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Identity politics is a Marxist revolutionary movement. As Lenin pointed out, in the Revolution, morality is subsumed in politics and Revolutionary violence is n
by ctrlp 5y ago
Identity politics is a Marxist revolutionary movement. As Lenin pointed out, in the Revolution, morality is subsumed in politics and Revolutionary violence is not actual violence, or rather, it is not immoral. The is no mercy to be shown to anyone who obstructs the Revolution. Phase I of the Revolution is to destroy the values of the "oppressive" preexisting order. Phase II is the realization of the promised Utopia, which of course never happens. We are in the logically necessary nadir of nihilism where no values can claim universality. This could be considered the antithesis of Christianity. The woke are the intellectual vanguard of the Revolution when they are self-conscious of their historical role. Most are simply unwitting foot soldiers pushing this revolution forward like ants, without understanding. Many are simply aspirational elites playing the power game for petty stakes. Some are true believers. If you want to understand what the world looks like when morality is subsumed under politics, consider the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, for which that was a defining feature. The woke are playing a dangerous game, supported by the ruling elites who are thinking they can control this. Are they right? We'll see. There were plenty of elites who thought they could control the revolutionary forces they were harnessing to gain or keep power.
- sbmassey 5y agoIt is anti-Marxist, in that Marxism requires that the whole proletarian class of a society unite, whereas wokism pretty much guarantees that society will be shattered into thousands of mutually suspicious parts.
- ctrlp 5y agoThat is an out-dated depiction of Marxism.
- sparks1970 5y agoCan you explain that further? I'm interested in the idea that our understanding of an idea like Marxism can improve the further away we are in time from it. That seems counter-intuitive.
- ctrlp 5y agoIt doesn't seem counter-intuitive to me that understanding improves with time. Quite the opposite. It's odd that you think that. Why wouldn't our understanding deepen with time to reflect, more information, and with the unfolding of events in history to reveal mysteries?
- sparks1970 5y agoI don't agree that our understanding of ideas improves with time. For example, do we understand the teachings of Jesus better today than someone who heard them first hand? I would argue no, because we don't have anywhere near the same life experiences as that audience. In addition, all our information has been mediated through the accounts of others with their own biases and every recounting makes it a little bit worse. With this in mind your statement that someone "has an outdated view of Marxism" sounds odd to me, like someone saying "You have an outdated view of Christianity". Says who? Marx?
- rafaelsoto 5y agoI love how anything happens in America and they look to quickly blame communism. The propaganda worked. Did you know communism is the most popular ideology in the world yet these clearly liberal tendencies and hate filled individualist concepts somehow sprout in the heart of capitalism.
- pphysch 5y agoIdentity politics has virtually nothing to do with Karl Marx's philosophy or political economics.
- ctrlp 5y agoThis is so ignorant I don't even know what to say to you. If you're interested in learning about the connection and evolution you can look into the Marxist Frankfurt school and its influence on modern identity politics.
- pphysch 5y agoWhat makes you think this particular interpretation of "Marxism" invented posthumously by the Weimar bourgeoisie is the One True Marxism? Sectarian nonsense. I am referring to what Karl Marx actually wrote, not the millions of diverging tangents that each claim to be "Marxism".
- ctrlp 5y agoWell, Marx famously wrote he himself wasn't a Marxist ("je ne suis pas marxiste"), but putting that aside, Marx was himself a bourgeois intellectual (as were Lenin and Trotsky, Che Guevara, and many other famous revolutionaries). Read Lukas' History and Class Consciousness if you want to understand the relationship between bourgeois intellectuals and Marx's revolutionary politics. I made no claims for any One True Marxism when I described Identity Politics as "a Marxist revolutionary movement" but I would agree that Identity Politics is consistent with what Marx actually wrote. Consider Marx's third Thesis on Feuerbach: "The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice." The part of society that is "superior to society" is just those bourgeois intellectuals who are able to transcend their place in their own culture, who have a view of History and can execute its logic ("The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."). These are the Revolutionary Vanguard, as Lenin described in What is to Be Done? Moreover, the materialist doctrine forgets, according to Marx, that circumstances are changed by man and "self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice", which i would argue is the essence identity politics and consistent with the centrality of 'homo faber' to all of Marx's philosophy. To understand Marx, you must understand that, first and foremost, he was a revolutionary. The failure of the actual Marxist revolution to arise from the proles as Marx predicted or to produce the kind of society most people would chose to inhabit (in fact, the opposite, in the form of Bolshevik and Nazi totalitarianism), was instrumental in the thinking of later Marxist theorists, Weimar bourgeoisie though some may have been. I would not count Gramsci as a Weimar bourgeois but he was instrumental in shifting the interpretation of Marxist revolutionary politics to the commanding heights of culture, rather than industry per Lenin. In that, he was 100% predicting the take-over of our education and media systems by revolutionary politics. Gender theory and identity politics are self-professedly Marxist ideologies. There's no real debate about what they think they're about, it's pretty well-documented. I wonder why you think you have a better claim to interpreting Marx correctly than 150 years of dedicated scholar-activists have been able to do. If you've slogged your way through Kapital vol III, I'm impressed and a bit mystified as to why you might think Marx's important thinking about political economy isn't consistent with identity politics, which, if it's about anything, is about deconstructing the legal and political superstructures that create power. What's more Marxist than that?