Here is CNN calling “safeguarding Western civilizational norms” a “far-right” issue. Look, they believe whiteness, patriarchy, colonialism, etc. are interlocking forms of domination to overcome. The deeper con is severing Western civilization from its own achievements: overcome the civilization, keep all the goodies.
The underlying story (con) begins with an immediate human unity. Primitive Communism, maan. People are embedded in a common social world before they experience themselves and their powers as separate from it. The unity is real but undeveloped and mostly unconscious. People belong to the whole without really knowing themselves as a whole. Just vibing, maaan.
So, then comes rupture of this low level vibe. Different theories locate it in the enclosure of the commons, private property, wage labor, commodification, colonialism, racial hierarchy, patriarchy, and so on. The details change, but the basic movement is the same in each of these (post)Marxist theories. Human life becomes divided, and powers once embedded in the social whole become scattered into separate social forms. At the widest scale though, Western civilization becomes the historical order in which those divisions take shape, harden, and reproduce themselves.
None of this requires anyone to sit down and design the system. The structures emerge “historically,” take on lives of their own, and are inherited by people who didn’t create them. People can benefit from them, exploit them, defend them, or reproduce them, but they’re operating inside forms already larger than themselves. The theory focuses on structures more than individual bad actors.
This is where alienation and reification come in. Human powers become objectified in property, capital, markets, institutions, social categories, inherited norms, and structures of authority. “Objectified” means those powers now exist outside immediate human life in durable social forms. “Reified” means those forms have hardened until they confront people almost like independent things, with their own apparent logic and power. The social world starts to look like a second nature.
These structures derive their power from the living human capacities bound up within them. Capital has no productive power without labor. Markets do nothing without human exchange. Institutions act only through people. Social categories persist because they keep organizing human relations. Yet the form conceals that dependence. The structure appears to possess the power that actually runs through it.
Human capacities become caught inside structures that seem independent of them and confront people as external powers. What belongs to living social life now appears to belong to capital, institutions, markets, categories, and systems.
Critical consciousness is supposed to see through that appearance. It sees history where ordinary consciousness sees nature, social relations where it sees fixed things, and human powers where it sees autonomous structures. It also begins to separate the human capacity worth recovering from the social form in which that capacity has become alienated.
The oppressed and marginalized provide privileged standpoints from which particular forms of domination can be exposed. A consciousness-bearing movement, the vanguard in its stronger form, connects those insights into a picture of the whole. It identifies what belongs to the oppressive form and what can be recovered from it. Critical consciousness then becomes a kind of sorting operation: separate the human content from the alienated structure, then turn that knowledge into action.
That raised consciousness gives the movement the standpoint from which to repair the fractured social whole. Praxis is the work of that repair. The oppressive forms are negated, while the powers bound up within them are recovered and reappropriated. Knowledge, technology, productive capacity, cooperation, social organization, cultural achievement, and the rest are freed from the forms that supposedly distorted, enclosed, or monopolized them and recast as common human powers.
Here the opening move pays off, because the achievements of Western civilization have already been detached from Western civilization itself, the civilization can be overcome without giving up its “goodies.” The historical shell can be discarded while the useful human capacities bound up within it are claimed for humanity as a whole. Thats the whole con.
This whole process is what is meant by sublation. The old form is negated, its recoverable contents are separated out and preserved, and those contents are reorganized at a higher level. Western civilization disappears as a distinct historical order, while the powers developed within it are universalized and recombined into a more conscious social whole.
The final unity is supposed to be richer than the original one because it has passed through division, differentiation, alienation, and conscious recovery. The first unity was immediate and largely unconscious. What existed at the beginning without understanding itself is supposed to reappear at the end as a consciously organized whole.
Taken together, classical Marxism, feminism, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, etc. are diagnosing different fractures within this larger civilizational whole. Class, race, sex, colonialism, and the rest identify different places where separation, alienation, and domination have taken form. Zoomed all the way out, Western civilization becomes the master frame to be sublated. Its hardened forms are dissolved, the human powers bound up within them are recovered, and those powers are consciously reorganized into a supposedly higher social unity.
The US State Department directed millions of dollars originally earmarked to promote human rights to promote far-right causes including Afrikaner rights in South Africa, safeguarding "Western civilizational norms," and documenting "backsliding" in Europe related to mass migration, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.
cnn.it/471EYZQ