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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"
It really isn't. It's a popularization (thus, inevitably, a bit of a bastardization) of a real theoretical development. I strongly recommend Martin Jay's "The Dialectical Imagination" for an academic but decently accessible intellectual history of the movement.
How bastardized does a theoretical development have to be before it can be considered an entirely different thing?
The Frankfurt School had lots of critiques of Western Civilization. But "people having critiques of Western Civilization" isn't a useful class--it'd group together everyone from the Frankfurt School to Evola to wokes to Mottezans to etc.
And, when you look at the actual content of Frankfurt critiques, they don't overlap much, if at all, with woke ones. They seem rather quaint actually, given the points of conflict and focus of today. And when you look at their actual actions during e.g. 68, they were considered enemies by student activists, shiftless intellectuals creating masturbatory theories while ignoring praxis. Habermas condemned "left wing fascism," Adorno famously called the cops on students protestors who occupied a lecture hall. (Marcuse, to be fair, was friendlier.)
The current theory of the American Left doesn't draw much from the Frankfurt School or any thinkers really; to the extent it exists at all, it's just a ramshackle gloss on patronage politics with a couple academic shibboleths to give it an air of legitimacy.
If the venn diagram of Critical Theory and wokism isn't a circle, it's pretty damn close. Or are you saying Critical Theory is not related to the Frankfurt School at all?
I'm saying that it's a mistake to identify the critical theory of wokism with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. The major figures of the Frankfurt School would reject wokism--ideologically and aesthetically, and in particular its focus on consumerist identity.
The only major thing they do share (at least, if we don't want to group together a lot of wildly disparate approaches) is a rhetorical commitment to communism, and in both cases that commitment is fake.
They had the opportunity to, but didn't. Just off the top of my head, Critical Race Theory kicked off around the time of the Civil Rights Act, and was indistinguishable from BLM from the start. I'm less sure of it, but I think even some of the people who developed it studied directly under the major figures of the Frankfurt School.
It's fair to say that the CRA is central in the history of social justice activism, right? And, I agree, the Frankfurt School didn't condemn it. But that's because they by and large ignored it--a quick search through Google books isn't digging up anything by Adorno, Fromm, Habermas, Horkheimer where they even mention it. They would probably have thought it was a fine thing, in the sense that people generally think "oh, that sounds good!" But race, in general, isn't something they concerned themselves with much: anti-Semitism gets at least 100x the attention (which is a point of critique against them by the social justice crew).
Sort of. There was a whole conflict between the liberals that actually made the CRA happen, and Critical Race Theorists, who had a much more radical vision, and were salty about the liberal one winning out.
The latter aren't likely to say nowadays (they did in the past though) that they the CRA was bad, because that would make them even less popular than they are now, but they will put out memes that go directly against the philosophy of the Civil Rights movement (for example seeing "there is only one race, the human race", or "I don't see color" as expressions of racism).
No, not really. Like I said, Critical Race Theory thinkers studied directly under them. It would be bizarre if they never heard of their theories, and took no inrerest in them. I think the most reasonable interpretation of their silence is complete approval of the crazy woke theries you claim they would have opposed.
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