r/PoliticalCompassMemes • u/Time-Acanthisitta558 - Auth-Left • 1d ago
Agenda Post Cold War Western Left in this image
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u/DrHavoc49 - Lib-Right 1d ago
Isn't critical theory just Marxism Class struggle applied to race?
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u/bl1y - Lib-Center 1d ago
No. Critical Theory is essentially the idea that the Enlightenment and all the associate Western Civilization stuff is a sham designed to perpetuate oppression of the underclass.
When applied to race, we get (naturally) Critical Race Theory, which basically says the Enlightenment Etc is a sham designed to perpetuate oppression of racial minorities. "Rule of law? Pshaw! Slavery was legal!"
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u/Jenz_le_Benz - Auth-Right 1d ago
Slavery is still legal, it just looks different in different places
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u/pocket-friends - Lib-Center 1d ago
Like most philosophical movements it really depends on the theorist in question. Lots of the frankfurt school did exactly what you say, but most of the more contemporary stuff is more generalized and about analyzing power relations and inequality.
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u/anotherpoordecision - Left 9h ago
This is like saying believing rational choice theory means you think everyone is making the most rational decision possible. Maybe if you were talking to a freshman fifty years ago this would be true.
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u/deepstatecuck - Lib-Right 1d ago
Basicly yes. Leftists may throw theory at you and try to use nuance to confuse the issue. It's dialectic materialist applied to any topic to impose apriori commitment to equal outcome.
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u/TheSpacePopinjay - Auth-Left 1d ago
No that's cultural Marxism. Critical theory is more of a methodology.
In principle it can be a valid method for reaching true and insightful understandings of society and culture in good faith but because it lacks self correcting mechanisms so it ends up gravitating to a policy based evidence approach to legitimise and justify the consensus agendas of the academics in the field.
Peer review and stuff then gets used to police critical theory being kept directed towards its 'proper use', perpetuating the consensus.
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u/RugTumpington - Right 1d ago
In principle it can be a valid method for reaching true and insightful understandings of society and culture in good faith but because it lacks self correcting mechanisms so it ends up gravitating to a policy based evidence approach to legitimise and justify the consensus agendas of the academics in the field
No it doesn't, it is one of the systems which enables bias to the highest degree to the point it shapes data and thus outcomes. Critical theory has t produced any policy of merit as a result. It ends up as concern trolling as a framework.
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u/SmegmaCarbonara - Left 1d ago
The whole point is discovering existing biases in systems. So what you actually mean is you want to ignore the biases exposed by critical theory.
Critical theory has t produced any policy of merit as a result.
I wouldn't love to see you try to substantiate this.
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u/AlternateSmithy - Lib-Right 1d ago
This one's cultural Marxism and this one's critical theory are the same.
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u/38Feet - Auth-Center 1d ago
Critical Theory is pre-determinism for retarded 19 year old Soc-201 students who seek to be bound by Nietzschean slave-mentality for the rest of their life.
“All my circumstances were preexisting determinations of my level of agency and my capability for accountability. Power structures inherently prevent me from achieving, not the sitting in my room doom scrolling and temu hauling 20 hours a day. It’s actually systemic implications that prevent me from even experiencing aspiration, let alone acting on it. When someone commits crime, it’s because they didn’t read enough Bell Hooks. We should rehabilitate rapists; also, white people shouldn’t have material or wealth anymore. We will recursively create a utilitarian society by defining everybody based on the legacy of their ethnicity’s crimes.”
Marx was at least cogent and respectable in his political theory though his Econ was a bit poor lmao. This slop is so much worse than Marx/Lenin it honestly shouldn’t even be compared.
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u/SmegmaCarbonara - Left 1d ago
There's a reason why you're criticizing a made up a straw quote instead of an actual one.
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u/ConebreadIH - Centrist 16h ago
I think critical theory was a powerful tool and did some good when it was first introduced, but now it has caused negative effects. For example, look at the publishing industry. It was a male dominated industry in the past and it pushed out women, giving them very few chances to write and publish books. That was called out, but now the publishing industry is 78% women. It's significantly harder as a man to get your work out there. Take a look at the best sellers list, or go browse a bookstore and see if you notice anything about the authors.
It's a flawed system that isn't worried about eliminating bias, it wants to take that bias and wield it for itself.
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u/anotherpoordecision - Left 9h ago
Theory has a will now? Do you think critical theory is the reason women are more published than men rn?
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u/BobbyButtermilk321 - Lib-Right 1d ago
Critical theory is just intellectual complaining used to make people feel powerless so they can be screwed by corporations. Marxism is just a salespitch for feudalism with extra steps in exchange for everyone living equally as peasants sometime around the heat death of the universe.
The based leftists are the various flavors of left anarchists and democratic socialists, who at least get the memo that people should be governed socially or have their will be represented if the government is to handle the distribution of resources (government that doesn't represent the people is no different from the people the left seeks to overthrow)
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u/pocket-friends - Lib-Center 1d ago
Post-leftist theory in particular goes so hard.
Also, I recently went back to grad school to get my PhD and so much contemporary theory is left/post-left anarchists telling Marxists of all varieties to get fucked. You love to see it.
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u/BobbyButtermilk321 - Lib-Right 1d ago
yep post leftist theory is crazy based, nothing like saying "hey no one is actually in charge and the resources belong to everyone" and then telling that guy who's like "well acktually, I'm in charge and get to decide where those resources go, anyone who disagrees dies" to go fuck off.
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u/pocket-friends - Lib-Center 1d ago
Nomads and the war machine, community-based resiliency, market-based approaches that (re)establish necessities as part of the commons (again), an actual difference between democracy and politics, the three virtues of imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and impersonality, vital materialism, assemblages, actants over agents, state paternalism is bad actually, insurrection over revolution, body without organs, the right to maim, necropolitics, and on and on.
There’s so much good shit there it’s wild.
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u/ParalyzingVenom - Lib-Right 1d ago
Gimme your favorite sauce to go look up for a basic gestalt on post-left whatever Edit: please 🙏
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u/pocket-friends - Lib-Center 1d ago
Here’s a pretty good primer on post leftism by Bob Black.
Also, some other solid books/articles include:
The Dawn of Everything explores the issues with social evolutionary theory, the enlightenment, and examines the general story of humanity with up to date evidence. The same author has another book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory that’s really interesting too.
Vibrant Matter is a foundational work in new materialism, an emerging paradigm that seeks to reconcile vitalism with materialism. Absolutely excellent book.
Nomadology: The War Machine is a description of Deleuze and Guattari’s search for a revolutionary group that could effectively counter recuperation by the state and describes how war isn’t actually a state of nature, but rather the mode of a social state attempting to ward off and prevent the emergence of the state.
Fair warning, the nomadology book is awesome, but incredibly dense and difficult if you’re not used to some of the more prose like theory. Just test it like a poem and it’ll make a lot of sense.
The Mushroom at the End of the World is really awesome too. It explores the ways in which a certain kind of mushroom facilitates its own movements across the world through black and gray markets, and focuses a ton on rhizomes. This book builds on the earlier work mentioned Vibrant Matter.
The CCRU Green book.pdf) is a really awesome example of theory fiction. This was a collective effort and involves Nick Land, Mark Fisher, Sadie Plant, Anna Greenspan, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton and others. Hyperstition is such an awesome idea and you see it happen all over the place these days.
There’s so much more, but these are all solid examples.
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u/ParalyzingVenom - Lib-Right 1d ago
Based, thank you fren
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u/141516_16_04 - Left 1d ago
Oh, hell no. F*ck communism. It screwed up economies of many countries, started multiple genocides and massacres, and is an antithesis of democracy.
I prefer wokeness to communism.
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u/aclahm - Right 1d ago
Wokeness: Cringe but doesn't cause death
C*mmunism: Cringe and causes death
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u/EasilyRekt - Lib-Right 1d ago
still uses the class consciousness myth and other baseline principles, at least y'all sit around twiddling your thumbs instead of forming angry mobs to
stealconfiscate people's stuff and kill farmers and/or people with glasses :/8
u/An_Oxygen_Consumer - Lib-Center 1d ago
Seems to me that the problem is the mob, not really the idea. Communist mob, nationalist mob, religious mob, always end up the same way...
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u/WaaaaghsRUs - Lib-Left 1d ago
I mean there’s some crossover sure, but as far as relativism between this post, it’s a bit obscure. Also, what fuckin theory did stalin ever write
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u/lachiebois - Right 1d ago
I saw someone summarise the left into four groups and I think it encompasses most of them The modern left is basically four groups of people.
- Boomers who watch cable news all day
- Minorities who get free stuff
- College-educated women who went crazy on SSRIs & birth control
- Mentally ill gender goblins who are on the verge of shooting up an elementary school
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u/bigmannordic - Lib-Right 1d ago
I mean, critical theory comes from marx, no? (Antonio Gramsci) I'm not too knowledgeable on this, though, so I could be wrong.
Still, I'm definitely more glad that in the west, we have useless woketards than mass murderers running things
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u/Ancient10k - Lib-Center 1d ago
Not really, no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
Most woke bullshit comes from Gramsci's thought though.
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u/ThePyxl - Lib-Left 1d ago
Both are fucking dogshit (excluding Marx‘s observations of capitalism)
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u/pocket-friends - Lib-Center 1d ago
Marx’s theory of alienation literally de-humanizes the very people it claims it wants to elevate by conceiving of them as animals below the realm of humanity.
Is it really any wonder many leftists end up ignoring the actual working class, tell the flyover states to get fucked, or tell people their too dumb to understand how to help themselves and need someone else to tell them what to do?
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u/ThePyxl - Lib-Left 1d ago
It appears I have some reading to do
I was thinking of how he describes that a free market cannot exist within (unregulated) capitalism because capitalism inherently leads to monopolies and oligopolies.
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u/pocket-friends - Lib-Center 17h ago
It’s not that Marx didn’t have worthwhile or innovative analysis and criticism in his time, it’s that in making his criticisms he banked on an animacy-inflected economy of humans, animals, and objects in an overly de-animating and reductionistic way.
Hence why we see a lot of modern day proponents seeing this sort of stuff as inert, and why, like I said, they’re so eager to ignore the people they claim to want to help—they’re not actually humans and we’d be wasting our time and breath in helping them liberate themselves.
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u/anotherpoordecision - Left 9h ago
Flyover states are the most likely people to vote against the interests of left leaning people is a pretty easy explanation for why left leaning people don’t like flyover states. They see people from flyover states as people voting against their own interests while being welfare queens to richer blue states. It’s not Marxist alienation. It’s that flyover states represent the opposition while simultaneously sucking resources from others. Their position is going to lead to ostracization from left leaning people. Most left leaning and leftists have never read Marx, so how would his understanding of alienation cause this not the simpler answer?
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u/pocket-friends - Lib-Center 9h ago
No, you mistake my point for your own. I’m saying that a good deal of contemporary leftist anti-worker sentiment and that framing of people as ‘voting against their self-interest’ stems from Marx’s dehumanizing notions of the working class in his comparison of the working class to animals.
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u/anotherpoordecision - Left 5h ago
How does the notion of “voting against one’s self interest” stem from Marx? Would this not have been a concept from the inception of voting, a person who voted and in trying to better their life accidentally makes it worse? And that wasn’t the main reason I said they look down on them, I said that it is their opposition to the left that causes left leaning people to look down on them. The opposition to one groups interests will lead them to look down on the people who stop them especially if they feel their opposition is stopping them from bettering the world. We can see both sides of the isle engage in this behavior. I don’t understand why you believe this is an exclusively Marxian or even left leaning way of thinking.
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u/lutzow - Lib-Center 1d ago
I am genuinely interested in how many people in this thread have actually read primary literature of Critical Theory/Frankfurt school. I tried and didn't get too far because it was boring af. But it was enough to know that it is not what most people here semm to think it is.
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u/Tantalum71 - Centrist 1d ago
I prefer Western socialists analysing social issues through alternative/Marxist power analyses to genocide, mass deportations to labor camps and the starvation of millions. That may just be me tho. Maybe Stalin banning homosexuality makes it worth it for you.
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u/_TheOrangeNinja_ - Left 11h ago
I'd love to hear you articulate your complaints about critical theory
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u/FistedCannibals - Auth-Right 21h ago
Imagine thinking that communism actually works like this retard.
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u/Excellent_Human_N - Lib-Left 1d ago
Critical theory isn't libleft. It's green/red.