site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   29323 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Yes, another top level comment about The Origins of Woke from me, in the same thread on the same week. But this is about something else. I had an epiphany while reading the book.

I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust. It's because companies are (de facto) legally required to fire racists, but they're not required to fire Marxists. In fact, firing a Marxist for merely being Marxist would be illegal in California.

California has a state law against firing people for their political beliefs, but it didn't protect James Damore, who was fired in compliance with the law against creating a hostile work environment for protected groups.

It all adds up.

I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust. It's because companies are (de facto) legally required to fire racists, but they're not required to fire Marxists. In fact, firing a Marxist for merely being Marxist would be illegal in California.

I would question Marxism being more socially acceptable than racism. Maybe in a blue tribe bubble, but there’s also bubbles which are the opposite.

I think the real question, instead, is ‘why are the blue tribe pinkos’, and that’s because 1) the Soviet Union spent decades and millions of dollars on infiltrating the western intelligentsia and 2) because Marxism is just uniquely designed to appeal to intellectuals lacking in specific knowledge, particularly intellectuals who don’t themselves work very hard. That’s what Marx was, basically, and it’s more or less an oversystematization of the view of someone in that position- workers(who produce things) work for owner-men who provide access to capital, so wouldn’t it make more sense to just do away with the owner-men and have the workers as a collective own the capital? That’s a nice idea, if you’ve never been on either side of that relationship. And if you have it’s probably tough to explain how the workers benefit from not owning their own capital. And, you know, the blue tribe mostly does things which might be valuable, but which are at remove from actual production. Hence Marxism feels true to an HR lady or a college professor or a journalist in a way it doesn’t to a mechanic or a farmer or a plumber.

This explanation doesn't track for me. In practice most nominally communist nations got their start on the backs of a huge stock of peasant farmers, not HR departments.

In America, the unionized working class were highly sympathetic to socialist ideals for a long while. It's only relatively recently that this has changed.

In America, the unionized working class were highly sympathetic to socialist ideals for a long while. It's only relatively recently that this has changed.

and

Hence Marxism feels true to an HR lady or a college professor or a journalist in a way it doesn’t to a mechanic or a farmer or a plumber.

And in most of the times and places where Marxism was a real political movement that threatened to take power, this was even more true (China is an exception). The Bolshevik power base really was the urban working class and the enlisted men of the Petrograd garrison. The German SDP really was a movement of industrial workers organised through unions. So was the French Socialist Party. So was the (not technically Marxist) British Labour Party. These movements were mostly led by educated men, but that was inevitable. And they actively sought to identify educate smart workingmen and incorporate them into leadership. Friedrich Ebert began his career as a saddle-maker. Keir Hardie was a miner.

21st century PMC Marxism is a LARP - most modern Marxists don't believe in, or even understand, the economic core of Marxism. Most of them run around denouncing slavery as an incident of capitalism, for crissake. But orthodox Marxism absolutely felt true to the mechanics and plumbers (not, admittedly, the farmers) of its day.

because Marxism is just uniquely designed to appeal to intellectuals lacking in specific knowledge, particularly intellectuals who don’t themselves work very hard

Yes, the kinds of people who fancy themselves in the role of chief central planner are friendly to a system that would give them the power to do that. (Everyone else is correct when they call them on this.)

I would question Marxism being more socially acceptable than racism.

Outright racist behavior is absolutely socially acceptable today; where it is most acceptable (in Blue tribe bubbles) it is overwhelmingly acceptable, and unless you venture into alt-Red bubbles it's not acceptable in most Red ones either because they're stuck in the time period when racism stopped being acceptable. (Newer Reds don't usually understand what racism was because they come from parents and grandparents that broke the machine that made the old kind of racism work; of course, doing that gave rise to the new kind of racism that, progressives being progressive, would be first in line to adopt.)

it’s probably tough to explain how the workers benefit from not owning their own capital

The answer to that is trivial- insulation from risk. Workers hate hearing that, of course, but (corruption of self-interest aside) a good chunk of them are either unwilling (risk tolerance is a personality trait, so is laziness) or unable (insufficient g; you have to be skilled labor to escape being a worker, and you also need some capital to bootstrap it) to free themselves from the cycle of work.

The reason Communism gets popular with the late 19th-mid 20th century working class is that the ratio of "risk and effort by worker" and "risk and effort by capital" was a lot more skewed against the former at that time period due to the dominant professions being either resource extraction or sweatshop and a correspondingly huge demand for those things... making the worker's assessment of capital's risk more accurate. Add the fact that automaton jobs like those tend to exacerbate certain issues with bad management and suddenly "the people doing all the work should own the place" starts to look a lot more attractive.

Hence Marxism feels true to an HR lady or a college professor or a journalist in a way it doesn’t to a mechanic or a farmer or a plumber.

The former professions are exclusively the insulated-from-risk types (they are as much UBI in 2020 as the average sit-down-and-sew or show-up-and-swing-the-hammer-or-sickle position was in 1920) and the latter professions tend not to be that way to the same degree, so I think that explains most of it.

Whether they actually produce anything is not relevant to how they feel.

I would question Marxism being more socially acceptable than racism. Maybe in a blue tribe bubble, but there’s also bubbles which are the opposite.

I think the real question, instead, is

No wait, don't tell me what the "real" question is, if you want to interrogate whether or not Marxism isn't more socially acceptable, let's do that. I think there are pretty clear asymmetries clearly showing that Marxism, and other forms of left-wing extremism are a lot more acceptable. Since this is a Hanania thread, let's take him as an example. The Huffington Post dug out his old pseudonymous posts, presumably in an attempt to get him excluded from "respectable" centrist to left-of-center discourse. Please find me *a single example* where someone goes looking for old pseudonymous Marxists posts, in order to get someone excluded from "respectable" centrist right-of-center discourse.

The disparity in how these cases are treated is so massive, that I find your proposition absurd. Current and open Marxists are welcome with open arms in right-wing discourse, as long as they offer any criticism of the modern left at all.

Notably, everyone knew that the Bush-era neocons had mostly been communists in their youth, and nobody held it against them.

I grew up in a conservative rural area, and even there being a Marxist may make you stupid and naive, but being a racist makes you evil. Explicitly anti-immigration conservatives will often go to great lengths to distance themselves from anyone who has ever said something that could be interpreted as racist, in a way that urban progressives would never think about with their Marxist brethren. In a 100% conservative org a single video of drunken teenage you saying "blacks are inferior" can easily be enough to get you kicked out, while you can offer a talk on abolishing capitalism (and the police, and everything else you don't like) at university without anyone even batting an eye.

Maybe America is different, but at least here in Germany the number of people who either self-identify as racist or tolerate self-identifying racists in their orgs is a rounding error. Even the far-right AfD doesn't actually consider racism acceptable. People may disagree on the exact definition of racism, but they generally agree on central examples such as Nazis being evil.

This doesn't really account for Marxism being extremely popular with manual laborers in Europe for decades.

You're probably already familiar with the Orwell quote but for those who might not be, in 1936 George Orwell declared that "socialism draws toward it with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England."

Which would suggest that socialism has not fundamentally changed it's 'magnetic force' over the last century away from manual labor and toward the sandal-wearers, sex-maniacs, and fruit-juice drinkers it continues attracting today.

The Marxist parties (communist and social democratic together) commanded a solid majority of working class support in most European countries up through the middle of the 20th century.

Double posting but your response seemed to be, frankly, in bad faith. By all means put up a quote from a prominent early 20th century socialist that purports it's a magnetic force for every lugnut, troglodyte, hardheaded, menial laboring, 9 to 5, factory man in England or at least some data on party registration by demography. "But ackshually it was working class" has negative probative value. Better not to have responded at all.

This set of Piketty slides show that the correlation between education and voting behaviour changes sign over the 2nd half of the 20th century. He looks at France, the UK and the US, with and without controlling for income. The big left-wing parties in the UK and France were explicitly socialist or communist for most of this period, so you can't say "the working class may have been left-wing in the past, but they were never socialist".

You can also look at the political affiliation of blue-collar unions back when they were a big deal, which was consistently leftist, and in Continental Europe (but not the Anglosphere) was more often than not explicitly Marxist.

For the French Communist Party, see for instance this:

In Meurthe-et-Moselle, all the members of the governing body of the party(secre´tariat fe´de´ral) from 1944 to 1979 came from blue-collar classes, with theexception of a teacher and an industrial draughtsman promoted at the end ofthe 1950s.4The predominance of workers increased in the higher echelons ofparty hierarchy: the higher the level of the organisation, the higher the numberof militants from blue-collar backgrounds. In 1962, blue-collar militants madeup 53 per cent of the comite´fe´de´ral in Loire-Atlantique, and 60 per cent in thebureau fe´de´ral and the secre´tariat fe´de´ral overall. The dominant position ofworkers from heavy industries and of those with a protected status (railwayworkers, civil service workers, gas and electrical operators and so on) in theparty hierarchy can be observed everywhere, including in rural regions likeAllier. In this area, where rural populations – notably peasants – stronglysupported the PCF, Party leadership was in fact composed mostly by militantsfrom urban industries (who are often from peasants families).

Or this:

Their survey took these results further. The right-wing vote was higher among people who practiced a religion. The left-wing vote increased depending on the degree of integration in the working class as measured by the number of working-class connections or attributes possessed (being a worker oneself, having a working-class father or spouse, etc.). It went from 18% amongst women who were without any connection to 55% for workers whose fathers were also workers. The effects of “objective” social class were seen to combine with those of the “subjective” social class, i.e. the class individuals feel they belong to.12 Identification with the working class increased with the number of working class attributes.

For Finland, check this long study, specifically page 60 (printed numbers). Here's the specific table showing that in 1948 and 1966 70-75% of worker voters voted for Social Democrats (SDP) and Communists (SKDL) combined, with over 30 % of this vote going the SKDL. A table below shows that ca 80% of SKDL voters were workers in those elections, and as late as 1988 SKDL's support base was almost 70% worker.

This doesn't conflict with the Orwell quote - the European big communist parties still attracted freaky-deaky types, but they only formed a small minority in those parties compared to blue-collar lugnut jockeys, while they were considerably more important internally for Anglo Communist parties that lacked a similar mass base of worker support.

Thank you very much for this! Always happy to learn something new. Particularly enjoying poking through that Finnish study

The mining and industrial regions in the northern UK have been called the Red Wall because they consistently voted Labour for so long, until within the past decade.

There's also the similar 'Red Belt' in France, centered around the former heavy industry heart of the country, which voted for a long time not only socialist, but communist.

Wedding, the one-time working class slum of Berlin was known as 'Red Wedding' in the interwar years, because it was a communist stronghold.

In Spain, in 1934, several thousand socialist-communist miners stormed the city of Oviedo, torched a bunch of churches, shot a dozen priests, declared a 'soviet republic,' and fought the army for two weeks to protest the entry of a right-wing party into the government.

Thanks for this, appreciate it

(1) Calling the British Labour party a "Marxist" party is stretching the word absurdly far. Yes, they were social democratic. Yes, social democracy was partly inspired by Marxist ideas. That doesn't make the British Labour party into a Marxist party. The Communist Party of Great Britain never won more than a few seats in Britain.

(2) "Extremely popular" is a vague phrase, but unless you mean just "popular by the standards of communist parties," I wouldn't say that French communism was "extremely popular" among the working classes of France. A single region where they did well in municipal elections doesn't prove that. Nor a single communist electoral stronghold in Berlin. Similarly for Czechoslovak communism, which you didn't mention but which did have some electoral success in competitive elections.

Nobody is disputing that there were working-class communists and that communists had some electoral successes in Europe. That's a fine motte to retreat to. However, the original claim was "This doesn't really account for Marxism being extremely popular with manual laborers in Europe for decades." (emphasis added) Can you defend that claim?

Calling the British Labour Party a "Marxist" party is stretching the word absurdly far.

The British Labour Party was never a Marxist party, but it self-identified as socialist, was committed to seeking "common ownership of the means of production" by Clause 4 of the Party Constitution, and did in fact nationalise the country's largest companies after gaining power in 1945. At the point Orwell complained about the lifestyle weirdness of "socialists", he was a member of the Independent Labour Party, one of those weird far-left groupuscles the British like so much, because he did not consider the Labour Party properly socialist. So he was writing about the lifestyle habits of the weird far-left, which has always been much more middle-class than the electorally serious left.

The quote is taken from The Road to Wigan Pier, which was a polemical book trying to get the Marxist left in Britain to get the stick out of their backside and compete for working class votes. Less than a year after writing the book, Orwell would travel to Spain to fight for the Nationalists. Foreign fighters were assigned to International Brigades based on the Spanish political party their home-country party was affiliated with. The Spanish left-wing group whose militia Orwell joined based on his ILP membership was POUM, which was a heavily working-class movement - it was led by an autodictat journalist from a working-class family and a union organiser.

Calling the British Labour party a "Marxist" party is stretching the word absurdly far.

Labour was an explicitly socialist party for decades. The plank calling for the socialization of industry/property was only removed, I think in the 80s or 90s. The communists didn't think they were hardcore enough and wanted violent revolution now, but that doesn't change the party's ideals in its early years. This was even more true of the Second International parties on the continent like the SPD, the SFIO, and especially the PSOE. Do you deny those parties were very popular with the working classes of their respective countries?

I said "marxism" not "communism" and explicitly identified both the social democratic and comintern-affiliated communist parties, because it's true that the latter alone never commanded a majority of working class support in European countries. Though they still did pretty good. The PCF got 15% of the vote in national elections France in 1936 (calling the red belt 'a single region' underrates it. It was the French equivalent of communists dominating the US industrial regions in the great lakes in the 50s). The KPD got 17% of the vote in Germany in 1932, especially from unemployed workers.

More comments

That's a historical path dependency thing and you can tell because of the way the working class majority has moved away from Marxism.

The working class was attracted to left wing parties of all sorts in the 19th century. Over the course of that century and into the 20th, Marxism slowly won an internal power struggle amongst the left wing parties and factions of many countries. Even those which maintained a non-Marxist policy bent often adopted Marxist language and trappings (if only formally -- see: the Social Democratic parties in Scandinavia, who were never interested in actually going through with a Marxist revolution but often put Marxist goals in their platforms early on).

As the Cold War heated up, this started to drop away. Social Democrats started to explicitly and consciously disassociate from Marxism, many transformed over time into more or less social liberal, welfare capitalist parties as the big state post-war consensus fell apart, and now much of their voting base has switched sides to right-wing or conservative populist parties.

Okay, with what level of veracity should I approach that assertion?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats