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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!
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.
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.
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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.
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