☭ Sup Marxists? ☭

Philosophy may have a reputation for impenetrability and for arid classroom discussion today, but for those who would reclaim the discipline’s more raucous reputation of the past, the graffiti is perhaps a positive sign, and maybe the first salvo in a war between Situationists and Enlightenment thinkers. Indeed, a critic of Kant’s ideas might feel a categorical imperative to take such direct action.

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Spoiler alert: You can find out now, or you can wait till April Fool’s Day.

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Have we alway had such lovingly detailed ban reasons,or is this a special occasion?

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Oh, my. :open_mouth:

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Ah, @anon50609448, @FoolishOwl, as usual you are both more patient, and articulate than I on the question of “What is a Cultural Marxist, like really?”

It’s dialogue like this that makes me disagree with @cowicide about the value of this thread - I find the thoughtful sharing of informed opinions to be stellar.

Oh yeah, that too. Definitely lots of knowledge-dropping going on, which has also pushed me to better educate myself.

Back to the questions at hand.

I view it as a reverse-engineered dog-whistle for “Look at this person that want’s to curtail our free speech and thus prevent us from being loud and proud about our bigotry.”

I can find no. credible. academic. definitions. of cultural marxism as an actual movement.

Just as some argue out of one side of their mouth that the C-word is not as bad as people make it out to be, surely they retreat from overtly expressing their preference for patriarchy or white supremacy. Language shifts over time, and it’s pretty well accepted these days that being a “good old boy” is bad, but opposing cultural marxism can still be seen as noble and gallant. And, Western.

Fear of the cold war has loomed large over most of our lives, and for regressive thinkers it’s easier to red-bait feminists than to debate feminists. If only we knew of a feminist scholar focused on cold-war culture…

I like Race Forward’s analysis , differentiating individual-level bias (internalized bias, interpersonal bias) from systemic-level bias (Institutional/structural) (page 3). Jay Smooth has a great short summary vid.

Through this lens, I see most regressive thinkers operating at the individual-level analysis, and often missing the systemic-level analysis. Thus, the oft-used defense “but I didn’t mean to offend” and “my heart was in the right place.” If those excuses are sincerely offered, then sure progressive folks who persist in calling out the systemic can be seen as cynical and indifferent to those that profess the best intentions but don’t see the bigger picture.

However, ultimately, those that fail to engage with systemic-level think are going to lose in the marketplace of ideas. More on that in the next Q.

Before leaving this point, though, I want to also highlight Race Forward’s Seven Harmful Discourse Practices (prior link, page 11). Looking over these, I feel that each of these tropes have already been deployed, under cover of the fight against cultural marxism, as direct attacks on feminism.

Absolutely.

And that’s where I feel a little bad for those who are afraid of socialism/communism. All too often, I worry they were fed the Reagan-era lie that America stood for Capitalist Entrepreneurs with the motto Greed is Good. And, those terrible soviets, they stood for a planned market and wealth redistribution.

Looking to the Declaration of Independence, the Founders laid bare some 27 grievances, and you have to go some 16 deep before you find the only two about Trade or Taxes. The vast preponderance is about injustice, inequality, and abuse of power.

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”
Theodore Parker, ~1857?

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Nor can past tradition trump the bedrock constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection…

…Similarly, in future generations the label same-sex marriage will be abandoned, to be replaced simply by marriage.

We are a better people than what these laws represent, and it is time to discard them into the ash heap of history…

–Federal Judge John E. Jones, III, appointed by GWB, in a 2014 ruling that Pennsylvania’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional.

It’s hard for me to be cynical, but then again my views aren’t headed to the ash heap of history.

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actually they are usually pretty hilarious. Would be great if there were a de-identified list of ban-reasons.

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You’re not going to find much movement at all, with that sort of eccentric punctuation! XD

I suspect that what you are saying here is true, but almost certainly not in the sense of what you were meaning to say. The contemporary struggle I think is that of the individual taking responsibility for the systemic. This is the process of moving from representative systems to custom, egalitarian structures. People’s individual analyses working together to make their inter-personal the new systems. But as fluctuating networks rather than concrete structures. The resulting homeostasis then feeds back to inform and influence the individual analyses indirectly.

When I read something like that, I wonder how much work has been done on specifying what the “collapse” scenario looks like. There is obviously a range of what socialism looks like, but when it comes to “barbarism” that could mean nearly anything. Are we talking people running around in the wilderness killing each other with machetes, or a dystopian totalitarian state, or what? To me, what capitalism devolves into isn’t some kind of total social collapse, but just into a plain or familiar aristocracy and a return to serfdom. When I look at America today, that’s what I see happening there.

What want to do is separating the question of laughability (a shadowy cabal of academics accomplishing anything at all) and moving to the root question of what the Cultural-Marxism-Theorists are actually accusing Marxists of.wanting to accomplish. Really, I suppose the question is whether Cultural-Marxism-Theorists are opposed to equality on principle. Like I say, when you replace the worst interpretation with a rational one (e.g., replace Marx’s brain in a jar ruling the world from the shadows with the plain fact that the contemporary thought is built on thought from the past), you’re left asking why it’s even a bad thing.

Maybe it’s silly to try to analyze conspiracy theory without the conspiracy, because the conspiracy is kind of the point. But just imagine I was here saying the Bilderberg Group was working with the Knights Templar to figure out how to cure arthritis and then distribute that cure for free into the population. The conspiracy element is laughable, but you’d probably be left thinking, “Is there something bad about curing arthritis?”

So this is what I found myself very confused about when I started thinking about the Cultural Marxism Conspiracy Theory. Positing a shadowy conspiracy is something people do, but rarely do they attribute benevolent motives to those conspiracies.

If Mao and Stalin are our model socialists then I can see how people don’t like socialism much, but to be honest, as murderous totalitarian states go, the USSR and China didn’t do so badly. It seems more likely it was the murderous totalitarianism that was the problem rather than the socialism, which seems to do quite well in Scandinavia.

The simplest explanation is the they accept communism is bad as axiomatic, so maybe I should stop digging.

I hate to quote Dr. Phil, but recently when I come across this “None of us is free unless racists are free to be racist” stuff, I think, “How’s that working for you?” I mean, America is the one developed nation that doesn’t seem to think that freedom of speech has to be balanced against other societal values, but America seems to be rapidly descending into a third world police state.

I was arguing with a familial pro-capitalist near-Libertarian economist about how capitalism seems to fail and pointed to America, but he wouldn’t have any of it because according to him America is completely anti-market and currently reminds him mostly of Uganda under Idi Amin (for reference, he says the closest countries in the world to achieving an actual market economy are Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore). Armerica has arguably left capitalism and even liberty behind in favour of… Monetarchy?

It all seems to centered in egotism, as if what an individual meant or thought mattered when police are out there killing black man after black man (for example). I suppose it’s no coincidence that a feminist refrain is “This isn’t about you.”

Well, they are, just a more distant ash heap. I swear history will make bigots of us all.

But that could mean two things and I think they get conflated even when we don’t spell it out in words like that. Is the individual supposed to take responsibility for their share of the systemic - recognize how they are a piece of the system and put effort into changing how they interact with the system - or for the systemic - each individual having to swallow the whole damn thing. I think that activists are mostly asking for the former, but a lot of people react as though it is the latter.

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That’s what I meant.

Of course people will try to game imperfect markets, but you would be quite dumb to buy an OS to run your server if you can set up a MEAN stack in less than 120 seconds on Ubuntu renting the hardware for less than 5 dollars a month. Corporations like Microsoft/Oracle/Apple will try to use their sales reps to push their inferior stuff to governments and organizations. But it will get closer to 0 each passing day thanks to Open Source development.

If marginal costs and distribution costs keep going down, I only get rewarded for my creativity and knowledge, not for the previous amount of monetary capital I had.

Keep in mind that it doesn’t apply only to software (it is more evident due to its ephemeral nature), but also to the shirts you wear: http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.html

(Of course, once again, keeping in mind that the current price is possible thanks to the slaves of marxist countries, otherwise it would be around 20 additional dollars)

PS: Also, I said free market, not capitalism, and it’s not like I’m some sort of Anarco-capitalist, I don’t think that the “solution” is on either end of the economic policy spectrum, and whatever leaning you have, it is insane to think that creative commons and open source software are bad things.

Touche, and right you are. haha.

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Both. Once we do away with the notion of a total, monolithic, all-encompassing system (which seems to be an unattainable ideal anyway), they become the same. Their share of the systemic becomes relative to which ever system we are talking about in any given instance. It’s a subscription model rather than a prescription model, instantiating and collapsing nodes as needed.

for posterity:

And here I thought he had taken his toys and gone home.

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I watched it twice. It holds up, as it’s such an eyeful. It would take me a while to get bored of the Hermitage.

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I found this comic to be pretty swell: https://thenib.com/lighten-up-4f7f96ca8a7e

It touches on publishing, race, bias, sensitivity, and how art and culture inform how we develop our identities, which seem to be recurring themes in this thread.

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Thanks for clarifying your point.

What about the labor question, then? I’m a big fan and user of open source, but I think we have to recognize that creating an open source project is an act of labor, as much as it is an act of love. At the end of the day, we all have our labor to sell in order to be able to buy the things we need, yeah? So, if you have a situation where the cost of goods are constantly getting driven down, what happens to the people making those things? I think we have the wide variety of open source products available, often for free, because the people who make it a labor of love have other means of supporting themselves. Unless we all go back to a subsistence existence or create some new, communal barter system, I’m not sure how we ensure our basic survival so that we CAN make these cool, interesting, and useful things. That was the reason that Marx wasn’t against industrialization - he was against exploitation of labor, where the real value rested (which Adam Smith agreed with).

I think whether or not countries that produce our fast fashions are truly Marxist or not is up for debate. Not like China prior to Nixon’s trip was some paradise, but given the increase in private investment over the years, it’s hard to call it marxist any more, I’d argue, even if it’s still a one party state. After all, plenty of one party states were fine during the Cold War, as long as they had markets open to American investment.

The end of the Cold War meant that the alternative to joining the capitalist order just went away, and now even countries that claim a Marxist/communist government pretty much are subject to the vagaries of the market, because there is no real alternatives in trade, other than Venezeuala/Cuba/Iran/North Korea.

I really couldn’t agree more. I think they are a positive in the world.

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To quote my aforementioned pro-capitalist near-Libertarian family member, “China didn’t take over Hong Kong, Hong Kong took over China.”

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It blew my mind when I discovered that Kyle Baker wasn’t white (I continue to worship at the altar of Cowboy Wally, a masterpiece in, ironically, black-and-white). White, male comics-artist was (is) my “default template”. :::sigh:::

Over the years I keep re-reading his work, re-assessing it. Nope. Nothing “particularly black” about it. Check a picture of the artist. Hunh. Still black. Golly.

Part of it is that his primary characters, outside of Family Baker, are white.

Aren’t they? I may be making some assumptions there. Have to go back and check. But, CW, Why I Hate Saturn, You are Here, Plastic Man. Looking at Wikipedia there’s a lot I haven’t read – including Nat Turner and a Captain America storyline based on the Tuskegee experiment. So, I have a limited exposure.

At any rate – there is nothing about his artwork that should signify race one way or another. He’s american, raised in america, working in an american medium - american comics. Japanese Manga has a different thing, and there are other comics mediums that dovetail to their own countries’ eccentricities. Perhaps continental-India or Sub-Saharan Africa have their own comic-book styles that might equate to race, but each of those area is a pretty large melting pot.

Hope I haven’t said anything too offensive in here. If I have, I’ll just top it off by saying that while I like Baker’s computer-assisted style, I still prefer the black-and-white of Cowboy Wally.

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The specific forms that Marxists have said “barbarism” might take has varied dramatically. But the underlying principle is that the system of capital is intrinsically unstable and unsustainable. It’s entire model is perpetual escalation of exploitation and consumption, which entails massive destruction and waste. It’s like we’re in a car with a drunk driver, who keeps accelerating and keeps drinking. Yeah, he swerved at the last moment and didn’t hit that big tree, but that doesn’t mean we’re safe now. If this goes on, maybe we’ll go off a bridge, or hit a wall, or die in some other way, or maybe we’ll just run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. But one way or another, either we gain control of the car, or something terrible will happen.

The most viable definition of “barbarism” I’ve heard, for this context, is that it would mean humanity reaches a state in which it’s no longer possible to achieve socialism.

And if you ask someone whether the US is a police state, or is becoming one, and they deny it, what’s the first thing they point to as evidence? Unrestricted free speech. A friend of mine argues that the US ruling class is actually reinforced by relatively frequent, but non-threatening, protests. There’s a huge ideological weight to this idea that free speech is the only civil right that actually matters, and that it trumps all other considerations.

Of course freedom of speech is important, and you need open discussion in order to have democracy. But, there are necessarily constraints. You can’t have a discussion if people are talking over each other – you need to have some way to take turns and make sure everyone has a chance to speak. That is to say, if democracy is the goal, than equality is a constraint on freedom.

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I’m not really sure such a state is possible, unless by “barbarism” we mean nuclear annihilation. I don’t think we can have a social apocalypse without a physical apocalypse.

People fret about a future where automation means workers are no longer needed because they are so entrenched in the idea that some fat cat has to own the productive capacity that somehow being able to make everything we need with virtually no work seems like a crisis (the rich may one day not need the poor). But imagine a star trek replicator future where a few rich people lord over the technology and everyone else is dirt poor subsistence farmers. The logical end to that is that either one day a “rich” person will just decide to share because they can and they are a human being, or the poor people will kill one or more rich people and take the technology. The poor have never needed the rich, and on multiple occasions have decided to do away with them.

I think protests are more useful than many people seem to, but these days I think of trying to change things for the next generation rather than for the next election cycle. But it’s not like protestors don’t get abused by American police. An average American has free speech according to their constitution, but doesn’t really have free speech in practice because they don’t have enough money to defend themselves all the way to the supreme court, and they don’t have enough clout to be free from police brutality.

I think I made this reference very recently in another thread, but once again I’m reminded of Screwtape telling Wormwood to get his charge to pray for someone’s soul instead of for the person. Many americans seem to cling to Free Speech as the soul of America and leave America - a place where people live and die and work and eat and etc. - completely out of the discussion.

I think people overemphasize this. It’s amazing how, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, I saw people giving France flak having laws against denying the holocaust, because that goes against free speech. Does a contemporary society really need to hear from holocaust deniers? The slippery slope argument only works if we deny any possibility of being reasonable.

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I’ve seen quite a bit of analysis related to how technological progress does or does not change how we should implement the 2nd amendment, but little related to how tech changes the 1st. Anyone know of any?

Certainly, I would think the cycle time to debunk a lie or falsehood is quicker these days, allowing for much earlier intervention in the spread of the bad memes that need to be bred out of our culture.

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