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This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory. In actuality, "identity politics" is a big bracket of civil rights issues, som

This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory. In actuality, "identity politics" is a big bracket of civil rights issues, some applications of which are good and some of which (the obvious example being cancel culture) are bad. But the whole point is to try to move towards an egalitarian society for queer, trans, ethnic, female etc people who have historically had the short end of the stick in the West in various different ways. The whole "if you're white then you're an oppressor" angle is a gross misapplication of the theory by people who don't understand the difference between individual and systemic effects.

AzzieElbab 5y ago
- “ This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory” - I am sure I could google exact quotes from I think Marcuse that states the opposite. Maybe his utopia wasn’t called communism, does it make any difference? Having said that, what I find more interesting is how Marxism is the only theory adopted by all of western humanities, because it is the only theory that defines what social progress should look like. I feel we desperately need some alternative view of what progress is, because what we use now clearly isn’t working
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Marxism isn't even an ideology though - Marx didn't concretely define what socialism and communism would look like outside of "collective control of the means of production", which really just means "factories are used for public rather than private benefit" (oversimplified but that's the gist). There's so many flavours of leftism that are completely mutually incompatible. There are also alternatives positions: anarchism of many flavours, the singularity people (post-scarity ideology, effectively - I like Manna [1] for a practical example - it's functionally equivalent to "fully automated luxury communism"), the degrowthers, the urbanists, the social democrats, the solarpunk types, probably a bunch of others I've left out. There's no limit to the number of futures being imagined on the left. There's lots of future-imagining on the right too, but the qualifying trait of the right is that their future is the same as the past. If you mean that western humanities have adopted Marxism as in the Soviet or Maoist visions of Marx - they haven't, by and large. They're mostly onto critical theory now, which is really interesting because it's a systems analysis of societal structures. Marx did a systems analysis of capital, so many critical theorists are also Marxists, but that's about as far as it goes in terms of their direct relation. As far as "not working" goes - trade unionism brought us many workers' rights, the 40 hour work week, and is the only thing big businesses are really afraid of. Marxism-Leninism was a massive failure, but the anarchists called that one in the 1920s. [1] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
zozbot234 5y ago
> This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory. Who said anything about the Frankfurt School? Mao Zedong quite literally tried to invent a new communism, and his Mao Zedong Thought was subverted by Lin Biao and the criminal Gang of Four to launch the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", which called on educated youth to "destroy everything that's old and bourgeois and counter-revolutionary" in Chinese culture and society. These ideas were quite impactful among Western lefist radicals in the late-1960s and 1970s, and a zombie version of that Western-Maoist ideology is what survives today as "wokeness".
- beaconstudios 5y ago

AzzieElbab 5y ago

- “ This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory” - I am sure I could google exact quotes from I think Marcuse that states the opposite. Maybe his utopia wasn’t called communism, does it make any difference? Having said that, what I find more interesting is how Marxism is the only theory adopted by all of western humanities, because it is the only theory that defines what social progress should look like. I feel we desperately need some alternative view of what progress is, because what we use now clearly isn’t working

beaconstudios 5y ago
Marxism isn't even an ideology though - Marx didn't concretely define what socialism and communism would look like outside of "collective control of the means of production", which really just means "factories are used for public rather than private benefit" (oversimplified but that's the gist). There's so many flavours of leftism that are completely mutually incompatible. There are also alternatives positions: anarchism of many flavours, the singularity people (post-scarity ideology, effectively - I like Manna [1] for a practical example - it's functionally equivalent to "fully automated luxury communism"), the degrowthers, the urbanists, the social democrats, the solarpunk types, probably a bunch of others I've left out. There's no limit to the number of futures being imagined on the left. There's lots of future-imagining on the right too, but the qualifying trait of the right is that their future is the same as the past. If you mean that western humanities have adopted Marxism as in the Soviet or Maoist visions of Marx - they haven't, by and large. They're mostly onto critical theory now, which is really interesting because it's a systems analysis of societal structures. Marx did a systems analysis of capital, so many critical theorists are also Marxists, but that's about as far as it goes in terms of their direct relation. As far as "not working" goes - trade unionism brought us many workers' rights, the 40 hour work week, and is the only thing big businesses are really afraid of. Marxism-Leninism was a massive failure, but the anarchists called that one in the 1920s. [1] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

zozbot234 5y ago

> This is the "frankfurt school tried to invent a new communism" conspiracy theory. Who said anything about the Frankfurt School? Mao Zedong quite literally tried to invent a new communism, and his Mao Zedong Thought was subverted by Lin Biao and the criminal Gang of Four to launch the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", which called on educated youth to "destroy everything that's old and bourgeois and counter-revolutionary" in Chinese culture and society. These ideas were quite impactful among Western lefist radicals in the late-1960s and 1970s, and a zombie version of that Western-Maoist ideology is what survives today as "wokeness".

beaconstudios 5y ago