Gary Childress wrote: ↑Sat Jun 08, 2024 2:47 am
Marx was a communist and saw democratic socialism as flawed.
The Communists fight with courage and devotion on all sectors of the international class front, in the firm conviction that the victory of the proletariat is inevitable and cannot be averted. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their aims can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of the existing social conditions. Let the ruling class tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
-- Program of the Communist International, N.Y., 1936, p.85.
If I were to begin with what I think is the most relevant and active aspect of Marxian thinking, I would start from, let's say, its *call to action* that is expressed in this quote and in so many quotes.
If I were to *make statements* about the various Critical Theories and also about Cultural Marxism, I would begin by making statements again about its *call to action*. That is to say, one is invited to get involved with critical theory in the sense that one is invited to become an
active agent -- an acid -- whose aims could be
this and could be
that (there is openness to what subject is chosen) but that it is the destructive, or deconstructive, mode that is predominant.
In a vulgar sense -- that is to say the attraction to a vulgar man (common man, not necessarily informed by a clear sense of philosophy of values) -- what is presented to that man is a means by which his will can become powerful in a given present. The appeal is to that
will and no matter how grounded or centered that will is in formal ideas and values. Seen in this way then the appeal is made to the individual that "You can become powerful". You can and you will act powerfully within history and within your present.
However, it is the philosophical foundation of Marxianism which, when disclosed with clarity and honestly, is a structure built strictly within a set of reductionisms. These require exposure and enunciation.
The general critique of Cultural Marxism in our present is, it is certainly fair to say, something like
shots in the dark. Meaning that many people react intuitively, or perhaps even psycho-physically, to those extremely rapid transformations occurring in the social world, and feel that there are *agents* around them (unseen enemies but really enemies in the realm of ideas) who carry forward a revolutionary project within those categories we are all aware of: the activities of a (in my view distorted and distorting) philosophy of
queering within all established categories where, to speak generally, average people have constructed their value-system.
Queering
American children are learning a lot about sex, "gender," and sexuality in their schools. District administrators, teachers, and even librarians are obsessed with pushing inappropriate topics onto kids, all in the name of fostering "inclusion." Children today learn that they were "assigned a sex at birth" and can change their sex or "gender" at will. Kids are no longer learning to read, write, or do math, but they are learning how to be "radical gender" activists. Meanwhile, school districts keep parents in the dark, hiding critical information about the health and well-being of their children from them.
American education wasn't like this forty years ago. The cult of Queer Theory changed everything. Inspired by the religious teachings of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Queer Activists "queered" American education. Schools are no longer teaching children how to flourish in society—they are initiating children into the cult of Queer Theory. Once initiated, children "experience the queer" as they adopt a new cult identity and embark on the destructive path of social and medical "transition."
In this book, The Queering of the American Child, Logan Lancing and James Lindsay explain what Queer Theory is, where it comes from, how it got into schools, and what it's doing to children nationwide. The cult of Queer Theory preys on children, and it must be understood if we are ever to stop the madness.
However, the fuller definition of what *queering* refers to needs to be more profoundly examined. It means -- if you follow my previous analysis -- becoming an intellectual acid in relation to some, even perhaps any, established category of value and focusing an attacking will
on it and
against it. The arming of the will is what I have found to be the most telling aspect. So queering in that sense takes a stand to say that normativity within sexual categories is arbitrary; expressive of *power dynamics*; is oppressive and distorting of what is redefined as *genuine*.
In my view, many people and even perhaps most people struggle to clarify to themselves first what it is they perceive themselves to be fighting: i.e. they cannot well or accurately define their enemy, and so they *grope* for those intellectual armaments that are presented to them or that lie close at hand.