One of the core progressive criticisms of Jordan Peterson is that Peterson is wrong to claim that the rise of reactionary political forces is a manifestation of cultural resistance to the deep and pervasive threat of cultural Marxism (or postmodern neo-Marxism). Though he may not have a Trump-size Twitter following, Peterson is not easily dismissed, given his stature as a well-respected psychologist and highly influential public intellectual. Progressive critics cannot ignore Peterson. Instead, they frequently insist that Peterson misleads us in identifying postmodern neo-Marxism as the scapegoat behind reactionary right-wing political movements. According to Matt McManus, Peterson misreads postmodern philosophers and unwittingly grants them more political clout than they deserve, while insulating neoliberalism from exposure as the true source of right-wing populism.
I agree that Peterson overstates the case. Indeed, a careful interpretation of various texts associated with critical theory and postmodern philosophy—some of which I have analyzed here, here, here and here—demonstrates that Peterson does not fully appreciate the many subtleties of postmodern philosophy. Nevertheless, while Peterson may not understand the important distinctions between Marxism and postmodern philosophy, he is not as widely off the mark as some progressives claim. He is not entirely incorrect in claiming that the excesses of Social Justice activism reflect a twenty-first century rendition of “postmodern neo-Marxism” and not simply a few extremist campus factions getting out of hand. I have explored the Marxist influence on social justice activism elsewhere. It is evident here, in Jason Barker’s piece in celebration of Marx’s birthday:
The key factor in Marx’s intellectual legacy in our present-day society is not “philosophy” but “critique,” or what he described in 1843 as “the ruthless criticism of all that exists: ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it,” he wrote in 1845.
Professor Barker connects this “critique” to the modern Social Justice movement:
Racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class exploitation. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the “eternal truths” of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.
Indeed, as I have discussed in a previous essay, neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci took up this task with an analysis of “cultural hegemony” and advocacy of a so-called “war of position,” in which partisan intellectuals strive to acquire positions of influence within the social hierarchy to advocate for the transformation of a culture that forms the basis of an allegedly oppressive social construct. Gramscian neo-Marxism, then, is a precursor to progressive activism in its call for political agitation and a revolutionary “war of position,” in the name of assuming control of the means of (cultural) production.
Postmodern philosophy may have eschewed metanarrative in favor of an epistemic skepticism focused on textual and cultural critiques, but Marx’s influence permeates postmodern culture’s obsession with social marginalization, especially as it operates at the level of the subconscious, even though the focus on false consciousness has been inverted—postmodernists claim that discourse makes power invisible to the powerful, rather than to the powerless. Ultimately, whether Marxian or postmodern, progressivism is obsessed with critiques of superstructures built on exploitative relationships between groups, sustained by false consciousness by way of ideology and/or discourse.
Political activism of the 1960s and 1970s—as books like SDS by Kirkpatrick Sale, Days of Rage by Bryan Burroughs, and The Critical Turn in Education by Isaac Gottesman have shown—contained the seeds of a long-term effort, by radical figures like Henry Giroux, Angela Davis, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohr and Kathy Boudin, to take refuge in the university and assume positions from which to pass on their virulent strain of progressive activism to a new generation of students. As Gottesman writes, this was already well underway in the nineties:
“To the question: ‘Where did all the sixties radicals go?’, the most accurate answer,” noted Paul Buhle (1991) in his classic Marxism in the United States, “would be: neither to religious cults nor yuppiedom, but to the classroom.” After the fall of the New Left arose a new left, an Academic Left. For many of these young scholars, Marxist thought, and particularly what some refer to as Western Marxism or neo-Marxism, and what I will refer to as the critical Marxist tradition, was an intellectual anchor.
It should come as no surprise, then, that research by Phillip W. Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research shows that “as of 2015, Marx stands nearly alone as the most frequently assigned author in American college classrooms, only surpassed by the ubiquitous Strunk and White grammar manual.” Given how wrong Marx’s theory of exploitation was, the activist streak of left-wing professors in a postmodern world seems to be among the most plausible explanations.
Few would dispute the prevalence of left-wing sentiment in Hollywood, the mainstream media and other prominent institutions that have exercised progressive “cultural hegemony” since at least the nineties. The rise of Rush Limbaugh and the Gingrich Revolution of 1994 afford perhaps the first transparent glimpses of what Matt McManus, following Peter Lawler, calls “postmodern conservatism”—not as a form of resistance against a neoliberal zeitgeist gone awry, but against a “war of position,” which has been waged since the sixties and which gained momentum when the west no longer had victory in the Cold War as a unifying objective. Peterson’s diatribes against “postmodern neo-Marxism” may obscure the subtle differences between Marxism and postmodern philosophy, but he is not wrong in tracing a long historical arc from Marxist agitation to the postmodern epistemic skepticism that galvanizes Social Justice activism in particular, and progressive activism in general.
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Engage fully with the fundamental precepts of dialectical materialism, live long enough to understand a bit about life and draw your own conclusions. You very well may come to the understanding that post modernism and Marxism have more in common than sophists and apologists are prepared to acknowledge.
We should also add another important observation, I think, to my March 1st discussion of Jordan Peterson’s popularity as a reflection of the decline of David Riesman and Nathan Glazer’s 1950’s “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture.” I did summarize the economic and occupational shifts already described by Barbara Ehrenreich in the early 1980’s that since the 1970’s have made liberal-arts majors and academic or “cultural elite” careers increasingly seem unrealistic and unattainable for college-age Americans from non-elite family backgrounds. However, I failed to discuss a significant demographic shift in the past half-century that has greatly reduced the number of young Americans who quite fit the particular social and cultural profile of Riesman and Glazer’s mid-20th century “eager strivers.”
In the 1950’s, when Riesman and Glazer wrote their article, American society was approaching the culmination of two processes that had dominated it in the first half of the 20th century. The first was the assimilation of millions of European immigrants into mainstream American society. The second was a great increase of educational opportunity for rural and working-class white Americans. The immigration restrictions of the 1920’s had led to an increasingly smaller and smaller and smaller population of unassimilated European immigrants speaking little or no English, clinging to “Old World” customs, and living huddled in “Polishtowns” and “Little Italies,” in Irish and Jewish tenement neighborhoods where one might see black-shawled grandmothers haggling with pushcart vendors. The post-World War II “G.I. Bill” had given a chance for college education to countless white male Americans who could have never previously even dreamed. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, these two social trends were winding down, as the last major cohorts of White Americans moved from the tenements, “coaltowns,” “steeltowns,” “Tobacco Roads,” “Podunks,” and “Dogpatches” to Suburbia.
This mid-20th century winding-down of the old mass immigrant Americanization, together with the “G.I. Bill” expansion of educational opportunity for white male Americans, led to increasingly fewer and fewer occasions for bitter inter-generational conflicts between rural, small-town, or immigrant parents and their newly “emancipated” and “sophisticated” college-educated sons and daughters. In the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s, even into the 1950’s, immigrant or small-town parents and their college-educated children could still engage in angry arguments over evolution, Bible criticism, dating or marrying boys or girls of the “wrong” ethnicity or religion, or “worldly” habits and practices like smoking, drinking, dancing, lipstick, jazz (or rock’n’roll) music, or Sabbath-breaking. The “kids” themselves, too, often experienced their new-found perspectives as a joyously liberating revelation. They frequently found a wonderful sense of personal liberation in defying their parents’, grandparents’, and home-town or ethnic-community authority figures’ prejudices against Jews or Christians, Protestants or Catholics, Irish or WASP’s, Poles or Germans–or in defending Darwinism against a literal interpretation of Genesis. Aside from the progressive Americanization of vast numbers of European immigrants, the first few decades of the 20th century also saw a literary “Revolt From the Village,” as Carl van Doren called it in his 1921 “Nation” article by that title, with writers like H.L. Mencken, Randolph Bourne, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell, Zona Gale, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, all criticizing what they saw as the negative sides of small-town life while celebrating urban sophistication. At the same time, “Americanization” was an analogous central theme for immigrant writers. These were major themes of American life and culture in the first half of the 20th century–but largely “lost steam” after the 1950’s and 1960’s, with fewer and fewer Americans defining themselves in opposition to “greenhorn” or small-town parents.
At least for young non-Hispanic white students, these cultural and demographic shifts of the last few decades have significantly reduced the once often quite large cultural gap between young America college students’ family, neighborhood, or home-town environments and mainstream modern American society as represented on campus. These days, college life is not quite as much of a “culture shock” for most young Americans as it would have been half a century ago. Few young white non-Hispanic Americans entering college nowadays are engaged in trying to shake off “old-country,” rural, or small-town or rural customs, attitudes, and prejudices increasingly found outmoded and irksome. It no longer seems necessary for them to fight the “up-tight” old-world or fundamentalist parental restrictions on normal youthful fun and games that loomed so large for collegiate youth in earlier decades. On the other hand, they now find themselves faced with new restrictions, constraints, and irritants in the form of “woke,” “politically correct” pressures. The new “call-out culture” makes the college experience far less comfortable than it used to be! Campus liberals and leftists are thus no longer felt to be allies, inspirations, or role-models for youthful rebellion against parental, religious, or community restrictions and prejudices, but rather as adversaries to be opposed or circumvented, their liberalism or leftism no longer an alluring temptation but rather a nuisance and a “turn-off”!
Peterson might thus be the perfect guru for college-age white American youth who find today’s liberalism just as restrictive and oppressive as the traditional cultural authorities their earlier counterparts rebelled against. He appeals to students who no longer feel an urgent need to rebel against family, church, or community–and find today’s liberals as rigid, authoritarian, narrow-minded, and killjoy as traditional authorities would have once seemed! At the same time, those campus liberals have totally forgotten Dale Carnegie’s warning 80+ years ago that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Once, campus liberals and radicals appealed to young people rebelling against parental, religious, or community prejudices they felt to be irrational and
oppressive. Now, however, those liberals seem just as oppressive, restrictive, and killjoy as the old cultural authorities once might have seemed, or even more so!
One concise way to explain Jordan Peterson’s popularity might be that it reflects a decline of David Riesman and Nathan Glazer’s mid-20th century “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture,” their term for the college-educated children from upward-mobile working or lower-middle class homes questioning what they had come to consider their families’ less “hip,” “sophisticated” or “enlightened” assumptions.
In their 1955 article “The Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes” analyzing the social bases of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s popular appeal, sociologists Riesman and Glazer noted that many of post-World War II America’s “newly prosperous” rejected the “traditional cultural and educational leadership of the enlightened upper and upper-middle classes.” However, Riesman and Glazer continued, those same “newly prosperous” had also “sent their children to college as one way of maintaining the family’s social and occupational mobility.” Some of those children had become “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture, rejecting the values now held by the discontented classes,” while many others however had rather “acquired…and helped their families learn, a half-educated resentment for the traditional intellectual values” of “some of their teachers and schoolmates.”
These “eager strivers” constituted a major portion of mid and late 20th century America’s college students and graduates (though of course by no means all of them). Occupationally, the “eager strivers” mostly gravitated to the careers portrayed by Barbara Ehrenreich in 1980 as heavily impacted by the post-1970 economic downturn–to work offering “relative autonomy from corporate domination,” as “in academia, many of the service professions, the public sector.” These career fields, which frequently also offered considerable freedom for personal nonconformity, with colleagues and co-workers often mostly sharing a sophisticated urban liberal cultural outlook, seemed to be endlessly expanding in mid and late 20th century America. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, as Ms. Ehrenreich noted in 1984, liberally-educated young college graduates could confidently expect “secure, high-status careers, provided only that they acquired some credentials and showed up for work.” Professional-level job slots were increasing in post-World War II America, “along with the expansion of corporate and governmental administrative apparatuses.” Jobs in “higher education,” too, “increased to keep pace with the growing demand for managerial and ‘mental’’ workers.” Such secure, high-status academic, professional, and administrative jobs almost seemed to be the natural, guaranteed reward for majoring in liberal-arts fields like History, English, and Philosophy in mid-20th century America.
All this, however, Ms. Ehrenreich noted, ended with “the long economic downturn of the 1970’s,” with America’s seemingly endless postwar boom giving way to what University of Economist Wallace Peterson later (1994) called our continuous post-1973 “Silent Depression.” From the early and mid 1970’s on, “whole occupations–from public administration to college history teaching–closed their ranks and lost ground.” Particularly hard-hit were fields like “academia, many of the service professions, the public sector” with “relative autonomy from corporate domination,” as opposed to “careers requiring direct subordination to corporate priorities”–and, we might add, often also with stricter demands for “bourgeois” propriety. Thus, as Ms. Ehrenreich observed, the “young man who might, in the sixties, have studied history or philosophy now swallowed his curiosity and took up accounting.” While 1950’s sociologists had lamented the bland conformity of the “man in the gray flannel suit,” the “middle-class male swallowed up by the corporate behemoth,” in the 1970’s “their sons were glad to find a white-collar job at all.” Countless “formerly middle-class, educated youth” now “drifted downward to become taxi drivers, waiters or carpenters.” Other college-educated young Americans “crowded into the most vocationally promising areas” like “medicine, law, management,” but soon “those too became hazardously overpopulated” as well.
All this, as I’ve been arguing, has had a particularly dampening effect on the sort of young men–only I’d also add young women here as well–whom Riesman and Glazer back in 1955 described as the “eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and culture,” and ESPECIALLY so on those coming from less privileged families–and I’m NOT thinking here of so-called “white privilege”! The economic, educational, and occupational shifts of the last half-century have made it seem both increasingly less and less worth-while for young people from at best only modestly affluent families to study liberal-arts subjects like history, philosophy, or English in comparison to STEM or business fields, and also harder and harder from them to break into occupations and work environments where a certain amount of nonconformity, unconventionality, and departure from strict “bourgeois” respectability is commonplace or even expected. In other words, it’s far harder these days for such kids to become “eager strivers” and young recruits to “upper Bohemia” than it was half a century ago!
As we all know, the once quite obscure University of Toronto psychology professor and Jungian mythographer Jordan Peterson has become a major intellectual celebrity in the last couple of years. His books, videos, and public lectures enjoy enormous popularity among college-age youth–mostly among young white men, it’s often pointed out–while his *12 Rules for Life* became a major 2018 self-help best-seller. Conservative pundits have embraced him as an eloquent, erudite spokesman for traditional values and scourge of “cultural Marxism,” “political correctness,” and “postmodernism,” while leftists excoriate him as a reactionary, sexist, racist, or even fascist, who in any case completely misunderstands both Marxism and postmodernism. He has been both ridiculed and defended for his invocation of lobster social and sexual hierarchies to justify similar human hierarchies, and for his attack on compulsory transgender pronouns as supposedly a prelude for Stalinist-type gulags.
Perhaps the most common explanation for Peterson’s popularity has been that he appeals to young white males’ anxiety over their displacement in an increasingly multi-racial and multi-cultural America. The Peterson vogue, in other words, is an expression of straight white cisgender male identity politics. That may well be partly true, but I also suspect that there is a structural economic reason as well. Racism, sexism, and a metaphysical or spiritual search for meaning in an alienating, bewildering secular society might indeed explain part of his appeal–but they may be trumped or reinforced by a more practical, down-to-earth, essentially economic motive.
One major reason for the Peterson vogue, I’ve long suspected, is college-age middle-class young Americans’ growing disbelief in any realistic possibility of ever rising into the sort of “cultural elite” or “upper Bohemian” occupations where it seems safe, even fashionable, to ignore or question the traditional eternal verities so ardently championed by Peterson and his defenders. Middle-class young Americans these days, I suspect, feel themselves permanently locked into “Middle America” (as it used to be called in the 1960’s and 1970’s), with little or no chance of mobility beyond it, to a degree that few observers would have predicted half a century ago. Peterson serves them as a guru in their no-alternative (so it seems) task of adjusting to permanent life in “Middle America,” and even learning to like it.
The socialist/feminist social critic Barbara Ehrenreich was one of the first observers to note this trend, in a couple of early 1980’s articles on changing American masculinity. She first. noted a steady post-1970 shrinkage of “cultural elite” career opportunities for college-educated young men in a 1980 *Socialist Review* paper with film historian Peter Biskind. She then followed this up with a more popular 1984 *New York Times Magazine* article on the “New Man,” again emphasizing changes in job and career opportunities for the college-educated.
Ehrenreich and Biskind first noted the shrinking post-1960’s career opportunities for educated young men in their 1980 *Socialist Review* discussion of “Machismo and Hollywood’s Working Class,” analyzing the 1970’s popularity of films like *Saturday Night Fever*, *Rocky*, *Rocky II*, and *Bloodbrothers* with blue-collar protagonists. The “working-class world,” they felt, “might not have become a subject for major Hollywood films” if its “discovery” had not coincided with that decade’s middle-class “masculinity crisis.” On “the home front,” Ehrenreich and Biskind noted “the inexorable spread of battlefield stretching from the kitchen, through the den, to the bedroom.” On the “job front,” at the same time, the 1970’s “economic downturn,” the fading of America’s postwar 1945-1973 boom, was “limiting middle-class opportunities.” Thus, careers “offering relative autonomy from corporate domination,” as in “academia, many of the service professions, the public sector,” now declined in comparison to “careers requiring direct subordination to corporate priorities.” As a result, “[t]he young man who might, in the sixties, have studied history or philosophy now swallowed his curiosity and took up accounting.” Sociologists in the 1950’s had commiserated” the “man in the gray flannel suit,” the “middle-class male swallowed up by the corporate behemoth.” In the 1970’s, however, “their sons were glad to find a white-collar job at all.” They “chase[d] after their lost autonomy, away from work or home, on the edges of highways, in Adidas sneakers,” in a dig at the vogue of jogging and running as upper-bourgeois status signifiers.[Peter Biskind and Barbara Ehrenreich, “Machismo and Hollywood’s Working Class,” *Socialist Review*, 50-51, 1980, reprinted in Donald Lazere, ed., *American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives* (University of California Press, 1987–618 pp.–Biskind & Ehrenreich on pp, 201-215), p. 206]
A few years later, Ms. Ehrenreich offered a skeptical “Feminist’s View of the New Man” in the May 20, 1984 *New York Times Magazine*, again emphasizing economic factors. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, she noted, the “professional-managerial middle class, which is the breeding ground for social ideals like the new man or new woman,” had “become an embattled group.” In the 1950’s and 1960’s, she nostalgically recalled, “young men of this class could look forward to secure, high-status careers, provided only that they acquired some credentials and showed up for work.” Professional-level job slots were increasing in the first two post-World War II decades, together with “the expansion of corporate and governmental administrative apparatuses,” while “jobs in higher education increased to keep pace with the growing demand for managerial and ‘mental’’ workers.”
Then, Ms. Ehrenreich continued, “came the long economic downturn of the 1970’s,” as America’s supposedly endless postwar boom faded out, in what University of Nebraska economist Wallace Peterson (no relation of Jordan) would later (in 1993) call the post-1973 “Silent Depression,“ and “whole occupations–from public administration to college history teaching–closed their ranks and lost ground.” A “whole segment of formerly middle-class, educated youth” now “drifted downward to become taxi drivers, waiters or carpenters,” she observed. Other college-educated young Americans “crowded into the most vocationally promising areas” like “medicine, law, management,” but “those too became hazardously overpopulated.” According to “recent studies” (as of 1984) of the ”disappearing middle class,” she noted, the “erstwhile middle-class majority” was “tumbling down and out (both because of a lack of jobs and because those that remain have not held their own against inflation),” while a “minority” was “scrambling up to become the new high-finance, high-tech gentry.” Our “new men,” Ms. Ehrenreich concluded, were “mainly in the latter category,” or “at least holding on by their fingernails.” [Barbara Ehrenreich, “A Feminist’s View of the New Man,” *The New York Times Magazine*. May 20, 1984, p. 36 ff.]
Ms. Ehrenreich put her finger quite accurately In these two 1980’s articles on the economically quite realistic and practical main reason why today’s college-age young men are flocking to Jordan Peterson’s books, videos, and lectures. Careers “offering relative autonomy from corporate domination,” as in “academia, many of the service professions, the public sector” offer far fewer opportunities now than they did half a century ago, compared to “careers requiring direct subordination to corporate priorities.” Young men who might have studied History, Philosophy, English Literature, Sociology, or Art History in the 1960’s, when such fields seemed almost endlessly open, now must “swallow their curiosity” and study Accounting– or perhaps Computer Programming or Software Design. Secure, high-status jobs in academic or public-service fields are hardly open these days to anybody who just bothers to get some credentials and show up, as it seemed in the 1960’s. A college-educated young American is nowadays lucky to find any white-collar employment at all, when since the 1970’s and 1980’s so many PhD’s have found themselves obliged to earn their living as taxi drivers, waiters/waitresses, bartenders, or carpenters.
Also quite important in the basically economic and structural reasons underlying Jordan Peterson’s appeal is the fact that most of the careers that have progressively dried up since the 1970’s have been exactly those ones–e.g., in College History,. Philosophy, or English teaching, or in publishing, or in “highbrow” and “upper-middlebrow” journalism–where there has long been a certain freedom to ignore or challenge traditional middle-class respectability and propriety, to be something of an “Upper Bohemian,” to question the eternal, universal validity of what Peterson and his supporters consider the admittedly “square” and unfashionable timeless verities, the “Gods of the Copybook Headings” as Rudyard Kipling called them a century ago in a 1919 poem. It just seems much less realistically possible now than it seemed in the 1950’s and 1960’s for young Americans to aspire to a high-status career where it was fairly safe to ignore, question, or deride the “square” virtues and prejudices–and manage to “get away with it.” Peterson’s books, lectures, and videos are so popular these days because they inspire young people to adjust to permanent life in “Middle America”–and to like it!
Half a century ago, it was precisely the career fields described by Barbara Ehrenreich as most impacted by the 1970’s economic downturn–academia, publishing, “quality” journalism–that offered the most day-to-day personal latitude to educated young Americans, the least day-in-day-out pressure to “shape up,” the fewest tongue-clucking raised eyebrows at harmless unconventionalities or irregularities–certainly on comparison yo most of the business world, or banking, or real estate, or even grade-school teaching. It was in fields like college teaching, publishing, or “quality” journalism a half-century ago, as opposed to the other areas I just mentioned, where you could most easily be somewhat casual in your dress and grooming, somewhat unconventional or irregular in your sex life, somewhat left-o-center in your politics, decidedly avant-garde in your artistic, literary, and musical tastes, and decidedly indifferent to flag-waving patriotism and organized religion–and still keep your job, enjoy good chances of career advancement, and be liked and even respected by your colleges. If interracial marriage or dating was still rather “edgy” a half-century ago, it was nevertheless still more common and more acceptable in academia, publishing, “highbrow journalism, and the arts than in most other sectors of mid 20th century American society–while inter-ethnic and inter-religious dating and marriage between young men and women of different “white” groups were quite commonplace and “no big deal”–very few if any eyebrows were censoriously raised in academia, publishing, or “quality” journalism by an Irish boy falling head-over-heels over a Jewish girl, or a Jewish boy marrying a “shiksa,” or a WASP girl dating a Polish or Italian boy. Upward-mobile working-class or lower-middle-class boys and girls from second- or third-generation immigrant “ethnic” enclaves–e.g., from largely Irish, Italian, or Orthodox Jewish urban neighborhoods, or from largely Polish, Hungarian,or Slovak “Coaltowns” or “Steeltowns”–fortunate enough to attend college (and maybe then also graduate school) might often find themselves meeting interesting, stimulating new friends and intriguing potential romantic partners that they would never have met in their parents’ church, synagogue, or ethnic lodge. The brighter, more intellectually “alive” and curious sons and daughters of Princeton University historian Eric F. Goldman’s upward-mobile, newly middle-class third-generation immigrants in *The Crucial Decade: America 1945-1955* (1956), his “Italian-American worker, Slovak-American accountant, Russian-American teacher” (p. 127) might often have found college a stimulating, broadening, and mentally and emotionally liberating enough experience, free from what they’d learned to consider the irksome constraints of “old-world” life-styles, to aspire to spend their subsequent working lives in a comparable setting. All this, however, was foreclosed for millions of young Americans by the post-1970 economic downturn–and has continued to remain increasingly foreclosed ever since! The Peterson vogue is an almost inevitable result of that foreclosure!
Regardless of what one might think about Jordan Peterson’s views or arguments, about “cultural Marxism” or anything else, I’ve sort of tentatively come to a sociological theory about the reasons for Peterson’s great popularity among college-age young Americans these last few years. I suspect that the economic changes in American society in recent decades (the 2008 crash being only the most dramatic illustration), the increasingly crushing burden of student debt, etc., have made college-age young Americans increasingly skeptical and pessimistic in our time about their realistic chances of ever leaving the struggling lower-middle or middle-middle class and entering the ranks of the so-called “cultural elites,” “effete snobs,” “limousine liberals,” or “Brie and Chablis set” who have traditionally felt free to safely be a bit cavalier or skeptical about the so-called “square” virtues extolled by Peterson, to be a bit irreverent about them and still safely “get away with it,” as seemed much easier and much more realistically possible in, say, the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s! It just plain FEELS far less realistically possible these days than it maybe did 40 or 50 years ago, I think, for a plumber’s, electrician’s, or truck driver’s son (or daughter) to rise someday to become Chairperson of the Yale or Harvard English department or associate editor of “Harper’s” or “The Atlantic”! :=) :=)
When I wrote this morning that the so-called “cultural elites” feel a bit more free than the ordinary lower-middle or middle-middle classes to be occasionally somewhat casual, offhand, or irreverent about the “square” virtues, civilities, and courtesies celebrated by Jordan Peterson, I was referring to a manifestation of the so-called “countersignaling,” or “showing off by not showing off” described by various economists and sociologists in recent years. “Countersignaling,” showing off by playing mediocre, means that high-status people secure in the knowledge that their social position, talents, abilities, and good qualities are recognized by everybody will tend to feel that no great harm is done if they sometimes stray a bit from strict propriety in their behavior, manners, appearance, or attitudes, that they will still be accepted and respected as elite no matter what–while at the same time other, somewhat less high-status people will be more likely to fear disgrace, ostracism, or perhaps even trouble with the law if they depart in any way from the meticulously “straight and narrow.” Peterson’s great popularity in recent years suggests, I think, that college-age young Americans no longer feel nearly as optimistic or confident these days as they would have felt a couple of decades ago about their chances of rising into the social and economic strata who can safely, securely “countersignal” with no serious consequences to their reputations or careers–as I facetiously put it in my earlier comment, of perhaps someday becoming Chairperson of the Yale or Harvard English department or associate editor of “Harper’s” or “The Atlantic.” In the past, I’d more generally add, I think that there was more of a widespread feeling that rising into the ranks of the “cultural elites,” “effete snobs,” “limousine liberals,” or “Brie and Chablis set” was a kind of natural, normal climax of upward social mobility, that if you worked hard and showed talent you would naturally wind up among the “cultural elites,” that someday eventually ending up a “cultural elite” type more or less naturally “came with the territory” of “bettering yourself”! Now, however, it’s rather less felt like an obvious normal climax, I suspect!
See: Humble bragging.
Jordan Peterson | Post-Modernism vs. Modernism at the Toronto Action Forum
Richard R. Weiner, 1981. Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology (SAGE Library of Social Research).
https://books.google.com/books/about/Cultural_Marxism_and_Political_Sociology.html?id=4G0XAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y
>A thorough examination and analysis of the tensions between political sociology and the culturally oriented Marxism that emerged in the 60s and 70s is presented in this volume.
Dennis L. Dworkin, 1997. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Cultural_Marxism_in_Postwar_Britain.html?hl=de&id=dY1Cgg8NV64C
> In this intellectual history of British cultural Marxism, Dennis Dworkin explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought. Tracing its development from beginnings in postwar Britain, through its various transformations in the 1960s and 1970s, to the emergence of British cultural studies at Birmingham, and up to the advent of Thatcherism, Dworkin shows this history to be one of a coherent intellectual tradition, a tradition that represents an implicit and explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar British Left.
Cultural Marxism of Laclau and Mouffe
McManus has repeatedly smeared Peterson with the usual half truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies. I’ve posted this repeatedly in the comment section on this site, and, to be frank, the Left simply do not want to admit McManus is a partisan hack.
See anything he’s written on Peterson at Merion West, including his new book. The comment sections are full of people pointing out McManus’ drivel. He does not represent Peterson’s arguments correctly. And I don’t believe he even attempts to do so. Honestly if the author of this piece begins by referencing McManus’ work, I’m not even willing to read the other articles to which the author links, such is McManus’ intellectual dishonestly. Helen, ditch McManus. He only harms the Left, and I say this as someone who abandoned the Left a few years ago.
McManus’ “conversative postmodernism” is little more than him not being able to tell the difference between postmodernism and a BS artist (e.g., Trump). I wish I could find the video (but alas it’s 4pm on Friday, nearly drinks time) in which Peterson himself admits he knows neo-Marxism and postmodermism is quite different beasts, opposed to each other in many ways, and he elaborates that he can’t exactly explain what these are in the usual short interviews.
“Helen, ditch McManus.”
No, Helen, give us more McManus. Relax Steve. I’m a huge fan of Dr. P (BTW where is he lately?), but I also enjoy Matt’s articles greatly. I think he is a bit wrong — that is, I agree with your criticisms of him — but in the spirit of genuine intellectual thrust and parry, I think he’s in good faith and his challenges should be met cordially and in that spirit of genuine intellect. I expect that Peterson and McManus would enjoy each other’s company just as Peterson enjoys conversing/debating with Harris who is perhaps his greatest opponent. Don’t denounce Matt, just refute him.
Steve,
This may be the video you’re thinking of.
Jordan B Peterson on “But That Wasn’t Real Communism, Socialism, or Marxism!”
«McManus has repeatedly smeared Peterson with the usual half truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies. I’ve posted this repeatedly in the comment section on this site, and, to be frank, the Left simply do not want to admit McManus is a partisan hack.»
Sometimes motives of the person are much more prosaic than we think. May be, the main reason McManus attacks Dr. Peterson is because regardless of you agree or disagree with Peterson, but Peterson makes you think; he is interesting to people. McManus is not.
Let’s not get a cancel culture going.
Perhaps this little publication might assist the author to dispel some glaring misunderstandings he obviously has about the nature of “Marxism” https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlet/marxism-revisited/
Read some history and economic theory, please. Quit posting this drivel from the Socialist Party’s PR department.
Modern SocJus is mainly indebted to Critical Theory (created by the Frankfurt School, an explicitly neomarxist project) and postmodernism via Foucault, Derrida et al. So yes, I don’t think he fully understands it but he isn’t far wrong.
I would make this «long historical arch» even longer.
From Inca Empire through catharism, Utopia of Thomas More, “Eternal League of God” of Müntzer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Conspiracy of the Equals of Babeuf, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao to modern SJW – this movement is always the same. Its hallmarks are the desire to destroy private property, religion and family, while the final goal is to wipe out the mankind.
Karl Marx was more honest – he admitted this «arch». Modern postmodernists are lying (for now…)
Postmodernism equally affects what are assumed to be opposite ends of the political spectrum, because they aren’t opposite. Fascism/Communism are not much different, much less polar opposites. Right/Left is irrelevant. Try Individualism/Collectivism as the opposites and it’s much clearer.
https://theotherclub.org/2017/12/the-right-hand-knows-full-well-what-the-left-hand-is-doing.html
The subtleties are only of interest to Progressive Professors and SJW activists as a means of avoiding association with the manifest failures of Marxism. Peterson’s point, in the simplest terms, is that because economic class warfare turned out not to be inevitable, new victim groups had to be invented.
Since *The Gulag Archipelago*, *The Black Book of Communism*, *Last Exit to Utopia*, *Heaven on Earth*, etc. it has not been intellectually feasible to pretend the problem with Communism was simply that the wrong people were in charge. Postmodernism offers a way out.
What “communism”? The Soviet Union was a system of state administered capitalism from the word go. It exhibited the core generic features that define capitalism -the accumulation of capital, the profit motive (enshrined in the 1936 constitution) . buying and selling and above all , generalised wage labour. Why dont people call a spade a spade. There was no communism in the Soviet Union , or China or all the other pseudo-communist states/ This is still one of the best books on the subject and its downloadable https://libcom.org/library/state-capitalism-wages-system-under-new-management-adam-buick-john-crump
So apparently your solution to the lack of communism in the old Soviet Union would be to abolish wages and the buying and selling of, what, anything and everything? That will be a fun place. Something like Atlanta in The Walking Dead, as wageless laborers wander the streets trying to find the government stooge who possesses what little exists in hopes that he will be actually willing to part with it.
David Alexander. I dont know warped concept of communism it is that you hold in your head but I suggest you do a little reading around the topic. Here’s a mice easy read for you to straighten out that muddled head of yours https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlet/from-capitalism-to-socialism-how-we-live-and-how-we-could-live/ BTW “socialism” in traditional Marxian usage means the same thing as communism
Yes. Wonderful. Thank you for the read. All the intellectual rigor of a Scientology advert with half the believability.
«What “communism”»? The Soviet Union was a system of state administered capitalism» – You definitely know nothing about the real “communism” 🙂
It’s amazing how the Socialists, Marxists and Communists in the west are so quick to heap praise on any and every new attempt at those ideologies. So slow to admit when or how they’ve gone wrong, or even acknowledge the inevitable body count. And yet so quick after the event to claim “that wasn’t real XXX-ism” and that it would have gone fine “if only…”.
It seems fitting to quote Dr. Peterson on “what they mean when they say that wasn’t real Marxism”:
“It means they think if ‘I were in Stalin’s position I would have ushered in the damn utopia instead of the genocidal massacres, because I understand the doctrine of Marxism and everything about me is good’.”
The work of Don Lavoie will help disabuse you of this idea, Robin Cox. It’s odd that you say the “Soviet Union was a system of state administered capitalism from the word go” when the early years were the most faithful application of Marx’s ideas, reducing their productivity down to about 10% of what it was in 2 years.
“His conclusion is that both channels of this river lead to the same bloody place in the end.”
Very well said. Dwelling on the nuances of the difference could end up being nothing but a distraction. Hitler and Mussolini were not exactly the same, but during WWII that distinction was not really what we needed to worry about.
And add Stalin and Mao to that list
Thank you. A worthy read and enlightening on the forces at play. I would agree, having heard from a number of post-modernists arguing the subtle distinctions between Marxist and post-modern thought, that Peterson generally ignores them. I don’t think it’s because he doesn’t understand the differences. I think it’s because he understands that they are, for his purposes, inconsequential. His conclusion is that both channels of this river lead to the same bloody place in the end. When they put a bullet in your brain for thinking the wrong things, or for being the wrong person, you don’t care what color pants they wear.