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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3450 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 29, 2023

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.

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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).

  • There's probably a better term for this, but I don't know it. I'm referring to labor union/working class Marxism that seemed to dominate for most of the 20th century.

I don't know that he's ever done an analysis of this, but your question makes me think of Brian Leiter. As of right now, the top headline on his blog is "Class, not diversity." He's an interesting case of an unapologetically hard radical (really, he's a genuine communist I think) who is deeply anti-woke, who regards postmodernism and all its children as horribly distracting from the Marxist project. It's one of those rare cases where a genuine scholar appears to have actually noticed the modernism of Marxism and the postmodernism of wokism are not compatible, and then actually disavowed the postmodernist stuff.

Unfortunately that only really answers (3), but you might be able to dredge up more on (1) and (2) by trawling his site a bit.

Thanks, this looks really interesting.

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