Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Can anyone recommend a left-wing analysis of how economic Marxism* seemingly got supplanted by "woke" or "bioleninist" Marxism in the U.S.? I'm interested in learning (1) what caused the shift, (2) a history of the shift itself, and (3) how economic Marxists view this change (i.e. how would they describe the phenomenon in Marxist language).
I can only talk about Europe, but this may explain some of what was also seen in the US.
The collapse of the USSR was a major thing for many of the extreme left, even if they were not tankies. There was no anti-capitalist superpower that would indicate “to see that it is possible, even if we disagree with the Soviets, it is not the US.” But when the USSR collapsed and Anglo-Saxon liberal capitalism seemed victorious forever - it was the age when it was possible to write books titled "The End of History" not ironically - the extreme left had a little crisis.
Tankies, of course, had the worst problem, because their ideological northern star, which financed not a few groups, just imploded. They scattered themselves into the wind and washed out in all sorts of strange places. But even non-tankies had to reassess and find out if their ideologies were blindfolds in the post-historical era, and if they hadn’t better switch away from the prole revolution for something they could really work on. (Whether it was a tactical regression with the intention of continuing to start a revolution in a more appropriate time, or a wholesale change of ambition and reconciliation with broad capitalism, varied.) In addition, when literally Moscow-guided and funded parties disappeared, the Overton window shrank and suddenly being a Social Democrat with some strange ideas about gender would be enough to put you in the vanguard and get a radical chic.
Some of this was the reinforcement and continuation of existing trends. Eurocommunism and the Third Way began in the 1970s, which moved the left wing from the Soviets and orthodox Marxism. The New Left basically dates back to the 1960s. But I am quite convinced that the collapse of the USSR opened ideological-ecological niches on the extreme left, which were quickly filled with identity politics. No collapse of the USSR and identity politics probably still plays the second violin for the old class struggle analysis.
(I am not sure why there was not much to be attached to Maoism and the PRC. Higher cultural barriers? The CCP has always been less interested in exporting the revolution than the Bolsheviks, and China had a much smaller presence on the world stage before Xi took the helm. Or perhaps it was expected that the PRC would either fall similarly - on 4 June 1989, it was also just a few years before the 1990s - or it would open up and reform when it joined the WTO.)
That all makes a lot of sense, especially the point about the shrinking of the Overton window.
I'm obviously not read up on the theory, but my vague impression of Maoism from reading Chinese history and spending sometime over there as a student is that Chinese Communism and Maoism were never really intended to be universal ideologies, hence the "with Chinese characteristics" qualifier. It always seemed to me that Maoism was merely a tool to seize and maintain power rather than an evangelical quasi-religion like Marxism-Leninism. This would neatly explain all the weird contradictions in Chinese Communist thought and why each leader is easily able graft on their own "thought" to that ideological chimaera.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link