I interpreted “endgame” to mean “as x goes to infinity.” Also, I think that any sensible person defending capitalism as a system would be defending the emergent properties (e.g., everyone will get a piece of the ever expanding pie), not the goals of the individual actors involved.
2 Likes
The fundamental problem with the system of capital that Marx pointed out was that it is prone to periodic crises – the boom and bust cycle. Marx predicted that these would get increasingly severe. He’d described human history as a series of class systems, always involving ongoing struggles for power between classes. Eventually, either the rising class succeeds in overcoming the ruling class, and creates a new system, or, if the rising class never succeeds in this, the entire system will collapse from its deepening flaws. A popular expression for this comes from Rosa Luxemburg, “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.” “Socialism or barbarism” is a phrase you’ll often hear Marxists use in casual conversation.
A critical point is that there’s nothing automatic about a social revolution. There has long been debate in Marxist circles about just how much influence self-conscious revolutionaries can have over the course of events. But, Marx and Engels, after all, wrote the Communist Manifesto, participated in the founding of the First International, and otherwise tried to encourage the growth of organization of working class revolutionaries.
Basically correct. It’s worth noting, they were academics first, and were literally sitting out two attempts at social revolution in Germany. They made a point of removing themselves from actual social struggle. Over time, their bias towards theorizing and against actually doing anything deepened. There were, of course, many thousands of people in Germany (as well as elsewhere) who were rather more concerned with taking action. (Job #1 for the Nazis was killing them all.) It’s also worth noting, and this is something I actually found really bizarre, that the Frankfurt School’s view of social science was that empirical research was secondary – at best – to their abstract theorizing. They weren’t interested in psychology in general, but just Freudian theory and its closest offshoots, for instance.
Some of all of that, I think. Socialism also predates Marx, and there’ve been close connections between feminism and socialism going back to their roots as self-conscious political movements in the late 18th century.
Here, it’s more about the ideology of the critic. He’s positing “Western Civilization” as a cause he believes in, which has already triumphed over all the fundamental injustices and is now perfectly self-consistent, and self-evidently so. So, women in the West used to be oppressed, but they can own property, hold jobs, and vote, so obviously they’re not oppressed at all. There are places where women do not have these rights – so the way to help those women is to bring Western Civilization to them. Questioning the motives of the leaders of Western Civilization in doing their great work is cynical.
From the time I was in college, when I first started becoming involved in political activism and then joined a socialist group, I’ve always been surprised at the rift between socialist activism and what we referred to as “academic Marxism”. They were two traditions that you would expect to heavily influence each other, but seldom seemed to connect at all – not even in the case of members of my group who were grad students, who were studying these very topics. (There’s more to academic Marxism than the Frankfurt School.)
The Frankfurt School started out as a group of academics, independent of affiliation with any political group. To some extent, this was a good call, as it kept them out of the sinkhole of Stalinist orthodoxy. However, they deliberately severed all connections with socialist movements or with activism of any kind, and this set them on a trajectory away from materialism towards idealism, and for many of them, on a trajectory away from even theoretical radicalism. My understanding is that a few of them, most notably Herbert Marcuse, changed course and moved towards connecting again with the emerging social movements of the 1960s, but the idealist cast of their thought remained.
I eventually left the socialist group I was part of, and after a gap of several years, I’ve been gradually making connections with old comrades who also left, and with the surprisingly large network of more or less independent Marxists; there’s always been a lot going of interesting thinking going on, that I hadn’t been aware of previously. But, the Frankfurt School rarely comes up at all.
I’ve thought that activist socialists may underestimate how much of value there may be in academic Marxist traditions, and I’ve seen a few examples where I think they may have had an influence – particularly, I mentioned Pollock’s early economic work, and later, Marcuse’s ideas, which I didn’t really know much about until it was pointed out to me in this very thread.
But by and large, I think it’s almost laughable to suggest that a group of intellectuals who deliberately cut themselves off from activism were really playing some subtle gambit from out of a Frank Herbert novel.
5 Likes
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.
2 Likes
Have we alway had such lovingly detailed ban reasons,or is this a special occasion?
2 Likes
Oh, my. 
1 Like
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?
.
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.
8 Likes
actually they are usually pretty hilarious. Would be great if there were a de-identified list of ban-reasons.
3 Likes
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.
3 Likes
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.
4 Likes
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.
5 Likes
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.
1 Like
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.
2 Likes
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.
1 Like
To quote my aforementioned pro-capitalist near-Libertarian family member, “China didn’t take over Hong Kong, Hong Kong took over China.”
3 Likes
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.
1 Like
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.
3 Likes
