Hey, and hello, everybody. It's James Lindsay. You're listening to the new discourses podcast. We are still exploring a little bit of queer theory. So you can get a feel for

what queer theory is all about. Of course, I don't want to call it queer theory. I want to call it queer Marxism. I want people to understand that in fact, queer Marxism is the right name for what they call queer theory, even though queer theory derives from say postmodernism more significantly than most of the other contemporary branches of identity based Marxism.

Let me explain how it's queer Marxism, and then I'm going to read this rather fascinating paper. Recently, we went through Gail Rubin's first paper and queer theory as a three part series here on the podcast. That was the paper thinking sex. I still intend to try to weave in between all the education stuff. Another stuff that's coming up, try to weave in some of the other older queer theory, you've said,

epistemology of the closet probably is going to come soon, sooner or later, I've got to get into Judith Butler as you're going to hear in the episode today. She is kind of central. She is maybe the fairy godmother of queer theory.

Maybe at some point we'll have to track backwards further into Michelle Foucault in the history of sexuality, but I don't know if I want to keep digging and digging.

In this episode, we're actually talking about something quite recent. This is another paper from 2021, which is that I'm going to go through today, which is the same as going the same year. I should say it's going through the other recent queer theory and education paper. I just did

for the podcast, which is about drag queen story hour. And if you recall in the groomer schools series, which that's number four, now there's a number two, which went through queer theory and early childhood education.

And the idea of destroying childhood innocence. So I'm trying to give you a flavor of queer theory, where it came from and queer theory, where it is now.

And kind of address the question that when you deal with the queer Marxism, that the, you know, the slopes always slippery. I've said that the slope, in fact, is being lubed by the queer Marxists to make it super, super slippery.

And the question that, you know, we want to answer. In some sense, is, is there a stopping point? Does this ever stop? Does it ever have a place where it says, okay, enough is enough.

And the answer is no, queer theory already conquered feminism. That's beyond debate. Or it's heggle like to put it, you know, history uses people and then discards them. So queer theorists or Marxists, I should say, used feminists and have discarded them in favor of queer theory, which is cannibalized it from

within and burst out. But let me give you before we dive into this ridiculous paper about incest and disability, through the lens of queer theory, which is what we're going to cover today, just to give you an idea that this has no, there are no breaks on the queer theory train. There are none.

It is relentless destruction of everything. I want to frame that in terms of how it's queer Marxism, just so we can touch on that and make sure everybody's on the same page about what we're looking at when we read this.

So Karl Marx kind of in a nutshell, and I've done this a number of times, which you have to keep hearing it, you have to understand Karl Marx kind of in a nutshell believed that there are certain people who have a certain have access to a certain kind of property. You always think with Marxism in the most general sense that there's some special kind of property that certain people have access to and they exclude other people from access to it and thus give themselves benefit in society, give themselves higher standing or privilege in society.

And exclude other people intentionally from it. This sets up a stratification. It's a power dynamic and it sets up a stratification of people who have on top and people who do not have on bottom with regard to that special property from Marx capitalists had private property and excluded other people from being able to have it.

So you have the people who have private property, that's their special form of property capital and people who have not to don't have access to capital or special property who are exploited by the people who have it, the people on top create a mythology, a religion, if you will, a social religion, justifying why they get to be on top, this is Marx's view, the name he gave for the social mythology or religion is ideology, so they create an ideology of capitalism.

To justify why they get to have access to special property and other people don't. The other piece of Marxism, besides the fact that you have this idea of a broken, a stratified society in conflict over some kind of property that only some people give themselves access to and exclude everybody else is that people, especially on the underclass, but in both classes can be awakened to the so-called reality created by this structural dynamic.

That's what it was referred to as a structure of society. The upper class was a superstructure for society, the underclass is an infrastructure, their dynamic interplay, which is described by dialectical materialism, to throw out more historical words for you, is called a structural phenomenon in society. It creates a structure to society and it's the real conditions of society according to Marx.

And Marx believed the first real science of studying the structure of history and how that structure unfolds over time. And so people who have taken on his scientific study of the structural conditions of society, what he called the Viesenschaft Likerssozialismus, that's German for the scientific socialism, understand that they believe themselves, I should say, to be this soul of society.

People on earth who have the necessary insight to study the true nature of social reality as it actually is.

And it's intended purpose because it's a scientific socialism. The purpose is to open up the eyes of people to get them to realize that we are actually a socialist species, a communist species that would transcend the idea of the special kind of property.

Marx said that's the specific purpose. If you read in the economic and philosophic manuscripts, I think it's in the third manuscript, but you can check me, maybe it's the second one, it's not the first one.

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