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Two things here that seem unconvincing: > It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with [Critical theory], e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an ef

Two things here that seem unconvincing: > It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with [Critical theory], e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice. Dominant in certain demographics, sure, but claiming it's "actually revolutionary" to disagree seems to be a sidestep of actually engaging with the claims of why changing things would be important to anyone involved or affected in the first place. "It's revolutionary to say things should stay the same"? So instead of debating the premise, you then try to pull a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-to of saying "you're just following the crowd" as a justification for... following the crowd among those really calling the shots instead of the crowd of high school debaters. > I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views) This, similarly, shifts from "here's why I don't support the formats/tactics" to slipping in "just take it for granted that the contents of the arguments are actually wrong, regardless of format."

brmgb 3y ago
> There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice Anti-capitalism is very pregnant where I live (France) with one mainstream political party embracing it and the Green supporting it covertly. It's a position which is popular amongst parts of most Green parties in Europe.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice It’s a fair question to debate. What’s nonsense is turning every economic question into this one.
- majormajor 3y ago
  Wouldn't that be a very different complaint, focusing on what judges reward vs what the actual arguments are? The original article touches on that more than the comment here. Instead of talking about if the tactic is valid or if the judges are doing a good job with it the comment here took a major tangent towards "actually the whole line of thought used is obviously flawed and wrong" with a dose of "nobody here is thinking about it they're just following the crowd." Which is suddenly not about tactics or scoring at all.
- masswerk 3y ago
  That premise is open to debate, there are Western countries with different systems. E.g., most Western European countries have a system called "social market economy" (which is not [exactly] capitalism).
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > premise is open to debate Again, nobody disagrees. But if you ask me if I want red or white wine, and I, instead, launch into a diatribe in Marxist-Leninism, that’s not a valid argument and it’s very annoying. Outside these debate circuits, it could come across as debilitating.
    - masswerk 3y ago
      Well as a classic example, you could debate "the unemployment rate is going down – is it good or bad?" (well, the Phillips curve…) and ask with Horkheimer/Adorno, if the entire notion of discussing this in terms of a relative change to a statistical rate isn't normalizing a dysfunctional aspect of economy, regardless, where it's at. This is still a debate, but it shifts the core argument to a conceptually more fundamental level.
  - astrange 3y ago
    All countries in the world have mixed economies. (Except maybe Somalia or North Korea.) The US has a fair amount more publically owned sectors than Europe, which eg has privatized postal services.
    - jerojero 3y ago
      Yes. This is correct. Though the extent of it really matters, I always hear "Norway is a capitalist country" when their economy is primarily in the hands of the state, more than for example Venezuela. But people tend to point to Venezuela, and not Norway, as an example of a failed state owned economy. It's not really about "sectors" of the economy that are publicly owned but actual economic output. The money in the US is produced and it is in the hands of private individuals most of it. In Norway near 70% of it is produced and in the hands of the state. Obviously Norway is a particular example because they're a country that relies on natural resources extraction. But you can look at other similar countries in terms of their exports (Australia, Chile) and see how the Norwegian model differs. The USPS, for example, is a service. It's not really a business, it doesn't have to be profitable it ideally has to be sustainable but I wouldn't say it's a necessity. Not only that, it subsidised private businesses like Amazon.
civilized 3y ago
Neither critical theory nor capitalism are revolutionary. They each have large bastions where you will be at best low status, at worst cast out, for criticizing them. Also, the idea that revolution is inherently good has been a dead cliché since the IT industry got hold of it.
- mitt_romney_12 3y ago
  Under this interpretation nothing can ever be revolutionary. There is absolutely and ideology that is dominant in society at large and trying to say that the ideology that runs 95% of world powers and one that opposes it are equally "revolutionary" is counterfactual.
  - civilized 3y ago
    You can be revolutionary by seeking big change at personal risk because you're not socially dominant (or militarily in other contexts). There have been times this happened. Who is doing that today?
    - defrost 3y ago
      Indigenous people resisting copper mines, gas pipelines, lithium mines, etc that are being proposed on territories they've been pushed back onto.
      - civilized 3y ago
        I doubt critical theorists do them any good.
        defrost 3y ago
        Oddly enough the OG Critical Race Theory that originated in law schools about the globe decades ago addresses systemic inequality issues fairly directly. This seems to have been forgotten since Tucker Calson et al started redefining woke | CRT to mean whatever they currently hated to avoid addressing policy.
gotoeleven 3y ago
Critical theorists and academics in general are smart enough to be able to hold multiple contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time. For example, they are at the same time against capitalism and against starving to death in a gulag.
- indigo945 3y ago
  Today from the "drank the kool-aid" study book on the history of capitalism: before Adam Smith invented and advocated laissez-faire capitalism in 1776, all the people in the world were starving to death in gulags.
  - gotoeleven 3y ago
    The only 20th century alternative to capitalism was socialism whose only fruits were a massive pile of skulls. So are you talking about going back to feudalism? Monarchy?
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Unfortunately "critical theory" (as stereotyped in public discourse, but also as practiced in American academia) is generally like Marxian theory completely stripped of the materialist method and an actual attention to economic fundamentals. It's name-checked radicalism. Any "anti-capitalism" is purely skin-deep, a kind of moral grandstanding but on the whole without any program they could give as an alternative, or even the ability to fully explicate what capitalism really is. And the milieux that circulates this is really primarily liberal, centrist in practice, overwhelmingly supporting and electing quite mainstream fully "capitalist" political parties... but with the aesthetic or appeal to a past radical, anti-capitalist, socialist "scene"... without an actual meaningful program or alternative for the working class. A working class which has as a result almost completely divorced itself from this "left." Which is all the end product of the demolition of the organized socialist left & trade union movement in the west through the 70s and 80s and early 90s and the retreat of associated intellectuals into academia and cultural politics. If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power. A very general "anti-oppression" politic which is primarily concerned with individual concerns, not collective ones. This "left" that I keep hearing about from the Shapiro etc types foaming at the mouth, it's a caricature not only made by its opponents... but by itself. Just Liberalism, and a very 21st century American product.
- thworp 3y ago
  > Which is all the end product of the demolition of the organized socialist left & trade union movement in the west through the 70s and 80s and early 90s and the retreat of associated intellectuals into academia and cultural politics. This was not some grand conspiracy, the Socialists just realized that workers in the West were generally happy and well off (iirc Marcuse said "Capitalism delivers the goods") and not at all friendly to Socialists' plans of revolution. As a result there was a push to shift the propagandizing ("educating") to the next best oppressed groups they could find, with these being the familiar categories of LGBTQ, racial minorities (only certain ones), women etc.). Just like the socialist revolutionaries of old, the majority of the "New Left" are not parts of those groups. They are merely using them as a "revolutionary mass" whose misery and grievances are single-use tools for the revolutionaries to gain power. Lenin was fuming at Bolshevik party members who actually tried to negotiate better working conditions or pay pre-1917 because happy workers don't have "revolutionary potential" (a euphemism for not being desperate enough to want to put him in power). > If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power. I explored some of the reasons for that above, but everybody with some sense could see that capitalist societies were happier, almost never genocided their own population, were vastly more prosperous and even produced enough surplus to have better social welfare than Socialist countries. On the other hand Socialism always ended badly, sometimes catastrophically. People are not blind, and associating your political movement with 60 million corpses is not a smart move. The reason they don't challenge "real power" is because the objective is to gain the power vested in those institutions, not to challenge them.

brmgb 3y ago

> There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice Anti-capitalism is very pregnant where I live (France) with one mainstream political party embracing it and the Green supporting it covertly. It's a position which is popular amongst parts of most Green parties in Europe.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice It’s a fair question to debate. What’s nonsense is turning every economic question into this one.

majormajor 3y ago
Wouldn't that be a very different complaint, focusing on what judges reward vs what the actual arguments are? The original article touches on that more than the comment here. Instead of talking about if the tactic is valid or if the judges are doing a good job with it the comment here took a major tangent towards "actually the whole line of thought used is obviously flawed and wrong" with a dose of "nobody here is thinking about it they're just following the crowd." Which is suddenly not about tactics or scoring at all.
masswerk 3y ago
That premise is open to debate, there are Western countries with different systems. E.g., most Western European countries have a system called "social market economy" (which is not [exactly] capitalism).
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > premise is open to debate Again, nobody disagrees. But if you ask me if I want red or white wine, and I, instead, launch into a diatribe in Marxist-Leninism, that’s not a valid argument and it’s very annoying. Outside these debate circuits, it could come across as debilitating.
  - masswerk 3y ago
    Well as a classic example, you could debate "the unemployment rate is going down – is it good or bad?" (well, the Phillips curve…) and ask with Horkheimer/Adorno, if the entire notion of discussing this in terms of a relative change to a statistical rate isn't normalizing a dysfunctional aspect of economy, regardless, where it's at. This is still a debate, but it shifts the core argument to a conceptually more fundamental level.
- astrange 3y ago
  All countries in the world have mixed economies. (Except maybe Somalia or North Korea.) The US has a fair amount more publically owned sectors than Europe, which eg has privatized postal services.
  - jerojero 3y ago
    Yes. This is correct. Though the extent of it really matters, I always hear "Norway is a capitalist country" when their economy is primarily in the hands of the state, more than for example Venezuela. But people tend to point to Venezuela, and not Norway, as an example of a failed state owned economy. It's not really about "sectors" of the economy that are publicly owned but actual economic output. The money in the US is produced and it is in the hands of private individuals most of it. In Norway near 70% of it is produced and in the hands of the state. Obviously Norway is a particular example because they're a country that relies on natural resources extraction. But you can look at other similar countries in terms of their exports (Australia, Chile) and see how the Norwegian model differs. The USPS, for example, is a service. It's not really a business, it doesn't have to be profitable it ideally has to be sustainable but I wouldn't say it's a necessity. Not only that, it subsidised private businesses like Amazon.

civilized 3y ago

Neither critical theory nor capitalism are revolutionary. They each have large bastions where you will be at best low status, at worst cast out, for criticizing them. Also, the idea that revolution is inherently good has been a dead cliché since the IT industry got hold of it.

mitt_romney_12 3y ago
Under this interpretation nothing can ever be revolutionary. There is absolutely and ideology that is dominant in society at large and trying to say that the ideology that runs 95% of world powers and one that opposes it are equally "revolutionary" is counterfactual.
- civilized 3y ago
  You can be revolutionary by seeking big change at personal risk because you're not socially dominant (or militarily in other contexts). There have been times this happened. Who is doing that today?
  - defrost 3y ago
    Indigenous people resisting copper mines, gas pipelines, lithium mines, etc that are being proposed on territories they've been pushed back onto.
    - civilized 3y ago
      I doubt critical theorists do them any good.
      - defrost 3y ago
        Oddly enough the OG Critical Race Theory that originated in law schools about the globe decades ago addresses systemic inequality issues fairly directly. This seems to have been forgotten since Tucker Calson et al started redefining woke | CRT to mean whatever they currently hated to avoid addressing policy.

gotoeleven 3y ago

Critical theorists and academics in general are smart enough to be able to hold multiple contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time. For example, they are at the same time against capitalism and against starving to death in a gulag.

indigo945 3y ago
Today from the "drank the kool-aid" study book on the history of capitalism: before Adam Smith invented and advocated laissez-faire capitalism in 1776, all the people in the world were starving to death in gulags.
- gotoeleven 3y ago
  The only 20th century alternative to capitalism was socialism whose only fruits were a massive pile of skulls. So are you talking about going back to feudalism? Monarchy?

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

Unfortunately "critical theory" (as stereotyped in public discourse, but also as practiced in American academia) is generally like Marxian theory completely stripped of the materialist method and an actual attention to economic fundamentals. It's name-checked radicalism. Any "anti-capitalism" is purely skin-deep, a kind of moral grandstanding but on the whole without any program they could give as an alternative, or even the ability to fully explicate what capitalism really is. And the milieux that circulates this is really primarily liberal, centrist in practice, overwhelmingly supporting and electing quite mainstream fully "capitalist" political parties... but with the aesthetic or appeal to a past radical, anti-capitalist, socialist "scene"... without an actual meaningful program or alternative for the working class. A working class which has as a result almost completely divorced itself from this "left." Which is all the end product of the demolition of the organized socialist left & trade union movement in the west through the 70s and 80s and early 90s and the retreat of associated intellectuals into academia and cultural politics. If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power. A very general "anti-oppression" politic which is primarily concerned with individual concerns, not collective ones. This "left" that I keep hearing about from the Shapiro etc types foaming at the mouth, it's a caricature not only made by its opponents... but by itself. Just Liberalism, and a very 21st century American product.

thworp 3y ago
> Which is all the end product of the demolition of the organized socialist left & trade union movement in the west through the 70s and 80s and early 90s and the retreat of associated intellectuals into academia and cultural politics. This was not some grand conspiracy, the Socialists just realized that workers in the West were generally happy and well off (iirc Marcuse said "Capitalism delivers the goods") and not at all friendly to Socialists' plans of revolution. As a result there was a push to shift the propagandizing ("educating") to the next best oppressed groups they could find, with these being the familiar categories of LGBTQ, racial minorities (only certain ones), women etc.). Just like the socialist revolutionaries of old, the majority of the "New Left" are not parts of those groups. They are merely using them as a "revolutionary mass" whose misery and grievances are single-use tools for the revolutionaries to gain power. Lenin was fuming at Bolshevik party members who actually tried to negotiate better working conditions or pay pre-1917 because happy workers don't have "revolutionary potential" (a euphemism for not being desperate enough to want to put him in power). > If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power. I explored some of the reasons for that above, but everybody with some sense could see that capitalist societies were happier, almost never genocided their own population, were vastly more prosperous and even produced enough surplus to have better social welfare than Socialist countries. On the other hand Socialism always ended badly, sometimes catastrophically. People are not blind, and associating your political movement with 60 million corpses is not a smart move. The reason they don't challenge "real power" is because the objective is to gain the power vested in those institutions, not to challenge them.