Jovial Monk wrote on Nov 30
th, 2024 at 3:03pm:
My name was removed because you didn’t have a skerrick of evidence that I was a cultural marxist.
You are really pathetic.
Glad to see you removed Kat’s name after being told SEVERAL times that she is dead.
I will be back to work my way down your pathetic list to have you remove names one by one.
It is, of course, a slight exaggeration to say that no one is a Marxist anymore. Some people have not yet received the memo. There are also the “left libertarians,” who are the rump of 20th century academic Marxism (these are people who cling to the self-ownership claim, while seeking to block the anti-egalitarian conclusions that Nozick derived from it). There is also a recent mini-trend of “neo-Republican” Marxists, but they are basically just liberals, who instead of appealing to Rawls’s egalitarianism, instead want to rely on Philip Pettit’s “non-domination” norm (which I take to be just another flavour of liberalism) to reconstruct Marxism.
But beyond this, the collapse of academic Marxism – as a body of normatively motivated social criticism – has been complete. Hence the fundamental unseriousness of contemporary Marxism in public discourse.
Popular Marxism (along with the sort of Gramscian or “cultural” Marxism one finds in critical studies departments) has become a religion without a theology. I can understand why some people might be reluctant to read serious Marxist theory, if the primary upshot is that it turns you into a liberal, but if the alternative is the style of aggressive, in-your-face stupidity found in Jacobin magazine (i.e. “I’m going to talk like a Marxist, even though none of it makes any sense, because you can’t stop me!”), then it seems to me a price worth paying.
Some people have failed to notice these trends, unfortunately, because there was no point at which any one person “refuted” Marxism. Serious thinkers, for the most part, just slowly drifted away from it, the way that guests at a party filter out of the living room into the kitchen, where the conversation is livelier. In this case, the conversation that they drifted toward was Rawlsianism. That is how Rawls wound up triumphing over Marxism – by rendering it superfluous, making it so that no one needed to be a Marxist any more.
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Cultural Marxism is everywhere. (Read 47343 times)
