We will ask: how does this framework help us understand the contemporary ruling class? How does Poulantzas help to explain why the working class remains politically fragmented. If you have read The People Are Not One you will remember that we incorporate many of Poulantzas’s insights into class theory. Poulantzas offers some very important frameworks for us to think about how to organize for socialism and build working class power in today’s time.

I invite you to join me in studying this text. We will offer lectures, presentations, discussion and commentary. I am pleased to co-lead this group with my colleague Mathilde Chevalier.

You can join this group by becoming a subscriber to this Substack after which you will immediately gain access to the book in PDF and the RSVP link to the Zoom meetings. If you cannot afford to do that please DM me and I will grant you access to the meetings for free. This applies to students and anyone experiencing financial hardship. You are warmly invited to participate without paying—no explanation is necessary.

Because the group will generally meet every other Wednesday, we will read and discuss longer sections of the book for each session.

Schedule

• Wednesday, September 9, 7:00–9:00 p.m. Chapters 1 and 2, through page 93

• Wednesday, September 16, 7:00–9:00 p.m. Chapter 3 and Section II, through page 180

• Wednesday, October 7, 7:00–9:00 p.m. Section III, pages 181–245

• Wednesday, October 21, 7:00–9:00 p.m. Sections IV and V and concluding discussion

RSVP link to Zoom below + the PDF of the book:

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For those outside of academia, the Jason Arday tragedy only reinforces the parochial, petty and frivolous state of the institution. While it seems likely that Jason Arday was indeed guilty of plagiarizing the literature review portion of his dissertation and potentially falsifying research studies, the media ran with these accusations and expanded them into an all-out assault on his entire career, portraying him as completely fraudulent, full stop. The UK media is a vicious beast, and many of its practices are taken out of the old yellow journalism playbook, with inflammatory headlines driven by exaggeration and hype. Jason Arday became a scapegoat for a broken and radically unequal academic system, pure and simple. That Arday is a black man made this process all the easier to parade him about as the embodiment of a deep crisis facing the university, he was a scapegoat for a set of contradictions that far exceed him.

The man responsible for initiating this campaign of smears against Arday that led him to commit suicide is named Nathan Cofnas, an academic who refers to himself on X as a ‘philosopher of biology.’ He harbors extreme racialist views. He believes that black people are inferior to whites based on IQ. In recent interviews, Cofnas admitted that he was motivated to be a ‘whistleblower’ over Arday’s plagiarism because he was resentful over not receiving a prestigious job at Cambridge. Cofnas’s ideology must be situated in the wider orbit of today’s far right. This means that the Arday case was not only pumped organically by the UK media, it was in fact a coordinated campaign financed by the Peter Thiel network.

Recently, I offered my thoughts on the Arday case in this stream, and to prepare for it I watched a few of Cofnas’s interviews before the Arday case, such as this one with Dave Greene. In watching and reading Cofnas I was drawn to his debate with the Nietzschean Internet personality Bronze Age Pervert (BAP). Both Cofnas and BAP have a very distinct Nietzschean idea of race. To grasp Nietzsche’s view on race, we need to start with his critique of slave morality, which is, as I have argued here, based on the idea that modern life suppresses a natural spiritual hierarchy of rank. There is a political task in this critique but only some of Nietzsche’s readers will have the courage to bring it about, and what is needed is a revolution in rank and distinction so that superior types, and superior here is understood through physiological disposition, are placed at the top. This new ranking order is to be ushered in by a small group of individuals who force it upon an amorphous majority.

Cofnas is a Nietzschean insofar as his view of race and society supports Nietzsche’s obsession with physiology and rank order. In §287 of The Will to Power Nietzsche writes, “My philosophy is directed toward rank order: not toward an individualistic morality.” In Daybreak §119, Nietzsche argues that our judgments are “images and fantasies” arising from physiological processes unknown to us. From a Nietzschean perspective, the problem with Arday’s lies and distortions is not that they are particularly surprising, or that they are to be understood as malicious. For Cofnas, Arday is an inferior individual inserted into a system that has lost what Nietzsche refers to as the ‘pathos of distance.’ In the ninth chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche argues that every higher elevation of human culture is the direct work of an aristocratic society that believes in the “pathos of distance.” The pathos of distance refers to the idea that any great civilization accords to a proper division between higher and lower types and the implication is that to restore this distance an aristocratic rebellion is needed.

In one interview Cofnas says that ‘after the revolution’ he might become appointed Chair of Race and Eugenics Science at Harvard University. It may seem odd that a conservative thinker would invoke revolution as a term, but this is what makes Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism so distinct. It sets its sights on bringing a new physiological rank that has been denied by the decadent social order. For Cofnas, Arday is seen as a racial inferior but he is also a class subaltern as well – that is what makes the Nietzschean view of race so singular and insidious. The very idea of racial difference is de-linked from pure racial in-group / out-group divisions; it is transversally applied to plebeians and weaker types across races and therefore it can be assigned to any weak type in any community or group. This is both a liberal and fascist outlook given that it can appeal to a market competitive context as much as it can apply to a more militant call for overthrowing the liberal order and replacing it with a more directly hierarchical social order. Its guiding vision is that a society that has lost touch with the necessity to enforce the pathos of distance will inevitably place the weaker types on top and this stokes a resentment that must be addressed politically.

What Nietzsche gives to his followers who are willing to revolt against the decadent social order is a militant ethics that is, as far as the right reads him, “something worse than fascism.” This is a phrase used by Bronze Age Pervert, the Internet personality also known as Costin Alamariu, a Yale Ph.D. who wrote a dissertation that eventually turned into a book published in 2023 called Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy. His core argument is bound up with the pathos of distance in that he argues both philosophy and tyranny emerge from a historical and anthropological crisis of the breakdown of aristocratic political orders. But what exactly is ‘worse’ than fascism for BAP’s politics is found in the way that Nietzsche permits a total indifference to human suffering for those willing to eliminate and purge the deformed, even within their own given race. If this strikes you as a perverse reading of Nietzsche, I encourage you to read about how Nietzsche has been read by fascist philosophers. I will not invoke the passages where Nietzsche endorses elimination of the weak and the inferior; much blood has been spilt on these troubling passages and however you read Nietzsche, you cannot ignore them.

Nietzsche has a reactionary politics that tends towards two options: the first is a militant, genocidal ethics that would be eliminationist; the other is more Bonapartist and conciliatory to the liberal order. This latter position is a conservative position that can come to accept liberal society on condition that it is not run by the weaker types, in my book this is how I interpret Nietzsche’s politics during his middle period after Human, All Too Human. The reactionary elements of Nietzsche are too often disavowed by his leftist readers, but they cannot be ignored.

My main point here is that Nietzscheanism does not offer a straightforward racism based on nationalist identification or in-group identity appeals of racial superiority. It is a more perverse, quasi-cosmopolitan elitism that sets its sights on a neo-aristocratic revolution of the higher types. But the so-called higher types often fall into a cold resentment when they attempt to be revolutionaries, and they get mired in fights such as the spat currently going on between Cofnas and BAP now. BAP thinks that Cofnas is too procedural, too academic, too nerdy, not enough Dionysian to lead the revolution.

Was the Arday Case a Nietzschean Murder?

Given the cold indifference that the neo-Nietzschean right has displayed towards Arday’s suicide and given the fact that it was a coordinated project, would it be fair to call this a Nietzschean murder? Importantly, this would not be the first time that a Nietzschean murder has taken place. As I reveal in my book, the famous 1926 criminal case of Leopold and Loeb testifies to a more general Nietzschean radicalism that compelled two wealthy students at the University of Chicago named Leopold and Loeb to murder a fourteen-year-old boy. Like the Arday case, this event received major press attention and came to be known as the “crime of the century.” The Nietzschean motivation for the crime is found in the fact that the two men committed the murder, in part, to prove that they possessed a higher intelligence.

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The case was defended by the famous trial lawyer Clarence Darrow, who had argued cases before the Supreme Court and was among the most prominent trial lawyers in America at the time. Darrow had Leopold and Loeb plead guilty and curiously used the boys’ Nietzschean commitments as points for sympathy before the judge. To make his case Darrow argued that the two men had read Nietzsche at too young an age:

“At seventeen, at sixteen, at eighteen, while healthy boys were playing baseball or working on the farm, or doing odd jobs, Babe was reading Nietzsche, a boy who never should have seen it, at that early age.”

Over the course of several hours, Darrow pleaded with the court that Nietzsche held a contemptuous and scornful attitude toward many of the values that young people were taught to regard as important in life. Nietzsche’s philosophy, he argued, constituted “a fixing of new values which are not the values by which any normal child has ever yet been reared. Nietzsche’s attitude is but a philosophical dream, containing more or less truth, that was not meant by anyone to be applied to life.” Darrow argued that the boys adopted a Nietzschean view that “the morality of the master class is irritating to the taste of the present day because of its fundamental principle that a man has obligation only to his equals; that he may act to all of lower rank and to all that are foreign, as he pleases.” This aristocratic conception of rank encouraged Leopold and Loeb, as well as Cofnas, to imagine themselves as belonging to a “rare superior order of beings”; that they were, in effect, “aristocratic,” and that lower types simply do not matter.

Why the ‘Prestige Take Down’ Method So Often Backfires

There is something in the Arday tragedy that points to a much wider symptom of modern academia, a very nauseating symptom of the decline of the relevance of the university. This is the rise of what I will call the ‘prestige take down’ method. This is a method of polemic where the scholarly debate exceeds the bounds of basic critique and moves to the level of legitimacy; i.e., the debate is no longer a debate in any true sense; it has become a question of core competency of the other scholar. The objective of this tactic is to eliminate the opponent, to go full scorched earth, to reveal to the world that the other scholar is not deserving of anything. I have seen this tactic repeatedly emerge both inside and outside the university. In concentrating resentments and frustrations into highly personalized attacks over procedural and scholastic matters instead of substantive intellectual debate, scholarly debate functions as a reflection of the market logic that academics are subordinated to, a zero-sum game logic. In fact, I regretfully allowed it to take place on my platform Emancipations. And without getting into the details of this pathetic occasion, suffice it to say that the method backfired completely. The scholar that attempted to go full scorched earth on the other scholar was treated to a backlash from both the public and the scholarly community that they may not be able to recover from.

The rise of the research university in the postwar period created a different academic culture to the post-2008 austerity driven system we face today. It is perhaps ironic now, but one of Nietzsche’s contributions to this academic culture was found in the way that he gave intellectuals like Foucault the freedom to flee from the realm of scholarly pettiness and textual scholasticism. Nietzsche’s style of the aphorism, a light, almost poetic meditation of philosophical argumentation, was treated as a liberatory method for the scholar, one that exceeded the dryness of the text. And this is why Foucault argued that the only way to do justice to Nietzsche is to deform him, to creatively reinterpret him. In today’s environment, we have less of Foucault versus Chomsky and more of petty rivalries over scholastic prestige that have very little public relevance. The university is decadent, which means that it is both highly brittle and impervious to change all the same.

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Socialist politics are growing in the United States, and intense intellectual debates are going on around them. Those debates happen mainly in the Internet. Brecha talked with Daniel Tutt, philosopher, public intellectual and host of the Emancipations Podcast, about the situation of the American Left, its risks and its possibilities.

This is a very strange moment for the world. And it’s a moment in which American domestic politics is very important for everyone in the world. So, I wanted to start by asking a very simple question that is, how does it look from the inside?

Well, in the first Trump presidency we thought that the ambitious plan by Steve Bannon to destroy the American bureaucracy, to basically fulfill the long-standing aims of far-right think tanks to obliterate the remnants of the welfare state might happen. But the first Trump presidency came and went without that type of intervention. The second Trump presidency, led by Elon Musk initially, with the DOGE reforms, has brought this nightmare to our doorstep. Musk has been responsible for eliminating hundreds of thousands of government employees. I live in Washington DC, and surprisingly there was very little palpable response. In fact, it was a very muted response. I understand this paradox through the Freudian notion of latency period. So, in Freud, you have the idea that a traumatic event is not registered on the body until a period of latency. I think what we have now is a latency period of shock. The effect that this has had on the organized left has been somewhat mixed. On the one hand, we see the rise of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York. We see the expansion of the Democratic Socialists of America. They now number 120.000 members, which is somewhat of an accomplishment. If you compare organized socialism in America to India or to Latin America, you would, of course, laugh at those numbers because they are quite low. I’m not suggesting that we are seeing the unraveling of the liberal consensus, but I am suggesting that the liberal civil society institutions (nonprofits and NGOs), largely organized around the Democratic Party, are extremely brittle at this moment. They are ideologically illegitimate. Their popularity is surprisingly low, despite the fact that Trump, too, is extremely unpopular, and his popularity has plummeted further with the Iran war. In contrast, democratic socialism seems to be having a resurgence of popularity. Although, we’ve seen these movements before, these oscillations of popularity. And one of the biggest problems that we have here is that the DSA, the largest socialist movement in the United States, at the end of the day, organizationally and legally, is only a non-profit organization. It’s not a party. So, therefore, it does not have any true force to determine the situation. And, in fact, it’s in a clientele relationship with the bourgeois liberal party. This is a worry because socialism has basically become indistinguishable from the liberal progressivism of the educated professional class. This is a major problem. In order to have a renaissance in socialism, the workers would have to find something compelling in socialism. We’re not seeing that happen. We are still seeing the deterioration of organized labor. Only 11% of all workers in America are unionized. So, the condition of the working class in the United States tends to be apolitical and quite pacified politically. Now, what’s very interesting is that the hegemony of liberal ideology, what people call as a pejorative “woke ideology”, has also experienced some crisis of legitimacy unto itself. And this is born from the fact that Trump took a very strong move to systematically remove, at every institution, both private sector and public sector, diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. I think what the Democrats and the liberals have to decide in the wake of these destructive moves is whether all of that program was itself embedded with liberal reactionary content. I’m not sure that they will have the honesty to do this. This introduces a real stumbling block for socialism, which is precisely how do we reform the ideology of the professionals away from their competitive individual liberalism, their atomized elite liberalism, which is very overdetermined by the imperatives of the elite university.

It’s a very complex situation. Because on the one hand, you’re telling me that the socialist left is subordinated to the Democratic Party. And at the same time, Trumpism made the move to try represent some kind of working class element. But at the same time, you can see that there’s at least a rhetorically very intense conflict between the left and liberals.

Well, if we analyze it at the level of a discourse analysis, the Mamdani campaign stands out as exceptional. What’s most exceptional about it, at the level of discourse, is the fact that he was able to run on an unabashed socialistic platform. I’m not talking about policies that are socialistic. Let’s say, in substance, they’re indistinguishable from general progressive liberal ideas. Things like daycare, access to healthcare, affordability issues, rent control, etc. Nothing too ambitious. But he proposed all of that, not in line with liberalism, but in line with socialism. And that signifier is very useful, I think, to recognize that the working class, at least across New York, was prepared to follow him in this regard. That’s a very promising sign. But the urban-rural divide may very well prevent this expansion of socialism into rural regions. The socialists don’t have the institutional power to experiment beyond urban and coastal cities. What they need is to garner more power inside of the Democratic Party apparatus to push them left. That is, after all, the strategy of the Democratic Socialists of America, to ‘realign’ the strategy of the Democratic Party to the left flank, away from this kind of third-way centrism that we saw with Obama and Biden. The third-way centrists seem to wait in the wings patiently, waiting for the failure of the left, to use the left as a scapegoat when things go wrong. So the left is popular right now, but their popularity is constrained by their allies. Today we are seeing emerge a new Popular Front kind of strategy that doesn’t see itself as a popular front, in which the socialists get the raw end of the deal, because they lack both the resources as well as the institutions to hold elected officials accountable. Meanwhile the condition of the everyday worker is exhausted and beleaguered and hungry for some type of change to the status quo. So at the level of elections, socialists do very, very well. Once they are in power, it becomes a different story.

Where do all these socialists come from? Some time ago, I mean, there was Bernie Sanders, there was the anti-war movement, there was Occupy. But there seems to have been a qualitative change in the amount of, people talking about socialism and intellectuals who are talking openly in ways that actually sound very radical.

I think two things have happened. One, the extra-parliamentary militant radical left experienced its peak expression with the George Floyd uprising, which occurred right concurrent to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. It was the largest uprising of the black working class that we’ve seen in decades. It was a very energetic and hopeful moment of an unbridled, uncontrolled rebellion across many cities, which had the flavor of something organic and which expressed a repressed rage at the condition of the black worker. The liberal institutions over the course of the last five to six years have been able to radically recuperate this energy into corporate slogans, DEI, professionalization, and so on. And this has basically raised the question as to whether protest is fated to a kind of controlled opposition and tragic deadlock. Many militants that led the Floyd uprising themselves were very critical of Bernie Sanders when he ran in 2015-2016. But their perspective and their strategy seems to have faced a wall with the rise of Biden, the pandemic, and then of Trump part two, in the sense that there’s a feeling, as Deleuze talks about of the control societies, of a kind of envelopment. An envelopment which has crippled rebellion, crippled protest. Of course, we saw this with Gaza as well. And all of this, of course, happened under the watch of the Biden administration. But the liberals’ repression of protests over Gaza cost them the election. There’s a major scandal here, which is that the Democratic Party had a report, an autopsy on Kamala Harris’ run against Trump, which they have refused to share publicly, precisely because it reveals that they lost the election most likely due to Gaza. This means the American working class, broadly speaking, was enraged to such an extent that they abstained from voting for Harris. So we’re facing this horizon of the end of the efficacy of protest and combined with that we have a psycho-affective condition born from poly-crisis, from the war in Iran to the fact that social life has never recovered from the pandemic and the general trauma that it has introduced to everyday social life. All of this has lead to a situation where the Democratic Party is, I think, permitting socialism to function as a palliative over this social-wide depression. And it may be that socialists will function as a repetition of Obama, who himself was an affective political figure whose mantras of hope and change functioned as an appeal to the self-confidence of the citizen. And now I fear that socialism will be used disingenuously by the liberal elites to function as a kind of self-help palliative for youth who themselves have no material bargaining power. This is a real worry as I see it.

I wanted to ask you about the role of the Internet and streaming in all this. Because the birth of a new type of intellectual seems to be happening. There’s yourself, there’s Varn. There are other figures: Hasan Piker, Joshua Citarella. Very different, but they all call themselves some kind of a socialist, with respectable platforms. What’s that phenomenon?

Well, first and foremost, I think that much of the playing field of the Internet is manipulated by external agencies to some extent. Hasan Piker is constantly prodded and harassed by both wings of the establishment. So it’s very difficult to discern organic engagement to some extent. The Internet now has this element, after Elon Musk took over X, of a secret algorithmic mechanism which boosts some content over others. Speaking for myself, I have refused any advertisement, I only do purely organic engagement under the principle that I don’t want to be managed by those interests. So there’s that darker side to the Internet. Additionally, the actions of DOGE witnessed the removal of 100s of thousands American bureaucrats and the attempted liquidation of the critical humanities. For example, the New School in New York has stopped accepting PhD candidates. They’ve had to fire many staff. Multiple PhD programs in the critical humanities have ceased accepting new students. Even the University of Chicago is affected by this despite their endowments. And all of this converges with the sense that social mobility for the working class seems to have reached a place of stagnation. In this context, YouTube and streaming becomes a replacement for that kind of education. At best, that education may be able to talk about ideas without the same constraints, without the same taboos of the university. Much of this space of podcasting and streaming is providing entertainment, but not all of it. Some of it has a substantive educational pedagogy in which the streamer functions as a parasocial educator to their followers. And I take this to be quite positive. Perhaps something powerful at the level of thought and theory in fact can be derived by the interaction of thinkers and their audiences within this space. In other words, this space gives us something more dynamic than the university gave us to think about left-wing politics. Not to mention the fact that even before the decompartmentalization and defunding of the humanities, the university was facing its own liberal forms of irrationalism. And that can be avoided in the streaming space, but the onus is on the streaming space thought leaders to bring rigor. They have to impose that rigor on themselves. That doesn’t always happen, although that’s the ideal. I would want to envision the para-academic streaming community as the site for something that could be scaled once we have a growth of socialist institutions and resources.

Just now you talked about liberal irrationalism and before you had talked about woke and its crisis. There seems to be like a road back from post-Marxism back to plain Marxism. How changed does Marxism come back from that detour?

We could say that the class clientele basis of post-Marxism was a rising petty bourgeoisie at a moment in time in which the capitalist welfare state afforded certain provisions of leisure. This led to a practice of liberation based on a social surplus that had enlarged the potential for consumption and the proposals of social liberation tended to follow from this. The downside to this petty bourgeois form of liberation, though, was that it tended to formulate an alterity of its own conception of otherness to a working class other, which it projected as authoritarian. This led to a constrained and repressed leftism which saw the working class as somehow terminally reactionary. Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality and much of the proposals of Deleuze and Guattari fit into this model in terms of their understanding of fascism and micro-fascism. It led to a very foolish exclusion of the working class which was based on the view that structurally the class no longer functions as the revolutionary agent anymore and now they have become part of the problem. This led post-Marxism down the road to becoming an elitist Marxism that was often unacknowledged as an elitism by its main thinkers. I think that all of this praxis was forced to change as a result of the post-2008 political economic arrangement which brought intensifying austerity. We are now revisiting the centrality of the working class and a lot of these old post-Marxist proposals do not have any popular resonance anymore largely because they emerged at a time when the middle class was ascendant. What we’re missing is a proper and thorough theorization that would be capable of developing a proper balance sheet that would in fact absorb what was best about post-modern, post-structuralist leftism and post-Marxist leftism. I’ve tried to do this in my work. I think one of the things that it necessitates is that we be more humble about some of the insights that post-Marxists did in fact operate from. But instead of a critical reflection today we see some strange tendencies on the left that say we must reject all of post-Marxism and replace it with neo-Stalinism. This becomes a kind of a mirror to the populist right. At the same time, we see people talk about the post-woke horizon and somehow people assume that the second Trump presidency has killed this kind of excessive woke liberal ideology. I take a slightly different approach. I think it’s more likely the case that we will see a kind of resurgence of the woke tendencies once the liberal party becomes re-established. And some of this has to be sensitively understood through a prism of dignity in the sense that, say, with the trans community, when Trump is in power their social visibility is so severely ransacked and diminished that they are forced into a popular front with the liberal party in order to have minimal social visibility. So I think it is necessary to forge a bond where we critically analyze this immediate popular front reliance and construct socialist institutions which would be able to support those demands in ways that would be better than the liberals. I do not want to see the return of traditional socialism or orthodox Marxism as making a kind of alliance with the right wing and say we don’t care about the social visibility of minorities and trans people, when of course we do. So again, a civil society strategy must be prioritized in order for the resurgence of socialism to offer an alternative to the bad centrist paternalism that only recuperates truly leftist demands. The task ahead will require developing resources and institution building for the socialist left.

How would that look like or how is that looking like? Do you know interesting experiments?

It has to latch on to mutual aid networks as well as networks that are connected to objectives of socialist party-building. We have to construct civil society organizations that mix professionals with workers in a very intentional way, to obliterate the representational game of liberalism which is based on a different logic than ours. I think that for a long time post-structuralism had the tendency to lead the left into a rejection of representational politics completely. What I think we need to do is actually reintroduce some minimal commitment to it but with a firmer repertoire of principles. I think that there’s a number of organizations that are trying to begin to do this. The general principle I would insert here is that we must construct a party, knowing full well that there are legal barriers to the construction of a third party in the US. But what I would want to envision is something closer to what Gramsci was trying to do in his early period, namely to construct institutions in which the working class can begin to know its condition and begin to actually contemplate its relationship to the political economy. At the same time, when the Democrats are in power at a national level which may happen sooner than we think, all of these local experiments in socialist mayors from New York to Colorado very well could come to a halting end if they decide it’s not in their interests. So we have to keep this realpolitik and Machiavellian dimension in mind. I hate to think this way but if we don’t then you just get eaten alive. This is bourgeois politics, after all.

I’m offering a seminar with The New Centre on The Later Lukács on Social Ontology, Irrationalism & Marxist Reason. It starts on October 2^nd and will meet for four sessions throughout October. Here are a selection of lectures and essays I've written on Lukács to help orient you to his thought and to explain why I believe it remains indispensable for understanding the present.

If you are new to the work of Georg Lukács, or if you’ve primarily encountered his work through his masterpiece History and Class Consciousness, I am offering a seminar on his more neglected bodies of work. Over the course of four sessions we will examine The Destruction of Reason, The Ontology of Social Being, his reflections on socialist strategy for a post-Leninist world, labor, ethics, and the critique of irrationalism.

Where to get started on Lukács:

First, in this discussion with Chris Satoor for the Young Idealist, I spoke about Lukács’ life and ideas, including a biographical portrait. If you have not yet read Lukács’s second great masterpiece The Destruction of Reason, a good place to start would be to ready my long review essay with Cosmonaut on why Lukács’ critique of irrationalism remains indispensable for Marxist practice today. And then read my interview with John Bellamy Foster, editor of the Monthly Review on how the critique of irrationalism remains important for Marxist and socialist practice in today’s time. This interview is published with Historical Materialism where I am serving as the co-editor of a new series on The Destruction of Reason which will include essays by Daniel Lopez, Ishay Landa, Tijana Okić, Carl Sachs, Mariana Teixeira as well as never before translated material by Henri Lefebvre on Lukács.

As part of this issue, Matthew Sharpe and I have written a long essay that situates the origin of The Destruction of Reason in Lukács’s thought and we have written a critical response to the 2022 Introduction to the book by Enzo Traverso. This special issue with the HM journal is slated be out later this year and has been in the works for the last four years since I organized the symposium Philosophy and the Rise of Fascism with Deakin University and Verso Books.

Last summer, I offered a keynote for the School of Materialist Research on Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness that reflects on the strengths and shortcomings in this work and how its insights can still guide socialist practice today. Many of these themes also inform my popular book, How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche, which develops a Lukácsian critique of Nietzsche’s place in contemporary left thought. I have also spoken to Michael Thompson about his extensive work on the later Lukács and critical social ontology. Finally, this video essay on some of the main ideas in Lukács’s critique of neo-Kantian thought and the concept of irrationalism and reason should help you get better acquainted with the work of the later Lukács.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

For decades, the later work of Georg Lukács was largely neglected by academic philosophers. The 2021 republication of The Destruction of Reason, together with a renewed interest in Hegelian Marxism, has made it increasingly clear that this period of Lukács’s thought deserves renewed attention as one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious efforts to construct a systematic Marxist philosophical project.

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In this Seminar, we will read major selections from Lukács’s later writings alongside works by his most significant interpreters. Our focus will be on his theory of the ontology of social being and his critique of irrationalism, examining them as attempts to break decisively with the lingering influence of neo-Kantian conceptions of reason in both philosophy and politics. Our aim is to clarify the distinct character of Marxist reason in contrast to neo-Kantian thought, while also revisiting the central debates introduced in History and Class Consciousness concerning alienation, reification and class consciousness. Far from disappearing in his later writings, these themes remain enduring concerns for Lukács, who develops a systematic Hegelian-Marxist framework intended to confront and overcome them.

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The Seminar aims at a deeper understanding of Lukács’s later philosophy and its significance for contemporary socialist practice, connecting it to neo-rationalism, speculative realism and current debates on humanism and transhumanism.

SESSION 1 — THE NEO-KANTIAN HOLE: TOTALITY AND HISTORY: In our first session, we will define Neo-Kantianism as a philosophical and political tendency that has remained pregnant in socialist and Marxist thought, and which brings up problems of immediacy, unknowability, and agnosticism. We will then assess Lukás’s own solution to this problem as well as the critics of Lukács that argue, despite his intentions, his work does not overcome neo-Kantianism, especially in History and Class Consciousness.

SESSION 2 — IRRATIONALISM AND MARXIST REASON: In our second session, we will turn to an analysis of irrationalism in Lukács’ work Destruction of Reason and pinpoint its other, namely a distinct type of reason that Lukács identifies in the wake of Hegel, a reason that is capable of relating to the social totality that overcomes the bourgeois cult of immediacy. We will build off the work of Tom Rockmore and Istvan Meszaros who argue Lukács’ theory of irrationalism is a philosophically rigorous theory based on his wider critique of the residues of neo-Kantianism. We will analyze what a distinct form of Marxist reason might look like and why it offers up a theory of knowledge and practice that requires the development of a far more robust system of practical reason, ontology and ethics.

SESSION 3 — WHY SOCIAL ONTOLOGY? SOCIAL CLASS AND ETHICS: In our third session, we will turn to a study of Lukács’s later turn to social ontology by asking what the aim of this project is all about. Building off the work of Michael Thompson and Meszaros, we will examine the ethical underpinnings involved in Lukács’s ontology and the ways that ontology might change Marxist practice.

SESSION 4 — THE ROLE OF LABOR AND TELEOLOGY: TOWARDS A RENEWED HUMANISM: In our final session, we will examine the third volume of Lukács’s social ontology and its unique focus on labor We will examine how “teleological positing” is developed out of Lukács’s study The Young Hegel and we will examine Lukács’s ontology in relation to Heidegger and phenomenology. Is Lukács proposing a renewal of Marxist humanism?

INSTRUCTOR BIO: Daniel Tutt, Ph.D., is a philosopher and critical theorist whose work focuses on capitalism, class struggle, and the Marxist tradition. He is the author of several books, including How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family. His writing has been featured in Jacobin, Current Affairs, Philosophy Now and Aeon Magazine and he lectures in philosophy at George Washington University, Marymount University, the District of Columbia Jail and the School of Materialist Research. Tutt is the host of the Emancipations podcast and study group collective, and he has degrees in philosophy from American University and the European Graduate School where he completed his Ph.D. with the French philosopher Alain Badiou.

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In this podcast—shared above in audio format and below in video—I am joined by one of Jameson’s former students, Robert T. Tally. Robert and I explore the main ideas and major works of Jameson and we define his main concepts, from cognitive mapping, postmodernism to the poetics of social forms.

Robert T. Tally Jr. is a professor of English at Texas State University. His research and teaching focuses on the relations among space, narrative, and representation, particularly in U.S. and comparative literature. Order his new book The Future of Totality: Fredric Jameson and the Prospects of Critical Theory.

It is hard to believe that it has already been two years since Fredric Jameson passed away. I marked the occasion by hosting a study group on his masterpiece The Political Unconscious, a text which I want to talk about and which I think stands as Jameson’s most important intervention. I never met Jameson in-person and I never got the chance to take a seminar with him, although in the last months of his life I had introduced him via email correspondence to the work of the French Marxist Michel Clouscard and the Clouscard circle in France had mailed Jameson a package of his main works. Just a few months after we sent him Clouscard’s work, to which Jameson responded with great interest and curiosity, I learned that Jameson had passed away.

It should never be minimized that Jameson rose to prominence during a time of profound political and cultural transformation and that his rise in the academy was shaped by the anti-communism of the Cold War. To work openly as a Marxist within the academy during this time meant accepting professional isolation and this led the vast majority of left academics to conform to the fads of an increasingly liberalized Marxism. Jameson was, at least judged by his practical commitments, a New Left Marxist. He was not bound to any communist party, he was largely critical of the Soviet Union, and he practiced a striking ecumenical method in his work, defined by a tendency to incorporate and subsume discourses that seem to have no reason to come into harmony or synthesis with Marxist methods.

In this piece, I want to argue that it would be a vulgar deduction to say that due to his New Left practice Jameson’s Marxist commitments were liberal or merely academic. I will argue here that once we follow the role that Jameson carved out for Marxism in the wider critical humanities—a field of study that he most definitely defined and dignified with a total rigor and Marxist commitment—we will see that his project rightly deserves the attention of Marxists, especially the admiration of those Marxists (I include myself here) who find academic Marxism to at best serve as a sanitizing version of Marxism, or at worst as an irrationalist obfuscation of Marxism.

After all, we should note that Jameson’s Marxism was serious enough to cause the science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick to report him to the FBI. Dick’s paranoia was driven by his fear that communist critics and writers like Jameson would come to dominate all opinion about science fiction, which is actually quite hilarious in retrospect because it can be analyzed along a Jamesonian line as a breakdown in what he coined as ‘cognitive mapping.’ Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping refers to the way that capitalist society has fragmented and parcelized to such an extent that the Lukácsian aim of literature and aesthetics as an attempt to grasp the totality has become increasingly impossible. Jameson’s theory of cognitive mapping thus serves, as many of his concepts do, a double function: it initially describes the limits of literature and art to capture relations of the totality, but its a concept that stretches beyond textual or merely academic concerns. The decline in cognitive mapping helps us understand why conspiracy theories have become so common in late capitalism. The proliferation of conspiracy thought is a compensatory phenomenon, a reaction to the decline in the capacity for people to know the social totality in which they live. But isn’t this something like a paradox given that globalization would seem to produce a highly interconnected social order in which multinational corporations, in eroding nation-state sovereignties and opening and unifying markets, might make the world more homogenous?

Roberto Calasso, in his exquisite work The Unnameable Present, gets at the problem of cognitive mapping in a long meditation on tourism and travel in the present. He offers a particularly useful formulation to describe the unnameable present, namely that ‘society’ has become what god is to his worshippers.1 Calasso’s unnamable present is closely related to the decline in cognitive mapping in that he argues more and more our experiences are registered as completely outside of our cognition; no longer do our experiences of the world occur inside via consciousness, a process which is discrete and continuous. He locates this in a shift towards globalization in ways similar to Jameson’s theory of cognitive mapping, and he argues that in the 20^th century, social control was about control over the past and the future whereas now, in the 21^st century, control is over the present. Calasso sees the process of social control as centered on the manipulation of data wherein the state is no longer the sole force intervening to manage social control. We no longer experience events as discrete instances in which we can locate causality. A proper Jamesonian response to the unnameable present and the problem of cognitive mapping would be to historicize its emergence in our culture, to trace the contradictory relation between the forces and relations of production that brought this intense fragmentation about. The Political Unconscious (1981) offers a means to get at this.

The Ecumenical Marxist and the Method of Fredric Jameson

I first encountered Jameson through The Political Unconscious. I found it one summer afternoon after working landscaping. About twenty pages into the book I began to realize that the sheer density of Jameson’s references were beyond what I had the capacity to fully appreciate at the time. So I began to draw up a bibliography of what it would take to be on level (equality is here too relative) with this monumental text. At that time I was only about 20 years old so there was no way I could have gained a grasp on the main contours and points of primary influence. We can identify what one needs in order to have a reading relationship with Jameson’s masterwork that is close to equal to the ambition of the author (and this list may indeed, arguably, have additional lineages of thought I have not included): Lukács’s theories of realism in literature, his reading of Hegel and Marx and most especially his concept of reification from History and Class Consciousness; Althusser’s critique of historicism and historical causality from For Marx and Reading Capital; the structuralist and the post-structuralist Nietzschean turn in French thought, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and Saussure’s concept of structural linguistics; a solid grasp on Lacanian psychoanalysis; Sartre’s Marxist turn in The Critique of Dialectical Reason; Northrop Frye’s theory of literary genres; Ernst Bloch’s conception of utopia and theory of ideology and the main currents in twentieth century Marxism more generally.

If you thought this was it, of course you would be wrong given that the book is about how to understand the hermeneutics of literature. As such, in order to fully grasp The Political Unconscious you should also be familiar with the main literary canon of European realism: Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Scott and modernist authors from Proust to Joyce, most especially Conrad and Gissing. These are the prerequisites that I did not have when I first encountered the book some 20 years ago. Reading the book last year and offering a series of lectures and guided discussion on it was deeply rewarding precisely because I had finally reached a place where I had worked though the prerequisites. I finally read Jameson on what felt like a level playing field.

At the outset of this essay, I made the argument that Jameson’s Marxism is singular and distinct and we get an indication of this in the first few pages of the Preface to the book where he states that Marxist methods are the “untranscendable horizon” that “subsumes such apparently antagonistic or incommensurable critical operations, assigning them an undoubted sectoral validity within itself, and thus at once canceling and preserving them.”2 Here we find the heart of the ecumenical method, one that is open to seemingly antagonistic forms of social critique whereby Marxism is that system that leads the way by consuming and processing (canceling and preserving) all rivals. This approach resembles the commitment to the Marxist method that Jameson no doubt learned from his first real master Jean-Paul Sartre who argued that Marxism remains the unsurpassable system of thought that cannot be transcended. At a time when most Anglo-American academics were more seduced by Foucault’s suggestion that Marxism is like a fish out of water when it leaves the 19th century.

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A Solution to the Problem of Mechanistic & Individualist Historical Causality

The sheer density and novelty of The Political Unconscious means that it can be picked apart in numerous ways, from the original reading of Conrad as a pivotal figure of modernism who allows Jameson to develop a series of interesting concepts to describe how Conrad depicts a society increasingly overwrought by imperialism and how this affects the capacity for the author to describe or give meaning to the total situation of an imperialist world system. Or one could focus on Jameson’s reading of realism and the end of realism.

If I were to hit on Jameson core problem in The Political Unconscious I would characterize it like this: late capitalism has reified realism and thereby caused romance as a genre to once again come to the fore because narrative is now heterogeneous: freedom is untethered from the reality principle, the reality principle is now oppressive, realistic representation is in a ‘hostage situation.’ The whole of the social cannot be grasped from the cause of a given structure as that would fall into the error of mechanistic causality, in which the truth of the world accords to a deeper more fundamental narrative. Once we assume this form of meaning we have to account for how this form of historical causality in which the ‘political’ appears in a given text. The political, in the wake of Freud and Lacan, is what is repressed from the text, i.e., it is what is hidden in the text. Related to this problem of arriving at the political, Jameson asks how can we arrive at a higher meaning of the text in light of French theorists from Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard etc. who have formulated an anti-dialectical method opposed to meaning and interpretation. Jameson argues for a reinvigorated method of literary analysis that does not nullify all meaning, as the post-structuralists insist, but one that demands a new “anti-transcendent hermeneutic” model. The task of the book is thus to discover this anti-transcendent hermeneutic, one that will restore the surface to the text while not forfeiting our commitments to history and to meaning.

Now if that was too compact, let’s analyze how Jameson gets at the problem of historical causality in order to show how his ecumenical method works. We must start with two terms: the social and the historical before we arrive at the political. The ‘social’ is defined by Jameson as the diachronic struggle between social classes as they appear in the context of the text; the ‘historical’ is the sequence of modes of production and social formations, and thus the historical opens the problem of causality and how we understand the ‘whole’ or the ‘totality’ of society, indeed, the historical poses a meta problem of meaning. If we locate the historical truth of the social world of a given text, say the realist novel The Red and the Black by Stendhal or Balzac’s Lost Illusions, something of the ‘historical’ is shown to us in these texts in that there is a unity between the social (the class antagonisms of the characters) and the historical (how class relations are determined by and shaped by the social formations and modes of production in which the novel transpires). But this does not offer up an immediately clear answer as to what the ‘political’ is.

Herein lies Jameson’s move to incorporate Althusser’s famous distinction between three forms of causality which helps us arrive at the proper means to understand the meaning of a given text. The first form of causality is mechanistic causality wherein the parts can simply be deduced from an external cause. The classic example is the base and superstructure model in which culture merely reflects changes in the economic base. Importantly, Jameson never dismisses mechanistic causality entirely because there are situations where changes in political economy alter literary production in direct ways. The commercialization of publishing, for example, transforms what kinds of novels become possible.

The second model is what he calls ‘expressive causality’ which is inherited from Hegel. Here every particular expresses an underlying essence. Every literary character, institution, or historical event becomes an expression of the whole. Lukács’ theory of realism often moves in this direction in that the literary character becomes a social type and the novel itself works as an allegory of society. History becomes legible because each part reflects the totality from which it emerges. Lucien Goldmann’s conception of class worldview in The Hidden God is critiqued by Jameson, wrongly I would say, as an example of an expressive causality in that the class being of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are determined by homology to an inner essence and not by mediation. This may be the one area of the text in which I find Jameson’s reading of expressive causality as flawed because I think he misses the logic of Goldmann’s genetic structuralism. But putting that to the side for now, what expressive causality posits is that the individual is capable of expressing the logic of the whole, i.e., that the whole is reducible to an inner essence. Herein lies the problem for Jameson with expressive causality, it posits a hidden deeper narrative, and this means that it relies on allegory as the underlying, more fundamental narrative. This leads to providential history as we find in some Hegelian readings of history, and it produces a teleology of history in which certain essential parts are posited as un-transcendable.

Jameson’s Impossible Synthesis

The shortcomings in expressive causality are made up for in Althusser’s theory of structural causality, the third form of historical causality after mechanistic and expressive. It posits that there is no hidden essence standing behind appearances waiting to be discovered. Society possesses no secret center from which everything radiates. All causes are therefore absent, or put differently, causes only exist only through the relations they organize. For Althusser, this destroys every attempt to read history as an allegory. Jameson accepts this critique but he refuses to abandon Lukács. This is the remarkable ecumenical move that he makes; rather than choosing between expressive and structural causality, Jameson asks how mediation itself might survive after Althusser’s critique. Structural causality still requires mediation because every social phenomenon must be translated across multiple levels of determination. Family life cannot be explained solely through psychology and nor can it be reduced to economics. The family exists at the intersection of institutions, class relations, ideology, sexuality, law, and countless other determinations. As such, no single phenomenon expresses some hidden social essence. Yet no phenomenon exists independently either.

The result is a synthesis of Hegelian expressivism with Althusserian formalism. It is a theory of historical mediation capable of preserving the Marxist ambition to think society as a whole without imagining that whole as an underlying substance. This leads us directly to Jameson’s conception of totality. If Lukács famously argued that the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought lies not in the priority of economics but in the standpoint of totality, critics too often assume totality refers to a completed system in which every contradiction is finally resolved. Others imagine that it names some authoritarian philosophical impulse to reduce diversity to unity.

Jameson rejects both interpretations. Drawing heavily upon Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, he insists that totalization is an activity rather than an accomplished fact. Totality is never present before us as an object. It exists only as an unfinished movement of thought. The totality is not an organic unity in which every part harmoniously expresses a central essence, and nor is it a mechanical system composed of isolated pieces. Jameson instead describes totality as produced through acts of interpretation that continually attempt to reconstruct the relations among otherwise fragmented experiences.

This is why The Political Unconscious remains such a remarkable book, precisely in the way that Jameson rescues totality from both its defenders and its critics. He does this both against and with the resource of post-structuralism. What Jameson shows is that in every refusal of totalization, another totalization is produced, i.e., even the celebration of fragments requires an image of the social whole against which fragmentation becomes meaningful. The irony of postmodernism of course is that in rejecting master narratives, that rejection becomes its own master narrative.

Against mechanistic Marxism, however, Jameson insists that totality itself can never become an object of direct representation. Every attempt to produce an organic image of society ultimately risks becoming ideological, and this is why the Althusserian ‘symptomatic reading’ remains indispensable because every apparent unity conceals what it excludes. The dialectic therefore becomes a continual movement between totalization and symptom.

Jameson’s deepest debt is to both Lukács and Althusser. He refuses the choice between historical totality and structural determination and instead he transforms each through the other. Our intellectual culture rewards specialization and theoretical camps. We inherit traditions by defending them against rival traditions. Jameson inherited traditions by forcing them into an ecumenical conversation that situated Marxism as the final word at the end of the movement of critique. His method was never reconciliation for its own sake. It was the conviction that capitalism itself is too complex to be grasped from a single theoretical perspective.

That is what made him an ecumenical Marxist.

My discussion on How to Read Fredric Jameson with literary scholar Robert Tally:

It’s been a while since my last Q & A, and we’ve covered a tremendous amount of ground together this year. Between the study groups on Althusser, Lacan and Clouscard, my recent writing workshop, ongoing podcast interviews, various Substack essays and my new book, The People Are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism we’ve explored a wide range of philosophical and political questions. I’d love to hear from all of you about where you’d like to go next. What books should we study together? Who are some guests you’d like me to interview on Emancipations? What kinds of series, lectures, or workshops would you find most valuable?

I also want to encourage you to ask me any theoretical questions you’ve been thinking about. Whether they’re broad philosophical questions or very specific problems you’ve encountered in your own reading, I’d be happy to take them up in the next Q&A. I will host this Q & A in the next two weeks on the main Emancipations YouTube channel. Please submit your questions by next week, July 15.

Here’s a few potential topics for questions:

1. The Collapse of the Academy
How can we navigate the fall of the university? What does it mean to continue to engage in intellectual work outside of the university? How should we relate to a university system that refuses to take seriously its own shortcomings?

2. Marxism and Philosophy
How should we understand Marxism as a comprehensive philosophical, historical, and political project rather than simply a contemporary activist framework?

4. The Legacy of Freudian Marxism
Questions related to our studies of Michel Clouscard and his critique of Freudo-Marxism. Or questions related to my own work on Freudian Marxism. I offered a seminar on Freudian-Marxism recently.

5. The Future of Psychoanalysis
Does psychoanalysis still offer indispensable insights into the human subject, ideology, and politics despite its declining institutional influence?

6. How to Improve Your Writing Practice
Questions related to my writing workshop or questions related to your writing.

7. Philosophy and Character Formation
Should we aspire to cultivate virtue, discipline, and moral character? If yes, what models and theories should guide us?

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“The drama reached its climax within the walls of the House of Detention in St. Petersburg, where the prisoners of the ‘Movement to the People’ were being held for the Trial of the 193. In July 1877, General Trepov, the Governor-General, visited the prison. A young student, Arkhip Bogolyubov, failed to remove his hat in the General’s presence. Trepov, flying into a passion, ordered him to be flogged. This illegal punishment broke the young man’s spirit; he was driven completely insane by the humiliation and spent his remaining years in an asylum. But among his fellow prisoners, the blows of the rod re-awakened the spirit of desperate, violent revolt.” –Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia.

The Separation of Marxism and Populism

Arkhip Bogolyubo was a good Narodnik. Bogolyubov went out to the countryside during the “Mad Summer” of 1874 to agitate the peasantry. Like hundreds of his peers, he was quickly compromised—partly due to the inability of the peasants to keep the radicals’ presence a secret from local authorities—and arrested by the Tsarist police. Before even being formally tried, he was held in harsh imperial prisons for years as the state slowly gathered evidence for what would become the famous Trial of the 193 (the mass trial of the captured 1874 populists). In 1877, while still detained, Bogolyubov was visited in prison by the notorious Governor-General of St. Petersburg, General Fyodor Trepov. Bogolyubov either failed, or refused, to raise his cap to salute the Governor-General. In a fit of rage, Trepov ordered Bogolyubov to be illegally and brutally flogged. Bogolyubov’s suffering became a massive rallying cry for the remnants of the populist movement. It directly inspired the revolutionary Vera Zasulich to walk into General Trepov’s office a few months later and shoot him in retaliation, marking the pivot point where disillusioned Narodniki abandoned peaceful peasant agitation and turned toward the violent militancy of underground cells like Narodnaya Volya.

We know Zasulich in Marxists circles because of the debates on Russian peasant communes that she had with Marx in his later years, and the letters that Marx drafted to her to clarify his position. We also know that Lenin rejected both the Narodniki terror campaign and the campaign of “educating the people” made in the early period. There was also, importantly a split with the Narodniki’s successors, the Socialist Revolutionaries (aka, the S.R.s) who had similar divisions and similar tactical orientations. This anecdote reveals the intimate proximity between left populism and Marxism in the Russian context. There are unmistakable lipstick traces on the letters of history, even though the two movements never merged.

Let’s move to the U.S. context around the same time. In the 1890s, Eugene Debs, A.M. Simons, Victor Berger, and many other early leaders of American socialism were drawn to the populist movement under the People’s Party. But the collapse of the Populist movement came on faster than they could have imagined. Once the People’s Party aligned with the Democratic Party under William Jennings Bryan in 1896, combined with the decline in sharecropping as a viable economic system, the populist movement fell apart. This collapse led these figures to conclude that only an independent working-class political movement could achieve lasting social and political change. If the Popular Front in the mid-20th century emerges to once again forge a bond between socialism and populism, it works ultimately to undo this deep, but nonetheless crucial, separation. The history of how left-populism has seeped into Marxism since the time of the Popular Front is what we examine in our book and the relationship is rocky. Less lipstick traces and more on-off tragic romance.

Marxism and populism do not have the same sort of intimate relations that can be concretized in the postwar context as they do in the late 19th and early 20th century. Our comrades at Geese Magazine think that the marriage between populism and Marxism is still viable, and indeed, necessary if not inevitable. We contend that the impulse toward separation has remained a defining feature of Marxism and, indeed, of revolutionary socialism as a political project.

The Debate Defined

It is necessary for honest debate to create a discourse that can join with material interests that help to sharpen our theoretical understanding of politics in our time. We have welcomed such debate and thus have encouraged what we expected to be a critical review of our book from our left-populist comrades at Geese magazine. And we recognize that the underlying critique of our book, The People Are Not One, is not one of treachery but a comradely exchange, and we welcome that spirit of exchange, especially given that such comradely debate often spirals into invective in today’s climate. But there are contentions and errors that were made in the article that require a response. In his response to our book, comrade Ant L. accuses us of not having a specific definition of populism:

“The authors fall into the first classic trap of critiques of left populism: they fail to articulate a robust theory of what “populism” even is and, as a result, their argument fails to maintain analytical consistency across its 80 pages. Populism is defined in different terms in different chapters, and thus the reader is unable to follow the authors’ steps from claims to conclusions.”

Now, it must be said that Ant L. does not have such a consistent analytic definition of populism in the first place. In fact, populism, for our reviewer, is defined as an organic, unavoidable response to existing material conditions: “the acknowledgement by Marxists or socialists that we must accept politics as it appears.” Ant L. then limits this definition to a strictly electoral strategy that is expressed through prominent political campaigns, citing figures like Bernie Sanders or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as the key vessels of populism. This is an equivocation between a broader definition and a very specific one, but it may be necessary given the frenetic use of the term on the left, even within the last 10 years since 2016 when left-populism moved from the Occupy era projects of SYRIZA and Podemos to Corbyn and Sanders.

After all, the Mamdani project today is indeed very different from SYRIZA or Podemos, as these political parties are not legally viable in the US system. Furthermore, we have the gift of hindsight to see the flaws in both of them whereas Mamdani can easily be spoken of in glowing terms because we are not a full year into his first term. There is no way to gauge whether Mamdani’s policy victories will be substantive as history has not rendered such a verdict as clearly as it has on Bernie Sanders’ attempts at the Presidency or Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt at reforming the Labour Party, and more recently in heading up the independent party, Your Party, etc. The limitations and failures of these past left-populist movements are not in comrade Ant L.’s scorecard.

Indeed, comrade Ant L. is right that our discussion of populism shifts as the concept itself has changed. Historical analysis needs to be dialectical in the sense that the terms of politics themselves change in history. Any attempt to limit populism to a strict analytical definition is nearly impossible without some equivocation from an analytic point of view, as the term itself has developed historically.

In what follows, we will reiterate that we do in fact offer precise definitions of populism throughout the text. We identify both left and right populism as an in-built feature of neoliberal politics and we refer to this as the ‘populist horizon.’ The structural transformations in political economy since the 1970s have intensified class conflict in ways that existing bourgeois institutions, from the Democratic Party in the United States to the NGO-dominated infrastructure of civil society, have proven incapable of translating into an independent socialist politics. This impasse demands a renewed commitment to class analysis capable of organizing working class power on an independent and revolutionary basis. Yet the dominant trajectory of post-Marxism, beginning with Marcuse and extending through Laclau and Mouffe, has failed to confront this contradiction adequately. Rather than clarifying the antagonism between labor and capital, these approaches increasingly dissolve the working class into broader moral, cultural, and popular subject whose apparent unity obscures the real class antagonisms of capitalist society. Whether on the left or the right, the result is strikingly similar. The working class is no longer understood as the independent political subject of socialist transformation, but as an object to be represented, mobilized, or spoken for. The populist tendency on both the right and the left tends to treat the working class as a manichean symbol rather than a historically concrete social force. This is what we name the ‘populist’ drift, an inherently class collaborationist tendency to conceive the actors of history as outside of the working class or the labor movement. The problem with the populist way of thinking about class politics is that it relies on a mythical conception of the working class that fails to account for class antagonisms and fragmentation.

If comrade Ant L. wants to criticize us for this definition being both compound and biased against populism, since the definition contains an inherent critique; this would be fair. This is also our definition and critique of populism as it exists now, which is related to but distinct from populism in prior periods of historical development. We also define populism as inspiration for a broader set of appeals used by non-populists but rooted in a conception of cross-class popularity:

“...populist rhetoric emerged as a strategy for the bourgeoisie to manage the breakdown of the social-democratic consensus through what he called ‘moral panics,’ which would today incorporate the ‘culture wars.’ The culture war dovetails with the populist turn in that it concentrates social antagonisms into a discourse that routes political conflicts into emotional, affective, and cultural registers” (p. 7).

Again, central to our definition of populism is the concept of the populist horizon, which designates the ideological horizon within which bourgeois politics increasingly unfolds. It refers not to any particular policy or material manifestation of populism, but to the hegemony of populist rhetoric as the seemingly inevitable language of political contestation. Herein lies the ambiguity of any attempt to draw up a balance sheet on left-populist victories and defeats, namely the fact that the left-populist is ensconced in bourgeois institutions that are at odds with the underlying objectives that righteous popular rebellions and protests represent. This leads to the problem of paternalism and liberal ideology that left-populism cannot get outside of because its successes are ultimately conditioned by the hegemony of bourgeois parties. This is not a difference rooted in abstract ideas and theory but an institutional difference that portends significant consequences for any assessment of the successes of left-populism, let alone socialist politics in our time.

At the end of the day, we claim that contemporary socialists will have to face the populist horizon and we encourage that it be faced with a materialist point of view. Left-populism is a form of politics that is not completely free-floating or rhetorical, it has its own practical understanding of political economy and of capitalism. Laclau, as we note in the book, ended up abandoning core Marxist commitments as he embraced left-populism, the most significant being that he abandoned the notion that there is a constitutive antagonism between labor and capital as the primary contradiction of the current capitalist system (pp. 36 - 37). This contention is not a mere theoretical position with no stakes in practice, it is a reflection of Laclau’s embrace of a populist orientation over that of a Marxist-oriented socialist one.

But Laclau’s divergence from a Marxist view of capitalism can be traced back to the long-standing ideological divergence between socialism and populism. We note that, “ideologically, the populist conception of capitalism drew from physiocratic (i.e., agricultural land-based) theories of political economy and currents of liberal and republican thought. These influences resulted in a rather inchoate sense of individualism which, perhaps paradoxically, projected a far less coherent account of collective class interest than did the socialist tradition” (p. 12). While the original class base of populism was agrarian (the peasantry in central and Eastern Europe, sharecroppers in the United States) the through-line from classical populism to today’s populism is found in the tendency towards class collaborationism and a lack of interest in abolishing capital or property. The difference between socialist and populist conceptions of class antagonism–and indeed of capitalism as a system–strike us as exceedingly clear, both historically and in our present.

Lastly, and related to this point, we argue that populism functions on both the right and the left to obscure real class antagonisms by projecting a false unity of ‘the people.’ This reduces the working class to an abstract moral category and thereby undermines the practical work of building genuine class consciousness and solidarity. It is true that with this last claim, specifically, we widen the category of what counts as left populism to include tendencies such as Communization theory as expressed by Endnotes, as well as various entryist gambits in the U.S. Democratic Party. If such a position strikes Ant L. as confusing, we will remind the author that we identify three key traits that we find across all populist political movements, left or right, going back to Marx’s discussion of Bonapartism, which had a similar appeal:

1. The Subversion of Class for Moral or Cultural Abstractions

Instead of defining political subjects by their objective structural relationship to production or even coherent strata of consumption, every variant of populism substitutes an abstract, moralized, or emotional category that creates the appearance of a broad coalition that subsumes the vast majority of society, despite any conflicting interests within the grouping.

2. The Projection of a False Unity Upon “The People”

Populism relies on creating a free-floating, flattened collective identity that intentionally glides over the deep economic fragmentation and internal divisions within the working class itself. This is implicit in the first trait, which also explains why populist rhetoric extends far beyond obvious populist politics.

3. The rejection of independent political agency within the working class

By decoupling politics from the contradictions between capital and labor as well as tensions WITHIN the working classes, these definitions show that populism strips the working class of its unique, foundational role as an independent historical agent. The working classes are rendered into something to be spoken for or acted against.

These points hardly add up to an unclear definition. We aim to develop a definition of populism that is broad enough to account for the shifting social and political constituencies that populist figures, whether on the left or the right, seek to assemble. We admit, for example, that the class basis of modern populism is different from Russian and American populism of the 19th and early 20th century which had a large agrarian core. And in fact, we imply that both right and left populism today pull from precarious and dependent strata of society, i.e., the most lumpenized and the most adjacent to the petite bourgeoisie.

The principal social base of left populism is the professional-managerial strata. Although many occupy petite bourgeois positions as knowledge workers, even those who are wage earners and belong to the working class have largely been socialized into petite bourgeois ideological assumptions, notwithstanding their growing precarity and downward mobility. For right populists, the coalition is with Sunbelt petite bourgeois, the rural and exurban lumpenized, and private equity. The class base of both right and left populism strike us as highly similar to right and left Bonapartist politics in the mid-19th century model in France. This is because we see both continuity and rupture in populist movements stretching back to the origins of socialist politics in the 1830s.

A Question of Balls and Strikes

Comrade Ant L. then says that we have

“a total lack of any engagement with left populism’s impressive political victories across the world in the 21st century and the ways in which left populism has enabled the resuscitation of organized leftism such that a media ecosystem and political infrastructure hospitable to debates about left populism can even exist. Put simply, while I, too, remember a time in American leftism before the rise of Bernie Sanders, no honest critique of Sanders can elide the ways in which his late career has transformed the political landscape of the United States. Thus, any critique of left populism must contend with the ways in which left populism has transformed the author’s own historical moment.”

To properly gauge the political successes – the wins and losses – of left-populism is an exceedingly difficult, if not impossible task. This is due to the fact that contemporary left-populism relies on a popular front strategy with the established liberal progressive end of the two bourgeois parties. This reliance conditions the imperatives of the progressive liberal party to lord over all left-populist activity and ultimately to take credit for left-populist victories. Moreover, this reliance, which we analyze through the concept of paternalism, reveals the core problem with Laclau and Mouffe’s left-populist strategy.

Our contention is twofold: populism is definable as a distinct political practice with a coherent philosophy and general orientation to political demands that are far afield from the socialist tradition and Marxism. Secondly, once left-populism is tied to a general civil society strategy that aims to coordinate disparate social movements (Laclau and Mouffe) this strategy leads to a hyperpolitics that prevents any coherent balance sheet regarding what is a distinct populist victory versus what isn’t.

While Comrade Ant L. may be old enough to remember a time before Sanders, when such debates were “impossible”, we find this to be a questionable statement that Sanders alone changed the landscape or that left populism was outside of the general consciousness. After all, debates around left populism defined the left of the aughts (2000 — 2009). While not exactly populists, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire was famously displayed next to mass-market horror novels in airport book stalls due to sheer demand. The book had profiles in The New York Times and Time magazine, which pushed it so far into the public debate that it became a bestseller.

At the same time, and even before the aughts, debates about the success of strategies proposed by Mouffe and Laclau in their 1985 work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy were common within the activist left and in academia. Indeed, the left-populist debate between Laclau, Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek in 2000 captured a great deal of attention within academic and leftist activist circles.1 Given the class collaborationist premise of both the Empire series and Laclau and Mouffe’s work, the popular debate about left populism has been a defining feature of socialist politics for the last 30 - 40 years. But it is worth noting that even Hart and Negri do not valorize populism but point to its tendency to fracture working class solidarity. What is more likely is that the geopolitics of empire after 9-11 stalled the discussion of left populism more than its lack of concretization in a figure like Bernie Sanders.

Yet, we would agree that Sanders either embodied or led – we would argue the former – the shift in the media landscape that corresponded to other neo-populist movements like Occupy Wall Street. If we are going to talk about honesty, we think our comrades should be careful about what is invoked. The point of Sanders’s campaign was not just to “move the Overton Window.” It was about the expansion of working-class power explicitly, led by a youth coalition.

Is this populist? In rhetoric, yes, as Bernie’s 99% rhetoric flew through the media, both legacy and new and reenergized a popular turn to issues of inequality in politics. But as a practical goal is this politics populist? That is harder to say. What is easier to say is that on its own terms, the practical aims of Sanders’s movement did not materialize. We have not witnessed any reversal in the long-term decline of union density in the United States. The steepest losses occurred between 1979 and 1983, when organized labor shed more than one-third of its private-sector membership. While there is now broad agreement that this decline has been socially and politically damaging, did the Sanders campaigns fundamentally alter this trajectory? No.

In fact, there were a few mild spikes in union density in the US during a period of flattening after the Great Recession. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was a brief increase in U.S. union density during the early part of that window, though the overall long-term trend has remained downward. National union density rose from 12.1% in 2007 to 12.4% in 2008. This small statistical uptick wasn’t driven by a massive wave of new labor organizing; rather, it was a byproduct of the Great Recession. Because non-unionized jobs, particularly in sectors like construction, were being wiped out faster than heavily unionized public and industrial sectors at the very beginning of the crash, the relative proportion of union members in the workforce temporarily spiked. Following that minor bump, density resumed its slide, dropping to 12.3% in 2009, hitting 11.9% in 2010, and ultimately settling at 11.1% by 2014 and 2015, where it plateaued. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, private sector union density has hit a historic low of 5.9% in the US.

It must be noted that this came precisely after Sanders’ campaign began, i.e., there was no increase in unionization after the campaign. There were, however, significant public sector labor victories in red states and some high-profile campaigns for increasing unions in the service sector. We speak about this as part of the fragmentation of the working class in our book. This is not Sanders’ fault. That is not our contention. It was owed to the fact that Sanders’s left populist coalition never achieved any viable independence from the bourgeois parties that ultimately co-opted his achievements. If left-populist victories are measured on the terrain of rhetoric and discourse, any expression of popular energies of revolt is registered as an achievement. The error of this metric for measuring political success is that it is idealist; it mistakes the display of popular energies for lasting political change, when in reality, what has occurred is far more transient.

Within the electoral arena, Sanders’s campaign made a name for itself for its remarkable electoral engagement with the youth vote in 2016 and 2020. However, upon closer scrutiny, the youth share of Sanders’s support base actually dropped in 11 out of 12 key primary states. Sanders also lost significant ground in his home state of Vermont and dropped key states he had won in 2016, such as Michigan and Washington, due to an inability to expand his message beyond his core 2016 base.

To make contemporary left-populism a movement about Sanders is misleading. Sanders has been an incredibly powerful advocate for progressive policies in Congress and has had many significant successes as well as many high-profile failures. His successes include the 2009 Energy Efficiency Block Grant Program, getting $11 billion in mandatory funding for community health centers in the ACA, getting a Federal Reserve audit amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, and helping reform the Veterans Affairs in 2014. Following his presidential runs, however, Sanders has had fewer major legislative successes: The College for All Act, The End Polluter Welfare & Fracking Ban Acts, and The AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act all failed. Medicare For All did not even get a proper vote and has been perpetually unable to get out of the committee. During the Presidency of Joe Biden, Sanders’s major wins were primarily supporting Biden’s agenda, like helping progressives get some of their concerns in the Inflation Reduction Act. Now, we admit that expecting Sanders to be effective from 2010 to 2018, when there were GOP majorities in Congress, is a steep demand but some of his clearest legislative victories happen during this time. There is, however, no such excuse from 2018 to 2022.

The emphasis on Senator Sanders as a cultural influencer helped generate a media ecosystem that, from the standpoint of our critique, is more than a little ironic. This presents a double problem, both for us and for our comrades at Geese. First, this move itself seems to shift the goalpost, instead of dealing with Sanders on the terms of his political projects, one speaks about him as enabling a cultural possibility for left politics, and this is then registered as a ‘victory’ for left-populism. This is the kind of goalpost-moving that we trace all the way back to Stuart Hall’s analysis, in which cultural battles are selectively picked as a means to weigh political novelty and gauge political antagonisms. While this is not the culture war mentality that most often defines populism, it is a structurally similar shift in focus. Similarly, if we look at Sanders’s second Presidential campaign, there is a significant correlation between his stalling out in the 2020 primaries and his adoption of talking points that were more aligned with professional activists and younger Democratic party consultants. These rhetorical moves were explicitly made to incorporate the trends of the Democratic Party’s younger cadre and were aimed at increasing youth and minority participation. While it is impossible to prove singular causation in this instance, it seems that Sanders’s move to be more inclusive of “woke” talking points in his public framework, at the very minimum, had no positive effect and that the adoption of this rhetorical strategy correlates with his inability to mobilize a serious youth base.

Considering the mayoral administration of Zohran Mamdani, it is far, far too early to call wins or losses for even his agenda, much less for socialism or left-populism. Again, the desire to conflate the two strikes us as perfunctory and sloppy. We can, however, call a few balls and strikes thus far, and the truth is that Mamdani’s record is very mixed. According to socialist writer Jack Fate:

Mamdani’s campaign had a lot of vibes, but it also came with promises to pursue concrete policies. Free childcare, a rent freeze (and more affordable housing in general), free buses, and reigning in the police department were among the most prominent, and most of these were to be funded by taxing the wealthy. His progress on all of these fronts has been limited. As soon as he took office, Mamdani immediately announced that he had discovered a $12 billion hole in New York City’s budget, which was later (and rather suddenly) pared down to $5 billion, still a hefty sum. He failed to push New York Governor Kathy Hochul to institute a new tax regime, beyond the pittance of a $500 million pied-à-terre tax on second homes in the city, which covers about 10% of the $5 billion deficit, and which by definition means a lot of people subject to it will not even be city residents. With Hochul, he announced the launch of a 2-K program to compliment the 3-K and Pre-K programs created by Bill De Blasio a decade ago. For the first year, this will be available for five school districts in the city out of 32 total and will serve 2,000 kids in a city of almost 9 million people. The official plan is to expand the 2K program city-wide by year four. Hochul has pledged to fully fund the first two years . . . .Mamdani’s housing plan landed with a thud. The most prominent policy goal is to build 200,000 new “affordable” units. One of the areas he has targeted for redevelopment is along Coney Island Avenue, just south of Prospect Park. . . These buildings are bright, shiny, and chock-full of amenities, but also have tiny units which are way overpriced. Often, these days, a “two-bedroom” unit is the size of most mid-century one bedrooms, just subdivided with an extra wall. Moreover, a cursory glance at the prices show these new units are far from “affordable” ….[t]hese buildings are not affordable housing—they are luxury housing…. When it comes to public housing, Mamdani has chosen to handle the problem of crumbling infrastructure by continuing a pre-existing program started during De Blasio’s administration that allows private property managers to take over management of public housing projects. No numbers for Mamdani’s specific initiative were provided, notably, but the report outlining the plan declares that an objective of this program is to help “deliver comprehensive repairs and long-term stability.”

Now, we would not necessarily be as dire as this policy breakdown indicates. Mamdani has had electoral victories with his slate in NYC, albeit with the caveat that the NYC DSA’s slate is NOT identical to Mamdani’s slate, despite the DSA claiming victory on that front, as Mamdani’s endorsement is not the same as national or even local DSA chapters. Mamdani’s success at balancing the budget was partly due to help from the Governor, in exchange for dropping a threat of a general property tax increase, and from renegotiating and restructuring a bad pension deal from former Mayor Eric Adams. Almost none of the gap was covered by the pied-a-terre tax. Mamdani has been able to get a rent freeze through the New York City Board, but why should this been seen as a qualified victory. 1-year leases have been frozen before (under both the de Blasio and early pandemic-era boards); this is the first time in the board’s 56-year history that a 2-year lease renewal has been frozen. Moreover, there are limits: the freeze is strictly for rent-stabilized apartments, not traditional rent control and market-rate apartments. Still, the freeze applies to roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, representing about 40% of the city’s total rental housing stock and affecting over 2 million residents.

If the success of left populism is measured by the ability of left-populist leaders to remain in office, then the experiences of our European counterparts in Greece and Spain suggest that this is an unreliable metric. If success is instead measured by policy achievements, it remains too early to assess the case of Mamdani. It is not yet clear whether his administration will become politically stalled or whether his public appeal will sustain him in office, particularly as many New Yorkers are not aware of the city’s underlying fiscal constraints. What we can say despite is that Mamdani’s historic wins are modest extensions of policies that have been expressed by more standard Democrats like Bill DiBlasio: both the housing supply and rent freezes are expansions of DiBlasio’s policies. The difference is that the DSA and people around Our Revolution-descended PACs are invested in sharing these policies and asserting they are unique. This tendency to exaggerate left-populist policy successes, which in reality often remain within the horizon of progressive liberalism, follows from placing excessive emphasis on rhetoric and discourse. This produces a characteristic blindness to the actual political content of these policies.

Mamdani’s most unique trait is his dedication and willingness to try to leverage a possible relationship with more traditional mainstream Democrats with a D.S.A.. insurgency, and doing so by expanding it in a direction that is in line with the more conciliatory factions within the DSA’s agenda. Even in areas where we see true victories, such as the recent victories of Mamdani’s endorsees, they are not without contradictions. The week we published our book, the DSA was claiming victory for Mamdani’s slate as if Mamdani’s slate was a victory for the DSA’s slate. But it was not. While Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez are both members of and endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Brad Lander is neither a DSA member nor an endorsed candidate. This distinction became a source of controversy when Mamdani reportedly intervened in an effort to persuade a DSA-endorsed candidate to withdraw from the race in order to consolidate support behind Lander.

All of this is predictable with our theory that populism has to maintain conflicting interests in its coalitions due to its paternalistic reliance on bourgeois parties and the hegemony of those interests. Mamdani may be okay with freaking out James Carville and with supporting more left candidates like Chevalier and Valdez but he will need support from establishment figures such as Governor Hochul and Representative Jeffries to maintain funding for his agenda. This will lead to compromises that will inevitably alienate elements of his coalition; and if austerity starts to be imposed from higher levels of government, Mamdani’s response to that will define his future. In the early 1980s, Francois Mitterand supporters in France faced similar problems and it added fuel to the fire of disillusionment with both the French socialist and communist parties in the 1990s and aughts. Mamdani may avoid this fate, but it is not something we can say from this moment so early in his campaign.

The core of Comrade Ant L.’s argument is that left populism has achieved “impressive political victories,” while the “pure Marxist” alternatives we propose have achieved very little in the 21st century. However, when evaluating left populism’s actual governance failures, our comrade completely shifts his metric of success: when Mamdani fails to reign in the NYPD or fire Jessica Tisch, Comrade Ant L. argues that this failure is actually a success because the campaign created the condition of possibility for criticism. He calls it a “progressive defeat.”

Conversely, Comrade Ant L. judges any alternative strategy strictly by its lack of historical implementation. This creates a logical double standard: Left populism is allowed to count its empirical failures as long-term structural victories, whereas other alternatives are written off as not having recent victories, and pre-21st-century victories are not addressed at all in the review. If a “progressive defeat” counts as a success for populism, the same grace should logically be extended to other leftist strategies, including the ones we propose.

Still, our comrades at Geese magazine may be surprised to learn that we are still agnostic on whether or not Sander’s or Mamdani’s shifting of the debate is a victory or a loss “for socialism” (or for left-populism). The reasons for that, like Comrade Ant L., are that we too think that a purely working-class political movement is not on the immediate horizon. Comrade Ant L. implies that this is part of the problem with our argument, which is that our strategy requires too much patience when the fights are happening right now. This, perhaps, is fair, but a movement’s success or failure is judged by results over various time scales, not just by the seeming possibility of immediate movement. If Mamdani fails to deliver on substantive change, it can lead to a backlash, and the history of progressive mayors in the late 20th and early 21st century tend to follow this course from Dennis Kucinich in Cleveland to David Dinkins in New York to Chokwe Antar Lumumba in Jackson to Brandon Johnson in Chicago.

What we do insist upon, however, is that victories go beyond merely electing leaders to positions and counting that as a win in and of itself. SYRIZA and Podemos went much further in electoral victories, France Unbowed has much deeper penetration in French society and in the legislature, and is an order of magnitude larger in loose affiliation than even the DSA at its current 105k-107k, which has about 15k membership in New York City and only about 4k in LA County. This relatively low membership base is not a failure of the Democratic Socialists of America, but it does make some of the claims about “unprecedented” success more qualified, considering that far larger movements have failed in Europe and Latin America in recent years.

‘The People’ as the only form of politics?

When addressing our critique of theorist Jacques Rancière, comrade Ant L. notes our warning: populism risks becoming ensnared in a reductive, totalizing image of “the people”—a fantasy originally projected by the ruling class.

Our reviewer explicitly agrees with this danger, admitting, “any political undertaking risks reifying the same underlying power paradigm.” However, instead of logically addressing how left populism can overcome this fatal flaw, he dismisses it with a shrug: “What else have we ever done? What strategy escapes this danger?” This is nothing more than special pleading. Furthermore, it is highly debatable that every successful socialist policy has given in to this danger. Lenin never once forgot the class contradictions of the late Russian empire or the tensions between 1919 and 1921. If Comrade Ant L. thinks Lenin wavered from those concerns, this has to be proven and settled with far more than a rhetorical question and a shrug.

We are not proposing that class unity would lead to a politics without antagonism: ideological, ethnic, racial, geographic and sectional tensions will continue to exist within the working class and have to be worked out politically and socially. We argue that structural antagonisms are not fundamental in the way they are presented within populist conceptions of class struggle, which reduce the diverse antagonisms between classes to a single, homogeneous opposition. We argue that ignoring these tensions within the working class is what so often leads to populist tendencies that treat workers as noble subjects to be acted upon, not as potential leaders of our movement. Getting our class theory right does not strike us as an impossible demand for socialists, and moreover, we see it as central to socialist strategy.

Talleyrand and Other Metaphors

Lastly, Comrade Ant L. frames his entire piece around an anecdote about the cynical French diplomat Talleyrand, who hears a riot in the street and tells his servant “We are winning!” but refuses to specify who “we” is until tomorrow. He uses this to argue that we must “head downstairs and step into the confrontation that exists before us.” But the analogy actually undermines his point. Talleyrand was a master class-compromiser and survivalist who shifted allegiances to maintain ruling-class power regardless of who won. This strategy is structurally only possible when defending the status quo. Using a historical symbol of elite opportunism to justify a “bottom-up” left-populist strategy is a severe misalignment of logic, and to us it is an odd admission; it implies that populism is fundamentally about opportunistic positioning rather than principled socialist transformation. To Marxists, it has always very much mattered who we are; others can throw their lot in with the proletariat; we defend the merger formula after all. The proletariat is the subject of our politics. Our politics can not merely be throwing our lot in with today’s seeming winners.

Book Launch Live Stream: The People Are Not One

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The course was very enjoyable to teach and I learned a lot in the process. Over the past twenty years of writing philosophy and critical theory I have experienced both successes and failures in the effort to reach an audience and publish work that I can genuinely stand behind. Being able to distill those experiences and pass them on to others was very meaningful.

Session I: Cultivating Discipline and Creativity

In the first session, I focus on developing a sustainable writing practice through developing motivation, creativity, reading habits, voice, and style. This lecture is full of practical advice (writing routines, note-taking systems, book reviews, publishing pathways) and it includes writing prompts and exercises designed to help participants clarify their intellectual commitments, cultivate a distinctive voice, and build a long-term writing plan. My contention is that strong public philosophy emerges from disciplined practice, careful reading, continual revision, and the development of a personal style that can communicate complex ideas to a broad audience.

Session II: The Philosophical Essay and Issues of Style and Clarity

In this session, I offer a lecture on the philosophical essay with the help of Adorno, Hume and Lukács. We examine the history of the essay, its roots in modernity and how the essay becomes a Socratic form of truth. We then review style and the method of improving style through engaging with George Orwell’s tips for good writing. Finally, we practice writing in a way that is free from jargon.

Session III: The Problem of Leisure and Writing: Socialist Realism and Autotheory

In session three, we begin with a lecture on the role of leisure, contemplation and its role in philosophy and writing. We focus on how to cultivate a space for active leisure in your writing and discuss the role of leisure in defining the writer and how it has changed historically. We then turn to examine autotheory by way of a discussion on Maggie Nelson The Argonauts (2015) and socialist realism by way of a look at Mike Gold’s “Go Left Young Writers” (1929) and Maxim Gorky, “How I Learnt to Write” (1928). This session also includes sessions devoted to practicing your writing.

Session IV: Navigating Publishing: Pitching & Proposals

In our final session, we share insights into how to pitch your work and how to navigate the world of book publishing in our age. We revisit the long-term writing goals from session one, and we map where you want to be in one year from this workshop. Marxist philosopher Conrad Hamilton offers a keynote on how to navigate publishing.

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Primarily, he is concerned with Nietzsche’s deleterious impact on the left. If his reactionary character is missed, Tutt argues, Nietzsche “performs a certain victory over the left that can and often does compromise any socialist or Marxist approach to changing the world” (6–7). Left Nietzscheanism is seen as variously flawed: in its tending to elitist conceptions of leadership; embrace of irrationalism in action and socio-historic understanding alike; and politicization of culture, inclining it to deemphasize political economy in favor of countercultural revolt (12, 54). Under these conditions, the left becomes indistinguishable from the world it is trying to change, which is likewise wholly animated by what Tutt calls, drawing on Waite, “Nietzscheanism.”^[16] This denotes the historical legacy and “cultural effect of Nietzsche’s philosophy,” the ways in which it produces a “set of ideologies that continues to interact with and shape our liberal, entrepreneurial, capitalist society” – even becoming its “common sense” (3, 5).

Parasite is a stirring read and well worthy of engagement by those interested in Nietzsche, modern intellectual history, as well as leftist theory and politics. Its history of “left Nietzscheanism” is illuminating, and its treatment of Nietzsche and Marx on religion, revolution, and ressentiment strident. It will appeal to a wide audience beyond academia, who will find much to challenge themselves, especially in the book’s latter half, which looks beyond exegesis of Nietzsche to a compelling intervention in contemporary political and socioeconomic dynamics. Those in the universities will also find themselves provoked. Albeit less than in their late twentieth-century heyday, the interpretive commonplaces at which Tutt takes aim still largely dominate. If reading Nietzsche as a political philosopher is increasingly uncontroversial, placing a critique of socialism at the center of his thinking certainly is, let alone presenting him as an apologist, indirect or not, for the bourgeois, liberal, Christian status quo. Tutt will surely find many willing to defend Nietzsche’s status as an apolitical thinker, or one far from the reactionary excesses with which Tutt associates him.

But Graveney is not fully on board with my conclusions, particularly around Nietzsche’s relation to contemporary capitalism and liberalism.

If on Tutt’s account Nietzsche would be essentially happy with the reception and impact of his philosophy, and on my telling above he would be aghast, the truth perhaps lies somewhere in the middle. Much as he would have welcomed an instantaneous return to the world of ancient Greece, Nietzsche knew that “time does not run backward” – rather, one must go “forward […] step by step further into decadence” (Z II, Redemption, and TI, Skirmishes 43). Not only this: as Daniel Conway has shown, Nietzsche acknowledged his own complicity in the crisis, giving his critique of modernity a “self-referential context.”^[43] He reminded his readers: “Need I say after all this that in questions of decadence I am experienced?” (EH, Wise 1). His disciples have been equally impotent in escaping the malaise of modernity. Yet if he has, to quote Conway, “attracted all the wrong readers,” inspiring “for every Stefan George or Thomas Mann […] a legion of graffiti artists, hack playwrights, and adolescent songwriters,” Nietzsche may yet have managed to view this with the wry consciousness of an unfortunate – but hopefully temporary – necessity.^[44] Perhaps the heralded “philosophers of the future,” to whom the task of legislation is deferred, are simply yet to arrive, the activation energy for the reaction of transvaluation having not yet been reached (BGE 42–4). In this respect, Tutt is right to note the “accelerationist” elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy (135–43).

Where we differ is on the question of whether this drive into decadence seeks a genuine exit from the prevailing bourgeois capitalist order – its palingenetic overcoming – or merely the preservation of existing contradictions in radicalized form; whether Nietzsche is, as Tutt has it, a reactionary, or, to return to Habermas, a Revolutionär von rechts.^[45] This is an important disagreement, and I have aimed here to make a (necessarily partial) case for the latter position, focusing on how Tutt’s methodological strictures ultimately overdetermine and narrow his reading of Nietzsche’s political philosophy.

I disagree with Graveney that my reading method ‘overdetermines and narrows’ my reading of Nietzsche’s political philosophy. This is one of the things that my parasitical reading has sought to bring out, which I find Losurdo’s method does not, namely an immanent reading of Nietzsche that allows us on the left to incorporate elements of his thought and use them against their intended application and direction. I will write more in depth on this in the future.

Here is my conversation with Kjeldsen in both video and audio. We explore our contrasting interpretations of Nietzsche’s thought, from the meaning of the will to power and the critique of morality to Nietzsche’s relationship to the post-68 left and socialism. While Kjeldsen approaches Nietzsche as a philosopher of radical self-overcoming and existential transformation, Tutt raises questions about the political implications of Nietzsche’s critique of egalitarianism and the extent to which reactionary politics influence Nietzsche’s concepts.

Show Notes:

Listen to our first discussion, Daniel Tutt on The Nietzsche Podcast

Learn more about Keegan’s podcast, The Nietzsche Podcast.

Get a copy of my book, How to Read Like a Parasite

Check out my playlist of lectures, interviews and podcasts called “New Directions in Nietzschean Studies”

Psychoanalytic concepts are often applied towards reactionary ends; we see this with Christopher Lasch’s reading of the concept of the ego ideal in Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. The same goes for Lacan – there is a liberal-reactionary way to read Lacan just as there is an egalitarian method of reading Lacan. A major focus of my work on Nietzsche has been set on attempting a parasitical reading of his work in ways that take seriously the reactionary core in his thought.

Marxist Ideology Critique and Pseudo-Aggression

With these provisos stated, I want to talk about Bergler’s book on the superego and how his account of “pseudo-aggression” sheds light on questions of ideology and class politics.1 In Bergler’s account of pseudo-aggression, he argues that there is a pre-Oedipal reservoir of libidinal guilt that constitutes a fundamental problem for the formation of the ego. The neurotic refuses to confront this guilt, and this refusal becomes the defining feature of neurosis. Neurosis is thus about the need to invent “pseudo-aggressive” defenses against confronting this reality of inner masochism.

Bergler’s theory of pseudo-aggression is useful because he also abstracts this tendency and applies it to the social field and to an analysis of the biography of artists. Pseudo aggression is an aggression that is responding to a fundamentally fictional object because it functions as a defense against addressing deeper sites of antagonism. This process is what we will call displacement. Pseudo-aggression offers a valuable supplement to the standard theory of ideology that we find in Marxist analysis known as fetishistic disavowal, encapsulated in the formula: “I know very well, but nevertheless . . .” The concept of pseudo-aggression is different than fetishist disavowal in that fetishist disavowal is about denial and refusal, pseudo aggression is about aiming at an invented and nominal object where aggression is concentrated. This is why displacement is the operative move with pseudo aggression as I read it, and this is why it helps illuminate not only how ideology involves a misrecognition and the adoption of a false sense of reality, it offers an explanation as to why social antagonisms are displaced in political discourse. In this way, the concept of pseudo-aggression adds to the Marxist theory of ideology a more precise account of contradiction and how to treat contradictions; it explains how certain antagonisms are transformed into substitute conflicts while more primary contradictions are ignored or rendered invisible.

In the Marxist account of ideology there is a more rudimentary tendency of thinking that argues ideology is a matter of false consciousness. We are all familiar with this theory of ideology; it presumes that what is ideological is what is false and that politics ought to be about approaching a truer, more rational—nay, more real—form of truth. This approach to viewing ideology as a matter of false consciousness fails to identify the logic behind why the false content is persistently adhered to in political discourse. The psychoanalytic method offers an answer to this question by answering both the why and the how of ideology. In other words, what Bergler’s theory of pseudo aggression and the superego offers is an answer to the question as to why we invest in false accounts of social conflict and antagonism and why we do so persistently and in aggressive ways. We often call this form of artificial politics some sort of symptom of the “culture war.” There have been many ways of defining the culture war but for the purpose of this context, we can define it as the general tendency for political antagonisms to become incoherent sites of irresolvable conflict, sites that are substitute sites for more primary contradictions. Bourgeois politics grows decadent as an ideological project when its intellectuals and functionaries take it upon themselves to manage and perpetuate the myth that these false accounts of political conflict are indeed primary.

A good example of this sort of decadent pseudo aggression on the liberal left is the way that the glue of all social conflict is reduced to a hyper racialist account of social oppression. This sort of advocacy possesses a noble impulse, namely, it aims to correct the condition of black immiseration and racist social relations. But once the ruling class begins to incorporate this perspective, they impose an ideology onto it that forecloses any emancipatory grasp of the underlying dynamics involved in the problem to begin with. What is refused in bourgeois ideology is the way that capitalist exploitation functions to perpetuate conditions of immiseration. Moreover, it is aggressive because it must prevent the only means to adequately address the problem, which is collective class politics that extends across the racial-and-economic-oppression facing black people and unties with a far wider cross section of the working class.

Bergler’s theory of pseudo-aggression helps make legible the element in bourgeois ideology that is refused by extending this refusal of the masochistic core of the subject to the system of capitalism as such. This is how we can read Bergler in a materialist way, by understanding that the core masochistic element that animates our subjectivity is both a subjective condition and it is conditioned by the materialist relations that bind us to the system of capitalist exploitation. This is the necessary Marxist addition to Bergler’s thesis. For the system to run, bourgeois ideology must cover over these realities. Just as the neurotic is caught in pseudo aggressions, bourgeois politics cannot touch the masochistic core of the systemic dimension; to do so would risk losing control over the system of ideological maintenance.

Ideology is about covering over antagonisms, and as such it introduces us to the realism and nominalism debate in political philosophy and epistemology. My contention is that bourgeois ideology nominalizes the true dimension of social antagonisms and that it must do so with antagonisms that revolve around market domination and labor exploitation. The socialist-realist dimension to social and political antagonisms are thus ontologically rooted in economic forces that reigning bourgeois ideology will predictably falsify. The effects of this falsification are severe in bourgeois society because they tend to be about the irrationalism of the bourgeois private individual. The myth of the individual becomes a site of condensation where personal rivalry and narcissistic investments function as stand-in points for otherwise primary or secondary social contradictions. The neurotic cancels and avoids any confrontation with what Bergler calls their “real masochistic self” (p. 82) and

“guilt is accepted except for the lesser crime, pseudo-aggression, and the scene of the crime is shifted to the outside. The neurotic behaves as if he were guilty of “aggression,” and his fear seems to pertain to outside dangers” (p. 70).

It is important to stress that there is a class dimension to the problem of pseudo aggression. Specifically, I would argue that a task of ideology critique would be to locate the ways that ideological pseudo-aggression is championed by the class fraction of the petit-bourgeoise responsible for ensuring that surplus value extraction continue unabated. This class is the most proximate to the problem of pseudo aggression and they have a material interest in creating ideological accounts of social wrong and antagonism that limit any true touch with the realities that make the system of capital perpetuate and wreak harm.

A significant element of bourgeois ideology thus entails perpetuating pseudo aggressiveness to pacify those antagonisms that might otherwise elevate to a primary contradiction. This is what liberal civil society and the wider superstructure, or culture and aesthetic production, is all about. What glues bourgeois society together is a set of ideologies that pose antagonisms — particularly those that are responsible for justifying capital’s misery over social life — as sites of pseudo aggression. This means that bourgeois ideology is located not as a left or right expression of establishment parties or tendencies. Rather, both the right and the left bourgeois parties and their surrogate institutions such as the NGO sector are in the business of converting political and social “wrongs” that are borne from economic exploitation and class conflict into sites where alternate explanations are put in their place.

A Marxist Metapolitics?

As you may have gathered, I’m interested in defining bourgeois politics as a set of identifiable tendencies which portend on to issues of truth – but this conception of truth is not based on a paradigm of truth as falsifiability and nor is it merely about truth as the principle of sufficient reason, although these methods of dealing with rational politics are important. Psychoanalysis does not reject these accounts of what qualifies as a wrong and what qualifies as an antagonism, I would argue that psychoanalysis rather helps us see that politics is indeed about truth – what many theorists refer to as “metapolitics”, or a politics about arriving at a settling of the score of truth that riddles the conflicts that circulate in the public sphere. Metapolitics is an interesting concept that often gets confounded and thereby lost in the maze of Heidegger’s irrationalist theory of ontological difference. Heideggerian metapolitics supposes that a truer form of politics will be uncovered in political action and this often entails a mystical or messianic dimension because Heidegger’s politics is rooted in a poetic conception of truth. Marxism has a version of metapolitics to be sure, and theorists from Rancière to Badiou have articulated compelling accounts of it.

Any politics that takes itself to be emancipatory must cultivate a concern with the truth of the situation and therefore with the effects that truth has on us as political agents. I am in favor of a materialist metapolitics that is construed on the idea that politics is about overcoming relations of exploitation, and the pursuit of this sort of politics does not grant the proletariat a superior spiritual or mystical access to higher truth. This metapolitics is different that the sort of metapolitics developed by Jacques Rancière which emphasizes how politics is about initiating a procedure of truth at the site of politics “wrongs.” Once dispute emerges of what qualifies as “wrong” – a metapolitical process is introduced to politics we begin to think about where truth really resides. If politics aims towards truth it requires that politics be engaged at a discursive level, that we enter the arena of bourgeois politics, and that we do so with the full knowledge and expectation that proletarian politics will not be tolerated, or put differently, that emancipatory demands are locatable within political discourse. Once we resign ourselves from this sort of possibility, we have adopted a form of leftist hyperpolitics that is content to rely on the power of spontaneous social movements.

But is the concept of ‘metapolitics’ necessary or is it better thought as a heuristic? I will argue for the latter point, namely that we can invoke the sort of politics that aims towards opening a more emancipatory horizon of political truth as ‘proletarian politics’ but this does politics does not ontologically separate the proletariat as some angelic other. This is a form of politics that requires the cultivation of political solidarity and the strengthening in collective capacity for coordinating class politics towards a more emancipatory and universal set of ends. This means that proletarian politics must entail the development of a distinct political epistemology of its own or it will risk falling into what I have elsewhere named the nominalist trap of bourgeois politics.

In my view it is essential that we define bourgeois politics as the politics of the ruling class, as a fundamentally coercive domain of politics. Bourgois ideology is indeed definable, and I would argue that a politics dominated by the two capitalist parties is a politics that insists that truth be far from the site of politics. Bourgeois politics prefers to be technocratic and efficient, it prefers to be far away from class struggle, but when class struggle rears its head it must fall back on ideology, i.e., on repetitive and continued investment in sites of falseness. False ways of thinking about social wrongs,

What all of this indicates is that bourgeois ideology condenses around points that obscure the real stakes of social and political conflict. It is only through proletarian politics and socialist politics that foster class independence politics that we can begin to re-conceive, and ultimately re-frame pseudo-aggressive politics.

Overcoming Pseudo-Aggression: Sublimation

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There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the legacy of French theory and at the root of these debates is the conundrum of its anti-Marxist foundation. The philosophical heavy weights that continue to shape our views of liberation from Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, etc. developed their thought in a social and political context that differs profoundly from our own. These thinkers may have given rise to a bona fide renaissance in thought and philosophy but they also, importantly, attempted to fundamentally revise (and in many cases completely discard) Marxism and its political practice. Scholars today tend to be of two minds regarding this problem: some indeed acknowledge the extent to which these thinkers strayed from Marxist practice while others argue that while they may have veered from Marxism, this veering was a necessary corrective to a social order that had fundamentally changed after the war.

It is crucial that this second claim be dealt with so that we maintain a foothold in social reality. While it is true that the capitalist order transformed after the war, and it is also true that in western Europe, American imperialist subsidies combined with social re-engineering from 1945 - 1975 gave rise to a new liberalized society. This was a political project of American imperialism known as the Marshall Plan, a massive social and political reengineering of capitalist society that dumped billions of development funds into these societies. It contributed to the “Trente Glorieuses”, or the thirty glorious years of intense economic growth across France. It is undeniable that a new consumer society was created in this context, one in which the problem of scarcity based on serial production and mass consumption was effectively solved.

It is from out of this transformation of western society that what we today know as “French Theory” began to propose a new conception of the revolutionary subject, one that discarded the working class to the dustbin of history. The social order had become what the philosopher Jean Baudrillard referred to as “neo-capitalism”, a concept which argues, wrongly, that the productive sphere no longer animates a separate or autonomous sphere of economic activity in social life and labor. In his writings on political economy in the 60s and 70s, Baudrillard argued that the dialectic between relations of production and the forces of production had become a mirror of society, that the very distinction between use value and exchange value had disappeared entirely before the pure reproduction of exchange value. Baudrillard also argued that Marxism had nothing to offer to revolutionary practice. There is a profound anachronism to the ideas of so-called ‘neo-capitalism’ that drove French Theory at its peak. It must also be noted that this postwar re-structuring of society was not localized only to France; these changes shaped the class composition of postwar society across the west, including the United States.

There is no better guide to navigating the precise inadequacies of the theorists that sought to adapt and discard Marxism — from Herbert Marcuse, Deleuze and Guattari, to Baudrillard and Wilhelm Reich — than Michel Clouscard. It is exciting news that his book Neo-Fascism and the Ideology of Desire, originally published in 1973, has finally been translated in 2026! This book is an original and penetrating Marxist critique of the new society after the war. It takes aim at the models of liberation proposed by Freudian-Marxism, particularly of Marcuse and Deleuze and Guattari but its focus goes beyond these thinkers by presenting a more far-reaching account of the situation of modern capitalism and how fascism emerges out of the contradictions of the new social order.

On June 10th, and then every other week from that time, I will lead a study group on this book. Along with the translator Takin R., this group will consist of presentations on the book chapter-by-chapter followed by discussions and Q and A. The Clouscard circle of scholars in France have approved our hosting of this group. I have written a review essay on the book to give you a sense of it:

Dates and Logistics:

We will meet every other Wednesday starting on June 10th from 7 - 9 pm EST. These meetings will take place on Zoom and once you register we will provide a PDF of the translated book with a reading schedule. Each session will consist of a guided set of remarks followed by discussion. Once you sign up you will gain access to the Zoom link to register.

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We are charging a very modest fee to join and a percentage will be shared with the Clouscard circle in France.

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In Psychocinema, the Lacanian theorist and filmmaker writes, “capitalism is a mode of production that relies on a denial of the universal, fundamental, generative force that is Lack, whilst exploiting it. Because capitalist logic can only tolerate the contradiction of Lack when it is repressed and denied, it must retreat from the conscious acknowledgment of Lack as a phenomenon and turn toward a logic of opposition.” According to Rollins, capitalism is, paradoxically, a utopian system based in a promise that it can fulfill our lack through constant commodity consumption. But this utopia is, of course, a ruse. The promise of the commodity is only capable of temporarily satiating the surface level of our discontents. Capitalism cannot, by its very structure, touch the deeper part of our split and fractured core, and in fact this deeper, more primordial lack in our very being is what capitalism must repress.

Rollins’ claim is that film, by exposing this fractured reality back to us, can reveal – intentionally or not – the symptoms of our collective disquiet and thereby help us to confront, digest and resolve these antagonisms in generative and enjoyable ways. Psychoanalysis (and film when it is done well) thus offers a remedy to the bad utopia of capitalist consumptive enjoyment because it does not re-produce what Marx would call exchange value.1 Rollins’s theory of universal lack is a central defining feature of the “Lacanian left” and in this discussion we address how these assumptions inform her wider perspective.

The most compelling thesis Rollins develops in the book is that good cinema has the structure of what Lacan refers to as the discourse of the analyst. This discourse she writes, “cuts across class and identity, speaking to the possibility of radically altering our political economy and challenging the ideological edifice that necessitates and endorses the subjugation, exclusion and exploitation of given groups” (p. 18). This is achieved by a director who can put the viewer of cinema in a similar position to the analysand on the couch. In other words, good cinema hystericizes us more than it makes us into perverts. By ‘hystericize’ what is meant is that a good film leads us to question the orthodoxy of the day and generate knowledge, like a scientist approaching her experiment from a place of doubt, letting go of all suppositions, in order to be challenged by the possibility of the new.

Rollins showcases a series of films that achieve this rare capacity to direct our desire and to bring out a confrontation with universal lack, from The Green Ray (1986) by Éric Rohmer, The Devils (1971) by Ken Russell, Citizen Kane (1941) by Orson Welles, Caché (2005) by Michael Haneke to The Last Supper (1995) by Stacy Title. I found these examples as singular as Rollins suggests and in each analysis she offers a distinct angle on what the film expresses from a psychoanalytic perspective. This approach is interesting as it offers not so much a theory of cinema as such, as much as a theory of what qualifies as exceptional cinema. This power of cinema, she writes,

“[r]esides in its ability to house contradiction within its structure and to operate on unconsciousness. What is perhaps unique about the artform of film is its ambition to totalize. Whilst structured storylines corral Lack within film toward a potentially productive point of revelation as to the true nature of desire, films that attempt to repress contradiction altogether are propagandistic. However, the very attempt to repress contradiction within the artform is exposed by it. The attempts sit ill with the viewer and are obvious. They may incite productive discussion since they reveal in relief the binary logic of ideology against the truly contradictory nature of life that art may more readily capture than oppositional abstraction” (p. 60).

Throughout the book, Rollins critiques Laura Mulvey’s canonical film theory essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” which argued that feminists should “fight the unconscious” as it appears in films marked by the so-called “male gaze.” In this reading, films made within the context of patriarchal capitalism display “unconscious” evidence of being in solidarity with a particular identity or agenda. But Rollins is clear that in Lacan’s account, there is no ‘substantive unconscious’ and therefore no unconscious-as-entity to fight. The unconscious is a fissure present in reality at all times, a residue of the ego’s aim for totality as a mechanism by which the self-conscious subject, as a child, comes to navigate the world.

What I found compelling in my conversation with Helen is that she offers an account not only of the ideological problems that lead cinema to be bad, but as a filmmaker she offers a series of insights into how the industry rewards mediocre filmmaking. The theories that subtend Helen’s work are fascinating and I think it’s worth sharing some additional resources in case you want to read and listen to more on this.

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It is not merely the aesthetic fetish of individualism that introduces the Robinsonade myth; the vision of the atomized and isolated individual has long been the starting point for bourgeois political economy, philosophy and economics up to Hegel. According to the Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch, Hegel moves beyond both Kant’s transcendental conception of consciousness as the subject of knowledge and the individualistic, atomistic model of science. Both, Korsch argues, define the subject in terms of partial elements of existing society, grounded in and shaped by a specific mode of production. The kernel of Hegel’s speculative concept that ventures out of itself and returns home to itself, rises from being and nothing, develops and then overthrows the subject is a subject founded in negation. Hegel’s subject thus produces truth by way of negativity and his dialectical conception of the subject gives rise to a decentered subject, no longer defined by the fetish of the independent producer. But the Robinsonade myth remained strong even during Hegel’s time, even in the realm of scientific theory, as Karl Korsch notes, “the subject of science” consisted of an analysis based on a single individual.”1

Despite his advancements, Hegel does not account for the repetition of the atomized individual throughout history. It is in Marx’s materialist conception of history that we we find the best means to locate and understand the persistence of the Robinsonade myth. Marx writes: “the deeper we delve into history, the more the individual appears—and thus the producing individual appears as dependent. It is only in the eighteenth century, in bourgeois society that the various forms of social cohesion confront the individual as mere means to his private ends, as an external necessity.”2 Put differently, the web of social relations had grown so cohesive in capitalist society that the standpoint of the isolated individual was only made possible on the back of a profound degree of social cohesion and interconnection. Lukács builds on this insight that the Robinsonade is a recurrent myth driven by showing how the myth is conditioned by capitalist crisis and decadence. In his later work Ontology of Social Being, Lukács writes:

It is a fact of cultural history that in at least relatively highly developed societies, and especially frequently in times of crisis, the idea develops in particular individuals that all relations of the individual to society are merely external, secondary, and merely supplementary, are ultimately established artificially, and can be terminated or abolished at will. From the hermits of the first centuries of Christianity , through to Heidegger’s doctrine of ‘thrownness’, it plays a indelible role, one might say, in the history of thought. From the classical Robinsonades, through to what I have called in my criticism of existentialism the Robinsonades of decadence, this conception still dominates a considerable part of bourgeois ideology; it has even obtained a pseudo ontological foundation, with the aid of the transformed modern Christian tradition of Kierkegaard, and the ostensible precision of Husserlian phenomenology: i.e. that it is the isolated individual that is ontologically primary and the basis of everything in the human world. It is of course possible, with the aid of a ‘phenomenology’, to conceive all human relation derived in this way, as created by the isolated individual and hence to be understood by reducing them back to him.3

The Robinsonade is not the exception to bourgeois society, it is the ontological starting point to bourgeois thought. This conception of the individual cut off from all sociality is an ideological and historical problem in Lukács’s view; to construe it as an ontological problem opens a number of issues. One might think that Marx’s formula from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’ offers up an immediate, or an intuitive alternative to bourgeois thought. However, Lukács argues that it would be an error to construe of Marx’s claim as some metaphysical constant, for to do so would reify the same naturalist fallacy of the individual that bourgeois thought posits.

Is Marx’s statement to be understood as a general ontological condition or as a historical qualification? My view is that we have to understand it not in any positivistic conception as that would reify a rigid conception of base and superstructure. Such a view would be wrong in that it accords a flat hierarchy of social being. Lukács argues that in the phenomena of the Robinsonade we discover a relation of form and content that is not teleological but one that is driven by uneven development of the productive forces. The Marxist view is that economic categories shape and condition human values and this process occurs in relation to social life. Thus, what is missing in the metaphysical reading that posits a strong determinism between base and superstructure — a reading that Plekhanov’s account of materialism has in part contributed to in the history of Marxism — is the way that social being is homogeneously determined by economic forces.

Rather, it is important that we recognize a specific social consciousness as a separate form — if we claim that social being is primary over consciousness it is crucial that this be thought of as a heterogeneous process riven by contradictions and unevenness in the productive process. Lukács writes that, “what is decisive here is simply the indubitable ontological fact that the development of the productive forces must necessarily accomplish this progress: just as labour brought about the transformation of animal into man, right at the beginning of its realization, so its permanent further development brings about the rise of the human species in its properly social sense.”4

The Trinity Formula: Totality and Fetishism

I want to argue that in terms of the Robinsonade what is at issue is an epistemological, and therefore ideological, problem that concerns how we conceive of the human subject situated with the web of society. What must be grappled with is the problem of fetishism in its full scope. As Althusser writes,

“what classical political economy does not see, is not what it does not see, it is what it sees; it is not what it lacks, on the contrary, it is what it does not lack; it is not what it misses, on the contrary, it is what it does not miss.”5

The oversight, then, is not to see what one sees, the oversight no longer concerns the object, but the sight itself. The oversight of bourgeois thought, its ‘non-vision’ is therefore a deficiency that is inside its own field of vision. This, after all, is the basis of commodity fetishism that Engels discusses in Anti-Dühring where he invokes Luke 23:24 — “for they know not what they do.”6

The sort of fetishism that is at the root of the Robinsonade myth is bound up with the higher level fetishism that Marx discusses as the “trinity formula” in Capital Vol. III. At issue is the failure of bourgeois economists to grasp the proper totality of the capitalist system, and the barriers to this capacity is found in the very continuity of the movement of production process itself. In the 1857 Introduction, Marx argues that it is no longer a question of identifying the variants of the ‘combination’ of the ‘relations of production’ and the ‘productive forces’ on the basis of historical material, but of examining what he calls ‘the general determination of production at a given social stage’, i.e., the relation between the totality of social production and its particular forms (branches) in a given synchrony.

In Reading Capital, Balibar argues that totalization can only come about in the actuality of the social division of labour at a given moment, not in the individual adventures of capitals.7 The notion that one can analyze relations of distribution as a set of separate processes to that of relations of production is revealed to be false when the capitalist system experiences a crisis. With the discussion of the “trinity formula”, Marx draws attention to how it is typically thought that distribution is the final end of the process in which individual needs are satisfied, where they are subjectified. The common logic of the three departments of the capitalist system are as follows:

• production – exchange and distribution – consumption.

These three departments form a “hollow syllogism” of general, particular and singular. However, for the bourgeoisie, distribution and exchange are thought as domains governed by “accident.” This leads to the conclusion that consumption is thought to be outside of the entire process. It is only production that is thought to be determined by natural laws. But not only is consumption immediately production, according to Marx, each domain supplies the other with its object. The two have an immediate identity, what Marx calls “consumptive production.” They are mutual and they mediate one by the other.

“The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production always predominates not only over itself, in the antithetical definition of production, but over the other moments as well. The process always returns to production anew.”8

We thus have three interrelated forms of fetish: the first generated by the commodity-form which Marx takes up in the first chapter of Capital, Vol I, the second is the fetish born out of the production process itself which is taken up in Capital, Vol II, and the third is taken up in Capital, Vol III, Marx introduces the “trinity formula” to describe another type of fetishism practiced by bourgeois economists. Bourgeois economists present the circulation process as simply a metamorphosis of forms and not a decisive site where value and surplus value is generated; and in so doing, they assume that in the immediate process of production, value and surplus-value of commodities are reduced to labour. But labor alone is not the basis by which surplus value is extracted according to Marx. Marx will note that services (lawyer’s fees), commodities (beets), and art (music), cannot be treated as part of the same production category. It is not wage-labour that is decisive for determining value, it is rather “the overall social labour-time, the total amount of labour which society has at its disposal and whose relative absorption by the different products determines their respective social weight.”9

The economic trinity of capital-profit, land-ground-rent, labour-wages forges the connection between the components of value and wealth in general and its sources — but what is completed in this formula is a mystification of the capitalist mode of production and its reification of social relations. The immediate coalescence of the material relations of production with their historical and social specificity: “the bewitched, distorted and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters and mere things.”10

The trinity formula describes the three main branches of revenue extraction in the capitalist system, namely, “Capital yields the capitalist profit, year in year out; land yields the landowner ground-rent; and labour-power - under normal conditions, and as long as it remains a usable labour-power - yields the worker wages.”11 This same siloing process is also found in the three primary classes that Marx identifies in Vol. III. Each class is defined by revenue sources.

1. owners of mere labour-power – wages - working class

2. owners of capital (capitalists) – profit - capitalist class

3. owners of land – ground-rent - landlord class

The trinity formula maintains that capital-profit is not a thing in itself but “the means of production monopolized by a particular section of society” and it thus points to the structural barrier to any conception of thinking totality within the capitalist system itself.

The Return of the Robinsonade in Neoliberalism

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But unlike Genovese, Lasch did not turn to the right. But yet his thought has certainly been co-opted—but arguably not recuperated—by the paleoconservative movement and the neo-populists from Compact Magazine and Unherd to the Red Scare podcast. The truth is that there is a battlefield on the contemporary left and ‘Lasch’ circulates throughout this battlefield as a signifier that revolves around the problem of the working class. I maintain that a Marxist reading of Lasch is important and necessary because there is something in his discourse that speaks to the limits of the contemporary left. And moreover, it is possible to incorporate Lasch while not accepting all of his more marginal ideas which do, at times, tend towards potentially reactionary positions. This has been my position ever since I wrote my first book, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family in 2022, namely that Lasch must be read as a socialist thinker and there are specific insights that can and must be isolated in his twenty year study of American culture beginning from 1968 - his death in the mid-1990s that are vital for 21st century socialists.

In 2022, I interviewed Lasch’s daughter, the accomplished American historian and cultural critic Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn. Initially, I only released a part of this interview to the public and left the full interview on my Patreon. But now I am sharing the entire thing here on my Substack. We discuss Lasch-Quinn’s work Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution — a fascinating study of the ideological matrix of liberal race discourse. And of course we discuss her father and his politics. She is very sympathetic to my Marxist reading of Lasch and I think you will find many of her insights to be of interest. They may even change the way you understand Christopher Lasch and his legacy.

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I’ve been thinking about how many people I know who are sitting on good ideas but haven’t quite found a way to turn them into something finished. Sometimes it’s a manuscript that’s been lingering for a while. Other times it’s a set of notes, fragments, or half-started essays that never quite take shape. Writing in philosophy and theory is demanding, and it’s easy to fall into a rut, even when you’re working with good ideas.

I’ve decided to offer a four-week writing workshop starting on May 6th, “Writing Philosophy for a Public Audience” that is meant to help you develop your voice, sharpen your argument, and learn how to publish thoughtful, engaging intellectual writing.

I’m a busy person, but I’ve found ways to consistently write and publish. Over the past five years, I’ve written three books and published numerous essays across peer-reviewed journals, independent presses, magazines, and academic outlets. Through this work, I’ve developed a strong sense of how to pitch ideas, capture a reader’s attention, and refine writing through editing. Alongside my own writing, I’ve also read and commented on hundreds of student papers through the philosophy courses I’ve taught at GW and elsewhere.

I’ve set the price for this four-week workshop at a level that feels fair for the time and attention I’ll be putting into the workshop. In addition to the four sessions, I will also read your work and offer detailed feedback as part of the experience. If your interested in learning more about joining this workshop please visit the registration page.

Writing Philosophy for a Public Audience

Overview

A four-week workshop meant to develop your voice, sharpen your argument, and learn how to publish thoughtful, engaging intellectual writing.

In this four-week workshop, philosopher and author Daniel Tutt will guide participants through the craft of public-facing intellectual writing. Drawing on his experience publishing four books, numerous academic articles, and years of teaching philosophy, Daniel will offer both practical tools and deeper methodological insights into what makes serious writing resonate.

This workshop is designed for anyone—from independent scholars, writers, students and curious thinkers—who wants to improve their ability to communicate complex ideas with clarity and style.

Together, we will focus on:

• Developing a strong and persuasive thesis

• Refining your writing style and voice

• Translating complex philosophical ideas into accessible prose

• Understanding the broader intellectual stakes of your work

• Learning how to pitch editors and navigate publishing—written feedback on your writing and or book proposal.

Each session includes guided discussion, writing exercises, and dedicated time for participants to share their work and receive thoughtful, constructive feedback in a supportive environment. All sessions will be recorded and made available to members.

Session Breakdown / Agenda

Session 1 — Finding Your Argument

• What makes a strong thesis in philosophical writing?

• Moving from ideas to arguments

• Identifying your audience and stakes

• Short writing exercise + discussion

Session 2 — Style, Voice, and Clarity

• Writing clearly without oversimplifying

• Developing a distinctive voice

• Common pitfalls in academic-style writing

• Editing techniques that improve readability

• Submit writing sample or book proposal for feedback (up to 10 pages)

Session 3 — Method and Intellectual Positioning

• What kind of writer are you? (critic, synthesizer, polemicist, etc.)

• Engaging sources without losing your voice

• Framing your work within broader debates

• Workshop & feedback

Session 4 — Publishing and Feedback Workshop

• How to pitch editors (magazines, journals, book publishers)

• Final participant workshop and feedback

• Next steps for continuing your writing practice

Who This Is For

• Independent scholars and researchers

• Writers working on essays, criticism, or theory

• Anyone interested in improving intellectual writing for a public audience

• Students and graduate students

• This workshop is especially suited for those who feel stuck and are looking for the motivation and structure to take their writing to the next level

What to Expect

• A focused and supportive workshop environment

• Practical tools you can immediately apply

• Constructive, thoughtful feedback on your work (including written feedback)

• A small cohort of engaged participants

  Daniel's Journal is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

In the days following Trump’s war on Iran, the Chinese-Canadian influencer “Professor” Jiang has blown up, hitting all the major podcasts from Tucker Carlson to Glenn Diesen to manosphere celebrity Sneako. Each host introduces him with the same three boilerplate points. First, Jiang predicted that Trump would win in November 2024; second, that Trump and Israel would initiate the war in Iran; third, that they will lose to Iran.

How novel are Jiang’s predictions? On several occasions, Jiang has integrated data from the popular real-time political betting site Polymarket into his lectures in order to gauge future events. This may explain why his predictions are hardly more original than those of Polymarket. In May 2024, when Jiang predicted Trump would win the election, the odds of it were above 50% on the website. While there was no specific betting pool on whether Trump would invade Iran at that time, many bet the U.S. would, with this position becoming a majority one by mid-2025.

The third claim – that the US and Israel will lose and the Middle East will change forever – is more contentious. It is also where Jiang shows his true colors, leaning into a conspiratorial worldview according to which Iran’s victory will lead to U.S companies relocating to Israel en masse due to the destruction of the petrodollar. He has a term for this: “Pax Judaica.”

Jiang launched his Predictive History YouTube channel and Substack two years ago. Already, he has 2 million subscribers. Thousands of them pay him. What subscribers can expect in exchange are Wikipedia-grade summaries of history and current events aimed at helping them better predict geopolitical situations. Subtending all of this is a claim to scientific authority – Jiang purports to apply rules of game theory to history. This combination, so we’re told, will help predict future political outcomes. One follows it in much the same way one might follow Mad Money with Jim Cramer for stock tips. Jiang’s grift converts social reality into pure exchange value. On offer to any student of Predictive History is the idea that they too can apply Game Theory to predict what will happen in the Middle East.

But aside from the main grift, it is hard to say what Jiang’s je ne sais quo truly is. The production quality of his videos is unremarkable, displaying no unique aesthetic. He lectures from a digital whiteboard in a nondescript classroom. By day he is allegedly a high school teacher in China. He claims his fans have given him the nickname “Professor.”

Jiang’s appeal is certainly bolstered by his Yale credentials. He completed his undergraduate studies there in 1999. Afterwards, he worked as a liberal journalist and educator across China. Despite this, however, he frequently undermines his credibility with absurd conspiracy thinking. In one video he states that “we don’t actually have any concrete evidence for the Holocaust.” In another discussion, he claims that communism is a continuation of Frankism, an 18^th century Jewish mystical movement that originated as an offshoot of Sabbateanism. Indeed: Jiang may be the first liberal conspiracist to obtain celebrity influencer status.

That Sneako is among his interlocutors is telling. The streamer – real name Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy – built a following of over 1.28 million predominantly young men through right-wing commentary, collaborations with Nick Fuentes, and vocal support for Trump’s 2024 campaign, before pivoting to criticism of the Iran war in a six-hour stream titled “Iran War is a DISASTER.” A subject of Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere, Sneako represents a younger wave of influencers linking the manosphere to electoral politics – a pipeline that runs directly into Jiang’s emerging audience. The fact that Jiang can now move between conversations with left-wing figures like Krystal Ball of Breaking Points and this demographic tells us something about the ideological promiscuity of the current moment.

Nowhere are the limitations of Jiang’s framework more apparent than in his treatment of the Iran War itself. His analysis rests on a handful of fixed premises: that Iran will succeed militarily over the U.S. and Israel due to the resolve of its proxies (the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah) and its strong cohesion as a military force. But Jiang does not account for the deep rupture between the Islamic Republic and large portions of its own population, made viscerally legible by the 2019 fuel protests and the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprisings. Similarly, Jiang’s reliance on zero sum logic game theory leads him to analyze the United States’ role without any attention to domestic pressures facing Trump, from the cost of living crisis to the widespread disapproval felt towards the war.

Given his rapid rise to internet prominence and the apparent amplification of his content by platform algorithms, it is reasonable to ask what accounts for Jiang’s visibility. As Alan Macleod documented in MintPress News, Facebook alone recruited dozens of former CIA officials into politically sensitive departments, including trust, security, and content moderation. Twitter similarly hired heavily from the FBI and CIA, with former agents placed in senior roles overseeing site integrity and content policy. These are not conspiracy theories – they are openly publicized employment relationships that exert influence over what billions of people see. If Jiang is some sort of op, this would explain his meteoric rise. But what would be the practical function of such engineering?

Jiang is anti-communist and highly pro-liberal entrepreneurship and elitism. That tells us something. But questions remain. Does he have ties to the intelligence community? If so, who does he work with? It is impossible to know definitively. But a more thorough look at his biography certainly raises a number of red flags.

A common tactic that the ruling class uses to shape perception is to set the terms of debate over major national issues. In the case of the Iran war this was evident in the resignation of Joe Kent, the former Director of National Counterterrorism. Kent’s resignation was delivered via a letter which criticized the war in Iran but stopped short of completely disavowing the Trump administration. Shortly thereafter he hit the podcast circuit. In effect, Kent was giving the party an exit strategy: if the war in Iran goes south and becomes wildly unpopular, he can function as a lifeline for disaffected Republicans to fall back on.

The Epstein files followed a similar logic (“limited hangout”). The intelligence community releases just enough information on a scandal to satisfy curiosity or outrage, while hiding the deeper reality. Our online lives are filled with this vicious circle of scheming and control, all of which makes the conspiracy theorist a serious threat to critical intellectual inquiry.

Social Fragmentation Fuels Conspiracy Thinking

Conspiracy theorists aren’t the pariahs that they used to be. In 2010, Peter Turchin coined the idea of “elite overproduction”: a societal condition where the number of people seeking high-status, influential positions (the “elite aspirants”) exceeds the number of such positions available.1 This in turn leads them to ally with marginalized groups and challenge the political status quo.

While this phenomenon seemed to undergird the “left populism” of the 2010s, since its defeat in 2020 we’ve witnessed the reverse trend: elite underproduction. This has been driven by the widespread gutting of the educational system. In the United States alone hundreds of programs in the humanities and social sciences were cut and over 80 colleges were closed or merged between 2020 and 2025. This institutional destruction has not only contributed to a crisis of elite legitimacy; it has also given rise to a new sort of public intellectual, one no longer curated through traditional institutional channels. A “parasocial left” is thereby forged in the interstices of the online world. It thrives as a set of counterpublics, often in conflict with one another.2

Conspiracists formulate their sociopolitical visions based on a cherry-picked and partial set of facts. They avoid engagement with deeper contradictions, as well as deeper social context. As a result, the conspiracist, and by extension their fans, tend to become neurotically obsessed with one thing. They become dependent—if not addicted—to the object of their investigation.

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This obsession is what makes the conspiracist anti-intellectual and hence resistant to conflicting accounts or interpretations. But it is also this obsession that endears the conspiracist to their audience. It implants in them a certain madness; a passion for the real. The Lacanian theorist Glyn Daly has argued that conspiracy theories have a Kantian epistemology that is ‘hyper realist.’3 But they practice only a halfway Kantianism. The conspiracist worldview is premised on the notion that some substantial entity is blocking the truth behind appearances. But it is not blocked by the limits of our knowledge itself, as Kant maintains. It is blocked by a malevolent agent: a spectral authority that orchestrates the illusion, or what Lacan calls the ‘big Other.’

How did we undergo such a profound deterioration of the public sphere? The first factor that must be accounted for is the extensive deployment of algorithms in the 2010s across all major social media platforms, from Meta to Twitter to Instagram. The rise of the influencer economy, and affective content more generally, made conspiracy-oriented material increasingly visible and easy to discover.

The second more properly materialist reality driving the conspiracy boom is a distrust of the status quo. This began with neoliberalism; since then, elite mismanagement of the economy culminating in the Great Recession of 2008, Trump’s victory, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic have all conspired to further shake faith in technocrats and mainstream media (we could throw in for good measure the imperialist instability that began under Biden’s watch with the Russia-Ukraine war and a two-year long genocide in Gaza). Unable to put forth a coherent narrative, the traditional bourgeoisie finds itself increasingly narrated by others. Egged on by the Internet, the understanding of reality goes up for sale. The conspiracist is primed for success in this market.

The Problem of Jiang’s Biography

As noted by a poster on X, Jiang’s early life is mapped out in some detail in his 2014 book, Creative China (创新中国教育). Born in 1976 in Taishan City, China, he immigrated to Canada with his parents at age six and grew up in Toronto. He enrolled at Yale in 1995 and studied Mandarin there, a language he had not acquired fluency in during childhood.

In this period, Yale was strongly linked with the American NGO complex. In 1997-98, Jiang Zemin and Bill Clinton agreed to implement the Sino-U.S. Rule of Law Initiative. In the years that followed, Yale Law School’s China Law Center played a crucial role as a safe harbor for Chinese activists, educating them in the operational and legal models of Western non-profits. Many of these ended up helping launch NGOs that received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—a U.S.-government-funded, private non-profit foundation that provides support pro-democracy and political opposition movements, including in politically tense parts of China such as Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Partly in response to this, China cracked down on NGOs that received foreign funding beginning in 2012.

In 1998, Jiang broke off his studies at Yale to return to China. During this time, he worked at the Affiliated High School of Peking University (Beida Fuzhong)—an institution with strong ties to Yale. He then returned to Yale to finish his studies, graduating in 1999.

For nearly the next decade, Jiang worked as a journalist in China. While his book does not cover this period in depth, Zhen Ming has uploaded a number of his articles on X. An article published in 2000, “Consuming Problem,” criticizes China’s health system, stressing the need for increased NGO intervention to combat tuberculosis. Another from 2001, “Fighting to Organize,” encourages Chinese workers to spontaneously rise up against the government. In 2006, he wrote a report while working for the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, calling for USAID and NGOs to invest more heavily in Afghan healthcare.

What is surely the most dramatic episode of Jiang’s journalistic career occurred in 2002. While filming a worker protest undercover in China for PBS, he was arrested by secret police and branded a spy. He was then deported, before being allowed to re-enter the country the following year.

This experience appears to have caused Jiang to give up journalism, instead opting to further his career in the educational sector.

In 2008, he took a job as Deputy Principal at Shenzhen Middle School. There, he was tasked with constructing a controversial “overseas studies unit” focused on sending students to top American universities. In a 2014 interview, he advocates reforming the Chinese education system to better suit the needs of the nation’s expanding middle class. “When I came here,” he recounts, “I hated rich people […] But at the end of the day the rich are the trendsetters. They see more, they have more access to education. […] So it’s elite, but it’s in this space that we can experiment.”

Jiang’s second stint in the educational sector ended 2014—just as China began tightening the screws on foreign-backed NGOs and actors. For several years, he worked as a researcher and writer, largely staying out of the public eye. In 2022, he took a job at Moonshot Academy in Beijing where he now teaches history and philosophy.

It is impossible to know for sure whether higher order forces are behind Jiang’s viral success. What we do know is this. He was educated in the United States, at a university that was at the time a hotbed of Sino-American intrigue. He was a longtime critic of the Chinese Communist Party, who actively cooperated with foreign organizations. He was accused of being a spy. He has become a social media phenomenon on websites in which the U.S. intelligence community is actively involved.

It is also worth noting that his central thesis – U.S. defeat in Iran, American withdrawal from the Middle East, the collapse of petrodollar hegemony – maps with striking precision onto the strategic interests of the Chinese state. This need not imply direction or coordination. The CPC has its own reasons to want the outcome Jiang predicts, and a high school teacher in China producing content that overlaps with the goals of the state is not something that requires a conspiracy to explain. Still, the convergence between Jiang’s analysis and Beijing’s agenda is one more thread in a biographical picture that demands more scrutiny than it has received.

Any influencer that arises ex nihilo, invents a completely new ideological persona and is subsequently raised on high by untransparent algorithms deserves to be heavily vetted. In Jiang’s case – due to his long history of Western cooperation, as well as his parroting of Chinese geopolitical goals – that goes double. Granted, even a cursory analysis of his biography is so damning that the entire case may seem farcical. But we can’t forget that the most powerful podcasters and media groups let him in.

We can expect many more Jiangs to sprout up. The best we can do is avoid falling for the next trickster.

I’m joined by American historian Paul Heideman for a critical discussion of Trump’s politics and a sober assessment of the dynamics shaping the second Trump presidency. In this episode of Emancipations, Heideman analyzes our present conjuncture by looking at the past 40 years of American bourgeois politics, with particular focus on how the Republican Party has transformed from the party of business into the party of chaos. We explore how today’s political disorder reflects the weakening of American political parties as institutions and the fracturing of the corporate elite. Along the way, we discuss the far right, the legacy of the John Birch Society, Newt Gingrich’s 1990s revolution in party politics, the consolidation of the capitalist class around the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, and the question of whether Trump should be understood as a fascist political figure.

This conversation is inspired by Paul Heideman's excellent new book, Rogue Elephant: How the Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos. Rogue Elephant traces the radicalization of the Republican Party over the past fifty years, arguing that its subordination to Donald Trump was not an anomaly, but rather the culmination of processes at work for decades. Providing a new perspective on figures from Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush to the Koch brothers and Donald Trump, it shows that the party’s lurch to the far right was the product of a volatile mix of a disorganized party structure and a divided and fractious class of American business owners.

Paul Heideman holds a PhD in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark. His work has appeared in publications such as Jacobin, Dissent, and In These Times. He works as a history teacher in New York City.

We live in wretched times, not only is the world swept up in imperialist madness, social atomization in the U.S. has grown to untenable levels. Over the past few years, C. Derick Varn () and I have been engaged in an ongoing conversation about the history of socialism, the challenges facing the left, and how to revitalize Marxist practice today. We took to writing an essay on these topics which soon turned into a short book.

I’m pleased to announce that this June our book will be published with . We will do a series of interviews, live events at bookstores and that sort of thing. If you want to set up a talk around this book please message me.

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US Book Tour, June- July

Philadelphia — July 20 6:00 PM — RSVP Free Library of Philadelphia

Baltimore — July 21 7:00 PM — RSVP: Red Emma’s

Washington, DC — July 24 6:30 PM — RSVP: People’s Book

New York — July 25 7:00 PM — RSVP: Woodbine with This Wreckage

About The People Are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left-Populism

Pre-order (ships late June 2026)

In The People Are Not One, Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn dismantle the central illusion of contemporary left politics: that “the people” can serve as a coherent subject of emancipation. Against both right and left populisms, they argue that this fantasy of unity obscures real class antagonisms and traps socialism in a dead-end politics of moral appeal and electoral maneuver.

Through a sustained critique of left-populism, post-Marxist theory, and Democratic Party–oriented socialism, Tutt and Varn show how the collapse of mass politics, alongside debates over the professional-managerial class and the atomization of working-class life, has produced a strategic impasse on the left.

What follows is not a lament but a provocation: a call to abandon populist shortcuts and rebuild socialist strategy on the terrain of class struggle as it actually exists—uneven, divided, and politically unformed. The People Are Not One is a manifesto for a post-populist left willing to confront fragmentation head-on and begin the long work of reconstructing class power.

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