Why did these videos get made? Was it an honest attempt at social justice? A grift? Clickbait? Why were they so disliked? As Marxists I think we can get to the bottom of this.
Why did these videos get made? Was it an honest attempt at social justice? A grift? Clickbait? Why were they so disliked? As Marxists I think we can get to the bottom of this.
One of my degrees is in a liberal arts thing and my experience was that critical theory is a confused hodgepodge of some Marxist theory blended together haphazardly with liberalism and just...fanciful thoughts that don't go anywhere. Saying it's a continuation of Marxist theory is kind of hilarious because it seems like the entire thing is built on assuming economic class either does not exist or it's just a singular facet of a wildly shifting array of personal details, not one of the main aspects of an individual's experience.
The best way I could summarize the outlook of the professors I had who subscribed to critical theory was something like "if we change how people read books and say certain words in a university classroom environment then inevitably the entire world will have its culture changed for the better." They would tend to place the blame of societal ills like racism or misogyny on some kind of nebulous social power structure built upon individual presumptions taking place entirely within that person's head that had been put there by wider cultural presentations. I had one professor, the most ardent critical theorist I had, mostly talk up how certain words influenced the psychology of racism, like he would say the term "enlightenment" was inherently racist because it suggested dark things are stupid and light things are smart, or he'd say good guys in cowboy movies wore white hats to represent white superiority. I mean there actually are terms that are full of racist baggage, but it seemed like he went out of his way to talk about stuff that didn't seem entirely related.
This is all anecdotal and I went to a college mostly known for training people to work on oil rigs, so take that as you will. If I were a more paranoid person I'd actually claim critical theory is some kind of op to either make leftist theory seem incoherent or to do a university wide gish-gallop of all potential academic avenues that would generate leftist students. Couldn't get rid of Marxism entirely so just flood the whole of academics with incoherent gibberish to drown it out.
I agree. There may be some value in critical theory, but whatever is taught in those classes sounds like liberal nonsense and I would argue a fed op. Ever notice how these classes became much more popular after Occupy? I think it's the feds.
Well, yeah. It's the alternative to the Soviet model. All the other tendencies kinda spring from the post war second international/Frankfurt school which developed critical theory as being explicitly critical of both the USSR and capitalism.
Just because it's a continuation of Marxism doesn't mean it's good, but it does mean that the parts that contain systemic analysis and dialectical reasoning will have some amount of predictive power.
The implicit problem I'd say then is critical theory seems absorbed with tackling problems with capitalism as some kind of intellectual puzzle to solve, rather than a political issue to mobilize around. That just makes it dead before it even starts and deliberately relegated to circular fights between already isolated academics.