#post-left

I linked a few times last year to Michael Sugrue’s Great Books lectures from the 1990s, which have become a sensation on YouTube. Sugrue’s channel also now features lectures in the same series by the historian Darren Staloff. The most recent upload, above, is Staloff’s lecture on the “outlaw Marxist” and sociologist of intellectuals, Alvin Gouldner. 

Everyone with any interest at all in the recent debates about the “post-left” should listen to this lecture, which, despite being almost three decades old, speaks with appalling clarity to the present.

In Staloff’s summary, Gouldner turns the Marxist lens on the Marxists, accounting for the veiled interests of this ideology’s exponents. These exponents, despite their meretricious claim to represent the working class, tend to be educated professionals. 

After noting that class struggle usually takes place not between owners and workers but between declining and rising elites, Gouldner uncovers two apparent flaws in Marxism that, considered together, are not so much errors as productive historical misreadings that empower Marxism’s elite partisans.

First, Marxism lacks an account of non-ownership classes, that is, classes not defined by the holding of material wealth. This prevents them from grasping the intelligentsia (to include what in premodern contexts would be called the clerisy, the mandarinate, etc.) as an independent social class—a class that is perhaps, alongside the peasantry, the oldest class in human history. Second, Marxism’s conviction that the state serves the owning class rather than being an autonomous bloc with its own interests makes it unable to properly account for state power as in itself oppressive.

Combine these two Marxist errors, says Staloff glossing Gouldner, and it’s no wonder that actually-existing Marxism produced Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot—and, I might add, our incipient new regime (supported by most left-wing parties in the west and by the left-wing intelligentsia) of global corporatist managerialism. The political unconscious of Marxism, a further development of Plato’s Republic, is a totalitarian state overseeing a social stasis managed by intellectuals. And if Platonism itself emerged to challenge Athenian democracy, a polity in which intellectuals were not in charge, then Marxism arose to battle modern capitalism and democracy, systems that likewise empower non-clerics in state, economy, and civil society.

How might we apply these ideas to the present? For one thing, to be post-left is to be a member of the intelligentsia who rebels against its power, either because it has in some way abused us or because we are not members of this class by birth and so do not owe it our primary loyalty—or both, as in my case. None of this cogent analysis, unfortunately, can solve that problem whose contemporary names are Donald Trump and Peter Thiel: the problem that the intelligentsia’s elite rival today is a somewhat decadent and attenuated alliance between the old capitalism (both owners and workers, as in Trump’s vaunted base) and the rising tech barons, themselves a new clerisy with authority premised on a different form of knowledge from the old intelligentsia’s. 

How badly has the left-wing clerisy misused its power that some of us could look with even a modicum of sympathy at this rival elite and its troubled alliances? So badly that I think back with nostalgia on last summer’s advocacy for permanent lockdownism. Two weeks ago their bright idea was self-immolation, while this week they’re celebrating “withdrawals of gestational labour-power,” which I take to include not only abortion but infanticide. Again I ask you: what are we without tenure supposed to do? I could think of all sorts of ideal phenomena to which I would prefer the present post-left, but thisleft—a death cult at either end of life, from “queer” infanticide to “green” suicide, with an intellectual career of “misinformation” policing and God knows what biological mandates in between for anyone who manages to live and to think—is the actualalternative.

Before Staloff’s lecture, I knew Gouldner dimly as a name in the bibliography of my doctoral advisor’s book, which I’ve cited here before. She wrote an incipiently post-left sociological critique of the high modernists for professionalizing literature in the interests of the expert managerial class and thereby confiscating culture from its prior superintendent: the much (and on this account unfairly) maligned Victorian matriarch, domestic woman, the so-called angel in the house. I found and still find this overstated as an objection to the likes of Woolf and Joyce, as opposed, say, to Marx and Freud. (My own dissertation ended up being a riposte to my advisor’s thesis, not the customary extension. And people wonder why I don’t have a career in academia! Actually, no one wonders.) 

Art’s polysemy and irony make it available to multiple classes or none—even to the individual in existential confrontation with life below and above all social contexts. Matthew Arnold and Northrop Frye were right: true art, true culture, does away with classes. Art is what Marxism only pretends to be. 

The proof? Look no further than Plato’s Republic itself. Primordial manifesto of the totalitarian intelligentsia or prose-poem, closet drama, and novel of ideas meant as ironic therapy for this intelligentsia’s will-to-power? In other words, philosophy or poetry? The latter, the latter, the latter.

—Justin E. H. Smith, “Is Everything Political?”

While I’m sure a man as erudite and cosmopolitan as Smith understandably doesn’t want to mistaken for a sadly typical example of his American generation—and see my reflections on the Gen-X conservatism here—it’s probably time to drop the “I’m not a conservative” schtick and either make peace with what the left actually believes or make peace with what kind of conservative you actually are. First of all, “But I’m not…!” is a weak defense against an imputation; better to just own the name, wear it with pride. Second, while different thinkers have thought about it in different ways, and we can probably turn up this or that quote from Engels or somebody as a counterexample, still, overall, “[t]here is a stratum of the human that is deeper than politics” is inconsistent with the left’s fundamental commitments: that existence precedes essence, that history is the work of human hands, that what we erroneously call human nature alters in time through social conflict and contestation (this is the dialectic), that humanly-produced economic and social circumstances shape and delimit the human character (this is materialism). Whether you take this “deeper stratum” to be the nature we share with the animals or to be the eternal breath of God, you still think there’s something that social conflict and contestation can’t reach, that humanly-produced economic and social circumstances can’t alter, or that alter these circumstance from outside the human. And if you think art is more profound and moving insofar as it seeks and finds this limit to our conscious agency, rather than “laying bare the device” by which the merely social is naturalized or divinized as this supposed limit, then you are practically the definition of the aesthetic reactionary—probably worse than a fascist, who is at least properly political in his history-making jackboot swagger, as Adorno’s foremost American critical legatee claims:

What Paul DeMan clearly was, however, as the articles testify, can be seen to be a fairly unremarkable specimen of the then conventional high-modernist aesthete, and the apolitical aesthete at that. This is clearly a very different matter from Heidegger (although it seems unquestionable that the twin Heidegger and DeMan “scandals” have been carefully orchestrated to delegitimate Derridean deconstruction). Heidegger may have been “politically naiive,” as they like to say, but he was certainly political, and believed for a time that the Hitlerian seizure of power was a genuine national revolution that would result in a moral and social reconstruction of the nation. As rector of Freiburg University, and in the best reactionary and McCarthyite spirit, he worked at purging the place of its doubtful elements (although one should remember that genuinely radical or leftist “elements” were very scarce in the German university system of the 1920s, compared to the Hollywood of the 1940s or the Federal Republic of the 1970s). His ultimate disappointment with Hitler was shared by a number of people on the revolutionary (anticapitalist) left within National Socialism, who failed for some time to understand Hitler’s pragmatic position as a moderate or centrist or his crucial relationship to big business. I know I will be misunderstood if I add that I have some sneaking admiration for Heidegger’s attempt at political commitment, and find the attempt itself morally and aesthetically preferable to apolitical liberalism (provided its ideals remain unrealized).

—Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(1991)