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Unfortunately "critical theory" (as stereotyped in public discourse, but also as practiced in American academia) is generally like Marxian theory completely stripped of the materialist method and an actual attention to economic fundamentals. It's name-checked radicalism. Any "anti-capitalism" is purely skin-deep, a kind of moral grandstanding but on the whole without any program they could give as an alternative, or even the ability to fully explicate what capitalism really is.

And the milieux that circulates this is really primarily liberal, centrist in practice, overwhelmingly supporting and electing quite mainstream fully "capitalist" political parties... but with the aesthetic or appeal to a past radical, anti-capitalist, socialist "scene"... without an actual meaningful program or alternative for the working class. A working class which has as a result almost completely divorced itself from this "left."

Which is all the end product of the demolition of the organized socialist left & trade union movement in the west through the 70s and 80s and early 90s and the retreat of associated intellectuals into academia and cultural politics.

If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power. A very general "anti-oppression" politic which is primarily concerned with individual concerns, not collective ones. This "left" that I keep hearing about from the Shapiro etc types foaming at the mouth, it's a caricature not only made by its opponents... but by itself.

Just Liberalism, and a very 21st century American product.

I largely agree (and consequently upvoted) that it’s not meaningfully socialist and only superficially anti-capitalist, but I don’t see how it is some kind of liberalism when it is criticized precisely for being illiberal. I get the feeling that “liberal” here (and perhaps to leftists in general) means “supporting/tolerating capitalism” and has little to do with, say, opposing racially discriminatory (i.e., “race conscious”) policies. I’m also not sure what you mean when you say it is concerned with individual concerns—it seems very concerned with collectives—identity groups specifically. In my experience, these people will argue that because the average whites person is wealthier, more privileged, etc than the average minority, any given white person in any interracial conflict (even if race isn’t germane to the conflict) should yield to the minority party irrespective of the wealth/privileges of either individual. Phrases like “we don’t need to hear what another white male says” as though all white men share a collective opinion.

There are multiple definitions of "liberal", but in the American context it's really stopped meaning anything about classical liberal concepts of personal liberty (in speech in particular) and more about perspectives on moral and identity issues, it seems. It's really, from my mind: not-conservative, defined almost entirely in opposition to the aggressive reaction from the religious moral right in US politics. Anything beyond that is just a huge mix.

Liberal across the Atlantic means something closer to its classic definition.

One of the first challenges I have when discussing politics with Americans (and increasingly other Canadians) is precisely trying to define how I, as maybe a more "traditional" socialist radical, do not fit on the spectrum they've defined there. I share a disgust with the conservative right, am secular, and broadly call myself a feminist or anti-racist but when it moves to bread and butter issues, gun control, or some identity politics stuff... there's basically no correspondence...

(Here in Canada, it's muddled in different ways, where "Liberal" is a political party, defined mainly by "whatever will win an election" than any constant ideological focus. Right now it's vaguely "left" (in so far as it takes "left" positions on cultural issues, combined with some kind of neo-Keynesian budgetary spending model, but combined with low corporate taxes) but in my mind it's really just a kind of croneyism... but that's a rant. We have a separate, sometimes-successful, social democratic party which sorta muddies any kind of comparisons to the US, but comparisons to the UK also don't work because our NDP isn't really like their Labour party, either... though it might want to be)

Agreed there are multiple definitions in the US, and the term is very murky. As far as I can tell, the people who fixate on identity stuff usually identify as 'progressives', although some who identify as 'liberals' might go along with it because that's increasingly the new moral orthodoxy on the US left. Of course, many conservatives often refer to the entire US left as "liberal" (in the same way that many progressives call everyone to their right "far right").

Incidentally, if you talk about liberalism people are more likely to understand that you mean the philosophy rather that some basket of policies and jargon that are popular with the liberal tribe at the current moment.

> broadly call myself a feminist or anti-racist

Even these labels are fraught, at least in the US. They are pretty much doublespeak insofar as the folks who identify as 'anti-racist' in the US tend to endorse policies that are explicitly racially discriminatory (they would say 'race conscious', but they mean exactly the same thing), and the folks who identify as 'feminist' in the US have no discernible interest in gender equality.

You should check out the recent Glenn Loury Show episode where he brings on Norman Finklestein. I think you'll highly enjoy it.

> Which is all the end product of the demolition of the organized socialist left & trade union movement in the west through the 70s and 80s and early 90s and the retreat of associated intellectuals into academia and cultural politics.

This was not some grand conspiracy, the Socialists just realized that workers in the West were generally happy and well off (iirc Marcuse said "Capitalism delivers the goods") and not at all friendly to Socialists' plans of revolution.

As a result there was a push to shift the propagandizing ("educating") to the next best oppressed groups they could find, with these being the familiar categories of LGBTQ, racial minorities (only certain ones), women etc.).

Just like the socialist revolutionaries of old, the majority of the "New Left" are not parts of those groups. They are merely using them as a "revolutionary mass" whose misery and grievances are single-use tools for the revolutionaries to gain power. Lenin was fuming at Bolshevik party members who actually tried to negotiate better working conditions or pay pre-1917 because happy workers don't have "revolutionary potential" (a euphemism for not being desperate enough to want to put him in power).

> If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power.

I explored some of the reasons for that above, but everybody with some sense could see that capitalist societies were happier, almost never genocided their own population, were vastly more prosperous and even produced enough surplus to have better social welfare than Socialist countries. On the other hand Socialism always ended badly, sometimes catastrophically. People are not blind, and associating your political movement with 60 million corpses is not a smart move.

The reason they don't challenge "real power" is because the objective is to gain the power vested in those institutions, not to challenge them.

Neither critical theory nor capitalism are revolutionary. They each have large bastions where you will be at best low status, at worst cast out, for criticizing them.

Also, the idea that revolution is inherently good has been a dead cliché since the IT industry got hold of it.

Under this interpretation nothing can ever be revolutionary. There is absolutely and ideology that is dominant in society at large and trying to say that the ideology that runs 95% of world powers and one that opposes it are equally "revolutionary" is counterfactual.

You can be revolutionary by seeking big change at personal risk because you're not socially dominant (or militarily in other contexts). There have been times this happened. Who is doing that today?

Indigenous people resisting copper mines, gas pipelines, lithium mines, etc that are being proposed on territories they've been pushed back onto.

I doubt critical theorists do them any good.

Oddly enough the OG Critical Race Theory that originated in law schools about the globe decades ago addresses systemic inequality issues fairly directly.

This seems to have been forgotten since Tucker Calson et al started redefining woke | CRT to mean whatever they currently hated to avoid addressing policy.

"Countering disinformation about Critical Race Theory" (2022)

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/08/countering-disinfor...

Your material:

    As readers of my book *All One in Christ* will find, the content of CRT is even more disturbing than this brief summary indicates – and it is also riddled with blatant logical fallacies, crude social scientific errors, and assumptions and policy recommendations that are utterly contrary to the natural moral law and the Catholic faith.

appears to be a lengthy pro catholic | anti CRT self promoting strawman.

Based on what? If it's your dislike of critical theory, that's merely circular.

Is running a casino more moral than a copper mine?

There's a clear distinction between

* people choosing to build a casino on a specific portion of their land that they choose to build upon, and

* people having no say over third parties excavating a giant hole beneath a large area of their land at a particular location they believe has deep religous meaning | spititual connection.

Stealing people's land to build a casino is no more or less moral than doing the same to build a copper mine.

However, only one of these is actually going on.

> Who is doing that today?

So many people. Look no further than the activists who are continuing to protest against Cop City in Atlanta despite the fact that the cops have already murdered one person [1] and arrested many more on trumped up charges [2].

[1] https://theintercept.com/2023/04/20/atlanta-cop-city-protest... [2] https://theintercept.com/2023/06/21/cop-city-georgia-attorne...

Animal Rescuers, e.g. https://bemagazine.org/direct-action-everywhere-trial-finall...

Where is this bastion of critical theory which I would like to visit?

I've spent years in academia, admittedly in STEM but I saw little actual explicit critical theory. I was all alone discovering and reading post-Marxist texts, with no group to discuss it with.

You had no cultural studies departments? No people who do cultural analysis in the literature department? No one in the sociology department who works in the tradition of the conflict theory? No one in the geography department who does critical geography? No one in the anthropological departments who does critical anthropology? In the US? In the 21st century? Weird. Which university is that?

Yeah, I think a lot of us looking at this must be wondering how we can be part of this university.

Even famously conservative universities like U. Chicago have plenty of this stuff going on.

Gee, I wonder why.

Could it be that the CRT is not inherently anti- (or even non-) conservative? Perhaps the term has been hijacked by conservative culture-warriors as a wedge issue for identity politics in a way that conservative academics disagree wirh? I'm just asking questions here.

I'm sure we did but basically you're showing there is no critical theory bastion, they are a diffuse minority compared to most actual departments.

And that tracks with my personal campus experiences, as well as the historical account of critical theory itself.

> not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice

It’s a fair question to debate. What’s nonsense is turning every economic question into this one.

Wouldn't that be a very different complaint, focusing on what judges reward vs what the actual arguments are? The original article touches on that more than the comment here.

Instead of talking about if the tactic is valid or if the judges are doing a good job with it the comment here took a major tangent towards "actually the whole line of thought used is obviously flawed and wrong" with a dose of "nobody here is thinking about it they're just following the crowd." Which is suddenly not about tactics or scoring at all.

That premise is open to debate, there are Western countries with different systems. E.g., most Western European countries have a system called "social market economy" (which is not [exactly] capitalism).

> premise is open to debate

Again, nobody disagrees. But if you ask me if I want red or white wine, and I, instead, launch into a diatribe in Marxist-Leninism, that’s not a valid argument and it’s very annoying. Outside these debate circuits, it could come across as debilitating.

Well as a classic example, you could debate "the unemployment rate is going down – is it good or bad?" (well, the Phillips curve…) and ask with Horkheimer/Adorno, if the entire notion of discussing this in terms of a relative change to a statistical rate isn't normalizing a dysfunctional aspect of economy, regardless, where it's at. This is still a debate, but it shifts the core argument to a conceptually more fundamental level.

All countries in the world have mixed economies. (Except maybe Somalia or North Korea.)

The US has a fair amount more publically owned sectors than Europe, which eg has privatized postal services.

Yes. This is correct.

Though the extent of it really matters, I always hear "Norway is a capitalist country" when their economy is primarily in the hands of the state, more than for example Venezuela.

But people tend to point to Venezuela, and not Norway, as an example of a failed state owned economy.

It's not really about "sectors" of the economy that are publicly owned but actual economic output. The money in the US is produced and it is in the hands of private individuals most of it. In Norway near 70% of it is produced and in the hands of the state. Obviously Norway is a particular example because they're a country that relies on natural resources extraction. But you can look at other similar countries in terms of their exports (Australia, Chile) and see how the Norwegian model differs.

The USPS, for example, is a service. It's not really a business, it doesn't have to be profitable it ideally has to be sustainable but I wouldn't say it's a necessity. Not only that, it subsidised private businesses like Amazon.

> The USPS, for example, is a service. It's not really a business, it doesn't have to be profitable it ideally has to be sustainable but I wouldn't say it's a necessity. Not only that, it subsidised private businesses like Amazon.

USPS is profitable, though. (even if Congress messes with their retirement accounting to make it look worse)

If they subsidize anyone it's China, because we forced them to do that by signing the UPU treaty. After that it's people who buy forever stamps.

Sorry, my bad. Point still stands though, services don't necessarily need to be profitable because they're there for a different reason.

> I always hear "Norway is a capitalist country" when their economy is primarily in the hands of the state, more than for example Venezuela.

Can you please provide some sources backing up your claim? What metric did you use?

The metrics that I would use, like the Index of Economic Freedom by The Heritage Foundation, seem to contradict your claim.

The fact that the state owns some companies in key industrial sectors and has stakes in others does not mean that the country's economy is primarily in the hands of the state.

The Index of Economic Freedom is based on ideological arguments, not material analysis. Norway's government revenue makes up about 60% of its GDP [1], in part due to its share in oil, gas and fishing - this is in the top ten in the world. Venezuela actually has the lowest share of government revenue in the world, at about 5% of GDP [1], the black markets caused by hyperinflation probably playing a part here.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governm...

A better measure than revenue would be public ownership of property, but this produces some surprising results. I am not sure whether the fact that Singapore is the second most socialist country on the planet would likely be more distressing to the left or the right.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/03/09/how-capitali...

Someone else has already posted a good source for it. But I just wanted to add here that the Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank particularly known for pushing "free-market economics" (read as: neoliberal policies of hyper-privatisation) so obviously it's on their best interest to label countries such as the nordic ones more capitalist than socialist.

And I mean, yeah, nordic countries for sure participate in the free-market... but Capitalism is defined by private ownership; so when you have such important portions of your economy be collectively, socially or communally owned (state, coops, labour unions) it's misleading to use such labels so lightly. These are mixed-economies, and I would even go as far as to say they're more socialist than capitalist.

Socialism does have a bad reputation though. So I don't blame for these countries to label themselves as "capitalist"; i mean, it's better for business.

It wouldn't be a contradiction to live in a country where most productive enterprises were owned by the state, but where individuals still had great economic freedom.

There is a big difference between governments owning things vs. exclusions to citizens owning things.

Socialism is when workers own and control the means of production. Capitalism is the opposite. There is no such thing as a "mixed economy." Social programs are not exclusive to socialism.

> Socialism is when workers own and control the means of production.

In most cases, workers can own the means to production as many corporations are public. They just have to risk their capital to buy a share of the company - like every other owner.

You missed the second part of that definition. Both parts must be satisfied. Workers do not control any public companies that I am familiar with.

If the workers control a company it's not a public company. That's what "public" means.

There are worker coops, customer coops, and state owned companies in the US.

This is true, but workers do not broadly own or control the MoP in the US. Thus, the US is not socialist. It is not a "mixed" economy, because there is no such thing.

I know "all numbers are either 0 or 100%" is a common belief, but people on here are supposed to be smarter than that.

Also you're still trying to argue against Keynes and your statement would make China and Vietnam capitalist, which would be a surprise to them. Not to mention Lenin's NEP mixed economy.

nb the people who "control" the means of production in the US are the voters, who can get the government to pass laws regulating it. It doesn't matter if you "own" it ie are equityholders. Although we have that too, in the form of our worker-owned index fund company Vanguard.

> and your statement would make China and Vietnam capitalist

Well they are. Just because they wave red flags and call themselves "socialist" doesn't make it true, for the same reason North Korea is precisely none of "democratic", "people's", or a "republic" despite its assertions otherwise.

If they are owners, they control it as much as the other owners - following the same rules; which I believe in most companies is the majority get the final say.

> In most cases, workers can own the means to production as many corporations are public

A thing being true throughout an economy and it being permitted by the formal rules are not the same thing.

Socialism is not merely where some workers do control some of the means of production, but where the entirety of the means of production are cobtrolled by the workers by virtue of their being workers.

If some people who happen to work also happen to have a private property relationship to some capital sufficient to be on par with their labor in terms of importance in their personal relation to the economy, then they are just petit bourgeois in a capitalist economy.

This classical Marxist definition of socialism is one I agree and identify with, but it's not what 99% of people mean by it, socialist or not.

I am not sure the word & associated baggage can be rescued from the 20th century at this point.

Who said anything about social programs?

Also, people just get on here and disagree with Keynes?

I always hear that European economies fall under the socialist rubric, but they seem pretty capitalist—at least a lot more so than the economies of any Marxist-Leninist government throughout history. I imagine scholars have a reason for their taxonomy, but I wish it made more sense to me.

To illustrate the difference, the Ahlener Programm, the first political program of Germany's conservative party (CDU) after the war in 1947, originally stated:

> The capitalist economic system has not done justice to the national and social vital interests of the German people. After the terrible political, economic and social collapse as a result of criminal power politics, only a fundamental reorganization can take place.

> Content and goal of this social and economic reorganization can no longer be the capitalist striving for profit and power, but only the well-being of our people. Through a public economic order, the German people should receive an economic and social constitution that corresponds to the rights and dignity of human beings, serves the spiritual and material development of our people and ensures internal and external peace.

This was dubbed "Christian Socialism", and, under the influence of Adenauer, the program soon inched somewhat to the center towards a concept now known as "social market economy", a term, which had also been in use by (some) social-democrats. Conceptionally, it's deemed different from ordoliberalism as it is more process-oriented and pragmatic. (We may also see how someone who is leaning marginally towards anarcho-capitalism like, say, Elon Musk, must be perceived as entirely misaligned.)

> There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice

Anti-capitalism is very pregnant where I live (France) with one mainstream political party embracing it and the Green supporting it covertly. It's a position which is popular amongst parts of most Green parties in Europe.

Critical theorists and academics in general are smart enough to be able to hold multiple contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time. For example, they are at the same time against capitalism and against starving to death in a gulag.

Today from the "drank the kool-aid" study book on the history of capitalism: before Adam Smith invented and advocated laissez-faire capitalism in 1776, all the people in the world were starving to death in gulags.

The only 20th century alternative to capitalism was socialism whose only fruits were a massive pile of skulls. So are you talking about going back to feudalism? Monarchy?