Hey everybody, this is James Lindsay. You are listening to new discourses, Bullets, where

I take apart one topic from woke Marxism that we need to understand so that we can fight

it and beat it. And today I want to talk about mystification. Mystification is one of

the favorite words of Marx and Marxists. They believe that ideology is like capitalism

mystify what's really going on. I can tell you, like for example, from George Lukauch

writing in history and class consciousness, the normal shifts of perspective produced

by the capitalist point of view in the image of economic structure of societies tends to

quote, obscure and mystify the true origins of surplus value, quoting from Marx there.

In the normal, purely theoretical view, this mystification only attaches to the organic

composition of capital to the place of the employer and the productive system and the

economic function of interest, et cetera. That is, it does no more than highlight the

failure of observers to perceive the true driving forces that lie beneath the surface when

it comes to this practice, when it comes to practice, this mystification touches upon

the central fact of capitalist society, the class struggle. Just an example, it doesn't

really matter what is being said there that much. What I want to say is that for the Marxists,

they believe that the overarching ideologies of capitalism or with race Marxism, white

supremacy or with queer theory, the elevation of the normal, which they would call normativity

or specifically heteronormativity or cis normativity or cis heteronormativity that normal people

are normal. These ideologies mystify the true nature of reality, which they are uncovering.

Marx build himself as somebody who was peeling back the layers of ideology. In fact, he claimed

that Marxism was, in fact, the one thing that's not an ideology because it's the anti-ideology.

I want you to learn, the point of this podcast is not to dive deeply into what mystification

...