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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3469 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 29, 2023

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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.

Late, and there are some pretty good answers/theories from other commentors, but I will give my own highly abridged explanation. I have some more lengthly explanations I posted on Reddit that hopefully I can dig up later.

  • The failure and the atrocities that arose and were revealed to the West in the latter half of the 20th century. Especially the Cultural Revolution in China, Khrushchev's Secret Speech and other USSR atrocities. This dampened a lot of support for orthodox Marxism and its derivatives.

  • Liberal/social democracies actually did a pretty good job of give their workers a decent quality of life, especially when compared to USSR (i.e. Marx was wrong). Which made economic/orthodox Marxism and revolution unattractive to the working class.Marcuse in particular complained about this constainly as a barrier to revolution (and influenced the pivot from the workers to the students, academia and the disaffected social groups as the new vanguard of the revolution.

  • Frankfurt School and neo-Marxists, including figures like Marcuse (who was an academic rockstar), Horkheimer etc grew incredibly popular in academia as an alternative to orthodox Marxism (the foundation of the New Left).

  • Social liberalism is far easier to subvert with "social Marxism" than economic liberalism is to subvert with economic Marxism. Aided by the postmodern revolution in academia and the obssession with manipulating language.

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