1) If you're confronted with grad student Marxists, just remind them that we know from their letters that Adorno greatly admired Benjamin's religious faith. It was when he tried to make it a "science" talking about art's aura and film that Adorno thought Benjamin lost the plot.
2) If I had stayed a historian, I'd be writing a book right now about how none of the successful Marxist revolutions in Asia succeeded in mobilizing around the concept of class alone to gain participation in the revolution. In all cases, some other, less than scientific concept was the concept around which revolutionaries rallied - the nation. Now, certainly there were socialist components to the organizing as well. Lots of class analysis of whatever quality to people describe how and why the Party was fighting. But class alone never defined the "we" who was doing the fighting. That part is politics and stands outside a traditional definition of science.
Really good work lately. Indulging in some nice light reading after your time with the Cantos I see.
I am definitely in a similar position to you and Lillian. Recent changes in my social life have brought me into contact with a lot of your typical leftist/Marxist grad students and I hate to say it but so much of the inclination towards that sort of thought really does just strike me as religious or psychological in nature or stemming from some sort of insecurity. Maybe that wasn't the case in Red Vienna or wherever but now it just seems to me like 100% Gouldnerian inter-bourgeois disputes and their protestations that actually the fact that they both work for a living gives them a supreme common cause to share with the undocumented day laborers in my neighborhood comes off as basically delusional.
Definitely not confident that the left's recent drift back into stochastic assassination will bring about any positive developments either. And the adoption of Palestine as the new omnicause is definitely causing a bit of a crashout as a whole, proving as it does that a history of oppression doesn't give a people any special moral insight, nor will being "people of the book" prevent you from descending into genocidal mass psychosis. Destabilizing realizations for a lot of people, myself included.
At the same time sometimes you pick up a positive case for liberalism -- I've been leafing through some of those, Tony Judt, Clive James, Trilling etc -- and you're like (as you mention with the NY intellectuals) OK I admire your erudition and intellect but this is so weaksauce, in no world could this be a cause to lay down one's life for, you don't sound convincing even to yourself! Aux armes, citoyens! Moderation or death! And totally true with the vulnerability to foreign policy adventures too. I've been in a Sontag phase recently and she famously made the transition from "the white race is the cancer of human history" to "we can do a little liberal imperialism, as a treat."
What are you gonna do, it's a sucker's game. Cheers to more dialogue between recondite rodent and potato-based pasta, at least.
Yeah, whatever you think about Gasda's The Sleepers (I liked it) the politics of his Dan character are very well drawn. Dan is better than average (qua n+1 blogger if not qua looser boyfriend) because he realizes that he's full of shit.
On a certain abstract level it is true that I'm "on the left and not a liberal," because of sincere philosophical and political commitments I've thought about for a long time. Also just as a matter of taste I find Perry Anderson or, like, Foucault more interesting than Clive James or Lionel Trilling. But in terms of "what kind of a person am I," I am a regular bougie liberal like everybody else I know. It is obnoxious to assign yourself too much moral credit for political opinions when they don't cost you anything. Even when it comes to Gaza, the focus can shift from what's happening there (horrific) to what's happening on US campuses (not great, but have some perspective; also free speech on campus seems like a good idea now doesn't it?) to circular firing squad denunciations of people who signed the wrong open letter.
When it comes to @gnocchicapocryphon's thoughts, I guess I differ most of all about what temporal perspective to take. I think 2020 was a sort of absurdist finale to the Left Populist movement that took shape everywhere in the rich world post-2008, and which has been completely crushed. But maybe this is just sentimentality on my part: I would like to think that the Sanders movement was organized around "let's do social democracy now!" and that it at least could have succeeded, but maybe this was sentimental of me. I was dead certain that "defund the police" was a one-way ticket to nowhere. All these people marching in the streets for... municipal budget cuts!? "Abolish the police" makes a certain kind of sense, although it is a bit like demanding "full communism now!" But "defund?" Wouldn't reforming racist police departments cost money? The real existing American left likes to make fun of Matt Yglesias and "popularism," but in practice, even in their most utopian moments, they don't dare ask for higher taxes on upper middle class voters in liberal cities.
Sorry for this rant! All this is to say that I understand why various "post-liberals" reacted to 2020 in the way they did. (I mean like John Pistelli, not Christopher Rufo. Perhaps this makes me like the fuddy-duddy Stalinist professor in Tom Stoppard's Rock & Roll who says that living through the sixties was like "accidentally opening the wrong door in a very specialized brothel." Although in 2020 unlike in the 60s I don't think people were having much fun.) Maybe being on the left means having confidence that existing left wing movements you can join will decisively change history for the better. I don't have that, so perhaps that makes me "agnostic," like Mr. Apocryphon.
Omg stealing that quote for the next response. I was definitely more taken by the spirit of the times-certainly not to the extent that some people were, but I had an “if this is the big one, so be it” attitude to 2020. I thought a lot of that rhetoric was quite silly too, but “if that’s what it takes, so be it” was the way I saw a lot of what I even then viewed as stupidity on the part of the left populist moment. You can maybe see in the inevitable recoil from that why I identified so much with the hoary “anticommunist leftists” of midcentury New York for a while.
In my case skepticism about the 2020 protests was partly sour grapes on the part of an overcommitted Bernie Bro. My attitude was: *Bernie* at least might have worked. "Planned Parenthood Supports Defunding the Police" was like something out of a fever dream. (And as an overcommitted Bernie Bro I knew the PP people were strongly anti-Bernie.) Whatever that was it stood no chance of working, the radicals of that moment had no coherent plan. At most there was a vague sense that Trump would fail catastrophically in a way that ushered in the millennium.
I get that. For me, in that moment, I think it was either “go along with stupidity” or “give in to nihilistic despair” (the peace to accept nihilism as a possibility came later) which is maybe in part why that Neumann book resonated so much with me a few months ago.
To me the extracts from Dan's blog posts sounded more like a right-wing parody of left-wing thought than that of an actual n+1 contributor (where was the namedropping of Benjamin and Kojève?). I did wonder if it was intentional - maybe if Dan had leant into his aphoristic style and got his transgressive kicks by posting as an anon, things might have worked out less disastrously for him (c. 2020 the post-left were the ones having fun).
I'm curious what you think the Sanders movement succeeding would have looked like. I fail to see how increased taxes, regulation and government spending on the poor (without addressing the issue of immigration) could have forestalled right-wing populism for long. It's easy to argue that the economic left is less obviously absurd than the identarian variety, but how do theories like Modern Monetary Theory hold up in light of the political implications of relatively moderate inflation?
A successful Sanders administration was probably not possible. But to indulge in fantasy…
If Bernie had won in 2016, a very substantial portion of the Democratic establishment would have regarded him as a dangerous fluke. He would have withdrawn from Afghanistan and they would have screamed blue murder and tried to impeach him or something like that. This might paradoxically have made him more popular. Ideally, Hillary Clinton’s supporters would keep calling him racist and sexist. In terms of domestic policy, the thing to do would be to maintain a laser-like focus on welfare-state expansion. Pass something like Matt Brunig’s “family fun pack” (if it got criticized by pointy-headed liberals for not being means-tested and for sexistly giving money to stay-at-home moms, so much the better) and let Medicare start at 50. If the benefits kicked in immediately, these programs would quickly become popular. When inflation started to kick in (although there was clearly a lot of room to spend in the 2016 economy), raise taxes. Sanders famously described open borders as a Koch brothers idea. After the Trump debacle, the sensible center might unite against Moscow Bernie: Paul Ryan is endorsed by Hillary Clinton (who he promises to make secretary of state again) and picks Michael Bloomberg as his running mate. They try to win the Latino vote by criticizing Bernie’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform. In this fantasy-land, you might see a lot of in-this-house-we-believe types from leafy suburbs voting for Ryan, and a lot of low income voters picking Sanders. “Woke” identity issues would be less salient because everybody was fighting about taxes and the welfare state.
If I were Dan I would post this on my n+1 blog and all my intellectual and erotic problems would be solved.
I can relate to this political transformation. I find I’m less interested in defining my beliefs or ensuring ideological coherence in myself since ~2021. I was an active member of a leftist Asian American Discord in 2020-2021, but gradually became disillusioned and bored with that community. TBH thinking about it just makes me feel tired
I appreciate this a lot—especially the chastened understanding of Marxism as a science which still allows it to function as a contemporary resource and framework. I’m also in agreement that the term “Left” is still necessary and preferable to “post-Left” as it at least formally keeps open the possibility of significant change beyond reform. Coming from a theological metaphysics which is quite formally different from much of Marx and Engels, I’ve always been particularly interested in Benjamin as a possible bridge—and I freaking love Kafka’s “The Penal Colony”
Thanks for this, I’m loving your exchange with Secret Squirrel, looking forward to more.
On Marx and belief, it seems that the aspiration of Marxism to be “scientific,” and thus to put fuzzy questions of belief aside, is both part of the appeal and part of the problem. I’m skeptical of the idea that Marxism succeeds in being completely scientific. If you claim to show the shape of history and the trajectory of human affairs, I think you’ve gone beyond the scope of what a scientific-materialist perspective can provide—it doesn’t really give you the resources to address those questions, and if you do nonetheless it’s because you’re drawing on something else.
The dialectical nature of the thinking is supposed to account for that, it seems, by synthesizing theory and practice. But again, does the tradition live up to its aims? I’m not so sure it does, which isn’t to say that there’s nothing there to learn from, because I think there is. Anyway, I share your skepticism and wish that leftists could hold the tradition of Marxist thought more lightly.
Two thoughts:
1) If you're confronted with grad student Marxists, just remind them that we know from their letters that Adorno greatly admired Benjamin's religious faith. It was when he tried to make it a "science" talking about art's aura and film that Adorno thought Benjamin lost the plot.
2) If I had stayed a historian, I'd be writing a book right now about how none of the successful Marxist revolutions in Asia succeeded in mobilizing around the concept of class alone to gain participation in the revolution. In all cases, some other, less than scientific concept was the concept around which revolutionaries rallied - the nation. Now, certainly there were socialist components to the organizing as well. Lots of class analysis of whatever quality to people describe how and why the Party was fighting. But class alone never defined the "we" who was doing the fighting. That part is politics and stands outside a traditional definition of science.
I just ordered the Benjamin/Scholem letters actually!
Really good work lately. Indulging in some nice light reading after your time with the Cantos I see.
I am definitely in a similar position to you and Lillian. Recent changes in my social life have brought me into contact with a lot of your typical leftist/Marxist grad students and I hate to say it but so much of the inclination towards that sort of thought really does just strike me as religious or psychological in nature or stemming from some sort of insecurity. Maybe that wasn't the case in Red Vienna or wherever but now it just seems to me like 100% Gouldnerian inter-bourgeois disputes and their protestations that actually the fact that they both work for a living gives them a supreme common cause to share with the undocumented day laborers in my neighborhood comes off as basically delusional.
Definitely not confident that the left's recent drift back into stochastic assassination will bring about any positive developments either. And the adoption of Palestine as the new omnicause is definitely causing a bit of a crashout as a whole, proving as it does that a history of oppression doesn't give a people any special moral insight, nor will being "people of the book" prevent you from descending into genocidal mass psychosis. Destabilizing realizations for a lot of people, myself included.
At the same time sometimes you pick up a positive case for liberalism -- I've been leafing through some of those, Tony Judt, Clive James, Trilling etc -- and you're like (as you mention with the NY intellectuals) OK I admire your erudition and intellect but this is so weaksauce, in no world could this be a cause to lay down one's life for, you don't sound convincing even to yourself! Aux armes, citoyens! Moderation or death! And totally true with the vulnerability to foreign policy adventures too. I've been in a Sontag phase recently and she famously made the transition from "the white race is the cancer of human history" to "we can do a little liberal imperialism, as a treat."
What are you gonna do, it's a sucker's game. Cheers to more dialogue between recondite rodent and potato-based pasta, at least.
Yeah, whatever you think about Gasda's The Sleepers (I liked it) the politics of his Dan character are very well drawn. Dan is better than average (qua n+1 blogger if not qua looser boyfriend) because he realizes that he's full of shit.
On a certain abstract level it is true that I'm "on the left and not a liberal," because of sincere philosophical and political commitments I've thought about for a long time. Also just as a matter of taste I find Perry Anderson or, like, Foucault more interesting than Clive James or Lionel Trilling. But in terms of "what kind of a person am I," I am a regular bougie liberal like everybody else I know. It is obnoxious to assign yourself too much moral credit for political opinions when they don't cost you anything. Even when it comes to Gaza, the focus can shift from what's happening there (horrific) to what's happening on US campuses (not great, but have some perspective; also free speech on campus seems like a good idea now doesn't it?) to circular firing squad denunciations of people who signed the wrong open letter.
When it comes to @gnocchicapocryphon's thoughts, I guess I differ most of all about what temporal perspective to take. I think 2020 was a sort of absurdist finale to the Left Populist movement that took shape everywhere in the rich world post-2008, and which has been completely crushed. But maybe this is just sentimentality on my part: I would like to think that the Sanders movement was organized around "let's do social democracy now!" and that it at least could have succeeded, but maybe this was sentimental of me. I was dead certain that "defund the police" was a one-way ticket to nowhere. All these people marching in the streets for... municipal budget cuts!? "Abolish the police" makes a certain kind of sense, although it is a bit like demanding "full communism now!" But "defund?" Wouldn't reforming racist police departments cost money? The real existing American left likes to make fun of Matt Yglesias and "popularism," but in practice, even in their most utopian moments, they don't dare ask for higher taxes on upper middle class voters in liberal cities.
Sorry for this rant! All this is to say that I understand why various "post-liberals" reacted to 2020 in the way they did. (I mean like John Pistelli, not Christopher Rufo. Perhaps this makes me like the fuddy-duddy Stalinist professor in Tom Stoppard's Rock & Roll who says that living through the sixties was like "accidentally opening the wrong door in a very specialized brothel." Although in 2020 unlike in the 60s I don't think people were having much fun.) Maybe being on the left means having confidence that existing left wing movements you can join will decisively change history for the better. I don't have that, so perhaps that makes me "agnostic," like Mr. Apocryphon.
Omg stealing that quote for the next response. I was definitely more taken by the spirit of the times-certainly not to the extent that some people were, but I had an “if this is the big one, so be it” attitude to 2020. I thought a lot of that rhetoric was quite silly too, but “if that’s what it takes, so be it” was the way I saw a lot of what I even then viewed as stupidity on the part of the left populist moment. You can maybe see in the inevitable recoil from that why I identified so much with the hoary “anticommunist leftists” of midcentury New York for a while.
In my case skepticism about the 2020 protests was partly sour grapes on the part of an overcommitted Bernie Bro. My attitude was: *Bernie* at least might have worked. "Planned Parenthood Supports Defunding the Police" was like something out of a fever dream. (And as an overcommitted Bernie Bro I knew the PP people were strongly anti-Bernie.) Whatever that was it stood no chance of working, the radicals of that moment had no coherent plan. At most there was a vague sense that Trump would fail catastrophically in a way that ushered in the millennium.
I get that. For me, in that moment, I think it was either “go along with stupidity” or “give in to nihilistic despair” (the peace to accept nihilism as a possibility came later) which is maybe in part why that Neumann book resonated so much with me a few months ago.
Interesting exchange!
To me the extracts from Dan's blog posts sounded more like a right-wing parody of left-wing thought than that of an actual n+1 contributor (where was the namedropping of Benjamin and Kojève?). I did wonder if it was intentional - maybe if Dan had leant into his aphoristic style and got his transgressive kicks by posting as an anon, things might have worked out less disastrously for him (c. 2020 the post-left were the ones having fun).
I'm curious what you think the Sanders movement succeeding would have looked like. I fail to see how increased taxes, regulation and government spending on the poor (without addressing the issue of immigration) could have forestalled right-wing populism for long. It's easy to argue that the economic left is less obviously absurd than the identarian variety, but how do theories like Modern Monetary Theory hold up in light of the political implications of relatively moderate inflation?
A successful Sanders administration was probably not possible. But to indulge in fantasy…
If Bernie had won in 2016, a very substantial portion of the Democratic establishment would have regarded him as a dangerous fluke. He would have withdrawn from Afghanistan and they would have screamed blue murder and tried to impeach him or something like that. This might paradoxically have made him more popular. Ideally, Hillary Clinton’s supporters would keep calling him racist and sexist. In terms of domestic policy, the thing to do would be to maintain a laser-like focus on welfare-state expansion. Pass something like Matt Brunig’s “family fun pack” (if it got criticized by pointy-headed liberals for not being means-tested and for sexistly giving money to stay-at-home moms, so much the better) and let Medicare start at 50. If the benefits kicked in immediately, these programs would quickly become popular. When inflation started to kick in (although there was clearly a lot of room to spend in the 2016 economy), raise taxes. Sanders famously described open borders as a Koch brothers idea. After the Trump debacle, the sensible center might unite against Moscow Bernie: Paul Ryan is endorsed by Hillary Clinton (who he promises to make secretary of state again) and picks Michael Bloomberg as his running mate. They try to win the Latino vote by criticizing Bernie’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform. In this fantasy-land, you might see a lot of in-this-house-we-believe types from leafy suburbs voting for Ryan, and a lot of low income voters picking Sanders. “Woke” identity issues would be less salient because everybody was fighting about taxes and the welfare state.
If I were Dan I would post this on my n+1 blog and all my intellectual and erotic problems would be solved.
I can relate to this political transformation. I find I’m less interested in defining my beliefs or ensuring ideological coherence in myself since ~2021. I was an active member of a leftist Asian American Discord in 2020-2021, but gradually became disillusioned and bored with that community. TBH thinking about it just makes me feel tired
Glad to hear you’re reading Capital
I appreciate this a lot—especially the chastened understanding of Marxism as a science which still allows it to function as a contemporary resource and framework. I’m also in agreement that the term “Left” is still necessary and preferable to “post-Left” as it at least formally keeps open the possibility of significant change beyond reform. Coming from a theological metaphysics which is quite formally different from much of Marx and Engels, I’ve always been particularly interested in Benjamin as a possible bridge—and I freaking love Kafka’s “The Penal Colony”
Thanks for this, I’m loving your exchange with Secret Squirrel, looking forward to more.
On Marx and belief, it seems that the aspiration of Marxism to be “scientific,” and thus to put fuzzy questions of belief aside, is both part of the appeal and part of the problem. I’m skeptical of the idea that Marxism succeeds in being completely scientific. If you claim to show the shape of history and the trajectory of human affairs, I think you’ve gone beyond the scope of what a scientific-materialist perspective can provide—it doesn’t really give you the resources to address those questions, and if you do nonetheless it’s because you’re drawing on something else.
The dialectical nature of the thinking is supposed to account for that, it seems, by synthesizing theory and practice. But again, does the tradition live up to its aims? I’m not so sure it does, which isn’t to say that there’s nothing there to learn from, because I think there is. Anyway, I share your skepticism and wish that leftists could hold the tradition of Marxist thought more lightly.