Philosophy Now Forum

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 11:11 pm

LuckyR wrote: ↑Mon May 27, 2024 6:14 pm At the current time, woke is a rallying cry for the MAGA crowd. It has lost it's original meaning, from a practical standpoint.

Oh?? Have I missed something?
What do you mean?

LuckyR wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 5:53 am

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 11:11 pm

LuckyR wrote: ↑Mon May 27, 2024 6:14 pm At the current time, woke is a rallying cry for the MAGA crowd. It has lost it's original meaning, from a practical standpoint.

Oh?? Have I missed something?
What do you mean?

A legitimate label, like woke, is initially created by a group to describe themselves. That is, those who are woke define the term. In many instances that's where it will lie. However, in situations where the initial group has stirred up considerable ire, as in this particular case, in Modern times it is a very common tactic for those who oppose the initial group to co-opt their label, redefine it in a very negative way, then trot out the, now ridiculous, redefinition as red meat to gin up the base. After all, who wouldn't oppose the heinous caricature that is now that original label?

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 12:17 am

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 11:13 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 10:27 pm
Good heavens, Gary...do you listen to nothing?

Marx was a pseudo-economic theorist.

Marx is the father of modern economic theory,...

Marx was a horrendous fraud, whose theories have been dead wrong every time, and who has precipitated far more deaths than any human being in history by his irresponsible nonsense. Even his current admirers call his theory "crude Marxism," and claim to have surpassed it. Not hard to do, since it's simply the most disastrous theory in history.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 12:23 am

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 11:23 pm Cultural Marxism is a phrase used mostly by right wing reactionaries

"Reactionaries." A totally Marxist way of talking.

Sculptor wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 11:59 am Like you Bible

Sculptor wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 12:00 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 12:23 am

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 11:23 pm Cultural Marxism is a phrase used mostly by right wing reactionaries

"Reactionaries." A totally Marxist way of talking.

I'll take that as a compliment thank you

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 1:34 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 12:00 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 12:23 am
"Reactionaries." A totally Marxist way of talking.

I'll take that as a compliment thank you

Don't forget your punctuation.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 1:34 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 11:59 am Like your Bible

Like me Bible?

Me no care what you say. You is igernent.

Sculptor wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 1:37 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 1:34 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 12:00 pm

I'll take that as a compliment thank you

Don't forget your punctuation.

Don't forget your other brain cell. The one you are using is lonely.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 6:27 pm

Consul wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 6:14 pm If the term "the Woke Left" is used so generally and vaguely that it becomes synonymous with "the Left" or "the Socialist Left", it thereby becomes quite useless; so its reference needs to be narrowed down both historically and ideologically.

No, I think it's a good umbrella-term. That "umbrella" covers three groups: 1. The informed theorists of the movement, 2. The half-informed leaders and advocates of the popular "actions," and 3. the ignorant masses manipulated by the former two. And the reason is that because the level 1ers are in charge of the whole bunch, they're all moving in the same direction, whether they know it or not. The level 2ers are being "handled," and the level 3ers are pawns and dupes. It's the level 1ers that are in control of the program, ultimately.

So the subcategories "narrow down" the definition, and the main category catches the key commonality between them. That's really quite a precise way of viewing the situation.

"The diversity of sources and forms of resistance complicates attempts to identify shared features of the various currents [of the New Left—added], but among those most commonly cited are a libertarian and democratic impulse, an emphasis on cultural as well as political transformation, an extension of the traditional left’s focus on class struggle to acknowledge multiple forms and bases of oppression, including race and gender, and a rejection of bureaucracy and traditional forms of political organization in favour of direct action and participatory democracy. In theoretical terms, the New Left’s major contribution was to a process of revision and diversification within Marxism and related doctrines, especially with regard to concepts of class, agency, ideology, and culture.
…
The New Left produced no unified body of political theory. In many countries, including the United States, it was primarily an activist force, although in France, West Germany, and Britain theoretical production was also an important concern. The range of theoretical influences on which New Left currents drew was extremely diverse…"

Quelle: https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-Left

"The left-wing position was already clearly defined at the time when the distinction between left and right was invented. Leftists believe, with the Jacobins of the French Revolution, that the goods of this world are unjustly distributed, and that the fault lies not in human nature but in usurpations practised by a dominant class. They define themselves in opposition to established power, the champions of a new order that will rectify the ancient grievance of the oppressed.

Two attributes of the new order justify the pursuit of it: liberation and ‘social justice’. These correspond roughly to the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution, but only roughly. The liberation advocated by left-wing movements today does not mean simply freedom from political oppression or the right to go about one’s business undisturbed. It means emancipation from the ‘structures’: from the institutions, customs and conventions that shaped the ‘bourgeois’ order, and which established a shared system of norms and values at the heart of Western society. Even those left-wingers who eschew the libertarianism of the 1960s regard liberty as a form of release from social constraints. Much of their literature is devoted to deconstructing such institutions as the family, the school, the law and the nation state through which the inheritance of Western civilization has been passed down to us. This literature, seen at its most fertile in the writings of Foucault, represents as ‘structures of domination’ what others see merely as the instruments of civil order.

Liberation of the victim is a restless cause, since new victims always appear over the horizon as the last ones escape into the void. The liberation of women from male oppression, of animals from human abuse, of homosexuals and transsexuals from ‘homophobia’, even of Muslims from ‘Islamophobia’ – all these have been absorbed into the more recent leftist agendas, to be enshrined in laws and committees overseen by a censorious officialdom. Gradually the old norms of social order have been marginalized, or even penalized as violations of ‘human rights’. Indeed, the cause of ‘liberation’ has seen the proliferation of more laws than were ever invented to suppress it – just think of what is now ordained in the cause of ‘non-discrimination’.

Likewise the goal of ‘social justice’ is no longer equality before the law, or the equal claim to the rights of citizenship, as these were advocated at the Enlightenment. The goal is a comprehensive rearrangement of society, so that privileges, hierarchies, and even the unequal distribution of goods are either overcome or challenged. The more radical egalitarianism of the nineteenth-century Marxists and anarchists, who sought for the abolition of private property, perhaps no longer has widespread appeal. But behind the goal of ‘social justice’ there marches another and more dogged egalitarian mentality, which believes that inequality in whatever sphere – property, leisure, legal privilege, social rank, educational opportunities, or whatever else we might wish for ourselves and our children – is unjust until proven otherwise. In every sphere in which the social position of individuals might be compared, equality is the default position.'"

(Scruton, Roger. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. pp. 3-4)

Consul wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 4:35 pm If the term "the Woke Left" is to be used at all, it will be on a par with the umbrella term "the New Left" and refer to something equally heterogeneous.

"The so-called New Left is also a complex of phenomena witnessing, on the one hand, to the universalization of Marxist phraseology and, on the other, to the disintegration of the doctrine and its inadequacy to modern social problems. It is hard to define the common ideological features of all groups and sects which claim to belong to the New Left or are considered by others to form part of it. A group of this name with revolutionary aspirations arose in France in the later fifties (the Parti Socialiste Unifié grew out of it to some extent), and similar groups were formed in Britain and other countries. The movement was catalysed by the Soviet Twentieth Congress and, perhaps to a still greater degree, by the invasion of Hungary and the Suez crisis of 1956; its literary organs in Britain were the New Reasoner and the University and Left Review, which later merged into the New Left Review. The New Left condemned Stalinism in general and the invasion of Hungary in particular, but its members differed among themselves as to how far the ‘degeneration’ of the Soviet system was inevitable and whether there was any prospect of the political, moral, and intellectual renewal of the existing Communist parties. At the same time they emphasized their fidelity to Marxism as the ideology of the working class, and some even professed allegiance to Leninism. They also took care to differentiate their criticism of Stalinism from that of the social democrats or the Right, and to avoid being classed as ‘anti-Communist’; they were at pains to preserve a revolutionary and Marxist ethos and to match their criticism of Stalinism with renewed attacks on Western imperialism, colonialism, and the arms race.

The New Leftists contributed to the ferment in the Communist parties and to the general revival of ideological discussion, but they do not appear to have worked out any alternative model of socialism except in very general terms. The designation ‘New Left’ was claimed by various dissidents who sought to revive ‘true Communism’ outside the existing parties, as well as bigger and smaller Maoist, Trotskyist, and other groups. In France the name gauchiste is generally used by groups who emphasize their opposition to all forms of authority, including Leninist ‘advance guard’ parties. The post-Stalinist years saw a certain revival of Trotskyism, and this led to the formation of numerous splinter groups, separate ‘internationals’, etc, In the sixties the term ‘New Left‘ was generally used in Europe and North America as a collective label for student ideologies which, while not identifying with Soviet Communism and often expressly disavowing it, used the phraseology of worldwide anti-capitalist revolution and looked chiefly to the Third World for models and heroes. So far these ideologies have not produced any intellectual results worth the name. Their characteristic tendencies may be described as follows.

Firstly, they maintain that the concept of a society's ‘ripeness’ for revolution is a bourgeois deceit; a properly organized group can make a revolution in any country and bring about a radical change of social conditions (‘revolution here and now’). There is no reason to wait; existing states and governing elites must be destroyed by force, without arguing about the political and economic organization of the future—the revolution will decide these in its own good time.

Secondly, the existing order deserves destruction in all its aspects without exception: the revolution must be worldwide, total, absolute, unlimited, all-embracing. As the idea of total revolution began in the universities, its first blows were naturally directed against ‘fraudulent’ academic institutions, against knowledge and logical skills. Periodicals, pamphlets, and leaflets declared that revolutionaries must not get into discussion with teachers who asked them to explain their demands or terminology. There was much talk of ‘liberation’ from the inhuman oppression that required students to pass exams or to learn one subject rather than another. It was also a revolutionary duty to oppose all reforms in the universities or in society: the revolution must be universal, and all partial reforms were a conspiracy of the establishment. Either everything or nothing must be changed, for, as Lukács, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt school had taught, capitalist society was an indivisible whole and could only be transformed as such.

Thirdly, the working class could not be relied on, as it had been irredeemably depraved by the bourgeoisie. At the present time students were the most oppressed members of society, and therefore the most revolutionary. All were oppressed, however: the bourgeoisie had introduced the cult of labour, and the first duty was therefore to stop work—the necessities of life would be forthcoming in some way or another. One disgraceful form of oppression was the prohibition of drugs, and this too must be fought against. Sexual liberation, freedom from work, from academic discipline and restrictions of all kinds, universal and total liberation—all this was the essence of Communism.

Fourthly, the patterns of total revolution were to be found in the Third World. The heroes of the New Left were African, Latin American, and Asian political leaders. The United States must be transformed into the likeness of China, Vietnam, or Cuba. Apart from leaders of the Third World and Western ideologists interested in its problems, like Frantz Fanon and Régis Debray, the student New Left especially admired negro leaders in the United States who advocated violence and black racialism.

While the ideological fantasies of this movement, whic reached its climax around 1968-9, were no more than a nonsensical expression of the whims of spoilt middle-class children, and while the extremists among them were virtually indistinguishable from Fascist thugs, the movement did without doubt express a profound crisis of faith in the values that had inspired democratic societies for many decades. In this sense it was a ‘genuine’ movement despite its grotesque phraseology; the same, of course, could be said of Nazism and Fascism. The sixties brought into the public view acute problems which humanity can only solve, if it can at all, on a worldwide basis: overpopulation, environmental pollution, the poverty, backwardness, and economic failures of the Third World; at the same time it has become clear that owing to predatory and contagious nationalism the likelihood of eflective global action is very small. All this, together with political and military tension and fears of a world war, not to mention various symptoms of crisis in the educational field, has brought about a general atmosphere of insecurity and a feeling that present remedies are ineffectual. The situation is one of a kind frequently met with in history, where people feel they have got into a blind alley; they long desperately for a miracle, they believe that a single magic key will open the door to paradise, they indulge chiliastic and apocalyptic hopes. The sense of universal crisis is intensified by the speed of communication, whereby all local problems and disasters are at once known all over the world and merge into a general sense of defeat. The New Left explosion of academic youth was an aggressive movement born of frustration, which easily created a vocabulary for itself out of Marxist slogans, or rather some expressions from the Marxist store: liberation, revolution, alienation, etc. Apart from this, its ideology really has little in common with Marxism. It consists of ‘revolution’ without the working class; hatred ofmodern technology as such (Marx glorified technical progress and believed that one reason for the impending breakdown of capitalism was its inability to sustain such progressAa prophecy that could not be repeated today with absurdity): the cult of primitive societies (in which Marx took scarcely any interest) as the source of progress; hatred of education and specialized knowledge; and the belief in the American lumpenproletariat as a great revolutionary force. Marxism, however, did have an apocalyptic side which has come to the fore in many of its later versions, and a handful of words and phrases from its vocabulary suificed to convince the New Left that it was possible at a stroke to transform the world into a miraculous paradise, the only obstacles to this consummation being the big monopolies and university professors. The chief complaint of the New Left against official Communist parties was and is that they are not revolutionary enough.

In general we have a situation today in which Marxism provides ideological pabulum for a wide range of interests and aspirations, many of them unconnected with one another. This is a long way, of course, from the medieval type of universalism in which all conflicting human interests and ideas clothed themselves in the garb of Christianity and spoke its language. The intellectual panoply of Marxism is only used by certain schools of thought, but they are quite numerous. Marxist slogans are invoked by various political movements in Africa and Asia and by countries striving to emerge from backwardness by methods of state coercion. The Marxist label adopted by such movements or applied to them by the Western Press often means no more than that they receive war material from the Soviet Union or China, and ‘socialism’ sometimes means little more than that a country is ruled despotically and that no political opposition is allowed. Scraps of Marxist phraseology are used by various feminist groups and even so-called sexual minorities. Marxist language is least frequently met with in the context of defending democratic freedoms, though this does sometimes occur. Altogether Marxism has achieved a high degree of universality as an ideological weapon. Russia’s interests as a world Power, Chinese nationalism, the economic claims of French workers, the industrialization of Tanzania, the activities of Palestine terrorists, black racialism in the United States—all express themselves in Marxist terms. One cannot seriously judge the Marxist ‘orthodoxy’ of every one of these movements and interests: the name of Marx is often invoked by leaders who have heard that Marxism means having a revolution and taking power in the people's name, this being the sum total of their theoretical knowledge."

(Kolakowski, Leszek. Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 3: The Breakdown. Translated by P. S. Falla. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. pp. 487-92)

Consul wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 4:35 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 6:27 pm

Consul wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 6:14 pm If the term "the Woke Left" is used so generally and vaguely that it becomes synonymous with "the Left" or "the Socialist Left", it thereby becomes quite useless; so its reference needs to be narrowed down both historically and ideologically.

No, I think it's a good umbrella-term. That "umbrella" covers three groups: 1. The informed theorists of the movement, 2. The half-informed leaders and advocates of the popular "actions," and 3. the ignorant masses manipulated by the former two. And the reason is that because the level 1ers are in charge of the whole bunch, they're all moving in the same direction, whether they know it or not. The level 2ers are being "handled," and the level 3ers are pawns and dupes. It's the level 1ers that are in control of the program, ultimately.

So the subcategories "narrow down" the definition, and the main category catches the key commonality between them. That's really quite a precise way of viewing the situation.

No, because your threefold distinction between groups of people can be applied to any (Left or Right) political movement.

The Woke Left is not the Left as a whole

To equate the Woke Left with the post-70s "New New Left" or (Academic) Cultural Left is already a verbal anachronism,

...it does make sense to use "the Woke Left" to refer to the New New Left, which emerged continuously from the New Left during the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s. (The rise of Cultural Studies in academia played an important role in that process.)

The New Left produced no unified body of political theory.

"The left-wing position was already clearly defined at the time when the distinction between left and right was invented. Leftists believe, with the Jacobins of the French Revolution, that the goods of this world are unjustly distributed, and that the fault lies not in human nature but in usurpations practised by a dominant class. They define themselves in opposition to established power, the champions of a new order that will rectify the ancient grievance of the oppressed.

This literature, seen at its most fertile in the writings of Foucault, represents as ‘structures of domination’ what others see merely as the instruments of civil order.

Liberation of the victim is a restless cause, since new victims always appear over the horizon as the last ones escape into the void.

The liberation of women from male oppression,..

...The goal is a comprehensive rearrangement of society, so that privileges, hierarchies, and even the unequal distribution of goods are either overcome or challenged.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon May 27, 2024 6:39 pm More academically, ["woke"] means "Cultural Marxist." Thus it describes a large group of the Radical Left, including a wide variety of mutually-conflictual agendas, everything from race to sex to 'gender' to transing to fat to disability to aboriginality...and so on...as many grievance-styles as can be invoked to promote social disestablishment, which is supposed (according to the Neo-Marxists) to issue automatically in Marxist "liberations" of unspecified kinds.

"Marxism lost its pivotal ideological role in leftist politics with the rise of the new social movements. In the United States, where the social base of Marxism was significantly narrower than in Europe, these movements were almost immediately at odds with Marxism and with the concentration of leftist politics on labor and class conflict. They had to struggle against Marxism to establish the legitimacy of their own oppositional claims and practices. Although Marxism facilitated social criticism among gays, feminists, and blacks, the privilege it accorded class politics rendered racial, gender, and sexual struggles secondary and marginal. These movements broke away from Marxism. By the mid-seventies, the left, in Europe and in the United States, was socially and ideologically decentered. It was composed of a plurality of movements, each focused on its own local or particular struggles to build autonomous communities, to evolve its own language of social analysis and to forge its own oppositional politic."

(Seidman, Steven. "Postmodern Social Theory as Narrative with a Moral Intent." In Postmodernism & Social Theory: The Debate over General Theory, edited by Steven Seidman & David G. Wagner, 47-81. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992. p. 50)

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 10:27 pm

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2024 9:55 pm Considering that Marx wrote almost nothing specifically advocating for gays, and transgender people (he generally referred to them as part of the "lumpenproletariat" and thought they were generally not useful to the "Revolution"), how is it figured that so called "Woke" culture is "Cultural Marxism". What is Lindsay's argument that ties "Marxism" to the current counter-culture? Does Linsday have an argument, or does he just make an unsubstantiated claim?

Good heavens, Gary...do you listen to nothing?

Marx was a pseudo-economic theorist. He did not use culture as his orientation point. Theology, yes; culture, no. And he knew nothing about transers: they didn't exist in his day. There were only a vanishingly small set of body-dysmorphic males, and none of them had any chemicals or surgeries. I know of nothing he wrote about gays. I don't think he gave them any thought.

It was Marx's followers, the Neo-Marxists, who converted his allegedly-economic theory to use culture instead. Nobody ever said otherwise. And the history bears that out. Go and read Marcuse, Gramsci, Lukacs, Foucault, Freire and that whole bunch, if you want to know about what Marx's admirers did with Marx after his death. It's all there. It's not a secret, or a "conspiracy theory," or even in any doubt: these jokers spelled out exactly what they were going to do with Marxism, and why, and how they were still hoping to get their "revolution."

Or more simply, go and read Lindsay. Or listen to his podcasts, if you prefer that. Then you won't make such obvious mistakes, and won't have to ask me to regurgitate what Lindsay himself has already so cogently argued.

Consul wrote: ↑Sat Jun 01, 2024 5:43 pm How Marxist is the contemporary Woke Left really?