Analytics wrote:What is “cultural Marxism”? You keep using the term, but if I doesn’t mean what I suggested (the battle between proletariat red-neck culture and bourgeoisie New York Times culture), then what does it mean?
"Cultural Marxism" is a term made up by unhinged right-wingers who fit the profile of an underclass engaged in a Marxists struggle, as you aptly pointed out; not to describe themselves, as they are unaware of what Marxism is and that they are
de facto Marxists, but to describe the elites who they blame for keeping them down. Genetically superior people tend to have this weird problem of getting beaten by genetically inferior people, that's why they need Trump to fight for them. Not sure how it happens. "Cultural Marxism" is a label for Marxism as cultural theory, as it exists in English departments, not economics departments, which I don't think would be a thing anymore.
A long time ago, Marxism split between Eastern Marxism, traditional communists, and Western Marxism, theorists who broke away from the authoritarian hardliners who served a merciless state and had forgotten about the people (anti-fascist European vs. Soviet interpretations of Marx). Recall that Marx built upon Friedrich Hegel's idea of a dialectic that Hegel used to explain history. Well, Western Marxists get back to this heady kind of theorizing as a way to explain human institutions, art, for instance. Somebody who can look at a painting and interpret it based on dialectical tensions rather than as a Shadesian pre-photographic representation of the physical world would be exactly the kind of a person to earn the label of a "cultural Marxists". Most importantly, such an interpretation would have nothing to do with the value of the painting in financial terms or the economics of the art market.
To give you an idea of how pointless this is to discuss, look up the debate between the Marxist Slvoj Zizek and the celebrated Capitalist, Jordan Peterson. When I stumbled upon the debate, I knew exactly what was going to happen. Zizek is an incomprehensible intellectual whose thinking inherits philosophers of the Continent, of the likes of Hegel. Jordan Peterson is a shallow mansphere bro who quickly read about Adam Smith as his preparation. Even as a psychologist, he apparently missed that one of his guys, Sigmund Freud, also lives a totally different life in the minds of continental philosophers than he does within the minds of true psychologists. just as Marx does. Zizek possibly doesn't know the first thing about Adam Smith. Peterson showed up expecting to debate Analytics. That would have been a good debate. Zizek probably knew exactly what was going to happen, but was too arrogant to break character and help somebody outside of his elitist clique understand anything. He lost a real opportunity. The people who attended the debate were all total idiots also, spending hundreds of dollars on tickets, when it should have been obvious to anyone who knows anything, that no discussion would be possible between the two. Maybe a few came for the dumpster fire.
The complete vapidity of the right-wing mind is once again on full display in Jordan Peterson. Peterson should have known better also what he was getting into. How did not know what Marxism is among academics? He never bothered to talk to anyone outside his department or ask a question? "Cultural Marxists" are often associated with postmodernists. Marxism -- Western Marxism and critical theory -- has become the tool of the Left to interpret cultural problems like gender and race. But here's the thing, Hound, that I find hilarious. Jordan Peterson, probably without realizing it, has begun to pick up on the same kind of intellectual jargon that theorists use to interpret gender in order to legitimize religion. Oh yeah. Listening to Peterson talk intellectually about religion is just like listening to the leftist academics you despise (but don't know anything about) talk about race. He's not doing this ironically, he's very serious about it.
"if you can't admire Joe Biden as a person then it's probably, you got a problem." -- Lindsey Graham