Cultural Marxism is really nothing new. Marx believed that property rights were the cause of all problems but were impossible to abolish until the clergy which held property rights sacrosanct, was first destroyed.
In Marx's day, of course, there remained a European artistocracy which did own most everything, especially land, and it was writers from the French Revolution which called out property rights and clergy as the man culprits, which is where Marx got his ideas.
Properrty is essential to capitalism but, outside of that, Adam Smith and Karl Marx share a lot of points covered in the Rerum Novarum 1891 which held that workers had to be able to afford to buy what they produced or the entire economy faield, rich people and all i.e. "teh Spirit of 1789".
The key is a just price and just wage which aren't easy to determine but neither capitalism nor communism really address that rather, they just complain about each other.
Nothing will make you into a Marxist faster than a sanctimonious, rich capitalist and vise versa.
When you try to repurpose economic models to meaning making ideologies you land in strange places, reducing humans to entities without a soul. Humans are not economic machines, or at least much more than economic machines. Seems Putin has caught on to that fact.
entertainment, used to bring persons and classes together, forming the center-piece of a community and later culture. Now somehow it's become a source of atomization and isolation, of metaphorical and literal gooning. Has something major corrupted the nature of entertainment?
The pivot of leftism in the West away from class issues and toward 'cultural' issues was entirely the result of a capitulation to capitalist imperatives and was accomplished by redefining 'freedom' from 'control of the means of production' to the 'consumption of preference as a product'. 'Cultural Marxism' is simply another niche market for a capitalism built upon niche markets of 'preference'. In fact, the more a 'preference' demands technological intervention and 'ongoing care', the more capitalism promotes it. The homosexual lifestyle is incredibly demanding on the medical establishment to respond to rampant diseases resulting from the type of practices requires to 'express one's preference'. The diseases arising from homosexual practices are a profit center for capitalism. In this way, the 'cultural marxist' support for deviance and 'minorities' is simply 'the left' acting as a hand-maiden for capitalist expansion.
The economic character you describe in cultural consumerism is in some ways more true to Orthodox Marxism than the cultural Marxism. Corporations love this. They know this. Their advertising suggests it to us in every commercial that reduces each individual to a caricature of our best selves. Needs we did know we had become drivers for consumerism - ring around the color based on a push to social competition, come at the expense of social bonds, history, and the fabric of society is hedonism. Corporations love this.
This followed/extended from my earlier post: The 20th Century revealed the great flaw of Marxism, which was its failure to recognize how much power is wielded not by the means of production but by the means of consumption.
Respectfully, I disagree. Consumption is simply a part of the industrial mode of (over)production. One cannot 'consume' anything that isn't produced, so, in all cases, production precedes consumption. In this manner, production *controls* consumption. The 'culture industry' exists largely to colonize your desires so as to assure that they never wander from what the producers want to produce.
I understand your objection. However, the point stands that it is the appetite driving the kitchen in many places today. Marxists maneuvered, with visible hands offering both glut and starvation, the appetites of populaces; these maneuvers were never sustainable. What seems to sustain economic systems today is the fetterless appetites of the populace. Manipulated or not, these appetites are ultimately “owned” by the citizens individually, the consumers. Marxists failed to consider this powerful means for the global collosus it could become. In many ways, ONLY if you can cater to the appetites can you cook up a favourable storm.
'Ownership' is a function of power, it's not intrinsic. This is where non-liberals of the 'left' break with liberals of 'right'. It's as if Pavlov and Skinner never happened. Most of 'economic activity' in the West is directed toward the *production* and management of desires. Media of all kinds - universities, advertising, film, TV, billboards, catalogs, websites - are all in business of producing and managing desire in the population. They've gotten so good at it that they can convince some people to sexually mutilate themselves.
When you say 'the Marxists' tried Pavlov and failed, you're assuming that some other system existed that isn't based on Pavlov succeeded.
And I don't see that's the case.
Once mass interdependence is created via the division of labor and specialization of tasks, that interdependence comes with more information opacity than transparency and that opacity is manipulated to create a simulated world.
In the long run, 'the Marxists' realized that consumer culture was the better way to manipulate the masses and pivoted their project to 'the West'.
And the West has been completely dominated by 'Marxism' every since.
Marxists won WWII, not 'the West'.
The power and presige of advertising and celebrity culture is a sign of their victory.
Andrej, we may be pondering upon the same phenomenon at the same time. Just yesterday I posted on X: In lands worshiping consumption it comes with little surprise that so few investigate the platform supporting its altar, and instead focus upon the morality bound up in orchestrating the next ritual sacrifice. In such lands religion arises in new codes for what may be eaten, what fuel may be used, what words may be spoken, and what makes for a proper victim. A powerful sect is now in exalted places, its high priests dressed by Savile Row's new eco-line, its choir singing psalms of "gimme-i-wan-it" with a backbeat that just don't quit.
Cultural Marxism is really nothing new. Marx believed that property rights were the cause of all problems but were impossible to abolish until the clergy which held property rights sacrosanct, was first destroyed.
In Marx's day, of course, there remained a European artistocracy which did own most everything, especially land, and it was writers from the French Revolution which called out property rights and clergy as the man culprits, which is where Marx got his ideas.
Properrty is essential to capitalism but, outside of that, Adam Smith and Karl Marx share a lot of points covered in the Rerum Novarum 1891 which held that workers had to be able to afford to buy what they produced or the entire economy faield, rich people and all i.e. "teh Spirit of 1789".
The key is a just price and just wage which aren't easy to determine but neither capitalism nor communism really address that rather, they just complain about each other.
Nothing will make you into a Marxist faster than a sanctimonious, rich capitalist and vise versa.
When you try to repurpose economic models to meaning making ideologies you land in strange places, reducing humans to entities without a soul. Humans are not economic machines, or at least much more than economic machines. Seems Putin has caught on to that fact.
entertainment, used to bring persons and classes together, forming the center-piece of a community and later culture. Now somehow it's become a source of atomization and isolation, of metaphorical and literal gooning. Has something major corrupted the nature of entertainment?
The sole true socialism is nationalism, the only true nationalism is socialism (just look at homogeneous and high GINI Japan & S. Korea)
and socialism is absurd unless founded upon nature.
The pivot of leftism in the West away from class issues and toward 'cultural' issues was entirely the result of a capitulation to capitalist imperatives and was accomplished by redefining 'freedom' from 'control of the means of production' to the 'consumption of preference as a product'. 'Cultural Marxism' is simply another niche market for a capitalism built upon niche markets of 'preference'. In fact, the more a 'preference' demands technological intervention and 'ongoing care', the more capitalism promotes it. The homosexual lifestyle is incredibly demanding on the medical establishment to respond to rampant diseases resulting from the type of practices requires to 'express one's preference'. The diseases arising from homosexual practices are a profit center for capitalism. In this way, the 'cultural marxist' support for deviance and 'minorities' is simply 'the left' acting as a hand-maiden for capitalist expansion.
The economic character you describe in cultural consumerism is in some ways more true to Orthodox Marxism than the cultural Marxism. Corporations love this. They know this. Their advertising suggests it to us in every commercial that reduces each individual to a caricature of our best selves. Needs we did know we had become drivers for consumerism - ring around the color based on a push to social competition, come at the expense of social bonds, history, and the fabric of society is hedonism. Corporations love this.
This followed/extended from my earlier post: The 20th Century revealed the great flaw of Marxism, which was its failure to recognize how much power is wielded not by the means of production but by the means of consumption.
Respectfully, I disagree. Consumption is simply a part of the industrial mode of (over)production. One cannot 'consume' anything that isn't produced, so, in all cases, production precedes consumption. In this manner, production *controls* consumption. The 'culture industry' exists largely to colonize your desires so as to assure that they never wander from what the producers want to produce.
I understand your objection. However, the point stands that it is the appetite driving the kitchen in many places today. Marxists maneuvered, with visible hands offering both glut and starvation, the appetites of populaces; these maneuvers were never sustainable. What seems to sustain economic systems today is the fetterless appetites of the populace. Manipulated or not, these appetites are ultimately “owned” by the citizens individually, the consumers. Marxists failed to consider this powerful means for the global collosus it could become. In many ways, ONLY if you can cater to the appetites can you cook up a favourable storm.
'Ownership' is a function of power, it's not intrinsic. This is where non-liberals of the 'left' break with liberals of 'right'. It's as if Pavlov and Skinner never happened. Most of 'economic activity' in the West is directed toward the *production* and management of desires. Media of all kinds - universities, advertising, film, TV, billboards, catalogs, websites - are all in business of producing and managing desire in the population. They've gotten so good at it that they can convince some people to sexually mutilate themselves.
When you say 'the Marxists' tried Pavlov and failed, you're assuming that some other system existed that isn't based on Pavlov succeeded.
And I don't see that's the case.
Once mass interdependence is created via the division of labor and specialization of tasks, that interdependence comes with more information opacity than transparency and that opacity is manipulated to create a simulated world.
In the long run, 'the Marxists' realized that consumer culture was the better way to manipulate the masses and pivoted their project to 'the West'.
And the West has been completely dominated by 'Marxism' every since.
Marxists won WWII, not 'the West'.
The power and presige of advertising and celebrity culture is a sign of their victory.
Andrej, we may be pondering upon the same phenomenon at the same time. Just yesterday I posted on X: In lands worshiping consumption it comes with little surprise that so few investigate the platform supporting its altar, and instead focus upon the morality bound up in orchestrating the next ritual sacrifice. In such lands religion arises in new codes for what may be eaten, what fuel may be used, what words may be spoken, and what makes for a proper victim. A powerful sect is now in exalted places, its high priests dressed by Savile Row's new eco-line, its choir singing psalms of "gimme-i-wan-it" with a backbeat that just don't quit.
It seems so indeed. Thank you for your insight.