Every so often a conversation haunts me long after the exchange has concluded.
It's typically relegated to the background, w/ demands of daily life taking precedence.
But when there is a break in the action...
A quiet lull when lights are out, the door is locked, and contemplation takes hold...
My mind revisits the exchange w/ none other than the Professor, re: Marxism.
If I recall correctly, it was your position that critical race theory (CRT) cannot be considered meaningfully Marxist.
I hear this exact argument all the time; particularly from those on the Left that are trying to condescend to me, gaslight me, or make me out as some caricature of a paranoid Right-winger that believes in conspiracy theories (to any conservatives out there reading this, don't let anyone tell you that cultural Marxism or Jordan Peterson's notion of "Post Modern Neo-Marxists" aren't a thing. They are, and all it takes is some careful tracing of philosophical genealogy to confirm this for yourself). It typically doesn't work since their arguments end up ringing hollow, and I've actually bothered to read up on a fair amount of Marxism to know what I am talking about. But you, you came at me w/ that argument in good faith, and you were ready to fight it out on a doctrinal level; I have to say I really appreciated that back-and-forth--w/ good reason I still think about it to this very day.
At the halfway mark of our original conversation, we came to the consensus that CRT cannot be considered part of orthodox Marxism, but as I laid out the case for, it can be considered part of Neo-Marxism. I think we're both fine w/ that; I still certainly am.
I recall a specific statement that you made, however. You said that b/c CRT doesn't make any overtures towards class in it's dialectic, it cannot be considered Marxist. It should be considered more Hegelian if anything. I agreed w/ you on that point, and I still do. Though--and this is largely why I'm even bothering to write this, to clear up and sharpen our understanding--I think we may have not appreciated enough of the distinction between the the Hegelian dialectic and Marxist dialectic; the two of us seemed to have presumed all that Marx did was take Hegel's homework, and, in naughty schoolboy fashion, copy it and swap around some words to submit to the instructor as his own.
In reality, the Marxist dialectic is NOT merely the same as the Hegelian dialectic, just narrowed in scope to focus on material, economic conditions and lasered-in on class-capital relations. What we failed to appreciate--and this is a gap in our knowledge that I hope will henceforth be filled, is that the Hegelian dialectic presupposes what he calls the "objective spirit". The objective spirit is what we would consider the social and cultural norms that people live and abide by. Without getting too much into it, I'd like to illustrate that this is different from Hegel's "subjective spirit", which is akin to individual consciousness--something for your own edification. From the objective spirit, we get acceptance and understanding of the existing social order--the thesis, which eventually forms it's own negation--the antithesis, which is eventually combined w/ the thesis to form a new and improved version of the thesis: the synthesis.
Okay, we knew that; we're familiar w/ the Hegelian dialectic. Working under the assumption that the Marxist dialectic is just the Hegelian dialectic w/ a materialist spin, the process should go something like this: the working class accepts working for the bourgeois, this eventually gives rise through material privation and resentment to a negation that leads to class conflict. Out of class conflict will rise a new and improved material reality. Sounds about right, doesn't it? Well, it turns out that this is wrong:
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite...the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought...With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.Karl Marx. Das Kapital. 1873
Where Hegel starts w/ the objective spirit, where people's understanding and embracing of sociocultural norms gives rise to a material reality (and thus it is within the purview of society and culture--ultimately people--to change material reality), Marx starts w/ material reality giving rise to sociocultural norms. From there, change in material reality cannot come from people rejecting/embracing sociocultural norms, but from the state. This is a VERY important distinction between Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. The former supposes that the objective spirit--the culture--comes first and shapes reality through the dialectic. The latter supposes that the reality comes first and eventually shapes the culture. They're exactly the opposite of one another.
...and I will admit that's all that I have for you. Maybe you still think that the Marxist dialectic is the Sanic to Hegel's Sonic, but I'm coming to realize that they're very different beasts.
What's interesting is that the type of Marxism (i.e. cultural Marxism) espoused by Antonio Gramsci is a departure from the Marxist dialectic and a return to the Hegelian dialectic. Gramsci's cultural Marxism went on to influence the Frankfurt school, and from there CRT. So our original agreement still stands: CRT is not exactly old-school Marxist, but it is certainly Neo-Marxist. The entire point of this post scriptum is to tell you that you were onto something when you first proposed that CRT is more Hegelian than Marxist, more than either of us at the time realized.
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