Tony on Gil I: Anticipating Conspiracies, Research Time, 02/03/2018

Here's a nerdy thing I’m enjoying about all the research of Utopias – a bunch of the key authors knew each other personally and wrote about each other’s work. So when I come across an essay that Antonio Negri wrote about the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, it’s going to have a little more significance than any other category.

Just like the Isabelle Stengers essay I was writing about yesterday, only I’ve read more of Negri’s work so far than Stengers’.

If Deleuze and Guattari had become as
prominent in American humanities
curriculums as the Frankfurt School had,
would Andrew Breitbart even have done
any of the radical anti-progressive activism
that defined his life? A butterfly flaps its
wings and a reactionary movement forms.

So Antonio Negri wrote an essay about Gilles Deleuze. It ranges across their political philosophy in two ways. It discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s own concepts, but it also describes some of the historical factors of how they were received.

In the case Negri discusses, America, it’s how they weren’t received. Because Deleuze and Guattari’s contribution to progressive political philosophy was, for a long time, squeezed out of public prominence by the Frankfurt School.

Historically, it was a matter of contingent historical connection. The Frankfurt School thinkers who survived the Second World War settled in the United States – Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse. Their writing was already prominent enough that they could land professors’ positions at the major elite schools.

Not everybody could do it, but the ones who didn’t seemed to be more effective in inspiring revolution against injustice.

Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse ended up locking down intellectual influence on the university-educated progressive left in America. Their books were the basis of critical political studies in the United States for the rest of the 20th century.

This fact is at the centre of why “cultural marxism” has taken hold as a conspiratorial concept in reactionary circles these days. It began from Andrew Breitbart’s misreading of Adorno – he saw the philosopher’s message as saying that social and political change begins from changing the culture, not from the top-down with state control institutions.

As a result, Breitbart shaped his extremist libertarian media outlet with an ambitious mission – change the culture through media activism. His goal was to counter the influence of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Brietbart and his followers saw these writers as the communist Jews* who spent decades spreading ideologies of state socialism – cultural marxism – into the young generations through their books and the humanities professors who taught them.

* Because this is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, just so we have that clear. The Elders of Zion are now a bunch of elderly university professors.

Another irony is that Negri, Guattari, Deleuze, and
many others who built the philosophy of radical
democracy like Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe,
and Bifo Berardi were all actual political activists.

Breitbart has, by all accounts, been incredibly successful. His brand of frothing anti-communism consumes conservative circles today. They make monsters out of people who support ordinary welfare state policies like government-provided health insurance.

Negri wrote this essay before Breitbart Media’s brand of extremism – rabidly anti-socialist white nationalism – took hold of American culture. But he provides an ironic point through his spin on the Frankfurt School. Even as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse identified the only route to change society in cultural change, they also considered liberatory cultural change impossible.

Theo, Max, and Herb analyzed all the vectors of cultural repression – economic, political, psychological, sociological – and found it omnipresent. It’s actually impossible to find any breathing room in cultural repression to start a positive movement that will actually overthrow the repressive relationships themselves.

The most a real revolution in state or economic power can achieve is changing the character of repression. As Marcuse put it, capitalist vectors of repression reduce people to a single dimension of activity and self-conception. It becomes impossible to conceive of any positive alternative.

So all you can do in the face of a capitalist framework of life is critique and question. Negri identifies the quietism and hopelessness at the heart of Frankfurt School philosophy. Writing more than a decade ago, Negri finds an irony for me – Breitbart didn’t realize that, for all the critique and questions, the writers who became his Elders of Zion already considered him the winner.

More next week.

Hey! Cultural Marxism IV: Strange Loops, Research Time, 29/08/2017

Looking at the extremism of modern right-wing politics in the United States should demonstrate something that I think a lot of folks in my generation don’t quite get. Rabidly intense anti-communism never went away – its popularity was just waning for a while.

The years from the Great Depression to the end of the McCarthy era were the formative years of anti-communist extremism in the United States. I have a philosophical hypothesis that the sustained hysteria of Breitbart anti-communists was rooted in a very peculiar style of communication.

If I can be appropriately transparent for the average media literacy of
the 1930s: It's almost as if the ordinary social conservatives of
America who lost their minds in moral panics over drugs, sex, comics,
violence in movies, violence in video games, and all the rest had
the reefer madness. The rest of us who could smoke a little on Friday
nights out in our early 20s usually inoculated ourselves against this
kind of paranoia pretty well.

Remember Reefer Madness? That was just the most famous of a whole wave of moral panic movies. They had titles like Assassin of Youth, Sex Madness, and The Cocaine Fiends. They all had that same deranged, cartoonish depiction of how some critical impropriety will destroy your life.

Yet people believed them! An entire generation of Americans grew up in a culture that hadn’t developed the media literacy to understand how ridiculous these hysteria films really are. The same hysteria was adapted to the anti-communist messaging of the early Cold War.

That hysterically paranoid conservatism was the mainstream right wing of political thinking, which saw even the most congenial trade union activist as a devious Stalinist sleeper cell. The least hint of collectivist politics, especially in the name of helping poor people, was a sign that the billy clubs were needed.

Friedrich Hayek and his network of think tanks kept its ideas alive during the social revolutions of the 1950s through 1970s. The John Birch Society kept the flames of deranged hysteria burning.

Those social revolutions were liberation movements – feminism, environmentalism, Indigenous awakening, black liberation, LGBTQ openness. The moralities of those liberation movements were very communitarian – informed by the moral importance of supporting each other.

These communitarian values are incompatible with one of the fundamental freedoms of classical liberal thinking – the freedom to tell everyone around you to fuck off. Call it the freedom of solitude, the sanctity of private property. That’s what it is.

The reason Reefer Madness worked was that people's media literacy
was still pretty simple. If you were an adult in 1936, you'd think that
a movie saying it depicted the real world was honest with you. Then
Marlon Brando acted like a real person all the way through The Wild
One, and his naturalistic, psychological acting technique
demonstrated in 80 minutes that all these moral panic movies are
bullshit. His realism made everyone else look like the cartoons
they always were. In 1936, Reefer Madness was a serious film.

Follow to the most intense degree the conclusion of Robert Nozick’s “Radio Show argument.” It ends with Milo and every jerk who learned to speak in Reddit and 4Chan threads. My inviolable liberty includes the freedom to be a total jerk to everyone around me, breaking all my promises, and turning away from my community.

Moral obligation as oppression. This is a popular belief I have seen more and more in everyday behaviour. People even directly said this to me. r/libertarian. Yet the idea is obscene. Imagine how hysterical, how intense your paranoia would have to be, for you to believe a philosophy to hostile to simply living as neighbours. It would literally be the end of society.

Yet in the Breitbart set, the communitarian values that strengthen promises and friendships in society are the bedrock of communism. As philosophy, this makes no sense. It mistakes the most abstract similarity – building and strengthening community is important – for the acorn whose greatest oak was Josef Stalin!

Conspiracy thinking as popular ideology. This is how having been one of literally thousands of students passing through a classroom over the years is seen as a nefarious mentorship in radical communism. Millions having been made – in their everyday thinking about politics – as deranged as McCarthy.

That was Andrew Breitbart’s original vision. We think of it as crazily white supremacist because that’s what Steve Bannon turned it into. So now, it's even more crazy. This is a popular way to think about marxism today. And even though I'm no marxist, I at least want to give the tradition's best thinkers their credit where my work is due.

Hey! Cultural Marxism! III: Like Rain At Your KKK Rally, Research Time, 28/08/2017

Yeah, it’s a pretty deep irony. Better men than me have described the utterly weird way the Frankfurt School thinkers have become the bogeymen of the radical white supremacist and libertarian set these days.

The Frankfurt School became the ideological prototypes of the cultural marxism that folks all over the far right see spreading everywhere.

Here’s something that tends to happen in the far-right of America since the Tea Party first blew up – they tend to mistake having been in the class of a professor for being the loyal soldier of their ideas.

The John Birch Society believed crazy shit like how a bunch of old
men who found most American culture totally distasteful and had no
experience or history of radical politics beyond the trade union and
international workers' associations could secretly direct a
revolution along completely different lines. Breitbart (the
network) took that conspiracist paranoid blindness to the
mainstream of American culture.

Barack Obama once took a course from Bill Ayers, who’d been in the radical anarchist Weather Underground decades before. Therefore, Obama was a disciple of Ayers, bringing the older radical’s politics to the Presidency.* Well, the same thing happened when Angela Davis was in a couple of classes by Herbert Marcuse.

* I think this is one reason why many Trump supporters throughout middle class Republican Party members aren’t concerned by the current President’s tacit support of extremist racist militias. They’re so accustomed to the notion that Obama was an extreme left-wing radical that they consider the President’s office long-radicalized.

Obama and Marcuse are – to a very special audience – a great triumph and a founder of ‘cultural marxism.’ The way it’s often used today, the term follows how from Andrew Breitbart understood it in most significant book, Righteous Indignation. Breitbart studied the works of the Frankfurt School himself – Marcuse, Theodor Adorno** – and came to a very unorthodox reading.

** Andrew Breitbart strikes me as a man who couldn’t appreciate Walter Benjamin. I don’t mean whether or not he’d agree with him – I’m talking about the value of his essays as a work of art and craftsmanship in philosophical writing.

Granted, it’s now a popular reading, thanks to him. It starts with his picture of the intellectual storehouse of communism.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau develops a concept of humanity that requires deep harmony with your community to complete yourself as a person. Georg Hegel transforms community into State, Karl Marx elaborates the theory into economic theories and real political movements.

The last of these was the Frankfurt School, the marxist theorists that fled Nazi Europe for the United States – all Jews, of course. They develop the idea that successfully changing society along a socialist line requires more than economic control, but changing the culture and moral values of the society.

The liberation movements of the 1960s were doing exactly that. Breitbart understood these movements as an explosion of marxism, but along cultural lines with activists instead of economic vectors with state planners.

He saw – as these philosophers had just developed their central theories of culture and social change – these threatening liberation movements emerge. He saw America walking the path to communism while singing songs of freedom.

The irony is that these movements had little to do with the cabal of refugee philosophers. Adorno and Horkheimer both found black culture distasteful, and Adorno developed a complex aesthetic theory which happened to justify his extreme hatred of jazz.

They were no directors of the revolutionary network. Women, black people, gay people, Indigenous people – they had nothing to do with a proper marxist revolution. That was for workers.

A very sarcastic ending. I want to talk more about this tomorrow.

Hey! Cultural Marxism! II: Missed Connections, Research Time, 25/08/2017

The philosophers went to the universities. The group of thinkers at the centre of Perry Anderson’s short book Considerations on Western Marxism are, more commonly, called the Frankfurt School.

They're at the centre of the great right-wing conspiracy theory of our time – cultural marxism. Part of what I want to do with the next few posts is clarify my ideas about this conspiracy image – the product of Andrew Breitbart’s weird interpretation of this existentialist marxism.

The cultural impact of this angry, angry man fascinates me.

I’ll be getting back to Breitbart’s interpretation later on, riffing from his book Righteous Indignation. I want to stick with Anderson for now, because Anderson describes accurately the history of the Frankfurt School and the other theorists of Western marxism.

So when I left off yesterday, Stalin had just purged the entire Soviet Union of any communist philosopher with any originality of thought beyond dutifully transcribing and explaining ideological directives from the Central Committee. Those people were all dead by the end of the 1930s.

It’s not as though the study or continuation of marxist theory was doing much better in Europe. The central clique of these thinkers in the university sector were at Max Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Hence the name.

They ran into some trouble when Hitler came to power. So Horkheimer and the rest of his crew picked up whatever they could and moved to New York.

Here was the break in the Cold War’s West* between philosophical creation and community organizing among working class people. The main institution the theorists used to become community activists was the Communist Party of each country where they lived.

* And the Cold War wouldn’t even start for another 15 years.

Anderson wrote his book in the 1970s, so there was no sign on the
horizon of the ironic movement in universities happening today:
Squeezed by large-scale underemployment, many humanities
researchers are pursuing careers outside the university campus,
and many on the left are becoming journalists and activists.

Already, the link between philosophers and activists was getting strained. The philosophers no longer worked for the political parties or the radical newspapers. They taught in universities. But there was still the party itself, where the theorists could work with the folks who pounded the streets and the factory floors.

Uprooting the entire intellectual rank and file of the western European workers’ movement** across the Atlantic Ocean had two effects.

** Or killing them. Many of them were also killed. Taken out of their homes and shot. Bundled into a car in the middle of the night, tortured, and never seen again.

Here was the first effect. I don’t even know why I included that note about so many socialist philosophers and theorists being killed. Because I can just say it here. The rise of Stalin in Russia and Hitler in Europe resulted in many original thinkers getting bullets in their brains. That’s one obvious loss to the community of writers and activists.

The other loss was a bit more subtle. While Horkheimer and the other political refugees from Hitler’s Europe were working in New York, they had no Communist Party to draw on.

Now, there were plenty of communist parties and groups in the United States. But none of them had the unity of the European communist parties. It was a literal unity, another function of the social organizing work Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did in the 19th century. They built an international conference for all the communist parties of Europe. It strengthened the unity of the European workers’ movement’s social network.

The flaw of the marxist tradition – and all traditions named after a
person – is excessive fealty to Marx himself. It hobbles a thinker
or an activist from adapting to changing times.

None of that existed in the United States. Its movements for workers’ rights developed in very different directions in an extremely different set of cultures from those in Europe. Left-wing politics in the United States was much more fragmentary, with different parties across the states all holding different principles and doing their own things.

That lack of centralization had one big advantage – it made the workers’ movement more flexible. The core ideas could survive many different attempts to repress them, their devotees could adapt to the most hostile and unstable political contexts. Plus, the movement on a national scale was more immune to pressure and co-optation by Stalin.

Not to say that plenty of communist parties throughout the United States didn’t become puppets of Stalinism. Many did. Which is why the ideas and goals of a social democratic liberation movement mutated away from communist parties themselves. But that’s for later.

The problem was that there was no unified political party on a continental scale for Frankfurt School leaders and other left-wing intellectuals to latch onto. So by the end of the Second World War, the university-based philosophers of the workers’ movement lost all their material connections to politics.

This is where the irony sets in . . . . To be continued