I think the line of reasoning is way more simplistic. The seed was rooted a long time ago (by whom and when I cannot, yet, specify - it will be an interesting pursuit!) that communism and expropriation are the same thing.
Maybe it was Proudhon? I won't quote his well-known saying, the one so frequently attributed to Marx.
Taking from those that have and giving to those that do not. This is the essence of Marxism as far as popular discourse chooses to frame it.
The leap from Marxism to Cultural Marxism is an updated variant whereby whitey took more than he deserved (and, bluntly, this is very accurate in the broadest terms) and now reparations are due. The elite class go on as before, white or otherwise, while the rest squabble over the crumbs.
Of course there's only so much stuff to go around so tacitly approving of robbery, without the gated communities, is very suited to the powerful class. It helps to strengthen the case for a strong State, armed cops, etc, that ultimately are Wealth Defenders. The significant cohort that administers all this, the PMC, tend to defend the State because the nigga that feeds you is the nigga that can starve you.
Letting the totally lost wander the streets crazed by fentanyl provides a visible reminder of the fate of thosse that won't knuckle under. Inventing money to create bombs for obliterating uppity Gazans likewise. Sterilising the deplorables, and convincing men they are women, and vice versa, helps birth rates to fall and may make the redistibution slightly less painful.
The historical roots of power/wealth imbalance are waved away.
Far be it from me to assert that this is deliberate or calculated, and it is certainly a gross simplification, but if it were, having a handy catchphrase that can be traced back to the 'property is theft' trope is amazingly useful. Kinda similar to that whole anti-semitism vibe.
But hey: there's no such thing as ideology is there Decoy.
Thanks for the typically thoughtful contribution to the comments section, Karen. There of course is not much for me to expand upon or disagree with. That's pretty close to my analysis of what managerial liberalism is and how it operates: the managerial class stokes social deterioration under the guise of bureaucratic paternalism, for purposes of legitimizing its social engineering imperative. I've no doubt there are plenty of true believers, just as I'm sure there are lots of cynical manipulators. They all serve their purpose. Having said all that, I do think in many instances property indeed is theft. Proudhon and Marx, notwithstanding their differences, were right that an ideology of contractual individualism does contribute to the entrenchment of the ruling class. Because of course it helps destroy the pluralist foundations of a genuinely alternative society. Which is what the new series on this substack is all about: so thanks for the segue.
You're most welcome MM. The history of the Enclosures in Britain is more than enough to convince me that yes, property _is_ theft. Remembering that one day, inevitably, I shall be separated from all that I hold dear, helps somewhat to cling to things, and life, a little less tightly. (Fends off the Terror Derangement Syndrome.) My quarrel (if that is the right word) with Decoy relates to the ideology is bad, mkay, argument. I get that ideology constrains us, but it also binds us (social cement), and I simply can't see how anyone can claim to step outside of the world of ideas. Except by adopting the narrower, pejorative (and very outdated) sense of ideology as 'false consiousness'. No one wants to be told they are deluded, of course, but I certainly know that I am. Can't speak for anyone else. Best wishes.
So, Karen. That was interesting because, as I’m sure you’d concede, the ideology question clearly relates to the “property is theft” question. I could easily agree with you that the Enclosures were theft, but the problem is how does one define theft? I know there were exceptions, but my understanding is that most of the enclosures where “legal” according to positive law. They were of course deeply illegal according to customary law. (Common law is a whole separate boat of bananas.) Of course, our old friend Carl Schmitt would smile wryly at the “legality” of the enclosures.
The history of positive law is largely a power grab against customary law, not just in this case, but throughout history. If we’re to consider customary law as more legitimate than positive law, which would be the position of a temporal, there’s the interesting situation of European settlement of North America. It strikes me as farfetched, given the sparsity of population in North America pre-European settlement, to say that every European who settled on the continent was stealing land from the indigenous population. (Assuming for purposes here that they were indigenous.) But of course, all this hinges on the terms of reference one is using in relation to legality: e.g., positive, customary, natural law. And obviously I don’t own the terms of reference. And many argue that that’s exactly what was happening, given their legal terms of reference.
This is of course where ideology comes into play. I am inclined to agree with you that ideology should not be framed as mere false consciousness. And it does have productive purposes for those who share in it. That productivity includes a shared perspective on what legal terms of reference are legitimate. When such legal terms of reference come into conflict, we will likely find ourselves in a great historical crime – at least as viewed from one side of the dispute.
There’s way more to say about all this, but I’ll leave it at that for the moment. Hopefully the new series with be helpful in unpacking some of these complications. Thanks as always for your contribution to the comments.
There are some interesting stories about explorers claiming land for God (or their Queen, etc) and the rituals that accompany this. (Erecting crosses, lighting fires, laying the foundations for a church, sprinkling of holy water, and so on.) It's these rituals which added that certain magic in areas/cultures where magical thinking was still respectable.
Likewise, and at the more local scale, there are many tales of brave Sir Whatsit defeating a gorgon, or dragon, or Grendel, and making the land safe. This derring-do (liable to be a fiction) legitimises the appropriation. In ideological terms the older myths of 'here be dragons' are supplanted: "I killed the dragon so I deserve the fruits of this land (and if you trespass I'll have your guts on a pike" (etc). The positive law is a formalised set of rituals. Look forward to exploring this some more. (Claude Lecouteux gives many details but is silent about the 'politics' of it all - https://ia802609.us.archive.org/35/items/occult-book-grab-bag-5/Demons%20and%20Spirits%20of%20the%20Land%20Ancestral%20Lore%20and%20Practices%20by%20Claude%20Lecouteux%20%28z-lib.org%29.epub.pdf )
Thought-provoking piece. Three comments. First, Marx envisioned the means of production to be some machinery sitting in a factory. But what if the means of production is intelligence? The obsession with race and IQ acquires new significance. Think Harrison Bergeron. Second, just because Marxism is monumentally stupid and disastrous doesn't mean they won't try it (I disagree with your argument that it's workable even in theory). Same thing for race communism. Third, and importantly, liberalism doesn't necessarily push for equality. That's an add-on or graft that liberalism hasn't protected itself from, but is not necessarily intrinsic to liberalism (I'll concede that this third argument is a form of saying "real liberalism hasn't been tried"). Your points are thought-provoking, but ultimately we disagree.
Hi Andy. Thanks for your contributions to the comments. I’m always happy with disagreements; it’s not my project to change anyone’s mind. I don’t even believe that’s possible, at least not in the “marketplace of ideas” way that liberals do. But I do think there can be value in sharpening the distinctions within a disagreement. So, I’ll just mention a couple of things toward such a sharpening. Starting at the bottom and working up.
Equality has always been implicit in liberalism, and it is the making explicit of this assumption which is most characteristic of the shift from classical to managerial liberalism. The liberal motto, “we believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome,” has always embodied bad faith. It doesn’t take a deep thinker to realize it is impossible to have equality of opportunity without equality of outcome in the prior generation. The long list of personal, cultural, and economic disadvantages entailed make a mockery of the purported equality of opportunity. Though, of course, even with such equality of outcome in the prior generation, heritable cognitive differences would prevent such opportunity equality.
That I take it is what you were getting at with your Harrison Bergeron reference. I certainly agree that limbic exploitation is going to become a major issue in the years ahead and, to your first point, obviously Marx could never have anticipated any of that back in the 19th century. Though that development, it seems to me, is an even bigger threat to the conceits of liberalism than those of Marxism.
On your second point, though, I have a considerably more sympathetic opinion of Marx’s thought (though not so much him as a person). He was one of the century’s most insightful critics of capitalist dynamics and the destructive forces of unfettered markets. Of course, he approved of that destructiveness, believing that all remnants of traditional society had to be destroyed to unleash industrial capitalism, which he considered the mid-wife of communism. But that hardly changes the profundity of his analysis. As a sociologist he was brilliant. Not quite as good as either an economist or historian, but still made a fertile synthesis of those disciplines.
As to whether “Marxism” (in the context, I’m assuming you’re referring to Marx’s idea of communism) could “work,” I don't know why you think a one-class Yeoman republic isn’t possible. I don’t know if such a thing has ever existed, though I’d guess there have been societies that were at least close (maybe in ancient Germania?). But perhaps more to the point, I’m unclear about what is meant by “trying” Marxism. Trying what exactly? Marx never provided a blueprint, not even a rough sketch, of what his classless society would look like. We have just a handful of scattered obscure references, some of which, as noted in the post, contradict each other. As a rather ambitious intellectual entrepreneur, likely that vagueness was his greatest genius.
However, as I argued in The Managerial Class on Trial: it is to fall for a con job to take seriously esoteric theoretical debates about the doctrinal nuances of communism; like fascism, and Nazism, and managerial liberalism, they are just contextually specific strategies of the managerial class. Their purpose is never to embody ostensible values or achieve rhetorical goals. They are ideological smoke screens for the rule of the ventriloquist manipulation of the managerial class in its exercise of power.
Again, no intention of persuading you to think like me. But I thought the productivity of our differences might be enhanced with those clarifications of perspective. Thanks again for your comments.
Decoy. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Don't know if you saw it (I believed it was linked a couple times in this post), but I've already addressed this argument. For any of the Frankfurt School's shortcomings, blaming them for managerial liberalism, its woke ideology, and social engineering ethos, is at best an over-simplification. On the contrary, they were way ahead of the curve in challenging bureaucratic rationality and the administrative state. And the core thinkers, Horkheimer and Adorno, both openly challenged the first mass mobilization of managerial liberalism in the form of the 60s student movement, at considerable personal cost.
If you accept that ideology is false consciousness then of course you would want to transcend that. Understanding the frameworks within which our ideas are formed (or passed on to us) doesn't enable us to step outside of those frameworks though. Literally every concept we use has been conditioned in some way.
These can be combined and recombined, and taken different places. Stuart Hall referred to 'articulation' and 'rearticulation'.
Imposing new ideas in the hope of achieving hegemony, ideological brute force, inevitably causes resistance (Foucault said the same, though at rather greater length!). Leaving elements of one set of ideas intact, while building around them, may enable a smoother passage.
Here in England, for example, very aged yew trees often stand in churchyards. The churches were build hundreds of years after the trees were already mature. The old site of veneration is left intact rather than brutally swept aside in the Thomas Cromwell/Henry VIII paradigm.
tl;dr: ideology should be viewed in wider terms than the pejorative.
But cultural Marxism, and wokeism, even (within a certain register) managerial liberalism, etc,. are ideas. What does it mean to have an opinion of the genealogy of ideas when you say that you don't care about ideas? I agree a personal lineage can be charted along the lines you describe, but Aristotle was Plato's student, yet their radical differences have informed the most fundamental divisions within philosophy to this day. The personal connection is of interest, but tells one little about their shared impact on the history of philosophy, and its precisely that confusion I'm trying to clear up with all the "cultural Marxism" and "race Marxism" talk.
Ah, okay, I understand you better, now. Just to be clear on my end; I’m not an idealist. I attribute no autonomy to ideas, though I do think they’re important in telling us things about those who hold and promote them. So, I do think ideology is important to study and understand. But I certainly take your point that the managerial class does and has changed its ideology framework as conditions have changed. So, if what you’re saying is that the managerial class has had an agenda for hegemony going back to Marx (and before), I of course agree with that – it’s largely what my book was about. However, that ideological framework has changed, and that’s my point, and I consider it an important one. The more we’re misdirected to think of the present managerial class ideology as Marxism or communism, the more people will be disposed to not recognize that the real source of woke, and CRT, and managerialism is not either of them, but liberalism. And not just liberalism as a set of ideas, but liberalism as a set of values and assumptions about social relations and commitments. So, the very charade of critiquing the managerial regime covertly reinforces its hegemony. I did try to make that point in the post, but it may bear repeating. Thanks again, Decoy.
I think the line of reasoning is way more simplistic. The seed was rooted a long time ago (by whom and when I cannot, yet, specify - it will be an interesting pursuit!) that communism and expropriation are the same thing.
Maybe it was Proudhon? I won't quote his well-known saying, the one so frequently attributed to Marx.
Taking from those that have and giving to those that do not. This is the essence of Marxism as far as popular discourse chooses to frame it.
The leap from Marxism to Cultural Marxism is an updated variant whereby whitey took more than he deserved (and, bluntly, this is very accurate in the broadest terms) and now reparations are due. The elite class go on as before, white or otherwise, while the rest squabble over the crumbs.
Of course there's only so much stuff to go around so tacitly approving of robbery, without the gated communities, is very suited to the powerful class. It helps to strengthen the case for a strong State, armed cops, etc, that ultimately are Wealth Defenders. The significant cohort that administers all this, the PMC, tend to defend the State because the nigga that feeds you is the nigga that can starve you.
Letting the totally lost wander the streets crazed by fentanyl provides a visible reminder of the fate of thosse that won't knuckle under. Inventing money to create bombs for obliterating uppity Gazans likewise. Sterilising the deplorables, and convincing men they are women, and vice versa, helps birth rates to fall and may make the redistibution slightly less painful.
The historical roots of power/wealth imbalance are waved away.
Far be it from me to assert that this is deliberate or calculated, and it is certainly a gross simplification, but if it were, having a handy catchphrase that can be traced back to the 'property is theft' trope is amazingly useful. Kinda similar to that whole anti-semitism vibe.
But hey: there's no such thing as ideology is there Decoy.
Thanks for the typically thoughtful contribution to the comments section, Karen. There of course is not much for me to expand upon or disagree with. That's pretty close to my analysis of what managerial liberalism is and how it operates: the managerial class stokes social deterioration under the guise of bureaucratic paternalism, for purposes of legitimizing its social engineering imperative. I've no doubt there are plenty of true believers, just as I'm sure there are lots of cynical manipulators. They all serve their purpose. Having said all that, I do think in many instances property indeed is theft. Proudhon and Marx, notwithstanding their differences, were right that an ideology of contractual individualism does contribute to the entrenchment of the ruling class. Because of course it helps destroy the pluralist foundations of a genuinely alternative society. Which is what the new series on this substack is all about: so thanks for the segue.
You're most welcome MM. The history of the Enclosures in Britain is more than enough to convince me that yes, property _is_ theft. Remembering that one day, inevitably, I shall be separated from all that I hold dear, helps somewhat to cling to things, and life, a little less tightly. (Fends off the Terror Derangement Syndrome.) My quarrel (if that is the right word) with Decoy relates to the ideology is bad, mkay, argument. I get that ideology constrains us, but it also binds us (social cement), and I simply can't see how anyone can claim to step outside of the world of ideas. Except by adopting the narrower, pejorative (and very outdated) sense of ideology as 'false consiousness'. No one wants to be told they are deluded, of course, but I certainly know that I am. Can't speak for anyone else. Best wishes.
So, Karen. That was interesting because, as I’m sure you’d concede, the ideology question clearly relates to the “property is theft” question. I could easily agree with you that the Enclosures were theft, but the problem is how does one define theft? I know there were exceptions, but my understanding is that most of the enclosures where “legal” according to positive law. They were of course deeply illegal according to customary law. (Common law is a whole separate boat of bananas.) Of course, our old friend Carl Schmitt would smile wryly at the “legality” of the enclosures.
The history of positive law is largely a power grab against customary law, not just in this case, but throughout history. If we’re to consider customary law as more legitimate than positive law, which would be the position of a temporal, there’s the interesting situation of European settlement of North America. It strikes me as farfetched, given the sparsity of population in North America pre-European settlement, to say that every European who settled on the continent was stealing land from the indigenous population. (Assuming for purposes here that they were indigenous.) But of course, all this hinges on the terms of reference one is using in relation to legality: e.g., positive, customary, natural law. And obviously I don’t own the terms of reference. And many argue that that’s exactly what was happening, given their legal terms of reference.
This is of course where ideology comes into play. I am inclined to agree with you that ideology should not be framed as mere false consciousness. And it does have productive purposes for those who share in it. That productivity includes a shared perspective on what legal terms of reference are legitimate. When such legal terms of reference come into conflict, we will likely find ourselves in a great historical crime – at least as viewed from one side of the dispute.
There’s way more to say about all this, but I’ll leave it at that for the moment. Hopefully the new series with be helpful in unpacking some of these complications. Thanks as always for your contribution to the comments.
There are some interesting stories about explorers claiming land for God (or their Queen, etc) and the rituals that accompany this. (Erecting crosses, lighting fires, laying the foundations for a church, sprinkling of holy water, and so on.) It's these rituals which added that certain magic in areas/cultures where magical thinking was still respectable.
Likewise, and at the more local scale, there are many tales of brave Sir Whatsit defeating a gorgon, or dragon, or Grendel, and making the land safe. This derring-do (liable to be a fiction) legitimises the appropriation. In ideological terms the older myths of 'here be dragons' are supplanted: "I killed the dragon so I deserve the fruits of this land (and if you trespass I'll have your guts on a pike" (etc). The positive law is a formalised set of rituals. Look forward to exploring this some more. (Claude Lecouteux gives many details but is silent about the 'politics' of it all - https://ia802609.us.archive.org/35/items/occult-book-grab-bag-5/Demons%20and%20Spirits%20of%20the%20Land%20Ancestral%20Lore%20and%20Practices%20by%20Claude%20Lecouteux%20%28z-lib.org%29.epub.pdf )
The Lecouteux book looks interesting. Might be intriguing to read alongside Schmitt's Nomos of the Earth.
Thought-provoking piece. Three comments. First, Marx envisioned the means of production to be some machinery sitting in a factory. But what if the means of production is intelligence? The obsession with race and IQ acquires new significance. Think Harrison Bergeron. Second, just because Marxism is monumentally stupid and disastrous doesn't mean they won't try it (I disagree with your argument that it's workable even in theory). Same thing for race communism. Third, and importantly, liberalism doesn't necessarily push for equality. That's an add-on or graft that liberalism hasn't protected itself from, but is not necessarily intrinsic to liberalism (I'll concede that this third argument is a form of saying "real liberalism hasn't been tried"). Your points are thought-provoking, but ultimately we disagree.
Hi Andy. Thanks for your contributions to the comments. I’m always happy with disagreements; it’s not my project to change anyone’s mind. I don’t even believe that’s possible, at least not in the “marketplace of ideas” way that liberals do. But I do think there can be value in sharpening the distinctions within a disagreement. So, I’ll just mention a couple of things toward such a sharpening. Starting at the bottom and working up.
Equality has always been implicit in liberalism, and it is the making explicit of this assumption which is most characteristic of the shift from classical to managerial liberalism. The liberal motto, “we believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome,” has always embodied bad faith. It doesn’t take a deep thinker to realize it is impossible to have equality of opportunity without equality of outcome in the prior generation. The long list of personal, cultural, and economic disadvantages entailed make a mockery of the purported equality of opportunity. Though, of course, even with such equality of outcome in the prior generation, heritable cognitive differences would prevent such opportunity equality.
That I take it is what you were getting at with your Harrison Bergeron reference. I certainly agree that limbic exploitation is going to become a major issue in the years ahead and, to your first point, obviously Marx could never have anticipated any of that back in the 19th century. Though that development, it seems to me, is an even bigger threat to the conceits of liberalism than those of Marxism.
On your second point, though, I have a considerably more sympathetic opinion of Marx’s thought (though not so much him as a person). He was one of the century’s most insightful critics of capitalist dynamics and the destructive forces of unfettered markets. Of course, he approved of that destructiveness, believing that all remnants of traditional society had to be destroyed to unleash industrial capitalism, which he considered the mid-wife of communism. But that hardly changes the profundity of his analysis. As a sociologist he was brilliant. Not quite as good as either an economist or historian, but still made a fertile synthesis of those disciplines.
As to whether “Marxism” (in the context, I’m assuming you’re referring to Marx’s idea of communism) could “work,” I don't know why you think a one-class Yeoman republic isn’t possible. I don’t know if such a thing has ever existed, though I’d guess there have been societies that were at least close (maybe in ancient Germania?). But perhaps more to the point, I’m unclear about what is meant by “trying” Marxism. Trying what exactly? Marx never provided a blueprint, not even a rough sketch, of what his classless society would look like. We have just a handful of scattered obscure references, some of which, as noted in the post, contradict each other. As a rather ambitious intellectual entrepreneur, likely that vagueness was his greatest genius.
However, as I argued in The Managerial Class on Trial: it is to fall for a con job to take seriously esoteric theoretical debates about the doctrinal nuances of communism; like fascism, and Nazism, and managerial liberalism, they are just contextually specific strategies of the managerial class. Their purpose is never to embody ostensible values or achieve rhetorical goals. They are ideological smoke screens for the rule of the ventriloquist manipulation of the managerial class in its exercise of power.
Again, no intention of persuading you to think like me. But I thought the productivity of our differences might be enhanced with those clarifications of perspective. Thanks again for your comments.
The Yeoman Republic sounds a lot like Distributism.
Decoy. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Don't know if you saw it (I believed it was linked a couple times in this post), but I've already addressed this argument. For any of the Frankfurt School's shortcomings, blaming them for managerial liberalism, its woke ideology, and social engineering ethos, is at best an over-simplification. On the contrary, they were way ahead of the curve in challenging bureaucratic rationality and the administrative state. And the core thinkers, Horkheimer and Adorno, both openly challenged the first mass mobilization of managerial liberalism in the form of the 60s student movement, at considerable personal cost.
If you're interested, you can see it here:
https://thecirculationofelites.substack.com/p/refuting-cultural-marxism-myth
You don't believe in ideology? What do you use to think with? Do you claim to live in an epoche perfectly sealed, like a brain in a bottle?
If you accept that ideology is false consciousness then of course you would want to transcend that. Understanding the frameworks within which our ideas are formed (or passed on to us) doesn't enable us to step outside of those frameworks though. Literally every concept we use has been conditioned in some way.
These can be combined and recombined, and taken different places. Stuart Hall referred to 'articulation' and 'rearticulation'.
Imposing new ideas in the hope of achieving hegemony, ideological brute force, inevitably causes resistance (Foucault said the same, though at rather greater length!). Leaving elements of one set of ideas intact, while building around them, may enable a smoother passage.
Here in England, for example, very aged yew trees often stand in churchyards. The churches were build hundreds of years after the trees were already mature. The old site of veneration is left intact rather than brutally swept aside in the Thomas Cromwell/Henry VIII paradigm.
tl;dr: ideology should be viewed in wider terms than the pejorative.
All the best.
But cultural Marxism, and wokeism, even (within a certain register) managerial liberalism, etc,. are ideas. What does it mean to have an opinion of the genealogy of ideas when you say that you don't care about ideas? I agree a personal lineage can be charted along the lines you describe, but Aristotle was Plato's student, yet their radical differences have informed the most fundamental divisions within philosophy to this day. The personal connection is of interest, but tells one little about their shared impact on the history of philosophy, and its precisely that confusion I'm trying to clear up with all the "cultural Marxism" and "race Marxism" talk.
Thanks, Decoy.
Ah, okay, I understand you better, now. Just to be clear on my end; I’m not an idealist. I attribute no autonomy to ideas, though I do think they’re important in telling us things about those who hold and promote them. So, I do think ideology is important to study and understand. But I certainly take your point that the managerial class does and has changed its ideology framework as conditions have changed. So, if what you’re saying is that the managerial class has had an agenda for hegemony going back to Marx (and before), I of course agree with that – it’s largely what my book was about. However, that ideological framework has changed, and that’s my point, and I consider it an important one. The more we’re misdirected to think of the present managerial class ideology as Marxism or communism, the more people will be disposed to not recognize that the real source of woke, and CRT, and managerialism is not either of them, but liberalism. And not just liberalism as a set of ideas, but liberalism as a set of values and assumptions about social relations and commitments. So, the very charade of critiquing the managerial regime covertly reinforces its hegemony. I did try to make that point in the post, but it may bear repeating. Thanks again, Decoy.