...The core of Marx’s view of human society is the primacy of political economy over culture and the distinction between socioeconomic classes. The individuals who make up a society may be empirically described according to many variables. They may have varying religious beliefs. They could have differing ethnic and linguistic profiles. They likely, in 2023 America, display variation in their sexual attitudes, behaviors, and identities.
But all of this, for Marx, is secondary. Indeed, “secondary” is not sufficiently descriptive in relaying precisely how comparatively unimportant Marx found all these cultural categories. What matters, according to Marx, is the relationship of different classes to the means of production. Do the members of a class own the means of production—the material apparatus from tools to factories that are needed to produce goods—or do they not? Answer that question, and you know the dynamics of class relations and conflict in that society. Those dynamics determine everything else.
...Culture and economics are interconnected in complex ways, but they are separable topics. Some of the confusion of those who equate Marxism and wokeism stems from a lack of clarity on this point. They note that some Marxists in the wake of World War I began to focus greater attention on culture. This is true, and there were factors in the political context of the day that produced this shift. Many Marxists had believed, in the days before the outbreak of the war, that the moment for revolution was ripe in those Western European societies that represented the heights of capitalist development. But instead of global revolution, what arrived was global war on a destructive scale never before imagined. This was followed by the failure of revolutionary communist movements across Western Europe and finally by the emergence of nationalist political movements and regimes in many of those countries that had been stimulated by legitimate fears of communist agitation. Marxist rethinking was required.
...Getting this topic right is not merely a matter of scholarly accuracy. The true nature of wokeism needs to be understood to further the fight against this ideology. Marxism once posed a significant danger to traditional America, but at present, it is not a Marxian anti-capitalist left that most threatens our society. It is a wokeism perfectly happy to consolidate progressive business monopolies with massive economic power over individual lives. This includes corporations—especially those controlling communication technologies—that can profoundly shape the ideology of young American minds by promoting the woke agenda to annihilate traditional Western values and morality.
...Eric Voegelin masterfully described how much the Gnostic desire for utopia one finds in Marxism owed to the Judeo-Christian cultural ground within which that revolutionary philosophy was rooted, however much Marxists would like to avoid recognizing the fact. Marxism is, of course, a distortion of the proper Christian view of perfectibility, and it is radical in the degree to which it perverts the original. But those of us who have changed ideological positions during our lifetimes might be forgiven for believing that it makes sense for adherents of Judeo-Christian religious principles to leave open some lines of communication with the Marxists. We are going to need all the help we can get to defeat the wokeist threat.
The Economics and Political Science Room
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by midcan5
