This one is going out to Antonio of Venice. In another thread I observed him calming that woke trans behavior couldn't be socialist, because the USSR was anti-gay.
So this is an educational resource for those who don't know how politicizing of fundamental social concepts like sex and gender roles can work towards a Neo-Marxist agenda.
Here is a link to an episode of James Lindsay's New Discourses podcast, where he defines Queer Theory and gives some of its history.
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 94; The Political Definition of "Queer"
James Lindsay isn't perfect. He is committed to the reform of the sphere of academia, and he recently tried to make "woke right" a thing. That said, he is very knowledgeable and gives extensive citations for every point he makes in this podcast. There are well cited publications elsewhere in his body of work which have extensive discussion and exhaustive citations. This is (more or less) the short, short version.
Queer Theory is a descendent of Critical Theory and redefines the Marxist class struggle along different lines.
tl;dw:
The podcast episode critiques queer theory as defined by David Halperin, a foundational queer theorist.
Halperin frames "queer" not as an identity rooted in reality (like being gay) but as a political stance opposed to norms, legitimacy, and dominance. Halperin’s definition seeks to elevate Foucault to sainthood and divorces "queer" from any "positive truth" or "stable reality," instead positioning it as a fluid, oppositional force against societal structures.
Lindsay argues this politicizes identity, conflates personal and political realms (a "Marxist maneuver"), and enables radical outcomes—including destabilizing science, rejecting limiting principles, and potentially justifying harm to children. Queer theory’s lack of "essence" or grounding in reality, Lindsay claims, makes it inherently destructive, warranting opposition to its ideological framework.
tl;dr tl;dw:
Queer Theory defines "queer" as political action specifically in opposition to existing social structures; deliberately conflating sexuality with political action. Doing so it makes action outside the sexual orthodoxly inherently political, without restriction. IMNHO Queer Theory specifically encourages both sexualizing and politicizing the youth.
The astute observer will observe this is exactly what is happening with the grooming and transing of kids.
This is one of the smartest posts that has been posted here in a great while.
I still can't adequately articulate what I have seen but this comes pretty close. Foucault and postmodernism are close to the root problem (if not the actual root problem).
I'll never forget when I was a dumbass lib Sociology graduate student and I tried to tell my class (in so many words) that I couldn't shake the feeling all of this theory was just orienting people to tear down all of the systems that we have built and held dear... I left that room convinced not only did they know it, they were rooting for it.
When your enemies say they want to destroy everything about you, believe it.
Most postmodernism is rooted in Critical Theory, the idea that everything in western society should be criticized forever from every angle until it collapses. Vertigopolitix has a great video on that.
I will watch that video, but I disagree insofar as the word intent - the truth is more nefarious than that in my opinion.
I won't argue this was the intent of the original Theorists, and is certainly the intent of some of the more radical authors now. Hell, the idiots at Black Lives Matter were too dumb to understand they were basically articulating that intent in their words.
But I just think (largely fed by experience with these people) that most of the academics now are foot soldiers who honestly and ardently believe the bullshit of it all. These idiots really believe there is no biological differences between men and women. They really believe that all the disparate outcomes American blacks see is rooted in racism and not rooted in bad choices coupled with a fucked up incentive system via government handouts.
There will always be people plotting against the dominant world hegemony, and the middle of the 20th century was no exception to that. It is really, ironically, in the collapse of the Soviet Union that this mind virus really took hold. People stopped being vigilant about bad ideas and stopped seeing the danger in ideology. The 90s to now really accelerated the communization of our universities.
You can see evidence of what I am saying in how Democrats (much more likely to be captured by the mind virus and now almost entirely comprised of those afflicted) govern. Take New York as an example. Their state budget is almost $300,000,000,000 and they spend the most money on social services... and continue to invite people like illlegals to come here, and drive out productive people, and promise everyone the moon. The result is no one gets anything, systems completely break down, and waste spirals out of control. The schools fail and they just cover it up with statistics. The police fail and they aren't even allowed to do their jobs in the first place. The prisons fail so they just find reasons to not put people in prison.
They are in complete and utter denial. They are honestly trying their best but their worldview is so fucked they can't even aknowledge the problems they create.
You have to remember Foucault and that ilk were all avid fans of the Chinese color revolution and still viewed themselves as modern Jacobins who could solve humanity if they could just get them to destroy themselves first and start from a blank slate. They simply saw the French revolution as one that did not go far enough to destroy the previous society.
The Frankfort school was deeply in love with the Hegelian dialectic. That is, according to Hegel, a concept would meet its opposite; both would destroy each other and be replaced by a superior version.
Marx and Engels were deeply in love with this idea and applied it to social concepts. In their thinking the Thesis (society) would meet the Antithesis (the Workers' Revolution) and the Synthesis would arise, in this case a Workers Utopia.
IMNHO this is a perversion of Hegel's work. Never the less, Marx and Engel's interpretation lead to generations of scholars who truly believe that first society must be torn down to be replaced with something better.
IMNHO this teeters on the edge of the insane.
Which can be seen in offshoots of critical theory. Feminism is this same offset of the “patriarchy”, LGBTQ is the offset of heteronormativity, on and on. What I find interesting is that this need to create opposition was massively controlled and targeted for decades. The difference today it seems is that the torch somehow didn’t get passed properly and lunatics are now running the asylum, which makes me wonder if that is just the natural consequence of creating this dichotomy.
Feminism is slightly different, because it is fifty years older than Critical Theory. Further, Feminism is designed to put women into the dominant role that they imagine men to have.
All while Feminists are raging against the biological imperative to have babies and raise a family.
Simply put, Feminism is penis envy. They want what they think men have and imagine themselves being the most rich and successful Chads, complete with wealth and harem.
I think Feminism informed Critical Theory and the Frankfort school was jealous of the success that Feminism has found.
But you are 100% correct. Feminism is and always has been deeply Marxist in origin and application. In the UK the ancient domestic violence movement was taken over by literal Socialists and used to secure a funding stream for their programs for social change, all while playing on the emotions of Useful Idiot women.
There are some very interesting interviews with Erin Pizzey on YouTube. She was very much on the leading edge of applied family systems and mens' rights. She was chased out of the UK (her dog was killed) because she would not bend the knee to the Socialists.
Communism is about utterly destroying the cultural and racial identity of a society and then 'rebuilding' it from the ashes. China is the perfect example for it. LGBT bullshit helps to destroy what's left of European culture which is why Communism is pushing it in the West.
I mean, if you think China is the end station of these people, you're far more optimistic than I am. The CCP does advocate for nationalism (because it is in power).
I don't see the woke doing anything but creatng societal collapse.
Most of them are useful idiots. Nothing more. Once you get an actual Communist takeover they get taken out the back and shot. Just like in China and Russia.
Woke is a tool. It is only the goal for useful idiots. Just like feminism, critical race theory and all the other garbage.
China's social revolutions were catastrophic failures that resulted in the deaths of billions.
The devotion to Political Correctness has resulted in a paper tiger of an economy, and the one-child policy is going to see the population crater.
There are a whole lot of plates spinning right now, but I fear the future is grim.
It is just one of many variants of cultural marxism, which is a favored tool of the globalist. They saw how effective communism was at destabilizing society and allowing an authoritarian takeover, and devised a version that would ignore the upper class in favor of sowing division between the lower classes. The head of the snake cares for no group or dogma, only power. They will use anything to concentrate power and take it over.
Racial identity politics are the same. This is why BLM used so much marxist terminology.
Globalists wield multiculturalism as a weapon, but it’s important to understand that the absence of the elites would not result in spontaneous cooperation and brotherhood among everyone else. We are organically divided by many things. Globalists have simply created close proximity for incompatible tribes.
Multiculturalism is just another marxist tactic to create the conditions for civil conflict. No sane society allows immigration greater than their own replacement rate, outside of the kind that comes from conquest - and conquered lands don't typically get a say in government for generations. And the outright anti-assimilation mindset is clearly weaponized.
We've also seen the consequences of trying to hold onto hostile cultures and everyone sane realized it isn't worthwhile.
Spot on.
Except it ignores the reality of organic division between peoples.
Any of the "theory" academic fields are Frankfurt School communism which reimagines the class dialectic of Marx into an oppressor/oppressed dynamic. They each center one of several "oppressed" people as the oppressed, and all of them place white males as the oppressors. They all feed the narcissistic moral tendencies of the anointed class who weaponize empathy and turn into monsters.
While he's correct that it's not strictly "socialist" in terms of prior socialist attempts, Lindsay (and others) have long been correct in calling it cultural marxism, which was actually on wiki for a long time until it got turned into a 'conspiracy theory' (aka fact the left doesn't like being pointed out).
The real issue is we never went far enough in removing the communists the first time, and we need to purge them again from every position of power in the US.
Patton was right when he said we shouldn't have stopped at Germamy, and should have rolled through into Moscow while we had the opportunity. They had him killed for it.
Queer Theory is explicitly a Neo-Marxist ideology. So is basically all of the current "Applied Post Modernist Intersectionalism"
I think the issue is Applied Post-Modern Intersectionalism rejects the concept of the Marxist Historical Dialectical Materialism. Socialism typically operates off of Dialectical Materialism, but typically puts it to the side when it becomes politically necessary. We saw this with both Fabian Socialism, National Socialism, and WW2 Stalinism.
Queerness is literally nothing more than Sex Communism. You sometimes even see people like Vaush push Queer historical revisionism and claim that pair bonding never happened in early human history, and that all societies were purely hedonistic and basically pan-sexual. This is a bastardized application of Rouseau's Nobel Savage concept into the idea of sex, where cultural limitations were implanted by civilization onto the savages in order to oppress his will. In reality, we know that all societies tend to push for some kind of pair-bonding, as it is a successful mating strategy for humans. We also see pair-bonding replicated a lot in the natural world.
Queers are basically treating normal sexual relationships the same way every Applied Post Modernist Intersectionalist treats civilization, or the same way every Marxist treats Romantic History, and the same way every Socialist treats Capitalism.
It is important to understand that Queer is very clearly not an asserted gender, nor an asserted sex, nor an asserted sexual orientation. When push comes to shove, though the activists will hide it, the truth is that "Queers" are a political designation. They have nothing to do with gender, sex, or sexuality. They are a political movement demanding radical change to those topics.
Hence, yes, it is a form of Sexual Communism / Socialism. The topic that the Socialists are covering happens to be specific to sex, rather than race, religion, gender, or nationality.
Thanks. I’ll check out the podcast.
Its good up until he starts crying about Christian Nationalism. Then his 90s liberal atheist roots start to show through. He has graduated to full lolcow on twitter at this point.
Yea I am just now getting to that part
It is really a shame. I learned so much from James.
I think James is deeply afraid that the MAGA movement will tear down the academic institutions rather than reforming them. James remains committed to saving the Academy and he feels that academics still have a lot to offer.
While I think that root and branch reform of the university system may produce results, I don't think there is the organization or political will to fire literally every employee of the Ivy League institutions.
It is thirty years too late to oppose the Long March through the Institutions.
Yes you are right he is hedging his bets by not saying anything "unforgivable" to his former station.
But I think he is just desperately clinging to the 90s fresh prince status quo that just isn't coming back. His contempt for Christianity and really any kind of morality grounded on fixed principles won't let him use his common sense to conclude certain activities are immoral because they harm society as a whole, and he thinks the only standard of behavior is "consent".
It's ironic, because it sits adjacent to the socially disruptive (yet fictional) Assassin's Order from Ubisoft, showcasing how it has its tendrils in every aspect of society, from politics and academia to culture and entertainment. Their slogan is literally a subversive attempt to normalise and even galvanise queer theory to its logical (and detrimental) ends:
Nothing is true, everything is permitted
pretty much all of social sciences is repackaged marxism.
I can't believe that was only 9 months ago. Lindsay's lolcow phase must have only started pretty recently.
Time flies and the ride never ends.
James Lindsey is the embodiment of "stay in your lane" If he had an ounce of charisma it'd be great, but there's no-one even close to him for his investigation of marxist theory.
Further to this, the "strategic" goal of gay communism to create a proletariat. You probably know the "workers of the world unite" etc etc bullshit which was old communism. Turns out workers aren't interested in being the vanguard of the revolution. So marxists need another vanguard population, and creating a generational cadre of young and mentally unstable kids fulfils this criteria. They are the crowbar that will be used to start the revolution.
If you can sit through his podcasts about marxist topics, it's well worth listening to new discourses.
And it’s so massively over represented but you have a lot of people who get upset if you point that out
Oh dear, what have I done now?
I think you misunderstood. A lot of wokies will call themselves socialist. It's clearly not incompatible. I said that you can hardly link wokies, whose ideas will lead to societal collapse, to the USSR which was at least a functioning society.
All of them eventually go back to John Locke, at least in retrospective genealogies. Doesn't mean they're not different things.
There's actually a precedent in Soviet history for this. Initially, the communists attempted to recruit the many, bizarre religious sects in Russia to politicize them against the ruling tsarist establishment. An example being the Skoptsy. If you want to throw up, take a look at what that is. Which brings us back to transgenderism...
The Critical Theories define the problem in different ways, but the solution is always the same. It is all a deliberate effort to bring about a Color Revolution and an authoritarian regime with these academics in charge.
I think your differences are mostly inconsequential. Useful Idiots are useful idiots and the end point is functionally identical.
Observe China, Spain, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Venezuela etc.
I mean, I guess you could try shouting "You are not real Marxists!" at the Brazilians and see if that alters the trajectory of their country. I suspect not.