domain:mattlakeman.org
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18m ago
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.
Would it also be a mistake to identify the socialist theory of Trotsky with the Socialist theory of Stalin? (Or that of Kamenev and Stalin, or Zinoviev and Stalin, or Bukharin and Stalin, or...)
...I submit that Marxism is best understood as a bundle of critiques of society emerging from a particular worldview. Beyond those worldview-clustered critiques, Marxism contains no actual, gears-level insight or plan for fixing society beyond "amass absolute power and use it tear down this society and build a much better one in its place". If you are tracking ideological descent, you should track it through the worldview, the critique cluster, and the prescription of amassing and wielding absolute power. These are the constants of Marxist thought.
The non-gears-level theoretical confections layered atop by Marx and his feuding successors are best understood as superstructure, epiphenomena. Lenin gutted much of Marx's own theoretical constructs to carry out the Russian Revolution, and no one cared because he maintained the constants of perspective, critique, and seizure of power, and he won. The Russian Revolutionaries who followed him themselves contained great diversity of thought and and many beautiful theoretical elaborations, until Stalin culled them all by hueing to the constants of Perspective, Critique, and seizure of power, and no one cared because he also won. Mao likewise diverged greatly from Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and yet he stuck to the basics, and he also won and so was recognized, at least initially, as a Real Marxist.
Consider the idea that Marxism does not actually contain actionable insight into the human condition or the proper ordering of a peaceful, prosperous society. Because of this lack, people attempting even minimally to engage with the human condition or build such a society in the real world quickly find themselves having to make shit up. Then if their improvisations work, they must have Really Understood Marx, and if they fail, clearly they were heterodox and benighted, at least by everyone within reach of the winner.
You may be correct that all the Frankfurt School and modern Social Justice share is a rhetorical commitment to communism, and you may be correct that in both cases, that commitment is fake. When in the history of the ideology has it been otherwise?
aaa
27m ago
How do you rate scenario 2 as more likely than scenario 1???
Israel needs western support to exist. Europe is going to become very muslim (and also very failed) in the next 100 years. In the US support for israel rests on three pillars: jews, defense contractors and red heifer evangelicals. The evangelicals are dying, the jews are quickly coming to see themselves more as liberals than as jews. On the other hand jews map to white and palestinians map to brown in the woke mind.
Within the next two generations israel needs to either resolve the problem fully, somehow, or find a new partner or they lose.
Supah_Schmendrick
27m ago
How bastardized does a theoretical development have to be before it can be considered an entirely different thing?
Depends on whether you take a genealogical (A taught B, who was read and cited by C, who taught D...) vs. taxonomic approach. Both have their strengths and weaknesses; both capture something useful and real about the world but have blind spots.
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.
One could certainly say the same of Mormonism vis a vis the early Christian church fathers...or indeed wokism vis a vis the early church fathers. But there are clear historical and sociological lineages there as well.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
28m ago
The major figures of the Frankfurt School would reject wokism--ideologically and aesthetically, and in particular its focus on consumerist identity.
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 Frabkfurt School.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
43m ago
Yes, and that is why the people we are calling Cultural Marxists have engaged in a protracted and highly public campaign to, among many other things, put black people in charge of art, universities, and "etc". Surely you are aware of this campaign, the explicit arguments forwarded for its necessity and its many notable and expensive foibles?
What is your actual argument here? You appear to be quoting newspaper headlines as examples of ridiculous things that obviously haven't happened.
ThenElection
47m ago
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.
I would like to cross post this excerpt about the mathematician Imre Lakatos, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
In Nagyvárad Lakatos restarted his Marxist group. The co-leader was his then-girlfriend and subsequent wife, Éva Révész. In May, the group was joined by Éva Izsák, a 19-year-old Jewish antifascist activist who needed lodgings with a non-Jewish family. Lakatos decided that there was a risk that she would be captured and forced to betray them, hence her duty, both to the group and to the cause, was to commit suicide. A member of the group took her across country to Debrecen and gave her cyanide (Congden 1997, Long 2002, Bandy 2009, ch. 5). To lovers of Russian literature, the episode recalls Dostoevsky’s The Possessed/Demons (based in part on the real-life Nechaev affair). In Dostoevsky’s novel the anti-Tsarist revolutionary, Pyotr Verkhovensky, posing as the representative of a large revolutionary organization, tries to solidify the provincial cell of which he is the chief by getting the rest of group to share in the murder of a dissident member who supposedly poses a threat to the group. (It does not work for the fictional Pytor Verkhovensky and it did work for the real-life Sergei Nechaev.) Hence the title of Congden’s 1997 exposé: “Possessed: Imre Lakatos’s Road to 1956”. But to communists or former communists of Lakatos’s generation, it recalled a different book: Chocolate, by the Bolshevik writer Aleksandr Tarasov-Rodianov. This is a stirring tale of revolutionary self-sacrifice in which the hero is the chief of the local Cheka (the forerunner of the KGB). Popular in Hungary, it encouraged a romantic cult of revolutionary ruthlessness and sacrifice in its (mostly) youthful readers. As one of Lakatos’s contemporaries, György Magosh put it,
How that book inspired us. How we longed to be professional revolutionaries who could be hanged several times a day in the interest of the working class and of the great Soviet Union (Bandy 2009: 31).
It was in that spirit, that the ardent young Marxist, Éva Izsák, could be persuaded that it was her duty to kill herself for the sake of the cause.
Though his research program is interesting and in spite of previously defending art by question artists, I now fear such ideas as memetic viruses cast evil people. How can we verify a communist correctly described the sky as blue, might it not be grey or beautiful and pink? I marvel at just how much we should throw out.
Ioper
49m ago
There is a little bit of that but giving it to trump also seems very premature, especially given his other proclivities.
aqouta
1hr ago
They lived in those areas as a persecutes minorities under, ironically given the acurrent asaccusations, appartide conditions. Subjected to additional taxes, exclusion from official positions, lesser status under the law and the occasional pogrom. There are some few contested incidents like the 1950s Baghdad bombings but many many more straightforward incidents like the Egyptian denationalization and mass asset seizures of jews across the region. The idea that the push factors compeling jews to move to Israel from the middle east were largely fabricated is ahistorical. Certainly Israel wanted to entice jews to move there and sure up their numbers but the woes of the jews across the region were very real.
The motte is Marxists caring about culture, which obviously they have done throughout history. The Soviet Union is just one famous example.
The bailey is the much less defensible claim that "wokism is the bastard child of communism" - this kind of 'cultural Marxism' is a much larger, more complicated narrative about how intersectionality, modern progressive thought, etc., derive from a complex chain of descent from Marxism.
This claim comes around with some frequency, and has always left me quite confused as to where exactly such a view emerges from.
From your understanding, what is the doctrinaire Marxist view on, say, feminism as an ideological/philosophical system?
My understanding is that doctrinaire Marxism had no room for Feminism as such; class conflict was the problem and the solution, and the future classless society would provide seamless, perfectly egalitarian solutions for existing conflicts between the sexes with no need for further analysis or theoretical constructions. My impression of the attempts to implement Marxism likewise believed this, even as they often implemented, for example, what from a feminist perspective would be considered large-scale rape culture, exploitation and repression of women in their societies.
Likewise, from your understanding, what is the mainline Feminist view of Marxism as an ideological/philosophical system?
My understanding is that mainline Feminists consider Marx enormously influential to their critique of society and its discontents, but believe their ideological/theoretical model is an application and refinement of Marxist social critique, and that as a refinement, their movement's distinctive perspectives and prescriptions should be prioritized over the older, cruder, pure-class-conflict marxist view.
It seems to me that the above two descriptions are accurate for central examples of Doctrinaire Marxist and Feminist thinking respectively, and that both the fundamental relationship and fundamental conflict between them is undeniable. This old comment provides concrete examples of the phenomena both from popular appeals to academia, and from within academia itself; I'd be interested in whether you think I'm engaging with a Motte and Bailey there, and if so how. The dénouement to that post seems evergreen:
It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism. It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly. I think the above position can be defended unassailably by looking at the academic output that constitutes the headwaters of the Social Justice movement. I think that those who argue that the obvious, inescapable ties between Social Justice theory and Marxism are some sort of hallucination or sloppy categorization are either woefully uninformed or actively dishonest. To those who have advanced such arguments in the thread on the subject below, I offer an invitation: assuming the above examples are insufficient, what level of evidence would satisfy you? How many papers from how many journals do you need to see? How many quotes from how many prominent figures within the modern social justice movement, and the people who taught them, and the people who taught them, and so on? How far back do we need to go to satisfy you? How deep do we need to dig to bring this question to a conclusion?
(And it's a genetic fallacy anyway, but that's a whole separate issue. Suffice to say that I think wokism is wrong, but it's wrong because it's wrong, not because of this or that historical antecedent.)
I would disagree. New Ranch Marxism goes wrong specifically because it retains many of the distinct errors of its progenitor.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
But when my uncle goes on about how DEI departments are "cultural Marxism" I think that is nonsense words. That's "progressive liberalism"
How? Critical Race Theory explicitly stood against the liberal approach to race.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1hr ago
Obesity is a complicated subject in that the question "why do Americans live sedentary lives and have terrible diets?" is one without an obvious answer or easy solutions. It is not a complicated subject in that the proximate cause of the obesity epidemic is that Americans live sedentary lives and have terrible diets.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
And, when you look at the actual content of Frankfurt critiques, they don't overlap much, if at all, with woke ones.
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?
Oh, a Nietzsche-type destined to to be "consumed by powerful manias" or "paralyzed with fear over not being able to fulfill the momentous duties" should be very rare, but real. Was Diogenes the first recorded Nietzsche-type? It is difficult to discern to what extent the Nietzsche-type, the Grill-type, and the Priestly-type are conditionally generated or individually driven. The printing press, plow, literacy, the Enlightenment, and the 20th century provides tools to enable the Priestly-type that simply didn't exist at other points.
I think it is fun to think of this piece as reactionary. RETVRN! The philosophy of individualism fallen prey to anti-materialist, post-modernist witchcraft contradictions. "We must go deeper and wider." The heretical sect -- that which has sapped vitality of the faith -- has not sinned such that they cannot be forgiven, but only if they repent and, once again, condemn capitalism the evil that corrupts them.
ThenElection
1hr ago
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.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1hr ago
I mean, its an easy heuristic to read Wikipedia and realize that it represents the most far left case that can be plausibly levied under their rules.
No? I am a far leftist and this really isn't the case. Wikipedia is generally pro establishment, and that lines up with the left in some ways and not at all in others.
Even so I was alone during 2nd intifada
My condolences?
terrorist campaign supported by all the relevant Palestinian parties in government, so that necessarily includes him and Arafat.
If you're going to claim that lets you call him a terrorist, you're going to have to admit that the entire Israeli government consists of terrorists as well. If you're willing to make that claim, fair enough, but otherwise it doesn't really mean anything at all - not that "terrorist" is a particularly meaningful political designation these days anyway.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1hr ago
subject to the abuses that have led to there being basically no jews anywhere else in the islamic world
I feel like pointing out that the major historical abuse that lead to the jews leaving the arab world was actually the creation of Israel. Even wikipedia makes it clear that there were plenty of jews living in the Arab world up until the creation of Israel, and the descendants of those populations are largely referred to as Mizrahim today. Some of the other "abuses", like the 1950s Baghdad bombings, were almost certainly committed by Israelis in order to encourage Iraqi jews to emigrate to Israel to boot.
philosoraptor
2hr ago
Which invites the obvious question: what will the next Current Thing™ be?
AI. I won't know what the exact angle will be until I see it, but it seems like a good bet it will be AI-related.
Mantergeistmann
2hr ago
"Palestinians brutally murdered by occupying military forces!... but it's not the IDF doing it, so does anyone really care?"
gog
2hr ago
They want whomever they believe to be low-status in the culture to have more status. They believe everything is a social construct, and so they conclude that status is not earned, but granted by authorities to preferred classes of people, and stigma to disfavoured classes. Cultural marxists want to become the status/stigma-granting authority, and for them this means controlling art and education. In the US they’re primarily concerned with black people. In Canada they’re concerned about indigenous people. In Europe they’re concerned about migrants or something. You can question whether status actually works this way, but you can’t dispute that this attitude toward status is widespread all across the political spectrum.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2hr ago
So you're saying cultural Marxists think black people need to be in charge of art, universities, etc?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2hr ago
And are we arguing that that has yielded no fruit?
No I'm just saying I don't understand the explanation
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2hr ago
Cultural Marxism is a demonstrable thing, unless you believe that culture is some sort of fungus that shows up on economies. What do you think Homo Sovietcus was, anyway?
I mean sure, "the culture of Marxists" obviously exists
But when my uncle goes on about how DEI departments are "cultural Marxism" I think that is nonsense words. That's "progressive liberalism" and has essentially nothing to do with Marx except that I guess both have a general goal of a more equitable society (although I question if progressive liberals even want that).
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2hr ago
Soft skills aren't my strong suit, but I spent far too much time gargling rage-slop from Facebook until I turned off the spigot, and the upshot of all of that is that I'm confident that there's a very straightforward model on the vague-left, as follows.
Everything is some kind of class conflict, in that there are rich people exploiting working people in some way. In order to solve a problem, you need to figure out who the rich exploiters are, and, depending on how brave and/or edgy you want to be, regulate/tax or eat/behead them.
In this case, possibly due to the influence of the evil developer trope, developers are evil business owners who want to bulldoze virtuous, affordable working-class homes and replace them with empty glass high-rises. Because developers are evil, it's never considered that the existing homes were once newly built by some other developer. Because developers cannot do good, it's never considered that people will live in these new buildings, so there's a persistent idea that developers intentionally construct buildings, intending that they stay empty, and profit from this by "writing it off" or something like that.
Left-NIMBYism is, from what I can tell, frequently the result of getting negatively polarized against YIMBYs, who are, unfortunately, kinda smug nerds sometimes. For example, YIMBY poster Sam Deutsch made fun of comedian Kate Willett for being a gentrifier complaining about gentrification, and she is still, four years later, writing red-string-on-a-board articles like this and constantly tweeting about how YIMBYs are funded by "billionaires".
It's still not really walkable -- although I think now there's literally condo towers right on top of it, so I guess if you were in one of those it would work. Otherwise it's several blocks from anywhere people really live. (and of course those towers are not great for going places other than Costco -- or the hockey arena I guess)
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