Worth Considering

It's not true that the 'Woke' are strictly Marxists, not most of them: I know some who are, strictly, but most of them are just adapting Marxist argument styles to issues of gender or race. This author argues that they aren't at all Marxists, however, because they've abandoned collectivism. 

I'm going to think about that for a bit before I respond to it. I feel like it's wrong, but I'm going to work through it for a while before I decide. The one thing I will say now is that a good friend of mine who actually is a self-declared Marxist is happily working on reparations programs around the black community in one town in Georgia. He's right that the community was abused, historically and not all that long ago, by the expansion of the local university. Some of his ideas for making that right are not terrible;  and ironically, sometimes it requires him to defend non-Marxist things like property rights. 

So maybe there's flexibility, and maybe there's cross-pollination; but it does seem to me like there's a lot of compatibility, at least. I'll think about it; in the meantime, read his argument.

9 comments:

David Foster said...

"He's right that the (black) community was abused, historically and not all that long ago, by the expansion of the local university."'

...I wonder: was it *only* black people who were harmed by the university's expansion, or was the expansion also harmful to a broader category of people who weren't affluent/connected enough to defend themselves effectively?

Grim said...

That's a good question. You might contrast it with (say) the TVA's destruction of whole farms and villages in order to make lakes from which they could generate electrical power. The TVA itself tells this story as a story of their noble sacrifice for 'the common' or 'the greater' good.

https://www.tva.com/About-TVA/Our-History/Built-for-the-People/The-Lost-Towns-of-Pickwick

Now, I happen to think that the TVA is full of it. Those people weren't asked and didn't agree; they were told and they were forced. The TVA could do that because those people were poor, and they had no political power, and the TVA had the wealth and power of several states and the Federal Government behind it.

Those people were also mostly white.

On the other hand, what happened in this case was mostly targeting black neighborhoods, which the city didn't really like anyway; and racism was an additional motivation. The South in those days was decidedly racist, so much so that you couldn't get elected as a Republican because of Reconstruction, nor even as a Democrat if you weren't an outspoken segregationist.

Now the poor/powerless issue holds true in both cases. And doubtless the rich and powerful people had another story to tell about why these poor, powerless whites weren't really worth considering; not, you know, when 'The Greater Good' was at stake. Why, if they were only better people -- not so slow, like country folk tend to be, you know, and better educated like city folk -- they'd see that sacrificing for The Common Good was their duty as well as anyone's. (Of course, it wasn't everyone who was sacrificing anything -- just mostly those poor folks. The rest of them were planning their profits as part of that Greater Good to be realized.)

Racism is a part of the one story and not the other. Does it make it worse, or is it unimportant what kind of story gets told so long as the poor and powerless get oppressed? Maybe whatever story they tell doesn't matter, because it's really the same issue -- an issue of class and power. Or maybe it does matter, because racism carries an extra degree of dehumanization.

That's a good philosophical question. I'll let you figure out an answer to it.

Texan99 said...

In my experience, many are simply puddingheads, but that naturally predisposes them to Marxism should they happen to notice it lying around.

Grim said...

I have no doubt that their instructors were Marxists; or their instructors' instructors. At some point the tools crafted by the Marxists fell into other hands, hands that we might fairly call racist and sexist and whatever you'd call the gender police (who may not be sexist, because it isn't clear that they believe in sex or think it's important).

Many of these aren't Marxists, they just use the same methods and the same tools to forge very similar chains. Many of them probably don't even understand their debt, or know what the tools were used to do before.

But I think they are essentially collectivists, in that your membership in some group is where you derive your position and privileges; and I don't think they're entirely willing to let you self-identify into any group you'd like, as he suggests. I don't think I'd be allowed to 'self-identify' into any of their privileged categories, and it would probably be received as a huge affront were I to try.

Texan99 said...

Collectivists the way a leech is.

Christopher B said...

I think Grim has the take I've heard the most in his 11:50 comment.

Lots of people focus on the collectivism but the root is much closer to the Marxist focus on binary power struggles which gets adapted to all sorts of non-economic situations.

Joel Leggett said...

What does it matter if they are Marxists if “they just use the same methods and the same tools to forge very similar chains?” Such collectivist evil must be resisted regardless of the label.

Grim said...

At minimum, it matters in Sun Tux’s sense: you must know your enemies as well as yourself to reliably experience victory.

Gringo said...

Now, I happen to think that the TVA is full of it. Those people weren't asked and didn't agree; they were told and they were forced. The TVA could do that because those people were poor, and they had no political power, and the TVA had the wealth and power of several states and the Federal Government behind it.

The military government in Guatemala built a hydroelectric dam for Chixoy from 1976-85. (It generates 15% of Guatemala's electricity. ) In 1984, I visited a refugee camp with a German agronomist who had been working there. She told me that for the move of villages displaced by the dam, the army merely showed up at the villages and at gunpoint told people to get into trucks. A number of villagers resisted, and got killed for their efforts. Thus the number of fatherless children at the refugee camp.