I decided to elaborate a bit more - ok, whom am I kidding, a
lot more - on what I meant by the last paragraph of the opening post of this thread.
Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Apr 08, 2025 12:37 pm
And then there's the fact that I think that the Left's
policy proposals on most issues, or at least on most domestic issues, are pretty great, but most of their collections of
theory contain too many falsehoods and fallacies and are just not fit for purpose.
I used to be completely skeptical about political theory. Then, people smarter than me convinced me that
everyone in politics has some kind of theory, even if they're in denial about it, or think their theory is just "common sense". So now, I accept that you need to have some theory in politics. But I'm still
somewhat skeptical about it. I think all too often, political theory is used as a very effective method for explaining that up is down and down is up. And I think that the world would be better off without very effective methods for explaining that up is down and down is up.
As for the specific collections of theory that are common on the Left, it's probably a good idea to throw most of them out and replace them with something new. Let me talk about them one by one.
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The great-granddaddy of many left-wing theoretical constructs is, of course, Marxism. Now, Marx got some very basic and important things right, such as that there are many things wrong with capitalism, that class matters, and that material factors are very important in human life (though not as all-determining as he made them out to be). But he got most of the details wrong, and his followers and successors compounded those errors by insisting on treating all the details of his ideas as sacred truth.
For instance, it's way too reductionist to explain all of human history by using a simple model of six stages, where the first four are based on European history up to the 19th century, and the last two are based simply on Marx's
hopes for the future. A modern, complex society usually has a lot of different classes, not just two or three; and class can be ambiguous. (In my own personal case, name a social class, and I'll tell you why I'm
not a member of that class.)
And these days, there's a large number of people who don't own any means of production, who aren't part of the upper crust, who are employed or looking for employment, but who aren't any kind of industrial proletarians.
The proletariat has only acted the way Marxist theory says it should always act on relatively few occasions in history, but Marxists never concluded from this that there might be something wrong with their theory.
On a theoretical level, the core problem with Marxist theory is that Marx and Engels were trying to come up with a general theory of everything in human history, human society, and the human economy
based on the knowledge available to 19th century Europeans. It was always ridiculous to assume that that might work. It's as if a medieval astronomer who didn't have access to telescopes would have tried to work out modern astrophysics.
One contradiction specific to
21st century Marxism that wasn't there from the start, but that should be pretty glaring today, is this: According to Marxist theory, everything in human life is determined by material conditions. Even things like philosophical systems are entirely the result of the material conditions under which the people who found or follow them live. But 21st century Marxists still insist that people of their time should follow a philosophy that was worked out by people who lived under very different material conditions in the 19th century.
Finally, I don't think that the thing the oppressed masses had been really waiting for, the thing that would motivate them to finally rise up and throw off their shackles, was a detailed technical discussion of how to properly define the term "commodity".
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A while later came the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Based on everything I've heard about the people behind that, they seem to have been basically a bunch of German intellectuals doing what German intellectuals generally do best: taking themselves way too seriously and being generally
verbissen. Their main message seems to have been that people have an obligation to spend their whole life constantly miserable and that anyone who is ever not miserable must be either stupid or ethically rotten or both.
I'd say that if I
would want to follow an ideology that tells me to be miserable all the time, I wouldn't need 20th century left-wing theorists. I could go straight to the source and sign up for the one or other form of religious fundamentalism.
You might have noticed that I talk about Critical Theory in a different section than the one about Marxism. While Critical Theory is usually seen as Marxist by both its supporters and its opponents, I don't see what's supposed to be Marxist about a bunch of middle- and upper class academics telling proletarians that all the entertainment they like is evil.
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Then there's postmodernism. Oh dear. When it comes to questions of fundamental underlying values or basic priorities, or, for that matter, to questions of taste, you can, of course, argue all day long without ever coming to a conclusion. But on the vast majority of issues where the Left and the Right disagree about matters of
fact, the Left is simply right and the Right is simply wrong. Simple as that.
And then, large parts of the Left go and embrace a philosophy that teaches that there's no right and wrong, there's no true or false, and there are no facts, because it's all just a matter of different narratives.
Es ist zum Weinen. Why would someone voluntarily throw away one of their strongest and most powerful weapons? Really, this probably only makes sense if you put it into the context of the Left's perennial self-destructive tendencies.
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Postcolonial Theory seems to be mainly the idea that every atrocity or act of mass murder should be supported, defended, justified, and never in any way criticized or punished, as long as the people who commit it claim to be serving the cause of fighting colonialism. As such, it is simply one out of many intellectual justifications for atrocities and mass murder that people have come up with throughout history, and not deserving of any more respect or consideration than all the
other intellectual justifications for atrocities and mass murder.
***
Next point, feminist theory. I support many of the policy demands and demands for social and cultural change made by many feminists. But I don’t see why, if you start out with the statement "Women are people", you then have to arrive, a few rounds of elaboration later, at something like "The briziblocks are an ontomenatic expression of the mupaluscosity inherent in all klamdaburiounisness, and therefore you shouldn't [do whatever we've decided you shouldn't do this week]."
That said, at least Third Wave Feminism, whatever its other pros and cons, seems to have been an improvement over Second Wave Feminism, which apparently boiled down to the idea that all women are great and wonderful and should always be supported and respected, except for the 95 percent of women who make sartorial, cosmetic, or lifestyle choices which the Second Wave Feminists didn't like.
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Queer Theory. See the first paragraph of what I wrote about feminist theory above.
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The theory of Orientalism, at least if you look at how its followers usually apply it in practise, seems to mean that, while white Westerners can oppose their own unjust, repressive, and oppressive cultural traditions as much as they want, if non-Western People of Color - that is, the vast majority of people in the world - want to oppose
their own unjust, repressive, and oppressive cultural traditions, they're taking part in, or at least enabling, Orientalism, and are therefore bad and wrong and should be opposed and shunned and never be supported. In other words, according to that form of theory, the vast majority of people in the world have an obligation to spend the rest of human history putting up with whatever unjust, repressive, and oppressive cultural traditions they have now, and shouldn't even ever complain about it. I don't see what's supposed to be left-wing about that.
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The theory of intersectionality has a perfectly fine starting point: the idea that different forms of systemic oppression intersect, so that, if you belong to different marginalized groups at the same time, you'll be subject to those different forms of systemic oppression at the same time. So if, for instance, you're a Black woman, you'll be targeted by both racism and sexism, and you might still experience racism in feminist settings, and you might still experience sexism in anti-racist settings. So far, so true.
There are, however, three problems with how this is often applied in practise: First, fans of intersectionality all too often say that, since all the different forms of systemic oppression intersect, they're basically all the same, and can only be fought all at once, and there can't really be any improvements related to any of them until we've gotten rid of all of them. To me, this sounds suspiciously like the idea common in some
other parts of the Left that, since True Liberation can only happen after The Revolution, we have to wait until after The Revolution with getting any concrete improvements in any aspects of people's lives. Not very promising if you don't know when, if ever, The Revolution will happen.
Related to that, fans of intersectionality all too often talk as if, because of the interconnectedness of all forms of systemic oppression, all marginalized groups should be seen as being in the same boat. That's a nice ideal, but it ignores the practical reality that some members of various marginalized groups are themselves bigoted against members of other marginalized groups, and that sometimes, specific marginalized or formerly marginalized groups end up in a better situation than before, while other marginalized groups are left behind.
Finally,
some fans of intersectionality - thankfully not all of them - seem to use what they know about the oppressed or privileged status of various demographic groups as the basis for a kind of points system, where people are assigned privilege points for privileged demographic groups they belong to and oppression points for oppressed demographic groups they belong to, and then all those points are added up, and that calculation is effectively used to determine people's moral worth. Let's just say that I'm completely against assigning people moral worth based on which demographic groups they were born into.
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Related to some forms of left-wing theory, there's the matter of inclusive language. Now, of course people should stop using terms and words and expressions that are grossly insulting. So some amount of trying to change language is a good thing. But you should be careful about how far you go with that. Beyond a certain point, inclusive language is exclusive language, because it excludes all those who either don't have the time, or don't have the energy, or don't have the interest to constantly keep themselves up to date about the latest developments in inclusive language.
Besides, the more the Left insists on always talking in its own super special language, the more difficult it becomes to spread the Left's message to most people. And I think there are many left-wing ideas that
should be spread to as many people as possible.