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Notes -
Marxism and the History of Philosophy:
If this sounds a lot like a religion, then that's because it should. Marxism undoubtedly shares many structural features with traditional religions in its fundamentals.
(I have argued previously that wokeism is not identical with Marxism. The relationship between wokeism and Marxism should be understood as being something like the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Adherents of the newer religion incorporate the sacred texts of the older religion as their own, but they also make a number of modifications and additions that adherents of the older religion would stridently reject. Nonetheless, the two traditions are united in certain ethical and philosophical commitments that more distant outsiders would find baffling.)
Much ado has been made about the "crisis of meaning" in the contemporary West, and how "we", as a civilization, "need" religion (and how in its absence, people will inevitably seek out substitutes like wokeism). But speaking at this level of generality obscures important and interesting psychological differences between different individuals. Many, perhaps most, people are actually perfectly fine with operating in the absence of meaning. And they can be quite happy this way. They may be dimly aware that "something" is missing or not quite right, but they'll still live docile and functional existences overall. They achieve this by operating at a persistently minimal level of sensitivity towards issues of meaning, value, aesthetics, etc, a sort of "spiritual hibernation".
It is only a certain segment of the population (whose size I will not venture to estimate -- it may be a larger segment than the hibernators, or it may be smaller, I don't know) that really needs to receive a sense of purpose from an authoritative external social source. And this segment of the population has an outsized effect on society as a whole, because these are the people who most zealously sustain mass social movements like Christianity and wokeism.
Finally there are individuals who are seemingly capable of generating a sui generis sense of meaning wholly from within themselves. This is surely the smallest segment of the population, and it's unlikely that you could learn to emulate their mode of existence if you weren't born into it -- but you wouldn't want to anyway. Such individuals are often consumed by powerful manias to the point of self-ruin, or else they become condemned to inaction, paralyzed with fear over not being able to fulfill the momentous duties they have placed upon themselves.
I find these arguments nonsensical.
The Jordan Peterson-esqe "cultural Marxism" shibboleth is genuinely gibberish.
What on earth does grievance politics have to do with redistributing the means of production so that the workers capture more of the surplus value of the product of their labour? How do you do that with "culture" at all?
It's literally just "I 'ate communism, I 'ate wokism, refer to 'em interchangeably, simple as"
Cultural Marxism is a demonstrable thing, unless you believe that culture is some sort of fungus that shows up on economies. What do you think Homo Sovietcus was, anyway? Only orthodox Marxists care to elevate their dogma as some sort of materialist science of history, which it obviously isn't and has failed on its falsifiable claims over and over. Late-stage capitalism has come and gone like so many proclamations of the Rapture.
Wokism is the bastard child of communism, and the connection strengthens in spite of strenuous denials of paternity. People realized you could substitute historical materialism for any other sort of intersectional nonsense. They could add infinite categories to the class-based analysis to suit their own purposes. As an active heresy and schism of the left it remains after Communism itself discredited its own legitimacy over a hundred years. They even claim to be communists themselves!
This was birthed from intellectuals on the left. History didn't stop with Kapital. Pay the damn child support - with words, if not action.
I mean sure, "the culture of Marxists" obviously exists
But when my uncle goes on about how DEI departments are "cultural Marxism" I think that is nonsense words. That's "progressive liberalism" and has essentially nothing to do with Marx except that I guess both have a general goal of a more equitable society (although I question if progressive liberals even want that).
For a parallel that captures a lot of the nuance (and echoes another discussion that happened here a while back), do you think a committed atheist from out of state bristling under Mormon rule in Utah would be justified in lumping it in as "Christian supremacism"?
Seems like one of those pervasive labeling problems: the Mormons in question label themselves as "Christian", which I think makes the use of it in this context within the realm of reasonable takes, even if the Pope, or maybe even the majority of self-identified Christendom don't accept that label.
Analogously, I don't think "Islamic fundamentalism" as defined from the outside in the West needs to take into detailed account which groups think of each other as infidels. "Actually Hamas aren't Islamic Fundamentalists because Ali was the rightful heir to the throne" is, uh, a take.
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Maybe I'm slow today but I'm not understanding your parallel.
Mormon rule is a derivative of Christianity and by prioritizing it with rules you do give it a "supremacy" of a sort I guess.
The words are actually connected to the real life effects.
"Cultural Marxism" has very little to do with Marxism, although I'm still reading through all the philosophy everyone linked so maybe there was a more coherent connective thread in the 1960s, but these days the way it's used is borderline meaningless
There are others around who are far more qualified to make the argument than I am, but my understanding is that the circumstance that Critical Theory is derivative of Marxism is beyond dispute. Wikipedia itself devotes a big section to it, and the introductory paragraph on its history already says,
I suppose that the assertion that is more likely to be disputed is that CT is a driving cultural phenomenon or could be described as the principal philosophical basis of US progressivism, for which it is much harder to show receipts. The only way I can see is to painstakingly show the provenance of defining features and tenets of it - value systems built around class/group interest and oppressor/oppressed dynamics, the fundamental rejection of positivism (lay definition, perhaps: the premise that something like a correct way of reasoning can be discovered and yield a "symbol-pushing" way of generating true statements that should be upheld regardless of human interests) and embracing of textual criticism (dismissal of a "text"'s content in favour of a meta-analysis of who stands to benefit from it being accepted and the motivations of those authoring and conveying it) as a tool to implement this rejection, emphasis on subjective experience, and faith-based anticipation of radical changes to society leading to an improvement of conditions.
One could also point at the high correlation between above-average engagement in the Social Justice movement and explicit self-identification as Marxist with all it entails (being concerned with economic oppressor-oppressed dynamics, anticipating a labor-based radical reorganisation of society resulting in utopia), which would be an unexpected phenomenon that warranted explanation if the two philosophies were not actually closely related.
Lastly, my personal experience as someone fairly deeply embedded in academia and acquainted with many Social Justice activists is that questioning any particular tenet of the movement on a philosophical level (like, "why is it actually desirable that black people get the same average salaries?" or "wasn't colonialism a net good?") will inevitably be answered with arguments from/concrete references to publications that explicitly situate themselves in the CT tradition. If the typical follower believes that SJ is fundamentally moral because its morality is asserted by a selection of activists and intellectuals they trust, those trusted assertions of morality are grounded in Critical Theory, and Critical Theory is grounded in Marxism, is it fair to assert that SJ is Marxist? My sense is yes, but there is obviously some nuance there.
I am actually with you insofar as I don't think that it is politically sensible or productive to apply the "Cultural Marxism" label as part of public discourse. This seems comparable to me to the erstwhile push to attack Muslims by saying things like "Allah is an Arabic moon god" - it may be true that Islam was shaped by the polytheistic soup of medieval Arabia, and this may even have great explanatory power regarding its culture and tenets, but in a modern context where most everyone is more familiar with Islam than with the medieval Arabic moon god you are trying to link it to, all it will achieve is making you look obsessive and schizophrenic as it suggests that your beef with Islam is just because you are the sort of person who would have a beef with the worship of a moon deity from 1500 years ago.
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How? Critical Race Theory explicitly stood against the liberal approach to race.
Ahahahaha it's fucked up colloquial word usage all the way down
Yeah fully agree that CRT and classical liberalism are at odds.
But much like the term "the left", which used to be a reference to actual Marxists but now means "progressive liberalism" (I genuinely don't know what else to call this).
The word "liberal" has evolved from the classical (borderline "don't tread on me") industrial Revolution liberalism to a phrase that's basically interchangeable with "the left"
AHHHHH
I don't think it's quite so bad as you say. I wasn't referring to 19th century industrialists when I said "liberal", I was referring to the American center-left of the 1960's, the architects of the Civil Rights Act.
Critical Race Theorists were explicitly opposed to them, claiming that the liberal / center-left approach doesn't go far enough. A lot of their ideas gained prominence recently in the forms of BLM, DEI, "racism = prejudice + power", "colorblind racism", etc. These people's scholarly lineage draws a straight line through generations of Marxist thinkers, and straight back to Marx himself.
You can call it a bastardization of his thought, if you want, I think Marx himself told one of his descendants "bro, if this is Marxism, than I'm not a Marxist", so it wouldn't even be the first time it happened. But your uncle is straightforwardly right about DEI, and your denials are just inadvertant gaslighting. Like, some of these people literally and explicitly called themselves "cultural Marxists".
To this day you find leftists who insist that progressive liberals aren't actually leftists. Nobody in the American system cares much but they'll passionately insist that America doesn't really have a left because they're all liberals.
The obscuring factor here is that progressive liberals seem to see leftists as closer to them politically than right liberals. But leftists will generally attack them even more for being more susceptible to their attacks than right libs.
Of course, when they're attacked from the outside they have no problem hiding behind the ambiguity.
The uncle/"simple as" stuff really does feed my belief that it just comes down to these terms being low status.
I don't know that any of the supposedly technical or more accurate terms - like Mounk's "identity synthesis" - are actually superior in intuitiveness to "cultural Marxism" or, even worse, "gay race communism". Those other terms are just used by icky dumb people like right libs.
I see why this ideology, which is notoriously against being named at all would behave this way but I don't see what anyone else gains.
I'm at a loss myself, but I think the status thing might be a big part of the equation. Some people built their entire philosophy around "Uncle Roy is wrong".
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