The Other Red Pill: Wake Up! Class is Back in Session!

I mentioned previously that societies that romanticize revolution and demonize capitalists do so at a heavy cost.  But then, so do societies that fail to take materialist definitions of class into account when looking at both economic and social issues.  To say that our society has suffered enormously as a result of a lack of class in its political outlook is an understatement of grand proportions.

Historical materialism was consigned to the dustbin of history very prematurely.  The failure of the USSR was not the failure of this kind of an outlook on political economy.  If anything, we've been failing for a lack of it, as I've tried to demonstrate throughout the Other Red Pill Series.  To address numerous social problems, it must be resurrected and rehabilitated, without a lot of the other Marxist baggage it became burdened with over time.  Let's just pretend that Lenin and everything after in the east and the Frankfurt School and everything after in the west never happened, shall we?

In fact, I would go as far as to say that The resuscitation of economic class, as defined in Marx's materialist conception of history, must be THE central project of alternative-left politics.  This is what the Other Red Pill is ultimately really all about.  What we do with that knowledge, as it becomes more mainstream, is up to us. 

But the truancy of the left must come to an end.  It's time to wake up.  Identitarians of all stripes and neo-liberals have kept the wool over our eyes for far too long now.  It's time for the alt-left to take them back to school: class is back in session!

The Other Red Pill: A Touch of Class

Friedrich Engels wrote:

The materialist conception of history has a lot of [dangerous friends] nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history. Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late 70s: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist." (...) In general, the word "materialistic" serves many of the younger writers in Germany as a mere phrase with which anything and everything is labeled without further study, that is, they stick on this label and then consider the question disposed of. But our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian. All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce them from the political, civil law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views corresponding to them. 

In short, historical materialism is not a master key to understanding all of history and society, and is not a shortcut to understanding the complexities and nuances of each individual society and era.  Marx and Engels, though they had insights sufficient enough to merit rescue from "the more savage travesties of his critics", were not infallible or omniscient.  No one ever is.

The usefulness of historical materialism as a means of analyzing the way societies worked, and just how powerful a critique it was (and to a considerable extent still is) in criticizing capitalism, combined with with the almost apocalyptic nature of Marx's predictions on where capitalist society was headed (predictions that were overwhelmingly wrong the vast majority of the time) and the resulting romanticization of revolution for its own sake, led to Marxism becoming a kind of surrogate religion for many of its most devoted followers.  Especially since Marxism naturally entailed kicking one's opium (of the masses) habit, and a similar kind of belief system was needed to fill the void.

This resulted in all of the evils of religious fanaticism that were carried out under the cross or the crescent over the centuries being carried out under the hammer and sickle in the 20th century.  These "communist" states carried out countless atrocities and disastrous policies which were driven in large part by a religious fervor towards Marxist ideology, or what these fanatics thought Marxist ideology was, which is very often very different from what both its supporters and opponents thought it was.  Think critically at all times, even towards otherwise good ideas.

It's worth touching upon the age old debate of whether or not the USSR was actually socialist.  This depends on how one defines the term.  What we do know, however, were that the "soviets" - democratic councils of workers established to manage factories and local economies - for which the USSR was named, were taken over, often by force, by the central Bolshevik state as soon as they had the power to do so.  Like the "state priests" of the "Bonapartist State" of the early 19th century that Marx himself criticized, and like the regressive left SJWs in media and academia in our time, the Bolsheviks regarded themselves as a kind of "intellectual" elite who, by virtue of their superior insight into the one true faith, had the right to capture popular democratic institutions and use them to rule over the plebs with an iron fist.  For their own good, of course.

In materialist terms, what we know is that the Soviet state had utter and complete control over the means of production.  Compared even to monopoly capitalism, ownership was more rather than less concentrated under the USSR system.  Of course, even totalitarian states knew the value of good PR, and so described themselves in ideal socialist terms.  The arrangement was also useful, if in an ironic way, to the capitalist elite in the west, who could then point to the monstrosity that was the Soviet state and claiming that was what socialism really was all about, kill any interest in the materialist outlook that its working classes may have had.  Even western leftists were drinking this Kool-Aid, especially after the Soviet state unraveled, with results I've discussed elsewhere.  

Any Soviet citizen who complained about any aspect of it could expect to find themselves sent to that part of it known as the gulag.  If socialism or communism can be defined as kinds of democratic citizen's or worker's control over the means of production, the USSR and its copycats and sock puppets were as far away from that as you can get.

Perhaps more significantly, is full blown democratic citizen's or worker's control over the entire means of production feasible or even desirable?  Perhaps they were when Marx put pen to paper in the mid 19th century, but are they now?  Are they now that the joint stock or limited liability corporations have become the primary organization in capitalist production and distribution, doing away with the strict dichotomy of bourgeois tycoon vs. propertiless proletariat that so much of Marx's theory depended on?  What would Marx, or Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes for that matter, make of an incorporated entity in which the employees, customers, parts of the broader community or even the state were in part or in whole, the shareholders?  These all seem to be vastly superior models to classic Marxist-Leninism if you ask me.  If we were opt to "in whole" as opposed to "in part" ownership in the above cases, how would these organizations raise capital?

Marx's critique of capitalism relied heavily on the labor theory of value, and the claim that profit resulted from surplus value: the workers receiving less than the value of what they produced, and the difference going into the capitalist's pocket.  I doubt that this is always necessarily true, though it can be, and without a proper regulatory structure, economic forces most likely will result in the kinds of economic meltdowns that Marx believed would eventually destroy capitalism, such as the market crashes of 1929 and 2008.  

If the capitalists compensate themselves for their own work in organizing production, if they compensate shareholders for the risk the run in investing in the business in the first place, if they invest in capital that increases the productivity of the business, resulting in more revenue and allowing for higher salaries across the board, wouldn't this admittedly ideal (meaning not always the really occurring) scenario be, in many ways preferable to the physical laborers simply taking it all as income, while allowing the capital assets to deteriorate?  I've often suspected that this is why real existing socialist societies - from Russia a century ago to Venezuela today, start out so well for the commoners, but the standard of living then deteriorates to a point where capitalist systems surpass them in terms of living standards.  

And don't get me started on the economic calculation problem, demonstrating the almost total lack of feasibility for any system of planned economics.  Societies that romanticize revolution and demonize capitalists pay a heavy price for doing so.  The thing to aspire to, I think, is not a retread of revolutionary socialism, but a capitalism wherein all, or at least most can profit, not just a few.

The Other Red Pill: Engendered Failure

In 1993, Warren Farrell, Ph.D. exposed us to many poignant truths about the reality of being male in America at the time.  Among them are:

• 94 percent of occupational deaths occur to men.
• Every workday hour, one construction worker in the US loses his life
• Men have been the overwhelming majority of the cannon fodder in every major war ever waged.
• Most successful suicides are male, and unemployed males commit suicide at twice the rate of their employed brethren.
• 96% of the adult homeless in San Francisco are male.  The national median at the time of writing was 85%.

And more besides.  Things have not improved either.  Not for most men anyway.  Eighty percent of job losses in the 2007 to 2009 time span were male.  This led to the coining of the term "mancession", which did not end until 2015, according to some sources.  Except for black males, which must doubtlessly be the fault of white privilege.  

Some men have done quite well through it all, however.  Which ones?   Probably not the ones reading this, despite what the feminists are no doubt telling them about their male privilege.  Which all men have, regardless of race, sexual orientation or physical ability.  Or, you know, anything else that might impact social inequality.  If you're still confused, go and take a cl ... I mean course on it.  The important thing is that men as a cl ... as a group supposedly have all the power and women have none.

And the statistics bear that out, as any woman will tell you.  Women still suffer from a very real wage and wealth gap compared to men.  Which can only be explained by men, all men, hording all the money to themselves.  But not evenly.  White men, quite naturally, have the most.  Even the homeless white men referenced above?  Well, yes I suppose.  The historical reality, after all, is that blacks were slaves and were discriminated against in the Jim Crow era while whites were not.  That's the only real explanation open to us, since race and gender are the only social axes upon which wealth and power are distributed.  So all white males benefited, and benefited equally.  Or so the best social commentators of our time will tell us.  The ones who graduated at the top of their cl ... I mean, got the best marks while in college.

The Myth of Male Power was a book not lacking in power.  It quite effectively takes a wrecking ball to notions popular at the time of its writing, and still popular today, that men have gone and made everything wonderful for themselves at the expense of all women.  Which needed to be said.  It apparently still does need to be said, and even I've said it.  But not nearly as well as Dr. Farrell said it.  In some respects, The Myth of Male Power is in a cl ... a category by itself.

Men continue to be the disposable sex, and growing numbers of men continue to be mad about it.  And so they should be.  Though the mancession is over, most men are finding job prospects limited and wages stagnant.  If you take the "red pill" and go into the online "manosphere", you will find that feminism has been responsible for most of men's woes over the years.  We can only guess that all of those military and workplace fatalities and the economic struggles that working cl ... I mean just men face are due to feminism also.  Even though feminism is scarcely more than two hundred years old and men have been dying in wars and working in drudgery for a lot longer than that.  

And I don't blame the manosphere types.  They do have legitimate gripes with feminism.  No, really.  They do.  Because many feminists have been blaming all men, at least collectively, for their own struggles, which are sometimes different but quite frequently look the same as well.  Lagging wages, declining opportunities, all too frequently outright poverty.  Whose fault could all of this be?  After all, corporate profits are up again.  Who could be making it if not white men and their centuries of privilege?  It's not like there's any other cl ... I mean category of people who could be benefiting at the expense of women?

Well that's obviously preposterous, and you'll learn that quite quickly the deeper into the underworld of the internet you go.  You'll find that it goes beyond feminism.  The deeper problem is "cultural Marxism."  Or should I say, (((cultural Marxism))).   You see, this "Marxism" has to do with this guy in the 19th century who must have figured that white western civilization was a bad, BAD thing because it oppressed and colonized women and people of color.  And what's funny about it is that if you go to college and take a cl ... course on critical theory, for example, or women's or black studies, they will indeed teach you that those terrible things did happen.  And the only reason they happened was because racism and sexism.  For the benefit of white males, just for being white males!  After all, it's not like there's any other way that any other cl ... group of people could have benefited from the dispossession of indigenous people and African slavery.  

Or so the cultural Marxist colleges will teach you.  But it's all a lie, don't you know?  A (((lie!)))  Any fool worth his salt knows that white males are struggling to get by these days.  Well, most white males, anyway.  The real blame lies with the Jews, or so I've read, because I can't imagine any other cl ... category of people who might benefit from stagnant wages and unemployment among the white male working cl ...

One other thing that I've run into with all of this study of the politics of race, gender, culture and oppression.  And that's this idea of linguistic reclaimation -  a once dirty, derogatory or forbidden word being brought back into acceptable use by the communities that experienced oppression under that word, or perhaps by the absence of that word.

Right off hand, I'd say there's one word that people of all races, genders and sexual orientations have been far too afraid to say for far too long now, and our racial and sexual politics have been distorted almost beyond reason and recognition as a result.  The first task of the Alt-Left should be to reclaim that word.

A good place to start might be to take a look at what that Marx guy (Karl, not Groucho, in case you were wondering) really had to say.

The Other Red Pill: Race to the Bottom

So why bring all of this up at all?  What good is Marxist materialism in the 21st century, decades after the collapse of the USSR?  Because it is desperately needed.  The previous two entries in the Other Red Pill series describe how the lack of understanding of class in a materialist context is causing terrible distortions in racial and sexual politics, as well as enabling the widespread acceptance of neo-liberal economics.  With no understanding of class rooted in economic relations, persistent inequality across racial and gender lines can only be explained by either an entrenched culture favoring one group over the other, or an appeal to innate biological differences between the unequal groups.

Suffice it to say, these explanations are not helping racial and gender relations any.  And it's only going to get worse.  Discussions between feminists and men's rights activists, or between Black Lives Matter supporters and the Alt-Right certainly do lack class.

This isn't to say that culture and identity don't matter.  They do.  But making these factors central puts the cart before the horse, so to speak.  If you've been following the Other Red Pill series since the beginning, you should know that the most fundamental relations that people engage in boil down to physical survival and sustenance, which is most certainly material and economic in its character.  Economic relations and forces of production are therefore the base of your society.  These activities, over time, end up shaping the politics, culture, dominant belief systems, personal relationships and so on.  These more cultural and personal matters are thus the superstructure upon which the base is constructed.

Racial prejudice, for example, is commonly seen in terms of being a moral failing or the result of ignorance.  And for white people, racism against people of color is seen today as being worse than that: it is actually an instrument of oppression.  Evidence cited for this later claim is the ongoing economic inequality between whites and black people, and the subsequent poverty and social problems that result.  Therefore white people must stop being racist if blacks are to achieve equality. This necessitates the existence of a class of educated sociologists in media and government to monitor and police the words and behaviors of whites to make sure they are not racist.  Suffice it to say, many white people are not happy about this.

These views are not entirely wrong, but are but a part of a much bigger picture.  Whence comes racism and resulting racial inequality?  All forms of extractive economics - systems that work by screwing over one segment of the population to benefit another, tend to have to rationalize this conduct in a way that makes it morally palatable to its beneficiaries, victims and onlookers.  If you were a Spanish Conquistador and you just waltzed into 15th century central and south American and just took their gold and bound the natives to the land in an incredibly exploitative system of forced labor, you might feel like a bit of a prick, right?

Not if you had religion, and had God on your side and were saving the native's souls by converting them to the one true faith!  That made it okay, and that gold then becomes more guilt free.  It's easier to grow fat off plantation slave labor if you tell yourselves that your dark skinned slaves are less human than you are, and that you're really doing them a favor by having them work for you.   More compact cultures built around these kinds of rationalizations for the flagrant exploitation of whole categories of people more effectively work to ease guilty consciences.  So you tell yourselves whatever you have to: a shoehorned interpretation of the bible that refers to dark skinned people as the children of Cain and therefore cursed and deserving of mistreatment, or pseudoscience involving skull measurements and other racial characteristics to conveniently brand the slaves as an inferior race.

But the bottom line is always, well, the bottom line.

For a variety of reasons, not least of which being that the industrial mode of production made chattel slavery less competitive, though the plantation states losing the Civil War (for that reason) hastened the process, said chattel slavery fell out of use.  But the racist ideas it gave rise to (the superstructure) didn't go away because they still had a place in the underlying relations of production (base), even after slavery and later Jim Crow segregation were finally defeated: racial prejudice enabled the paying of lower wages to black workers (rationalized according to their "laziness"), dividing the working class and weakening the unions.  This resulted in all workers regardless of color doing less well as a result, though many even in the white working class were loathe to give up the ego stroking sense of supremacy over blacks that racism gave them.  As Lyndon Johnson put it:

I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it: if you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

Due to their long period as slaves, and then as victims of legal discrimination, blacks and other minorities had far fewer opportunities than whites to accumulate capital and pass it on generation to generation.  And since capital is where wealth in a capitalist society really comes from, as I'm sure you've guessed, this compounds the problem.  Less capital means less cultural influence as well, not to mention politicians exploiting racial sentiment to keep their more economically populist rivals out of office.  So you can see now that culture ultimately flows from economy, though is also quite capable of having a life of its own that is slow to change, feeding back into the economic system incentives to keep the existing cultural system in place.

Ultimately, however, economy is the stronger of the two most of the time.  Racial prejudice gradually faded - it was removed from the core structure of the plantation economy by the abolition of slavery, and phased out politically over the next century when Jim Crow segregation was challenged by the civil rights movement.  I would not be the only one to notice, however, that when the man who's name is synonymous with the US civil rights movement - Martin Luther King Jr. began talking about inequality in terms of class and economics, even going as far as to plan a poor people's march on Washington for all races, that's when he got assassinated.

The FBI's notorious counter intelligence program may be (officially) shut down, but perhaps it's more the case that it has actually been institutionalized to an extent that it's no longer really needed.  Radicalism is perfectly fine and acceptable in the US and other western nations these days, as long as it's the right kind of "radicalism."  Provided that power is defined in terms of race and gender, media and academia that have become more rather than less corporate and beholden to corporate and advertising revenues are, in fact, quite supportive of "radicalism."

There's always space in mainstream media for cultural criticism, provided it stays cultural.  Major media conglomerates will give front page space to black nationalists who see racism everywhere.  But especially in the trailer courts and dilapidated rust belt suburban neighborhoods.  There's always room to criticize the ethnic composition of the cast of the latest Marvel superhero movie, or even the ethnic composition of the board of directors at Sony, Viacom or Time-Warner.  So long as there's no criticism of how powerful these institutions actually are outside of an identitarian context.  Firing troublemakers on the pretext of "racism" is actually a good way to keep the status quo the status quo, as a matter of fact.

But most of the time, things don't have to get so messy.  People who want to be "left" and fight oppression now have acceptable channels through which to do so: attack white people and their privilege, which all white people must have in equal measure, because ... because reasons.  And sometimes the reasons are valid.  The white man's racism is not to be condoned.  It's worked against the common interests of all of the have-nots for far too long now, as the LBJ quote above indicates.

To criticize the lower class white man for his racism when appropriate is one thing.  To charge the lower class white man as being a beneficiary in equal measure with all other white people in a system of power over which his lack of class gives him no control is quite another, and is itself an act of oppression geared towards preserving rather than undermining the real power structures.  He is made an acceptable scapegoat for the evils of an unacceptable system, despite his own very real powerlessness.  It is important that alt-leftists call this out in a manner that does not turn these tables on the poor black.  You've been red-pilled now, you should know where people's attention really needs to be focused.

One wonders if President Obama marvels in a manner comparable to President Johnson before him, over just how easy it is to pick the pockets of the lowest black man so long as he can look down on the best white man for his "racism."  Their loyalty to Obama at the polls tells the story.

But white people who rightly get annoyed by this - the white people who actually lack the power that the upper middle class sociologists define as a key ingredient to real racism - the white people who've never been that much closer to the top of the social hierarchy than blacks due to the fact that they've never owned anything more than their own labor power to sell in a country that's always been hostile to worker's rights - can then blame "the left" and its "cultural Marxism" for demonizing whites and their culture.  But the poor white must above all remember, it's the "left" and especially "Marxism" that he has to blame.  If there's anyone that both poor blacks and poor whites need to be steered clear from, it's that Marx guy.

I can't help but wonder if the souls of those dead conquistadors; the ones who were just doing God's work and the dead plantation owners who were just preserving the natural order of things aren't looking at the women's studies and black studies department theorists and shaking their heads with that mixture of admiration and shame that comes with the knowledge that you've finally been utterly and completely out-classed at your own game.

Whatever success they have from here, the SJWs have been utterly successful at what I firmly believe their true purpose was.  They've truly beaten the Ku Klux Klan at their own game.  We're to busy checking our privilege now to be the 99% any more.  And that's the important thing.

The Other Red Pill: No Class

From the 1990s onward, the left in the west found itself increasingly dependent on educated urban liberals, minorities and immigrants for its electoral support as the unions collapsed due to the loss of manufacturing jobs to places like China.  Gradually, dialectics based on race and gender would come to replace dialectics based on class - despite how monstrous a misapplication of Marxist theory this was.  

It was a new lease on life for the beleaguered leftist parties everywhere, albeit one that would come at a heavy price.

Critical theory based on race and gender begun its own "deconstruction" of western culture in academia, supported quite ironically by state and corporate cash, not to mention student debt. The organs of western culture - corporate media and academia - expressed increasing worry that racism and misogyny were "found" to be deeply embedded in western culture - the same culture that financed and enabled the spread of feminist and multiculturalist theory.

A quasi Marxist dialectic recognizing all white males regardless of class as a kind of ruling class, and women and minorities as an exploited underclass emerged, and analysis of racial and sexual relationships through this kind of lens became prominent.  In the absence of a political theory of class rooted in relations of production, such views emerged almost entirely unchallenged.  What we now recognize as political correctness emerged. 

When social media allowed for this ideology to extend beyond academia and into the broader culture, a new plague was released upon the world: the social justice warriors.  Despite their anti-capitalist pretenses, Wall Street certainly had no objections to the SJWs - better white male tears than being occupied, after all.  Silicon Valley went further, with online magazines and social media of all kinds rushing to give platforms to feminist and anti-racist concerns.  The pettier, the better, it so often seemed.  If an article got clicks, the article got bucks.  Advertising fuels it, after all, and what better way to draw attention than with manufactured controversy?  And what worked better for that than some or another instance of "political correctness gone mad."

Each day brought new excesses of social justice trivialities, it seemed.  Microaggressions, trigger warnings, cultural appropriations, the ubiquitous phrase, "check your privilege."  "Problematic" imagery and words were everywhere, from video games to the shirts worn by astrophysicists while landing satellites on comets and everything else you can think of.  A new culture war was underway, and it was much better for business than a class war - narrowly averted coming out of the Lehman Bro's meltdown, would have been.

It should not be a surprise that there'd be a backlash against the excesses of online political correctness.  Its core ideology was not new, but its means of delivery and proliferation were as modern as you could get.  Politically correct culture was viciously attacked, and mainstream conservatism held to ridicule for its failure to adequately stand up for western culture.  Their critique went back to the Frankfurt School, its Jewish-Marxist luminaries and its deconstruction of western civilization as a prelude to socialist revolution.  Conspicuous in its absence were Marx's theories of class relations.  Nor did it seem to matter to the emergent alt-right that as a meaningful force in 21st century politics, Marxist socialism was extinct; its fire has gone out of the universe.

"Cultural Marxism" was the boogeyman that the alt-right was convinced was hell-bent on destroying the west.  And we can all guess (((who))) was to be responsible for it.

The alt-right's bastardization of the cultural Marxist idea is lifted straight out of Mein Kampf, Hitler decisively and explicitly rejected the materialism of Marx, and saw instead a Darwinian struggle of races and nations instead of class struggle. Antisemitism was a common prejudice in Europe in those days, as was fear of communism. Hitler wove the two together into a narrative that he used to appeal to the anxieties of the German people. That Hitler was chosen in preference to the communists in Wiemar Germany was further proof to the Frankfurt theorists that culture went deeper than class in the psyches of the working and middle classes. Hitler differs from the SJWs and their white male counterparts on the alt-right only in that he was many decades ahead of them in his theories. Indeed, it is Hitler much more than Marx that underlies the thinking of both the SJWs and the alt-right, though not directly in the case of the SJWs.  Although it must be admitted that "My Struggle" would make a great name for an edgy teenage girl's tumblr account.

More recently, the Fuhrer's old ideas were dusted off by one William S. Lind, a paleoconservative theorist whose attribution of current year SJW political correctness directly to Marx has, along with Nazi style anti-semetic conspiracy theories been an ideological impetus behind the rise of the alt-right.  Lacking a better way to understand their declining fortunes in the 21st century, the angry white male keyboard warriors of the 4chan and Reddit undergrounds were no less vulnerable to cultural conspiracy theories than the very SJWs they condemned were.

How could any of them have known any better?  The SJWs and the Alt-Right alike cannot be faulted their lack of education.  Class had been dismissed long ago.

Western civilization has paid a dire price for the loss of class consciousness and historical materialism from its political mind. We are without a means of explaining widespread inequality except either through the lens of racial and gender discrimination, or as a natural and good outcome of some people just working harder or being naturally more talented than others.

The results greet you in your newsfeed every day.

The Other Red Pill: Class Dismissed!

The Frankfurt school influenced modern leftism a great deal.

It began in 1920s Germany by a group of Marxists, many of whom were Jewish (Marxism appealed to intellectuals who were ostracized from the cultural mainstream; who would have guessed?). They were mainly interested in why European working classes allied with their respective countries during WWI as opposed to uniting across national boundaries to stop the war and overthrow capitalism, as well as not having much class consciousness at all beyond what Lenin called a "trade union consciousness." That meant that the working class was content to win its rights within the capitalist system rather than overthrowing the system all together.

That it simply might not have been necessary or even desirable for the working classes to do this crossed the minds of neither Lenin nor the Frankfurt Theorists.  The nasty effects that this preoccupation with romanticizing revolution had on Marxist theory on both sides of the iron curtain, I've discussed elsewhere.  Lenin and his successors had options that were not open to western Marxists to get the working classes in the Soviet Union thinking along the right lines.

The Frankfurters had no such options open to them.  So they came to believe that ideologies that countermanded class consciousness went deeper into the working class psyche than the mere economic determinism of Marx could have allowed for, and that these beliefs were constantly being reinforced in the broader culture. This brought them into contact with Freudian psychoanalysis for further study of how what they came to call cultural hegemony was internalized by even those whose class interests went against the way the broader system worked. The Frankfurt school came to believe that western culture had deeper problems than merely an exploitative economic system, and thus needed its own kind of psychoanalysis - "deconstruction" in order to make its oppressive characteristics conscious, and so be rejected. Thus critical theory was born.

In the early 1930s, it seemed reasonable for Jewish Marxists in Germany to get the hell out of Dodge. Perhaps one of the few times that desire for a "safe space" in academia was reasonable. So most of them went to America. Some, I think, returned to Europe after the war, especially since it was America's turn to go after the commies (though not nearly as savagely as Germany had done previously) in the 1950s.

The new left of the 1960s, inspired by Frankfurt School ideas to a much greater degree than the "old" left had been, found itself making common cause with emerging civil rights and feminist causes (remember that bit about Marxist appeal to the ostracized), which were also developing bodies of theory of their own. Frankfurt theorists thus had a great impact on feminist theory and critical race theory which emerged in 1970s academia. Perhaps the 3rd world and its "manifestations" among minorities and immigrants in the 1st world, uncorrupted by western culture, would succeed where the proletariat had failed, and become a truly revolutionary class?  Such was the hope in some quarters.  This, I think is where this idea of cultural Marxism that the far right is always on about, comes from.

It must be mentioned that the Frankfurt School was by no means the only group experimenting in what were then different modes of leftist thought that broke from the dull orthodoxies spouted by the Kremlin and its other sock puppets throughout Europe and Asia.  Nor was the Frankfurt School necessarily wrong.  They had useful insights.  Discontent with an obviously corrupt and brutal regime in Moscow was another obvious source of discontent.  Another alternative view came from the French postmodernists (think Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc.)

Contrary to what you might hear, Antonio Gramsci, whose theories of cultural hegemony spook any alt-rightist obsessed with cultural Marxism, wasn't involved with the Frankfurt School and did not coin the phrase "long march through the institutions," whereby Jewish Marxists would infiltrate academia and other cultural institutions and destroy western civilization from within - although Herbert Marcuse, who was associated with the Frankfurt School, did approve of that basic concept.

If the intent of this leftist infiltration of cultural institutions was to erode public faith in western civilization and therefore make ready the people for a revolutionary socialist consciousness, it could not have failed more spectacularly.  Rising popular acceptance for feminism, multiculturalism and secularism throughout the 1980s and early 1990s were not exactly accompanied by an explosion of revolutionary socialist fervor in the western world.  To put it mildly.

And this is less of a coincidence than people are inclined to realize - among Marx's most prescient observations was that rapacious global capitalism would undermine traditional cultures and gradually replace them with a world wide culture built around commerce and consumerism.  So far from undermining capitalism, the emergent social liberalism worked hand-in-glove with it.

Immigration brought cheap labor and spared cash strapped governments the expense of providing services for mothers and children. Multiculturalism opened up new markets at home and abroad. Feminist preferences of career over family were most welcome in corporate board rooms and the cabinets of neo-liberal governments.

... to be continued ...

Men apparently have no balls. Really, they don't.

No, this isn't some current year gender attribution thing.  Nobody has been misgendered due to incorrect pronoun usage.  But this is nearly as bad.

Laurie Martin is unhappy that women need to start asking men out, because men have "no balls."

There's no door-holding, no hand-holding and definitely no free drinks. There’s no taking off hats or courting through invitations. There are no smooth moves, no jackets to dinner. There are no flowers, no tables by candlelight … If you're a single woman, you probably envisioned your twenties as a roaring social scene full of expensive dinners and lavish nights out. 

Oh noes!  No free drinks?  No expensive dinners?  Women might actually have to approach men they're interested in?  Whatever is this world coming to???  Whatever is an oppressed woman in a patriarchal society to do???  Load up on chocolate and start buying cats would be my advice.

Believe it or not, I'm not actually going to pick the article apart.  Not that much anyway.  That would just be too easy.  Give it a read and think long and hard about why the Laurie Martins of this world are romantically challenged.

We're dealing with a new breed of men here and it's not the kind we grew up dreaming about. It’s the want-what-I-want-but-don’t-know-how-to-get-it type; it’s the sweet and cuddly mama’s boys who grow up terrified of making the first move; it’s the guys who have so much to say but don’t know how to say it.

Oh, I'm sure guys know just what to say to Laurie Martin and exactly how to say it too.  The absence of a comments section at the end of this article means that Laurie Martin probably knows it too. That the entire weight of all social media is given to the 24/7/365 condemnation of men who act as Laurie Martin thinks we should as "misogynists" and "sexists" who "harass" and "objectify" women due to "entitlement", "rape culture" and "male privilege" might, just might have something to do with their reluctance to sweep poor miss Martin off her feet?

Or maybe men with half a brain have better things to do than buy flowers, drinks and candle light dinners for entitled little whiners who then go on about the same men lacking balls, having fragile egos or being immature?  Lord knows, I do.  Watching paint dry and grass grow is exciting in comparison.

Not that some men do not warrant these descriptions, mind you.

Does miss Laurie Martin even want a relationship at all?  Because it looks to me like what she's pining away for are the trappings of romantic love completely divorced from the mutual love and respect that gives those trappings any real value.

And the role playing.  Damn, the role playing.  More role-playing than a Wizards of the Coast convention.  Men need to make the first move.  And hold doors open.  And take off hats.  And court through invitations - not that these are bad things in and of themselves.  Nothing wrong with a bit of LARPing. I've done it myself.  But the real problem here isn't with the trappings of romance per-se, it's with the article's author's sense of entitlement to them.

I could go on, but like I said, too easy.  Because maybe on a deeper level, our entitled little Laurie Martin just might have a point.  Though not for the reasons she undoubtedly thinks she does.

It's not a big secret that men are losing interest in relationships with women compared to the way they used to be.   Not all that different than what women went through when the feminist second wave broke out late in the last century.  It is not the kind of sensational and demonstrative movement that feminism in the 1970s was.  This quiet revolution is taking place below the radar, not something that social media appealing to a largely feminized, cosmopolitan audience is going to pay attention to, except to ridicule as a fading bastion of old world misogyny.  In light of the above, however, men going their own way or taking the red pill (though not the red pill they should be taking) are, as individuals, acting completely rationally.

As individuals.  But collectively, it's no less self defeating than the most absurd feminism these days is.  And this is where I think Laurie Martin might have a point.  Dropping out of the mating game all together, or taking up some kind of "pick-up artistry" only adds to the underlying problem.  What this signals to women is that relationships with women, except maybe as one night stands to be obtained through psychological trickery, are of little value to men.  Which is not a message that's likely to quench the fires of feminist self righteousness any time soon.

What can men do, or what could men have done differently?  Could men, and sympathetic women, have instead confronted feminism en-mass?  Not out of any reverse sense of victimhood and entitlement - the hegemonic notion of the 21st century; that victimhood and marginalization confer an innate moral superiority, is not more becoming when men do it.

Rather, what if men took the stance that good and healthy relationships with women were actually worth fighting for?  And what if they advocated for this individually and collectively, the way they've done in the past for things like civil rights and even feminism?

• What if men slapped back after holding a door open?  There's nothing sexist about courtesy and politeness?
• What if men effectively organized and campaigned against the demonization of male sexuality at every turn, rejecting the Catholic-turned-feminist dogmas of "objectification" and instead saw consensual sex as a good and healthy part of the appropriate kind of relationship.  This would mean zero tolerance for the equating of compliments to harassment to a sustained and organized push back against the ever inflating definition of rape to hold men responsible for the decisions that women make and might later regret?
• What if misandry in media was met with the kind of outcry that such alleged "misogyny" as a male daring to display attraction to a female now garners?  Not because of concern for male fragility - we can take a joke, after all, but out of respect for mutual respect, and how important it is for relationships both platonic and sexual?

And that just for starters.  And women would be more than welcome to join too, since this isn't a movement for men's rights but rather a movement for good, positive relationship norms.  What if women took the organizational savvy and social media outrage they typically reserve for politically incorrect white males who dare display attraction for women - "objectification", after all, and direct that instead to people of both (not all, but both) sexes who contributed to the present day culture of gender based hatred, against members of either sex?

I suspect you'd have a lot less demonstrable misogyny, for one thing, since the unmistakable whiff of childish egocentrism, daddy issues and sexual neurosis that presently motivates a lot of feminism would not attend this fictional movement of mine, and so men - and the kinds of men miss Martin seems to wish we were rather than spineless numales and feminist men-who-get-it - would be much more likely to support it.

I suspect there'd be a lot fewer single, lonely and romantically/sexually frustrated people out there of both genders.  Relationships would last longer and be more mutually satisfying due to a culture of mutual respect rather than one of mutual derision.

You can bet there'd be a LOT less feminism because men would make it clear that they value the women in their lives, and act accordingly in the most intimate of forums.  We're a long, LONG way away yet from realizing that men cannot defeat feminism outside the bedroom.

I suspect it would just be better in so many ways, with a lot of spin-off effects that would help in other areas of human experience and endeavor.

Imagine the possibilities!

Alas, such a movement has not been and is not to be.  Hell, so few people of either sex have seen erotic heterosexual love worthy of any kind of spirited defense over the last forty years.  Such a defense would have taken balls - precisely what so many people, of both sexes in recent years, have lacked.