Anyone who's been to Sunday school can tell you this isn't a new concept, and is at least two millennia old (almost certainly longer, since Judaism has an even longer shared tradition). Christians have continued riding the coattails of their martyrs and "persecution" for centuries after they became the dominant force. If anything, the modern "woke victimhood" is merely the cultural legacy of evangelical Christianity that was (and arguably still is) deeply engrained in US culture.
The argument is probably that Judaism was the first religion to introduce concern for the victim into its moral teachings, and therefore inevitably there would be people hijacking that to differentiate themselves, boost their status through claims to victimhood.
I do think DEI has many religious and dogmatic believes that mirror other religions. It is pretty weak on the absolution part though. That is what a church sells, DEI sells an inquisition, making it even worse in some parts.
It is a bit weird overall. It decries conservatism, but is very heavy on fundamentalism. It is far more conservative than other groups it indicts with sexism/racism. And mostly these accusation are also false.
I'm confused... are you endorsing acting this way or against it?
Kinda seems like you're justifying the current action of "woke" people by discussing past injustices? Isn't the whole idea of the "woke" DEI initiative to fix injustices in our society?
I think they're just saying this occurrence isn't unique and it doesn't look like they approve of it. Many of us identify with our own struggles in deep ways. If you create an opportunity for people to organize around those struggles then people will, because as was said, there is power there. That power is in representation. The problem is generally in the silo'ing of representation. This is, imo, what things like intersectionality begin to address.
We have an entire country now that was founded based on legitimate religious persecution that devolved in the ~200 years since it's founding to go on to oppress others. We can and should do better.
Ok, and my point is that doing the exact same thing as those people did in the past isn't doing better. You don't fix oppression by moving that oppression to a new group.
Simply pointing out that victimhood has always existed serves no purpose at all in response to my original comment.
"This is, imo, what things like intersectionality begin to address."
How? All intersectionality does is create a competition for the most oppressed. You will never be enough of a victim. Nothing good comes of a society that focuses specifically on how oppressed they are and vies for the most oppressed group or person.
"We have an entire country now that was founded based on legitimate religious persecution"
Name a country where this hasn't happened. There are many where this is still happening and to a further extent than anything in the US.
Ironically, you're right in weird roundabout way that I do not think you fully comprehend. EVERYONE has been a victim of some sort so it's irrelevant and we shouldn't spend one iota more of our short lives trying to discern who the highest victims of our society are. What a waste and it does nothing to improve the supposed oppressed.
Your description of intersectionality is the exact opposite of what it is. It's entire purpose is to show everyone that playing the operation Olympics is a pointless game that no one wins. It's too show that everyone's struggles don't fit into neat little boxes that define them, and show that social problems are multidimensional that don't have simple solutions, and shows that a lot of DEI initiatives are superficial, and likely won't make any real difference.
Could you link me to the source that describes intersectionality in a way even remotely approximating that? Or where this "victim hierarchy" is detailed? I'd love to calculate my victim score™.
AOC isnt exactly a shining light of intersectionalism. In fact, she kind of prides herself in tribalism. Consider this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/aoc/status/1103163478024601601 Rather than trying to share ground with others she's being reminded that she regularly drowns out other people's voices. She went on to do exactly that after this.
If your point is that not all leftists are intersectionalists and not all people who use intersectionalist words actually have the values, then I'd respond with, "duh".
Intersectionality isn't about telling one person's story or exemplifying one person's pain. It's about showing that these things are interconnected and effect people differently, and ways in which you probably wouldn't expect. It does the absolute opposite of a hierarchy.
Well thats just it. If you're a Muslim female your score is higher than a Muslim male. If you're a gay trans disabled Muslim you're higher than the Muslim woman. Thats how you figure out your victim score(tm).
(I could care less about AOC. She was like 1% of content of the article I posted.)
You keep insisting there's a score or hierarchy, but I've yet to see an example of what that looks like. To me, and clearly others in this thread, the point is that there is no victim hierarchy. Nobody's victimhood, trauma, problems, whatever are any more important than anyone else's.
What’s missing here is a notion of intersectionality, which explicitly is about how people are not just a singular identity, but an “intersection” of many - some of which may confer privilege, some of which may be discriminated against.
Ignoring this body of work makes the linked article a straw man argument with some cherry picked examples that don’t even make a point (why am I supposed to care that AOC tweets about some people at the exclusion of others?)
So to answer my question, no you can't provide a source.
Even if it hadn't been the case that the article you linked failed to mention the topic actually under discussion even a single time, a random right wing ("brexiter") blogger is not a "source" for corroborating claims that intersectional egalitarians have a clear "victim heirarchy".
(And to be explicit, identity politics and intersectionality aren't the same thing, despite the right's habit of using them as meaningless scare words)
Wait, what is "neo-Marxism"? When he's not busy "waging moral war on Disney", Rufo is full of weird stuff like this --- "neo-Marxism" is a turn of phrase most famous for its use in Jordan Peterson's nonsensical coinage "postmodern neo-Marxism".
Marxism is distinguished as an ideology by totalizing class consciousness. That's the opposite of wokeness, which ratifies identity politics. In fact, "wokeness" is a fault line in modern leftist Twitter thinking, between the populist "dirtbag left" that eschews DEI-speak and the university left. Just how much work is the word "neo" doing in that name?
Most "DEI wokesters" are the farthest thing from Marxists. They're jealous and enthusiastic beneficiaries of the mortgage interest tax deduction.
"Collapsed mainline Protestantism"? Explain! Does being a Catholic draw me closer to or further away from "wokeism"? Because I have things to say about the intersection of DEI culture and Catholicism.
I think the parallel to Marxism that is being made here is more about epistemology and the rules of debate than about economic systems.
In Marxist terms, when your opponent disagrees with you, you don't engage with their argument on its merits, but look for deeper structural factors that have led them into such serious ideological error, factors that render your opponent incapable of understanding the truth of your correct argument. In Marxism, these center around the person's class background, their internalized class interest, petty bourgeois thinking, etc. They may be conscious or unconscious, but in all cases they are the ultimate motive force behind the person's wrong beliefs.
In modern elite ideology (whatever name we give it), the role of class background is replaced by the cross-product of various -isms and forms of oppression that prevent the privileged from being able to admit deep truths that are obvious to the marginalized.
In both cases, it's a kind of nihilistic structuralism which asserts that the only meaningful way to evaluate an argument is by examining the identity, circumstances, and background of the person making it, as those factors relate to societal networks of power and oppression. In this form of debate, you counter what someone is saying by pointing out who they are, and whose interests they represent.
I'm more inclined to take your word for it than Chris Rufo's, but I don't see what's distinctively Marxist about the rhetorical pathology you're talking about. That same nihilistic structuralism animated fascism, too, didn't it? If you're describing a thing and it's opposite at the same time...?
Critical Race Theory emerged from mid-20th century Black Power and Colonial Independence movements, which often either were literally Marxist movements in their own right, or intimately tied to them. There are countless examples of the close relationship, but one of the most pertinent embodiments would in be Frantz Fanon, who is one of the most important if not the most important ideological fathers of both Critical Race Theory (as well as other, older movements) and to a lesser extent several Marxist movements in post-colonial Africa.
A lot of anti-CRT rhetoric is clearly trying to use the Marxism link to discredit, out-of-hand, CRT. American politics has long been like that--guilt by association with Socialism. I understand the reflexive instinct to push back. But if you try to deny that the links exist, all you're doing is discrediting yourself and others, bolstering those pundits' credibility. The links absolutely exist and are substantial. The nuance is that they're not substantial in the ways that their rhetoric implies. (It's like if you took Christianity and replaced Jesus with Santa Claus. You couldn't plausibly claim the new religion wasn't an offshoot of Christianity, and much of it would be indecipherable without understanding historical Christianity and the figure of Jesus. But it would simultaneously be true that the new religion would in some of its most fundamental dimensions be entirely incompatible and incomparable to Christianity.)
If anybody wants to have an informed opinion on these debates, they could do much worse than reading Frantz Fanon. IMO, CRT begins and ends with Frantz Fanon. If you read one of his seminal works, "Black Skin, White Faces", you've read all you'll ever need to read regarding the ideological underpinnings of not only CRT but much of modern liberal American identity politics, either because it descends directly from Fanon, or because Fanon expertly articulates the experiences and reasoning. I found it a very powerful and enlightening book.[1] But Fanon takes (in the book, but especially in subsequent works and the arc of his entire public life) the ideology to its logical conclusion, which is permanent apartheid, and therefore lays bare the stark choice being made when one adopts the axioms shared between liberal identity politics and Fanon's philosophy. I can't refute Fanon's ultimate conclusion that black-skinned minorities will never be able to find equality among a white-skinned majority (or, presumably, vice-versa if the historical script were flipped), but I choose to believe that there must exist some way to get there; otherwise as Fanon persuasively argues, all identity politics can possibly do is mitigate some of the worst injustices, but ultimately never eradicate the fundamental inequities. And therein lies much of Fanon's motivation for his Marxism advocacy--he thought the only way forward was for black countries to go their own way, and that necessarily involved adopting Marxism as capitalist systems would ultimately benefit the white, colonial establishment at the expense of black countries and communities.
Also, FWIW, modern Marxist scholarship provides some of the most vehement and technical opposition to CRT for precisely the reason you hinted at--replacing class conflict with racial conflict is anathema to Marxism. But when you read that scholarship, it's also obvious that CRT and Marxism use nearly identical language. CRT is indisputably descended from the culture of Marxist scholarship. That's also why modern Marxists are so adept at counterarguments--they're familiar with many of the underlying modes of reasoning. (20th century Marxists weren't very interested in opposing these philosophies for geopolitical reasons.)
[1] I first read it 20 years ago, before CRT entered mainstream liberal discourse, and before I had any knowledge of CRT as a school of thought or movement. When I did learn of CRT, the parallels to Fanon's ideas were immediately obvious. Until then mainstream liberal identity politics hadn't moved much beyond, say, Cornel West's philosophy in "Race Matters". West has always been very careful to not cross the line into race essentializing territory, and it's for that reason that in the past several years West has been condemned by the identity politics movement as it continues to follow identity politics to its logical end.
Oh boy. Look, I just wanted to ding Rayiner for buying Rufo's schtick. In the Rufo cinematic universe, Gramsci is the most dangerous thinker of the 20th century.
Would Crenshaw agree that Fanon is the beginning and end of CRT? Race, Reform, and Retrenchment[1] contains an extended, detailed critique of Critical Legal Studies for instrumentalizing and superficializing Black struggle, and for the premise that in a conflict between avoiding legitimizing the dominant class (in the broader Gramscian sense) and advancing Black material interests, it's Black interests that need to give.
For that matter, you can go back to Crenshaw's Demarginalizing the Intersection[2] and see that (a) it is in the main a par-for-the-course case-by-case legal case study like lots of other law articles, and not an inscrutable blob of woke jargon, and (b) not especially Marxist? (Amusingly, this article was weaponized, with Crenshaw's approval, by Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders).
If CRT has anything to teach, it's that if you dismiss people's lived experience[1] you're only causing more trouble. When people see parallels between CRT and Marxism, you can either dismiss them or take them seriously. The fact that you disagree about the scope or meaning or implications of those parallels is a different matter. If you outright dismiss what seems patently obvious to people, that's where they'll stay stuck; and moreover, they'll take your dismissal as evidence of relative credibility.
I get that there are trolls out, including professional trolls, who weaponize innuendo and have zero interest in engaging in honest debate. But the reason for abstaining from quick dismissals is for the benefit of the people they're targeting, not the trolls. I guess what I should have written was: CRT absolutely has deep connections with Marxist thought. See, e.g. Frantz Fanon. So what?
I can't not point this out, even though it's about the orangest thing I can write here: Fanon died roughly 30 years before CRT was a thing, and, moreover, CRT is an offshoot of Critical Legal Studies (which in turn is an offshoot of critical theory), and Fanon wasn't a legal scholar. He's a race-oriented critical theorist (I can't believe I'm writing this), right, not a critical race theorist?
Again, just back to Crenshaw, who wrote at length about how Critical Legal Studies loses the plot about racism in its zeal to reconsider the entire liberal legal structure.
I promise I'm just writing this because, like many HN comments, it is a sort of rhetorical burp I just have to get out.
More seriously: it is somewhat frustrating that any serious analysis of oppressor/oppressed systems can be dismissed as "Marxist" because of Gramsci and hegemony, because oppression is obviously a real thing (ask any evangelical Christian) but neo-Marxism is principally trotted out when the oppressed are disfavored. But then, lots of academics who pretty clearly aren't Marxist are happy to use Gramscian neo-Marxism as a tool, so, sure, maybe you're just right about this.
> Look, I just wanted to ding Rayiner for buying Rufo's schtick
It’s so funny that criticism of Rufo always revolves into this esoteric academic debate. I’m a plebe and I’ve never heard of any of those people. Rufo came to my attention because he leaked material that was given at a teacher training in Loudoun County, right next to where I grew up. As far as I can tell the bulk of his journalism is just publishing these leaks.
Maybe a better comparison is to the imams in madrasas teaching young Muslim kids that they’re oppressed by the west? Who knows? Whatever you label it, these materials shouldn’t be in the same building as kids, and the people who green lighted that should be out of a job.
If you're not familiar with Rufo, a fun fact about him is that he ran for Seattle City Council on a pro-LGBT+ platform just a couple years ago. He's a professional troll.
I'd have to do a proper nerdout to give you a more intelligible answer. It's hard to talk about this stuff without slipping into boring political rants. The gist of the matter seems to come down to these bits:
1. A schema of the world as an unfair arrangement of oppression and coercion
2. The claim to a correct understanding of how this system operates and perpetuates istelf
3. The belief that contrary thoughts and beliefs, however sophisticated they sound, are a simple product of these more fundamental power relations, which must be unmasked
4. A plan for how to make everything better through transformative change, which includes a radical remodeling of the self to expunge wrong belief and wrong thinking
5. A totalizing belief that everything falls within this ideological universe of discourse. You can't go off and study butterflies or Taylor series and tap out of the battle.
This is the shape of the "thing" that makes people see a similarity between modern elite belief and Marxism. I'm not familiar enough with fascist ideology to answer your question, but consider that fascism was a pretty incoherent and fast-changing target, while the core beliefs of Marxism have shown remarkable staying power despite a body count that would have doomed lesser belief systems (like fascism!). Note also that, with small changes, the schema I gave above is a religious schema; part of the power of totalizing ideology is that it plugs into the mental and spiritual machinery of religious faith.
That's a real phenomenon! Obviously it is. I only dispute that you can:
(a) Trace it back to Gramsci, call it neo-Marxist, and then accuse anyone who ever bought an Robin DiAngelo book and performatively left it on their desk at work of being a neo-Marxist, and
(b) Seriously argue that the phenomenon is not only a religion, but is simultaneously the result and cause of the ordination of women in the Episcopalian church --- which is absolutely part of Rufo's subtext.
I do not want to get in the line of fire between anybody and Ibram X Kendi. I get that there's lots to criticize. It's not that I think there isn't a lot of frankly silly Marxist stuff happening in, like, the "institutional" Black Lives Matter movement. I just dispute that Chris Rufo knows what he's talking about, or cares, and that his summary of "wokeism", the one quoted above, makes sense.
Prepared to be wrong about all of this, but don't need to nerd out about it any more than you want to.
I confess that I do not know who Rufo is or his opinions on any topic, and only jumped in to this thread because you seemed honestly at a loss about why people were being accused of Marxism despite having comfortably bourgeois beliefs about who should own the means of production.
I endorse your not knowing who Rufo is. I am retreating from the bailey of my claim that there is no such thing as neo-Marxism (though I will go to the mattresses for the claim that Jordan Peterson doesn't know that it means) and retrenching in my motte of none of this having the slightest bit to do with the collapse of mainline protestantism.
> Marxism is distinguished as an ideology by totalizing class consciousness. That's the opposite of wokeness, which ratifies identity politics.
It's an ideology that replaces Marxism's "totalizing class consciousness" with a "totalizing race consciousness."
> Just how much work is the word "neo" doing in that name?
A lot, and the "Marxism" is doing very little. It's a clumsy construction. But the meaning is clear in context.
> "Collapsed mainline Protestantism"? Explain!
It’s a religious revival, but without Jesus. They’re descendants of Puritans who don’t believe the theology anymore, but have the same religious zeal, sense of moral universalism, and faith that America's institutions belong to them. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbbxQqKXUIk (warning: offensive period language). I’ve had several experiences with woke whites where, when I pointed out that the minorities they purport to speak for disagreed with them about this or that, they responded with the same sentiment as Matt Damon in the final line of that clip.
I don’t know anything about Catholicism. I will say that there’s something about America where every religion takes on elements of Protestantism—especially the reliance on the conscious of lay people rather than doctrines announced by learned religious authorities.
So it's... not Marxism at all. None of the rest of Marx makes sense if you replace "class" with "race". Who owns the means of production? Or is it the means of something else now? It's like calling capitalism "neo-fascism", or, for that matter, taking any ${BADTHING} and attaching neo- to it to craft a slur.
The meaning is clear in context because you know who he's talking about. But you just called this "the best description you've seen", and it's not a description in the least.
I don't care that you disagree with DEI types and with wokeism in general. I have my own qualms! But don't elevate hucksters like Rufo. And stop following him on Twitter. He's a clown.
Right, but the world is full of conflict perspectives, not least among right-wingers. They can't all be Marxists, just because Gramsci came up with an ultra-generalizable concept.
(I think we agree, just writing it down to clarify my thoughts).
It's interesting that calling CRT "Marxist" gives the Fox News watchers a familiar enemy to fulminate against, and it gives the CRT peddlers themselves unearned credibility as dangerous dissidents, so it's a misidentification that serves everyone but the dwindling number of actual Marxists, and pedants bent on accuracy.
Anyone who's been to Sunday school can tell you this isn't a new concept, and is at least two millennia old (almost certainly longer, since Judaism has an even longer shared tradition). Christians have continued riding the coattails of their martyrs and "persecution" for centuries after they became the dominant force. If anything, the modern "woke victimhood" is merely the cultural legacy of evangelical Christianity that was (and arguably still is) deeply engrained in US culture.