should evoke a reaction that is also on a similar level.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think that while Stalin is rightfully reviled, Hitler and his movement set a new cultural standard for evilness. Whenever we (as a culture) want to drive home the fact that something (e.g. abortion, factory farming, enforced political correctness) is maximally evil, the metaphors we reach fore are not "Stalin", "KGB", "political commissar" and "Holodomor" (a word which chromium does not even recognize), but "Hitler", "SS", "Gestapo" and "holocaust".
To be fair, the Nazis worked really tirelessly to earn the top spot on the evil assholes list. At the end, I do not think that popular culture dispassionately decided that Stalin might have killed more people, but Hitler managed a higher rate and should thus get the first prize. It was probably more that Hitler went to war with most of the Western world, so there was already a rather strong sentiment against him by the time the magnitude of his evil became common knowledge. "Turns out that the guy against whom we have been fighting one of the most bloody wars in history and who has been painted as a villain by our propaganda was actually also murdering people at a rate of a few trains a day, so if anything our propaganda painted him too flattering."
By contrast, Stalin died in 53, way before peak cold war. Subsequent propaganda focused on the USSR in general, not their dead worst leader ever. And of course there were plenty of sympathizers to downplay his atrocities.
It's totally normal for people to describe shit they think as evil as 'kgb', though. You're correct that people call their political opponents Hitler more than Stalin, but there's always been a token of axiomatic evil in figurative speech- it used to be the biblical pharoah(like from Exodus). Hitler's portrayal during WWII was actually rather buffoonish more than outright evil; the Japs on the other hand...
Now why Hitler gets the title rather than Tojo, that might just be the dominance of Jews in Hollywood. I can remember old folks using terms like 'banzai' to refer to crazy evil, but that was more specific to the crazy part. I can definitely remember, quite recently and by younger people, Stalin used as a metaphor for totalitarian evil. But Hitler definitely takes the generic spot.
More options
Context Copy link
I think they were both pretty equal in evil. The reason that Stalin gets a pass is that it makes an absolute mess of the moral certainty that the postwar order created. We were allies with Russia, and im not sure that the Allies would have won without Stalin and his war machine. If the war had remained a one front war, it’s possible that some form of Nazi German Empire would have survived. It was only because Russia was involved that we won, and thus talking about Holodomor and Gulag systems (which were absolutely as evil as any of the German labor camps) becomes a bit of a hagiographic problem. Stalin being known to be equally as ruthless would turn the story sideways. Which is a problem because the postwar mythological narrative of Liberal Western Globalist order is “we defeated the worst thing that had ever existed. Thus we have the moral right to rule over everything.” And furthermore it gives the new order a moral certainty— evil looks like Hitler, evil looks like straight armed salutes, arm bands, and speeches in big stadiums and big red flags.
Now they were obviously both evil and killed millions and committed genocide of people into the millions of people. But I don’t think the way the mythology works in th3 modern world works for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it turned things that used to be considered okay into evil simply because they’d been used to evil ends. Nationalism and patriotism are usually good things, they hold people together to build a country. It works in China. They think being Chinese is good and favor things that benefit China.
More options
Context Copy link
This is an interesting phrase; it's accurate at the surface level, and also revealing in its accuracy upon scrutiny. It is more than evident that Hitler and his movement set a new cultural standard for evilness.
Cultural.
...Personally, I simply note that, by my standards, many and perhaps most people fail this particular test of humanity, and downgrade my understanding of humans and human society accordingly. The way leftists talk about fascists and fascism is, to me, a reasonably accurate working hypothesis of what most of you out there, the population in general, are really like. Maybe you can be reasoned with, or coerced. Maybe you need to have fire dropped on your cities in industrial quantities. Time will tell, and we all have it coming in the end.
Maybe I'm tired and not understanding correctly, but your use of the collective 'you' is reading to me as linking to both the perpetrator and victim of firebombing alike- or possibly both, as in someone deserving firebombing.
Might I ask you to reword this for clarity?
In the above statement, "You" is a generalized label for the people who have internalized the belief that "Naziism set a new cultural standard for evil". It seems evident that this is a considerable portion of the general population.
You, Dean in particular, are doubtless familiar with Progressive discourse about "fascists" and "fascism". I expect you are also familiar with the sort of person who believes that the North was far, far too lenient with the South in the American Civil War, and expresses the wish that far harsher measures had been employed to eradicate the scourge of slavery and the ideology that gave rise to it. The way such discourse frames "fascists" individually, the structures of "fascism" generally, and the lessons it draws from the aftermath of the American Civil War are reasonable analogues to how I regard the aforementioned considerable portion of the general population.
Such people have learned nothing of consequence from the disasters of the 20th century, and it seems likely to me that they will consequently repeat and thus suffer those disasters again in this century. Nothing has changed. This should not be surprising. Humans inevitably human.
"We all have it coming" should be self-explanatory. I also am a human, and am not sufficiently righteous to reasonably claim exemption from the Dresden treatment.
Thank you for providing an elaboration at request. (And that is a sincere thank you. An ! would feel flippant, but the gratitude is meant.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Look at the education system. "In high school, you get 155 hours on Hitler, 3 minutes on Stalin, and nothing on Pol Pot. Nothing on Mao. Barely a mention of Fidel Castro."
Look at the cinema industry. A million movies about the holocaust, one film about the Holodomor.
Ask random normies about Hitler, and they will tell you that he was evil because he tried to exterminate the Jews. Ask random normies about Stalin, and chances are they won't even know who he was.
Yougov: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Worst_World_Leaders_poll_results.pdf
68% have an unfavorable view of Stalin, with only 26% undecided (a subset of which presumably have not heard of him).
Edit: stefferi beat me to it.
More options
Context Copy link
My public K-12 education had 0 hours on Hitler. It had no WW2 history at all. We went over Japanese internment quite a bit. But somehow not the theaters of war or Hitler. Which seems like an obvious gap.
I remember WWII history, but far less of it than Holocaust.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Come on, man. Just give this claim a basic sanity check. An American high schooler will have an hour of history a day and about 180 school days per year. This claim would indicate they spend most of a school year's worth just on Hitler. This isn't happening. They're not spending that much time on WW2 as a whole, let alone just Hitler.
Florida and many other states have a mandatory two-semester Holocaust class.
I'm not finding evidence of this, though obviously it's possible I'm missing something. States mandate that the Holocaust be included in the educational curriculum, among myriad other topics, but I'm not finding anything specifying mandatory classes focused specifically on the Holocaust.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
First of all, "155 hours" is an obvious hyperbole; there are not literally a million holocaust movies, either.
Secondly, it's not just history class. The Diary of a Anne Frank and Night are staples of English courses. I was assigned both, as well as We Are Witnesses.
The same site also lists Animal Farm and Nineteen eighty-four as staples of English courses. I agree that Orwell intended Nineteen eighty-four to be a general warning against totalitarianism but both when it was published in 1948 and now it is seen as primarily anti-Communist. Animal Farm is straightforwardly anti-Communist.
FWIW, the anti-Nazi lit I was exposed to in school was mostly of the refugee memoir variety (The Silver Sword and I am David) which doesn't represent the USSR very positively either. We also read Animal Farm and we looked at excerpts from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when we were studying "Why translating serious literary fiction is hard."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Especially since according to woke we also have to spend inordinate amounts of time on slavery and the wrongs done to minorities and other minorities. There isn't enough time for that and 155 hours of Hitler.
We did spend a lot of time on Hitler relatively speaking, but I also remember reading animal farm in history class and spending almost equally large amounts of time on the evils of communism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Idk, I got a day long lecture on Stalin twice and Mao once. Admittedly multiple monthlong units on the Holocaust make it add up to a similar fraction.
I also would expect random normies to know who Stalin was, and if poorly educated default to describing him as ‘Russian Hitler’ or similar.
Yeah, I would be astonished if random normies didn't know who Stalin was. That's not even being highly educated, that's "did you graduate high school" material.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
While I am undoubtedly living in a country prone to see Stalin as particularly unfavorably (though I doubt the scientific factor of the quotes above), this prompted me to go find an actual poll on the topic. In a YouGov poll of 1000+ Americans, 68% view him as somewhat or very unfavorably (58% very unfavorably), 6 % as somewhat or very favorably, and 26% don't know. So, while there's a contigent who don't know him, "asking random normies about Stalin" does clearly show they do know who he is and view him (very) unfavorably.
Hitler unsurprisingly is better known and even less favored, and there are some other world leaders who surpass Stalin (Kim Jong-Un and Saddam Hussein), but interestingly Hitler isn't even the least favored of the figures asked - Osama bin Laden is.
There has also of course been a push for more remiscining on the evils of Stalin around the West in the recent years due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine leading to new visibility for Holodomor and comparisons of Putin to Stalin etc.
More options
Context Copy link
I can't speak to that posters experience but my high school world history classes (late 00's-early 10's) definitely covered Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and Castro.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A little offtopic, but has there been much discussion about why Marx's theory is called Materialist-Dialectic or whatever? The word "Dialectic" is almost exclusively used by (my) outgroup so I don't care much about what it means specifically -- much of its use is probably shibboleth. Why the word "Materialist?" That Marxists do not believe in God seems unimportant to me. You might as well call wokeness Materialist, or the Nurture Hypothesis also Materialist. Is it too uncharitable if my first instinct is that it is the same phenomenon as postmodern writing appropriating physics terms? That is, using the term "Materialist" makes Marxism sound descriptive and scientific? This wouldn't surprise me, especially since my read of the discussion here is that LTV seems obviously like a moral prescription.
Slightly more on-topic, I think Zagrebbi is more correct than Cofnas. We actually went over this a few weeks ago. The deleted comment in this thread originally linked to here. Perhaps the equality thesis has not been falsified already. But if it ever were, I fully expect those facts to be memory-holed.
I guess that means we should expect the actual undoing (if it should ever happen) of woke will be mocking it and making it low status (somehow? This is left as an exercise to the reader).
The word "dialectic" has had multiple incompatible definitions throughout the history of philosophy. When Marxists use the term, they're using it in the sense that Hegel used it, which is... well, you could argue that even Hegel and his followers didn't have one consistent definition of the term. But I think you can reasonably say that all usages of the (Hegelian) term "dialectical" revolve around the idea of an "immanent internal critique of a concept or position via the concept's internal contradictions". Many common arguments against naive libertarianism could be classified as dialectical (in the Hegelian sense). If you tell the libertarian that libertarianism is bad because freedom is bad, that's an external critique. But many people accept libertarianism's presupposition that freedom is good; they just think that libertarianism fails to live up to its own ideals, that the particular kind of formal freedom offered by libertarianism fails to secure certain actual freedoms that we value. Freedom can in fact give rise to its own opposite, unfreedom (an isolated individual in a pure state of nature is "free", but he's also rather unfree, since the physical world immediately begins to make strenuous demands on him). That's an internal, dialectical critique.
Marxists have a dialectical view of history because they think that the internal (and material, according to them) contradictions of a given mode of production are what give rise to social and historical change.
"Materialism" has two distinct meanings in philosophy. There's materialism as a metaphysical thesis, which is the thesis that everything that exists is material (this is the "God doesn't exist" version), and there's materialism as a sociological thesis, which is the thesis that material conditions are the driving force of social and historical change (as opposed to "sociological" idealism - the thesis that people inventing and adopting new ideas is what drives historical change). In contemporary analytic philosophy, you basically only see materialism/idealism used as metaphysical terms, while in continental philosophy (the tradition that Marx and Marxists belong to), people will freely switch between both usages. The type of materialism that Marxists place the emphasis on is really more of the sociological kind (although they're almost universally metaphysical materialists as well).
See this for an overview of the debate between Marx's sociological materialism and Hegel's sociological idealism.
More options
Context Copy link
Matt Walsh making Robin DiAngelo pay $30 to his black camera man was effective in that even mainstream media talked about the scene and she vanished in shame:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9JSjAnGwzqI
But mocking is difficult, as the superweapon of political correctness was to make mocking cringe, one can’t make deriding jokes of gay/fat/trans/ChingChong/disabled/mentalIllness/unhoused/otherness when it is punching down. Sort of a jiujitsu move: being gay was low status and destroyed careers until coming-out got the quality of braveness. This can be easily transferred to other former icks.
More options
Context Copy link
Marx called his dialectic "materialist" to differentiate it from the Hegelian dialectic that was its philosophical ancestor, and was fundamentally idealist in nature. "Dialectic" in this sense refers to a specific notion of an idea (or material condition) being confronted by its negation and the contradiction between the two being resolved in some further form. For Hegel this generally took the form of some initial idea (thesis) being confronted by its negation (antithesis) and the contradiction between the two being resolved in some further idea (synthesis). Marx intends to ground this process in material conditions (in social classes, or labor relations, or similar sorts of things) rather than in ideas so it is "materialist" in contrast to Hegel's idealism. It doesn't really have anything to do with God or the use of "materialist" in other philosophical contexts.
More options
Context Copy link
Because back in the 1850s there were a lot of non-materialist philosophies so it was actually a meaningful distinction.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That little link has 6236 words and a hundred links! The post makes one interesting (novel?) idea in positioning itself against Hanania and others: Wokists are not woke because they believe in equality, but they believe in equality so that they can signal wokism (to differentiate themselves as elite from the non-elite underclass). Wokism is more viral than Marxism, because the latter was born in a homogeneous society while Wokism evolved in the multi-ethnic world we are living today and is used in credibly giving a pro-social signal to minority-elitists. Wokism is a tool in the status hierarchy. That also means we have not reached peak wokeness, as the tool will remain useful in future.
As a side note: some Russian nationalists bemoan that USSR-Marxism developed wokist elements (promoting the minority out-group). For example Ukraine getting Crimea under Khrushchev instead of Russification like under the Zars.
Tzars*
I haven't heard any Russian nationalists say that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am not a scholar of Marxist thought by any means but I come across it often enough as a leftist more generally. My impression is that what Marxists of all kinds agree with, and find value in, is Marx's critique of capitalism and his particular methods (dialectical materialism) for doing so. Where they often diverge is how we will get from our present system to a communist (moneyless, classless, stateless) one. Each of these different branches thinks of themselves as "real" communists in a way the others aren't. You also get the "communism has never been tried" discussions because there have always been (and likely will always be) deviations from an ideal theoretical implementation when actually implementing them, which allows those adherents to continue believing that the correct outcomes would be achieved if only they had been closer to theory (this is not unique to Marxism).
As to wokism's advantage, I think it is simpler. To the extent wokism encompasses things like non-discrimination laws it fits firmly in the liberal (in the political philosophy sense) tradition that American elites have always considered themselves inspired by. Certainly in a way that the more common varieties of communism (like Marxism-Leninism) do not.
More options
Context Copy link
I gave up on Marxism as a 'serious' ideology (maybe such a thing is already an oxymoron) long ago when I learned that they've failed to resolve the Economic Calculation Problem even though it was introduced 100 years ago. Even though it kept rearing its heads every time they actually got their way and were able to implement the system.
The trajectory of Venezuela and (recently) Argentina alone should make someone skeptical of their ideals!
You can redefine 'efficiency,' you can try to redefine people's desires or propose that as long as things are more 'fair' (as defined by you) it doesn't matter if people's desires are fully sated...
But end of the day if your economy is not producing as much of [desirable things] as efficiently as a comparable economy using a different system, you are losing the argument.
Even more telling that even the partial solutions require re-introduce market mechanisms, and thus private property and trade.
But rather than take this critique (and the various real-world experiments that have occurred) seriously and throwing their efforts into truly solving it or at least trying solutions at smaller scales... they just plow on ahead trying to remake various economies into their preferred system and damn the predictable consequences.
Someone I read recently (might have been here?) pointed out that almost all notable lefties these days aren't even trying to pretend there's any place where socialism works and people are thriving, or that Marxism has viable answers... its literally just power politics at this point, leverage grievances, make exorbitant promises, and lie through your teeth to get to a position where, ironically, you can leech massive amounts of wealth off the Capitalist system, and deliver some of that to your supporters as reward. The more earnest ones might still try to claim they're opposing fascism but its almost impossible to believe that they don't know how their proposed system has failed to achieve its goals everywhere it has been tried (this is the part where someone says "ALWAYS HAS BEEN").
At this point I am genuinely in favor of a permanent exchange/exile program where avowed communists/marxists over the age of, say, 25 can be sent to any given country of their choice that will take them, and we will accept one citizen from said country that can correctly answer some economics 101 questions.
On the other hand, if there's any "moderate" Marxists who dislike Capitalism but aren't actively trying to dismantle it, I'd also be willing to put them into a policy thinktank where they can propose methods of possibly addressing the worst excesses of Capitalist society (measured in a quantifiable way and compared to a meaningful alternative/baseline!) and work on making Capitalism better. I don't want to remove all ideological competition to Capitalism, that would be hypocritical, and our own theory says competition helps improve most things. But these Marxists would have to understand that the very instant they're caught doing any of that activist shit, I, personally, will be loading them on the one-way flight to North Korea.
Really, there's long been this sense that socialism and communism are one and the same, and bad. That's to an extent true. But the reality of the situation is that most modern American socialists are not socialists. They are "democratic socialists". I realize that's a slippery label, but the core idea is that capitalism is good (they would rather die than say it, but it does underpin their worldview) but you can use central government power to accelerate a certain level of redistribution (providing a floor for quality of life, but not necessarily any more than that) on top of that system. Also, you can "tame the beast" a little bit if you have enough smart rules in place for how capitalism works. And you know? I feel like that's a valid and defensible worldview/proposal, even if you disagree.
So in that lens, I'd say that modern lefties are on some level aware that socialism doesn't work. Many prominent lefties do try and think about ways to make capitalism better, even numerically! (There's a reason modern monetary economic theory is popular on the left, because it allows a capitalist framework way of making the numbers work out - oversimplified, you can just print money to uphold high social spending, as long as you are still the world's reserve currency and you take certain tax actions). It's true that you don't always get this vibe, but that's because the loudest people online are the most recent college grads who haven't followed the trajectory of economic thought maturation yet to its leftist local resting place, and still might be Marxists (for now). In short, the American political system provides a capitalism off-ramp other than actual Marxism: AOC, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, all are variants on exactly this idea, and they have started to get a portion of power because their ideas are less crazy than the actual Marxists. They still mimic the language, because they have the heritage, and don't want to alienate young supporters, but those are not intrinsic to the voting-public appeal.
A defense of the PMC is essentially a defense of this added layer. You really do become more capitalist in the minds of progs by gutting layers of management and HR that work to offset pure macho entrepreneurialism. Or by undermining NGOs and non-profits, which they'll happily concede are private sector manifestations. Size of the state or public vs. private are not really where the action is anymore. Left vs. right all takes place within a permanent indispensable and inescapable capitalism.
The right that wants to woo the left by going after a portion of the private sector, i.e. engaging political economy on the left's classic terms, can't get any traction, because the left has moved on.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I feel like your last point is basically the social safety net and pro-union wing of the left (and now right?). In that respect we already do have a lot of pushback against pure capitalism in a practical sense, and a lot of it came from socialist strains.
More options
Context Copy link
But Marxists don't care about winning or losing "the argument". What they want to do is change the rules by which the argument itself is conducted. They want a wholesale reevaluation of what it means to "win" or "lose" "the argument" in the first place.
If your politics is based on "whoever is producing the most goods most efficiently is the winner", then Marxists would consider that to be, to use one of Zizek's favorite phrases, "pure ideology". That belief is an ideological effect of capitalism itself. It's not a natural or obvious conclusion. You could conceivably hold a different belief instead.
This is not to say that Marxists must necessarily adhere to a degrowth ideology of course. Rather they would say that, whatever historical epoch comes after capitalism, the way in which inhabitants of that epoch think about concepts like "production" and "efficiency" will be as incomprehensible to us as the capitalism vs Marxism debate is to hunter-gatherers. Marxism at its core is a theory of history, and how contradictions in social relations drive historical change (e.g. the contradiction between the formal freedom of neoliberal free trade, and the fact that this formal freedom can paradoxically result in less actual freedom as globalized hypercompetition forces homogenization). Your historical epoch plays a role in shaping what counts as a "winning" or "losing" argument to you, what counts as a "reasonable" political aim, etc.
Sure.
But for being so big on "Material Conditions," they should notice that if material conditions are more favorable in the other system, that's going to supercede their clever wordplay.
If we're talking about a "satisfying human desires" contest, that seems pretty fair.
I think even the Hunter-Gatherers were playing that game, and could probably grasp that a tribe that was bringing home more meat and berries and could use its surpluses to make things like fur coats and better tools and weapons were 'winning' in some meaningful way.
Capitalism's great "insight" was that you didn't have to go over and raid and pillage the neighboring tribe to benefit from their bounty. Instead you can identify things you have, that they want, and trade such things for mutual gain, then use those gains to bolster your productive capacity again. At some point someone invents 'money' and its off to the races.
Not sure what Marxism's great "insight" was, or at least what insight they have that improved people's lives since it was implemented.
They want to CLAIM things like "the five day work week" or "liberation of slaves" or "unionization/collective bargaining," but I think even their own theories support the materialist interpretation that such things only ever came about because Capitalism made us productive enough to spare more resources for leisure and alleviation of suffering, and to give workers the leverage to demand better compensation for their labor.
Charitably, the great insight of economics that favor redistribution (more broad than Marxism/socialism) is that people who fall below a certain standard of living lose the ability to participate in the net-gain market, and so it's in everyone's favor to help them. Now, it's still under debate if the math works out, but I don't think it inherently doesn't work out! Or, you could say that leftist economics (the capitalist variant kind) had the realization that free markets develop monopolies too easily, so you need a certain level of intervention to stop it (e.g. Walmart using economies of scale to undercut a local supermarket for years on end, driving them out of business, only to raise prices once the competition lessens).
More options
Context Copy link
But human desires are malleable. They are not static across history. That's the point.
A century ago, not wanting to have kids was seen as much more eccentric than it is today. Now there's a whole "childfree" movement and the birthrate is dropping precipitously. Biology didn't change that fast. A change in material and social conditions caused a change in desires. So before you say "well this is the best way to satisfy human desires", you have to ask whose human desires.
Of course almost everyone is going to want to be assured of their basic survival and security. That one is pretty hard to get around. But even then! There have been plenty of people who chose to live an ascetic life and managed with very little.
I mean, were they? What is "winning"? Is the winner the one with the most weapons, or are the weapons just a means to some other win condition?
Are you using the system of production as a means to your own ends, or is the system of production using you as a means to reproduce itself? (Marxists of course think that under capitalism, it's the latter.)
This is not how Marxists use the term "capitalism". Not the intelligent ones anyway.
The sophisticated Marxists recognize that there's no single identifying feature that separates capitalism from other "economic systems" in previous historical epochs. Money, trade, wage labor, private property, and even financial speculation have existed essentially since the beginning of human civilization (I believe Max Weber talks about this in the preface to The Protestant Work Ethic). "Capitalism" for Marxists essentially means "industrialization", or perhaps more specifically, "the contradictions in liberal humanist social relations engendered by industrialization".
Yes, that is literally just the orthodox Marxist position.
Capitalism is not an aberration or a mistake. It's a necessary phase of development; albeit one that contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is in fact the only thing that can give us the tools to go beyond itself. It is always and only the master's tools that dismantle the master's house (if you believe Hegel).
Proceeding from the assumption that this is a prerequisite for human flourishing, I would like you to illustrate how a state governed by the principles of Marxism would be superior in securing "value" for people (however you define this) as opposed to capitalism. It's not difficult to radically question others' conceptions of value and attack their stated goals. Sowing philosophical doubt via endless Socratic questioning is easy, especially when it comes to a wishy-washy question without an answer like "what is value?". It's not quite so easy to make your own value proposition, defend it from criticism and prove that your preferred social structure best satisfies that. As such I find Marxists are really good at subversive critique of the existing order, but their ability to demonstrate the utility of their own system is downright anaemic. It is characterised by evasive, wishy-washy arguments meant to distract people from the fact that their vision for society is extremely ill-defined.
Personally, I think we have enough evidence that a Marxist state struggles to grant the majority of its populace even the bottom tier of Maslow's hierarchy and thus fails at the first hurdle. Vietnam's experience with collective production is a pretty illustrative example. Collectivisation nearly starved that entire country and after private production, trade and other capitalisty things were established and bolstered by the government, agricultural production skyrocketed and the populace explicitly stated they considered themselves better off. Is there any better measure of value than the people's own assessment of their well-being? If there is one, I would like to hear it.
I suppose it is always possible that the Vietnamese were brainwashed by the nascent capitalist system into valuing the wrong things... ah, false consciousness, how many issues thou can explain away.
You've admitted that the need for survival and security is "pretty hard to get around". Guess what having weapons is meant to help with? Arms races that involve the production of resources are a fact of life in any remotely multipolar system, and unless you live in delulu land everyone knows they have to participate unless they want to be somebody else's punching bag at best, and wiped off the face of the earth at worst.
Having resources does not directly equal value, no, but it sure helps achieve most terminal goals aside from "starvation, poverty and the slow death of my entire society".
I'm not a Marxist (although I do think they make some good points that are worth taking into serious consideration), so I'm not here to defend Marxism qua Marxism, and I'm certainly not here to defend the specific economic policies of the USSR or China. I just want to help people understand what classical Marxists actually believe, so that when they reject Marxism, they have a better idea of what they're rejecting.
"A state governed by the principles of Marxism" is a bit of a misnomer (besides the fact that Marx thought that advanced communism would bring about the dissolution of the state). Marx was intentionally very light on specific details about how a "communist society" would work; we can say what communism is abstractly, but not concretely. Because communism will involve a fundamental transformation of human subjectivity (according to Marx), it's impossible to predict exactly how it will work, because we can't extrapolate from human behavior under capitalism to predict human behavior under communism.
Marx never said "you have to immediately and forcibly collectivize all farmland". What he did say is that there needed to be a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in which the proletariat would commandeer state power and use it to begin the process of overcoming capitalism. But no one can decide for the proletariat how they should go about this or what exactly this process should look like; they have to decide it for themselves, concretely, as they struggle through the actual process. (I think the DotP is a bad and unworkable idea for many reasons, which in turn is one of the many reasons why I'm not a Marxist.)
That's largely the point, yes. The best way I heard it explained was, "Marxism was not the proletarian socialist movement; it was the self-critique of the proletarian socialist movement". And I think that's correct. Marx certainly did not invent socialism, the workers' movements preceded him, their demands preceded him. Marxism was intended to be a type of self-criticism that would bring the socialist movement to self-consciousness. The incessant Socratic questioning of the Marxists was directed just as much at the socialists themselves as it was at broader capitalist society, if not more so.
Guilty as charged, yes. I think all the sophisticated ones would admit to this.
Yes of course. I'm no pacifist. I was mainly asking that question as a way of probing faceh's thoughts on value.
Okay, fair enough. Consider my question revoked then. You bring up some interesting points, I have some thoughts on a couple of them.
An aside - Vietnam's implementation wasn't exactly immediate; it was a gradual rollback of the possibility of private enterprise involving multiple steps. It started with the Land Reform Law which involved redistributions of land from landed Vietnamese to those the VCP considered to be impoverished, then progressed towards forming mutual aid teams of farmers who were encouraged to aid each other with work on their fields (which, at this point, they still privately owned) during periods of peak labour demand. Then they created agricultural production cooperatives obligating them to perform collective labour for the state, rewarding them with workpoints, and it was then that the process of collectivising proper started.
I do realise this isn't the main point so I'll move on though.
I have read this and Marx does state the following about the dictatorship of the proletariat:
"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible."
"Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production."
"These measures will, of course, be different in different countries."
"Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable."
"1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes."
"2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax."
"3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance."
"4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels."
"5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly."
"6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State."
"7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan."
"8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture."
"9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country."
"10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c."
"When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character."
It's not exceptionally specific, but it's not non-specific, either; many broad goals are laid out, including abolition of land and collectivisation of production by the state, and it notes that this should be achieved via "despotic inroads on the rights of property". This model outlined here actually parallels what a lot of communist countries in effect chose to do; they were in fact loosely following the instructions contained within Marx (and Engels') famous manifesto. I think this model clearly has not worked in any case in which it has been implemented.
Which is an issue when your movement has a strong urge to tear down and then proceeds to have no idea what to do once the much-hated system has been completely dismantled. My perception upon talking to many Marxists in my time around these people is that there isn't that clear of an idea regarding how one would handle the incentive problems, coordination problems, etc that the envisioned society would face. I find many of them don't really have a proper theory of governance; they pretty much just cross their fingers and hope ideology does the work of sorting all these issues out once capitalism is no longer an obstacle.
When you're working on things as complex and fragile as entire societies, you just can't operate like this.
Well, sure. There's been a century of selection bias. The natural thing to do for a communist who thinks their idea of communism would solve its problems is to join a commune. The USA had like a hundred of them in the 19th century. Some lasted a decade or more before failing. The trouble with joining a commune is that that's the point at which you have to have ideas to solve its problems, and if you don't then you're not just being told that communism doesn't work by some capitalist jerk you can ignore, you're just not getting told that It-Wasn't-Real-Communism-Anyway doesn't work by a history book, you're getting told your specific style of communism doesn't work by reality itself.
Part of why the few remaining communists fantasize about seizing entire nations before they get started is that that's a necessary prerequisite for certain "solutions" to the brain drain problem, but I think part of it is this selection bias: the remaining communists must have some excuse not to be communists right now, or after a decade or so of direct experience they'd stop being communists. From China to the kibbutzim, the least unsuccessful communist societies in history managed to hang on in part by becoming steadily less communist.
More options
Context Copy link
Fair enough! I have no interest in defending any of the specific points listed of course. Just one more reason why I'm not a Marxist.
I will point out that 1) the Manifesto was a relatively early work and Marx's political thinking developed as he progressed into his mature works, and 2) it was a polemic intended for general consumption and may not represent the most "nuanced" version of his views. But I don't have any further relevant textual references to cite.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Excellent comment
More options
Context Copy link
Natural biology didn't change that fast. Chemicals that changed people's biological makeup in subtle but drastic ways probably did, I'd wager. Lot of social changes downstream of that, though, which of course we've discussed.
If the Marxist critique was more limited to "Capitalism generates feedback loops that can spin off and have 'unexpected' effects that harm more people than they benefit in the medium term" I'd not push back hardly at all.
But we've had a theoretical solution to that issue for decades. Marxism didn't generate that solution.
The weapons can make them more efficient hunters (or maybe the weapons are more durable and so can be used more than once) so as to increase their surplus, in this case.
Which can either free up the time and labor of some of the guys who would have been hunting to work on other things, or allow them to store up more meat for lean times like winter, and if they make good use of that surplus they'll be positioned to be even more productive on the other side of it. I think Irwin Schiff's How an Economy Grows and Why it Doesn't gets this right in the particulars.
I don't necessarily think there is any 'final win condition,' mind, at least not in an entropy-increasing universe, just the process of ensuring continued improvement as long as possible and, ideally, the continuation of your genetic line.
Well, I don't believe Hegel.
Again, I don't see this as an 'insight' of Marxism. Capitalism is a 'necessary' stage of development if humans want their desires to continue being fulfilled.
Capitalism (even if we limited it to your preferred "industrialization and its consequences" definition) continues to adapt to fulfill a greater array of human desires using the tools of 'free' trade, development of ever greater capital stock, and innovation towards more efficient use of resources. It isn't necessarily building 'towards' something or to any other new phase of existence unless, I suppose, we somehow manage to actually satisfy every human desire to the point of full contentment.
To my personal dismay, it turns out that people's desires tend to skew towards seeking pleasure and raising their own status (which makes sense, when you consider our evolutionary history) over trying to elevate the species as a whole towards controling more energy and resources than those found in the crust of our little spinny space rock.
But then Capitalism also permits the existence of Billionaires who use their surpluses to fund their own preferences, including creating really massive rockets which can be used to bootstrap further industry in outer space.
(which yes, goes towards the whole "people's desires change." If affordable flights to Mars ever become available, there's probably a lot who would take those, even if it barely crosses their mind right now).
Marxists get REALLLLLLY mad about this for some reason, that we might get "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism"... without the Communism.
I don't see any good argument from Marxists for:
A) Why we ought to go beyond Capitalism (Hume's Guillotine notwithstanding, even!). Its working well, if we assume "fulfilling human desires" is the game and is a worthy goal;
B) How Socialism/Communism is going to replace it when its a fundamentally broken system that can't coordinate human society beyond the tribal level.
Its a seeming dead end in both those respects. It can't fulfill the role they predict for it, and there's no cognizable moral imperative to try and make it fulfill the role.
So what use does Marxism have on offer for any rational human being, other than perhaps allowing incisive critiques of the flaws in a Capitalist system which we can then try to address and fix within said system?
I'm still a bit unclear on whether you think increasingly efficient production is a good in and of itself, or if you think it's only good insofar as it can be a means to other ends.
What kinds of other things?
What if we could hypothetically assume an eternal universe? What then?
Well, there are multiple ways to read that.
If we start talking like "the best man is the one who sires the most children", then all we've done is smuggle the same language of marketplace efficiency into a new domain.
I used to, but I do not anymore. Increasing efficiency is still pretty close to a primary goal, though.
However its a prerequisite to many, MANY good things. Some of those things result in less efficient use of resources, however (broadly speaking, leisure/leisure activities).
Have they invented the wheel yet? If so, lot of things they can work on with wheel tech available.
If not, it slightly increases the odds of someone stumbling upon that invention.
That's closer to my conception (contra Hegel et. al) of how society ends up improving changing.
From my perspective, seems obvious: develop tech as close to immortality as you can, then go travel around to see all you can see that's out there. Unless we can mathematically prove that we'll eventually saturate our desire for 'fun' and novelty, and we can't augment those desires, seems like one can make good use of eternity tooling around the galaxies looking for cool stuff.
I kind of use it in the broad sense of "there exist some people who can trace their genetic background to you (and beyond) and thus will acknowledge your existence long after you're gone."
Add in some sci-fi, and it becomes "you have descendants who might be interested enough in stuff that happened in your lifetime to run a simulation of you, assuming they can't resurrect you directly."
I dunno, I'm not trying to impose my terminal values on everyone else. To the extent people have different terminal values, increasing the amount of energy and resources available to people, and increase the efficiency with which we use them means more people can chase their preferred terminal values without stepping on each other's toes/inciting conflicts.
As I asked, what use does Marxism have on offer for any rational human being, other than perhaps allowing incisive critiques of the flaws in a Capitalist system which we can then try to address and fix within said system?
All the stuff I'm suggesting up there are achievable within Capitalism.
Pretty close? Is there anything closer?
You may have an answer, or you may not. It's fine to say you're not sure.
Wouldn't this just be the sort of pursuit of pleasure/leisure that you've been criticizing? Or do you not see it that way?
I'm much more interested in the way you think about value than the way you think about Marxism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Have to agree with this. Marx's central argument is that focusing on pure production is confusing use-value for monetary value. Capitalist focus on production above all else results in commodity fetishism and the misallocation of labor and resources to goods that don't provide much use value to members of society.
The inability to provide a metric for use value makes this moralism, not an economic theory.
You can make similarly sentimental arguments that some things are worth economic inefficiency, hell you can make convincing ones, but that has essentially no predictive power.
The question then is why should one listen to Marxist moralism instead of Christian moralism, even in these specific matters?
More options
Context Copy link
One can argue 'monetary value is not use-value'. Sure. But name a better predictor.
In practice, prices are literally--like quite literally and exclusively--the result of billions of people voting with their dollars, based on how much utility they believe item x has. What could be a better predictor average of use-value than every persons' opinions on use-value, averaged out?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A lot of people love to criticize Marx without actually having read him. You and this sub-stacker included. Where does Marx ever support wokeness in his writings? Capital was a critique of capitalism and the social systems that it encourages that is largely correct. I have yet to hear an actually convincing critique of commodity fetishism or the labour theory of value that isn't a nitpick. Western leftists don't actually want to read Marx (because he is hard), nor do they seriously want to implement his ideas (also hard, and never successfully done, you can complain all you want about me pulling out the "not real communism" card, but the Soviet Union and China very clearly still engaged in capitalistic commodity production, which Marx would have criticized).
Nah it's completely false. In fact, it is the failure of Marxian approach that gave birth to wokeness, in a sense. According to Marx, capitalism, with time, was supposed to lead to worsening conditions of the proletariat and making workers extremely poor, so that the capitalists would own all the means of production and the workers would literally work there only because the alternative it dying from hunger, and only paid as much as to allow them to barely not die from hunger. Which eventually would cause the desperate masses to revolt. That part kinda makes sense, if I were in such situation I'd probably revolt too. Except that it's totally not what happened in the developed capitalist countries. In fact, even in the countries where the revolt did happen - like Russia - not only it could not happen by Marxian theory (Russia was way to underdeveloped to progress to that point, it barely crawled out of feudalism by then, and there was a lot of confusion among Russian Marxist theoreticians about what the heck Lenin is thinking when Marx clearly says Russia is not ready) but it was largely perpetrated by the intelligentsia, with the proletariat taken along for the ride and used as a figurehead. And it went worse from there, because the masses of the workers under capitalism liked their 401k and ESPP much more than preparing the glorious socialist revolution. And if you look closely at who we see as self-described Marxians today, you'll see a distinct scarcity of factory workers and large prevalence of college professors and their brainwashed students.
And that was the reason why the Left needed something different from the classical Marxism. Because building a movement based on wage workers eager to overthrow capitalism was not viable anymore. That's why Gramsci invented cultural Marxism, which eventually performed a hostile takeover of civil rights movement and ecological movements, and evolved into wokeness. This all was because Marx's theory completely failed to predict the actual events.
I don't know much about China, but I will get into a debate about Soviet Union, because I know quite a bit about it. And in Soviet Union, they actually tried to implement Marxian economical planning as much as they could, completely honestly, and involved such mathematical powerhouses as Kantorovich, and after they got over the idiotic rejection of cybernetics, also all the computation resources they could muster. Only after it became absolutely clear to them there's no possible way they can make it work they started to let some capitalist elements in, such as khozraschyot, cooperatives, economic incentivization, federalization of economic planning, etc. They tried Marx as hardcode as they could afford without causing famine.... oh wait, scratch that, including causing famines that cost millions of lives - and still could not make it work. Nobody can.
More options
Context Copy link
90 percent of the people on the Motte got their entire knowledge of communism from one PragerU video they watched 10 years ago.
That's a rather confident assertion that reads mostly as a very broad generalization/insult.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think this is anywhere close to true.
More options
Context Copy link
Is this a joke? Please help me out here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Its not that Marx neccesarily supported Wokeism so much as the Woke copied the Marxists' homework and flipped few of the words around in the hopes the teacher wouldn't notice. The identitarian left literally used to describe thier ideology as "Cultural Marxism" back in the 90s.
The analogy I would use is that they dug out the rotting corpse of communism from the graveyard cut of the head (caring about social inequity), and limbs (e.g. working towards a revolution), replaced the head and a few limbs with what had previously been sideshows on the left, and then sent comrade Igor to the roof with a lightning rod.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A communist factory is having its workers toil away for hours making widgets that nobody wants. The value of those widgets is zero irregardless of how much work went into making them.
That's not exactly a nitpick. How much people want something is incredibly important in determining its value.
This is a straw man of the labor theory of value. And also equally applies to capitalist speculative bubbles. This is what Marx calls commodity fetishism: the divorcing of use value from monetary value.
The trick here is claiming there's such thing as quantifiable "use value". It's actually two tricks. The first one that there's some objective fixed value that an object has, regardless of anybody's opinions, and it can be calculated, even if it required omniscient entity having total view of the economy. The second trick is that a specific person or organization (Gosplan if you will) can calculate it. Both are wrong. This is actually one of the fundamental reasons why socialism fails - it can not produce proper prices, and without proper prices, economic cooperation can not function, as prices drive resource allocation. The Soviets tried to implement non-price resource allocation and failed miserably. You can just "assign" prices but as they would be disconnected from actual economic value, you will either get massive deficits, or a ton of resources wasted on producing useless widgets. In a socialist economy, you usually have plenty of both.
Sure, bubbles are a consequence of resource misallocation. But you know what is also true of bubbles? None of them can last for long. Exactly because this is a self-defeating process - the longer the price remains misaligned, the higher is the pressure to correct. Until the bubble bursts. On the contrary, the misallocation that is driven by directive prices and resource assignment can last indefinitely, it does not have the feedback mechanism.
More options
Context Copy link
Is there a way to quantify "use value"? If not, this seems to be a rhetorical trick. Why would I care about a notion of value that exists simply to win arguments about communism?
More options
Context Copy link
Whether or not they will be exchanged for money or handed out for free, nobody wants those widgets. They are useless crap. They are worthless.
That would mean the corresponding labor was not "socially necessary" labor time. Marx was trying to avoid getting down into supply & demand fluctuations, to mainly make a more core scientific approach to investigating where value/profit comes from. But that "socially necessary" term is where he had to bundle it in anyway.
Hm then where do you draw the line? What if the widgets just suck but aren't totally useless?
Yeah I think it's just backward-looking in his conception. To the extent it was profitable at all, then that's the extent that the labor turned out to have been 'socially necessary'. So it's supply & demand after all.
I think it basically works as a way to think of where the profit value comes from: putting together inputs and selling the output for more money, thus you got more 'use-value' out of the inputs than you paid for their 'exchange-value'. But I agree with others that there's no reason for Marx to have said that only labor can have a use-value greater than their fair exchange-value (apparently he just switched on a dime while writing Capital and declared that, in order to make the theory of value into a classical labor theory of value, and then got tied in knots trying to justify that declaration).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That just shows that the marxian concept of "use value" isn't fully capturing what people find...useful...about the things they buy, because money is entirely fungible into other "useful" items, and insofar as people are willing to spend it on one thing, they're revealing their utility function about both that thing and the other things they could have bought but aren't.
Money is entirely fungible -- that is, one unit of currency is the same as another unit of the same currency -- but it is not entirely convertible into other useful items (although it's pretty good at this). The divorcing of use value from exchange value doesn't make sense for commodities or bulk manufactured goods, but it does for other things -- real estate in particular.
More options
Context Copy link
This again assumes humans are rational actors, and fails to adequately capture the reasons for an economic booms and busts in a capitalist system and the kind of behavior you see from the ultra-rich.
...No? That's literally the opposite of what I said. "Use value" assumes some objective, rational value of "use"; exchange value includes all the irrational feelings and opinions people can have about goods and services like risk aversion, FOMO, status, or just idiosyncratic preference. People also make secondary bets on what other people will find useful/interesting/worth buying, introducing further fuzziness into the system.
That's not commodity fetishism; it's the opposite. Recognizing that when people are buying things, they're not just buying things - they're communicating with other people as well.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More to the point, sometimes you can't even determine how much people will 'want' something until you take the risk of producing it and trying to sell it.
And sometimes you guess wrong, or you underestimate the ultimate demand and have to adjust.
That risk doesn't go away, its just a matter of who absorbs the risk of getting it wrong (or gets rewarded for getting it right!), and the existence of such a risk makes for one hell of an incentive to get it right.
Vs. the Soviet Commissary who is only punished if the widget factory doesn't produce enough widgets in a given month, even if those widgets are just being thrown out. So he'll happily keep the widgets flowing as long as he can.
That's not unique to communism, though: it's just the principal agent problem. Capitalist corporations regularly make decisions that are wildly insane due to non-economic factors and burn a lot of value in the process, and the decision maker can still walk away with their bag.
It's true that there is more of a signal to discourage this in capitalist economies, but that is a very coarse signal. And once a corporation becomes successful enough, it rapidly realizes that the best way to maintain its position is to do its best to eliminate the risks of being subject to that signal.
Well you're just getting at the point that skin in the game is the best way to align incentives.
If your company offers paying customers a ride to the Titanic on an experimental submersible, having your CEO along for each ride is a good way to align incentives.
And on that point, someone had to realize "hey, there might be a market for tours of the titanic wreck site," and actually spend money and develop a product that can deliver on that desire, while being uncertain if they'd find enough customers.
And if it fails, well that CEO is now removed from his position of influence.
I agree that there's been a drift where decision makers in a corporate environments are insulated from the consequences of their decisions (although I argue this is mostly due to political influence. Criminal prosecutions are underused).
I also agree with the point that dominant actors in a market will usually start attempting to reduce the influence of competition, to build their 'moat' so they can start to exploit their position rather than improve their practices.
I would not agree that they're successful in the majority of cases.
I'm just pointing out that in practice Communism is unadulterated diffusion of responsibility for any mistakes, and Capitalism at least HAS a signal, and there are ways to make the signal sharper.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If Marxism does not work in practice, it doesn't matter how elegantly his theory is postulated: no more than we don't have to read Mein Kampf to present a convincing rebuttal of Nazism.
As for commodity fetishism and LTV, why do people want to buy Belle Delphine's gamer girl bathwater? Subjective theory of value (STV) is that it is not labor or the raw materials that determine the price of the good, but the people buying and selling. Can Marx explain the used panties market? The collectable card market? Not without extensive academic arm-twisting or moralistic dismissal.
Ah, but you don't understand. Nobody has yet tried True Marxism! /s
More options
Context Copy link
Breathlessly awaiting someone to upload "The Marxist Explanation of the Labubu Phenomenon" to Youtube.
More options
Context Copy link
If you were waiting for the right moment to add a flair, this is your moment.
Noted.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The labour theory of value makes economically inaccurate predictions and was falsified as such before Capital was even published (Smith himself, who invented it, admitted it cannot account for short-term fluctuations in prices and offered alternatives). You can say a lot of good about Marx's sociological analysis, you can say no good about the LTV. It's just wrong. The only way you can say it's not wrong is by turning it into a moral dogma.
To quote Rothbard:
If we're to call this a nitpick, we're to call all of science a nitpick for discarding theories that make empirically false predictions.
The reason for the NEP is that Lenin tried Marxian economics and it so massively failed that they had to pragmatically adopt bourgeois economics.
The reason for Dengism is a similar pragmatic concession to the massive toll of Maoism.
Marxian ideas have been implemented, they simply did not produce the expected results. Collective farms do not output more food than centrally planned or privately owned alternatives all else being equal.
But both Maoism and the initial Soviet attempts to produce goods were commodity fetishism. Especially in Maoism there was this obsession with quantities of goods produced rather than with satisfying individual's use values. Even after NEP and in Dengism there were/are heavy amounts of commodity fetishism: focusing on raw quantities of goods produced rather than thinking about what the population actually needs
People love to dismiss the soviet system, and undoubtedly there were serious problems, but in some ways it was very impressive. The soviets took a country that was ravaged by civil war and by the after effects of WW1 that had never been fully industrialized and within 20 years managed to largely self-sufficiently outproduce the Nazis and win the Second World War. Yes lend-lease helped, but Soviet home industry did most of the heavy lifting.
After the war, it looked like things like linear algebra might help better calculate production quotas, but a combination of corruption, lack of compute power, and excessive focus on military spending made it impossible for the soviet standard of living to keep up with the West.
Can you explain the Rothbard quote a bit more? I feel like the easy explanation for that from within the LTV is that the labor equivalence ratios between different goods aren't calculated correctly. Although that kind of argument can quickly get into dogma territory, so maybe you're right.
You'll find no such love from me. I have a surprising amount of sympathy for economic socialism as an engineer. But that's only translated to a deeper understanding of its failings.
Market socialists love to say this, but it's wrong. No amount of increase in compute power can solve the Economic Calculation Problem, because it's not inherently about compute power but about how computers can't read minds. And indeed MarSocs have been unable to produce models even today that would solve the problem, despite increases in compute power that give a single man today more than all that was available to nations then. Orthodox Marxists meanwhile well and truly gave up on even trying.
Intensification-90 could not work for the same reasons paper based Gosplan couldn't. Economic exchange requires informational inputs that planners cannot produce outside of very specific circumstances (like war), because the fundamental assumption that economic value is distinct from individual desire, and can thus be computed ahead of time, is wrong.
That's often advanced, yes, but nobody ever actually produces a "correct" formula for the ratios that actually makes any empirical predictions.
One of Marx's most famous conclusions out of the LTV is that since value is created by labour, profit rates must be lower in capital-intensive industries and higher in labor-intensive industries.
However, it has been observed by Smith and Ricardo (and since) that profit rates tend to equalize across all industries. How is this possible if the profit rates are always higher in some industries?
In posthumously published Volume 3 of Capital, Marx purported to solve this problem.
Instead of actually providing some relationship between the rates of profit, Marx punts and uses prices of production and capital mobility to explain it, thus reinventing an ad-hoc marginalism to solve this particular problem.
Either the labor theory of value explains prices (but then the transformation problem is unsolved) or competition explains prices (but then why do we need the labor theory?).
The economic calculation problem is worse than even that. It's not just that a planner cannot properly figure out how much of each good to produce without price information (though I have had communist-sympathetic individuals unironically tell me that the solution might just be to conduct a whole lot of opinion polling, I am not kidding), it's also that a planner cannot estimate the most efficient method of production for any given good since there is no meaningful measure of profit under a centrally planned economy. As Mises puts it:
"The director wants to build a house. Now there are many methods that can be resorted to. Each of them offers, from the point of view of the director, certain advantages and disadvantages with regard to the utilization of future building, and results in a different duration of the building’s serviceableness; each of them requires other expenditures of building materials and labor and absorbs other periods of production. Which method should the director choose? He cannot reduce to a common denominator the items of various materials and various kinds of labor to be expended. Therefore he cannot compare them. He cannot attack either to the waiting time (period of production) or to the duration of serviceableness, a definite numerical expression. In short, he cannot, in comparing costs to be expended and gains to be earned, resort to any arithmetical operation. The plans of his architects enumerate a vast multiplicity of various items in kind: they refer to the physical and chemical qualities of various items in kind; they refer to the physical productivity of various machines, tools, and procedures. But all their statements remain unrelated to each other. There is no means of establishing any connection between them."
This is damning, since even if the mind of a planner were miraculously endowed with complete and accurate knowledge of the quantities and qualities of the available factors of production, of the latest techniques for combining and transforming these factors into consumer goods, and of the set of all individuals’ value rankings of consumer goods, the economic calculation problem still exists. Without market prices that could be used to determine the profitability of a project, one would still be unable to determine if a given plan for production of goods was optimal, and in fact would never be able to assess that even if the plan was horrifically and destructively uneconomic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's dramatically underselling lend-lease. The US provided approximately 2/3 of the USSR's trucks, 60% of their aviation fuel, 10% of their planes, etc. And the US was also able to give all this to the Soviets while they also built the most powerful navy in human history and waged a war across North Africa, Europe, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia.
More options
Context Copy link
I'd say American industry did most of the heavy lifting. The levels of American production were simply insane.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link