Vagrich Bakhchanyan, Stalin Face, 1981. Stamped cardboard. Kolodzei Art Foundation
Two recent articles bring to light theoretical tensions in left-wing criticism of identity politics: Zine Magubane’s review of Kenan Malik’s Not So Black and White, and an interview with Gabriel Rockhill in Monthly Review.1 Each article has its particular realm of interest. In one case, it is the relation between issues of race and class in the United States, and in the other, it is the contribution of middle-class intellectuals to the dismantling of the left since the postwar era. Both articles illustrate problems in Marxist theory around questions of method as they inadvertently raise the issue of the distinction between a reductionist and a non-reductionist Marxism. Moreover, they also raise the problem that the formula according to which material relations can become naturalized as ideology is also used by post-structuralists who are not Marxist and may even be anti-Marxist. What then is the distinction between Marxist and postmodern understandings of materialism? How do efforts to regain intellectual ground lost to the postmodern pseudo-left run up against traditional problems of method?
The longstanding debate over economistic or vulgar Marxist reductionism coincides with the avoidance in neoliberal academia of serious discussions concerning debates around the term “cultural Marxism.” Since cultural Marxism is in fact the lingua franca of scholars in postmodern cultural theory who rely on cultural studies methods and discourse theory, I had proposed to the editors of the Canadian journal RACAR (the official publication of the Universities Art Association of Canada) a special theme issue on the topic sometime in the months after the debate between Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson in Toronto in April 2019, which was titled “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism.” The journal’s editor in chief turned down the topic but suggested that I submit an essay instead, which I did and that was rejected by the editorial committee without peer review. This silence regarding matters that are foundational to the discipline are directly related to the general silence among bureacurats regarding political matters. This is not necessarily for the worse since disciplines seek to avoid political manipulation, especially by conservative forces. The risk taken, however, is that avoidance of politics can also enable those same forces. This on the whole is the dilemma that faces progressive neoliberals as they seek to offset the onslaught of global capitalism and control by the billionaire class through a now moribund postmodern consensus in the cultural sector. We are indeed in an interregnum, as Antonio Gramsci once said, and the monsters we face are disoriented academic novelties that have long ago given up on the notion of social progress.
The use of the term cultural Marxism by the so-called alt-right has had a chilling effect on academic and public discourse, but it also enables leftists to address issues that they might prefer to ignore or forget. Putting the idea of cultural Marxism to rest as simply an alt-right provocation allows “orthodox” Marxists to avoid dealing with developments in Marxist theory since the postwar era. It also allows “left” postmodernists to avoid dealing with questions of political economy and socialist politics. At the institutional level, this allows intellectuals to maintain a cosy relationship with neoliberal university administrators and the bourgeois trade union bureaucracy. The meeting of the president of the Teamsters union with Donald Trump on January 3, 2024, three days before the January 6 coup attempt anniversary is a small indication of the extent to which neoliberalism corporatism is allied the far right. In May of 2023, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten travelled to Ukraine to show support for the NATO-backed regime of Vladimir Zelensky, who laid his country to waste through a predictably failed policy of anti-Russian and far-right nationalism. All of this seems remote somehow from postmodernism. In the increasingly rarefied realm of radical politics, the left thinks that it can ignore what we could think of as the “political unconscious” of the generation of intellectuals that have been educated in structuralism, semiotics, discourse theory, deconstruction, and the like. When students of critical social theory look at the world around them, they become aware of the gaps in their education and explore radical intellectual sources on their own. When they do this they understandably import ways of thinking that are at odds with the Marxist left, or they try to play the academic game by combining new and old methods in ways that presume to update Marxism for contemporary times. The special issue of the journal Crisis and Critique on “Class(es) Today” is just such an effort that provides some valuable insights on familiar issues but that in other respects caters to postmodern zaniness.2
Like the political establishment, the postmodern left gets away with some intellectual backsliding when it does not compare itself to the best in the radical tradition but to the venality of the mainstream and the conservative right. The atmosphere of fear and loathing that has been created by the use of the term cultural Marxism by devious people like James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson, or dangerous people like Stephen Bannon and Anders Breivik, should not cause committed left intellectuals to back down from using and debating this concept. However, there can be consequences for those that do. Neverminding the outdated accusation of “cultural Bolshevism,” there are distinctly contemporary issues that the term cultural Marxism understands about the relations between Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School and postmodernism, not to mention the never-ending analysis of ideology that is fundamental to the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao, but that do not necessarily advance the left political agenda in an immediate, practical sense.3 When it comes to the American social democratic politics of reform and wealth redistribution, an agenda that is focused on higher wages within a bourgeois labour politics would no doubt be opposed to a theoretical discussion that might do more to describe middle-class culture wars than to build a political base on the left. While it must be said that much of this comes around to whether one is committed to identity politics or to labour politics, which stand in imprecisely as liberalism and socialism, an unstated aspect of theoretical acrimony has less to do with scholasticism than it does with political differences among progressive and left factions. While not all theoretical disagreements need be reconciled, especially when put to a vote, squabbles nevertheless reduce the possibility of a mass-based thrust of the socialist left beyond the control of bourgeois parties.
More than one decade before anyone had heard of the madman Breivik, a book like Dennis Dworkin’s Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain, published in 1997 by Duke University Press, presented the intellectual history of British cultural theory and cultural studies as a “theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar British left.”4 This involved an assessment of the contributions of figures like Eric Hobsbawm, Sheila Rowbotham, Catherine Hall, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. A few years later, in 2004, John Hutnyk published Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies, a Pluto Books title which argues that cultural studies is less a radical discipline than an academic field that toys with Marxism in ways that have nothing to do with anti-capitalism.5 The figures he addresses are Jacques Derrida, James Clifford, Gayatri Spivak, Georges Bataille, Homi Bhabha, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Lawrence Grossberg, who at one time presented himself as specialist on such discussions around Marxism and the interpretation of culture, has since then sold the store, as it were, alongside most of his likeminded colleagues, including the dean of subcultural anti-hegemony Dick Hebdige.6 Another of the premiere commentators on the (broken) links between Marxist social theory and postmodernism, Douglas Kellner, emphasizes in his work on cultural Marxism the role of thinkers like Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton in the origins and development of cultural Marxism, without scare quotes, a field in which cultural phenomena, cultural ideas, cultural forms, cultural artifacts, cultural texts, cultural forces, cultural formations, cultural groups, cultural institutions, cultural values, cultural production, cultural history, cultural criticism and cultural politics are related to questions of class, ideology and society.7 Indeed, there is much work for academic cultural studies to perform in light of residual, dominant and emergent “cultural” theories.
As early as the mid-1970s, Perry Anderson diagnosed the canon of Western Marxism as a symptom of the defeat of revolutionary socialism in the 1920s and the rise of fascism.8 The concern of Western Marxist thinkers, however, was not to abandon Marxist politics but to explain the role that culture and ideology play in the legitimization of capitalist society. Part of the difficulty in Marxist cultural theory has been the inordinate role given to the helpful but potentially mechanistic base and superstructure metaphor. According to the standard model, the function of ideological superstructures – the realm of ideas, philosophy, politics, culture, religion and law – is to serve the socio-economic interests that are determined by the economic foundations of society and its dominant class. Culture is therefore said to reflect, naturalize and legitimize class domination, covering over social contradictions through the apparent autonomy of culture. Although there are clear indications that Marx and Engels had such a model in mind, the general purpose of this paradigm was to criticize mechanistic theories and understand the autonomy of culture and politics. This would further enable the understanding of social change.
While in his mature writings Marx is focused on economic theory, the realm of aesthetics allows us to appreciate the non-reductionist nature of Marxist theory with regard to ideology. While the notion that art is “relatively autonomous” from the socio-economic base is attributed to Louis Althusser, there is no reason to conflate the writings of Marx and Engels with the former. Not unlike Andrei Zhdanov, the progenitor of Socialist Realism, Marx and Engels believed that it was possible to appreciate art that was made in former times, like the ancient Greek art of slave societies, or the bourgeois art of realists like Victor Hugo and Gustave Courbet. However, unlike Stalinists, Marx and Engels did not automatically support the “politically correct” art of their leftist contemporaries who mechanistically reflected the dogma of the political left, which they rejected with the term tendenzkunst, or tendency art. In contrast, Vladimir Lenin promoted “party” art that was involved in a politically engaged transformation of the autonomist aesthetics of bourgeois idealism. Mediating between these options, Leon Trotsky was appreciative of works of art that qualified as exceptional but nevertheless privileged aesthetic works that reflect social contradictions in a critical manner. This approach was elaborated through Georg Lukács’ historical materialist studies of literature. Lukács considered that in some cases the work of a bourgeois artist can more accurately reflect social contradictions than the work of a left-wing artists of lesser note. The famous example is his study of Balzac, a royalist who excelled in the depiction of social types. Aside from his development of cinematic montage, the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein relied somewhat mechanistically on this encyclopaedic logic of social characters, leaving the function of montage to questions of dramatic action that are designed to spark political consciousness. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht broke with the Lukácsian mold by showing the contradictory dimensions of typical characters in circumstances in which a character could be said to have changed, leaving it up to the viewer to decide what they had seen performed. Frankfurt School thinkers, in contrast to the previous, were more concerned with the capitalist conditions of cultural production, beyond the text, which serious art was expected to resist. They reiterated Marx’s non-reductionism by refusing to impose political directives and meanings on artistic production. On the other hand, the writings of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and later Henri Lefebvre, led Marxist cultural theory to the critical understanding of popular and mass culture, linking the concerns of avant-garde artists and the study of modern communication technologies to Marxist and sociological analysis. The delayed influence of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, however, reasserted base and superstructure thinking, linking the thesis of ideological naturalization to Althusser’s emphasis on culture as the purview of the ideological state apparatus. The concept of political consent, where the masses are not simply dominated but negotiate the terms of their domination, led cultural studies scholars to focus on ethnography and reception. The cross-disciplinary field of cultural studies, which emerged in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, tends to argue that because of unresolved contradictions in a society of class exploitation and class mobility, no socio-economic regime is entirely absolute and therefore no works of culture have fixed and determinate meanings. Cultural works are therefore conditioned by contradictory intentions, meanings and interpretations, making the realm of culture into a sphere of ideological disagreement, negotiation and contestation. However, the impact of institutional gatekeepers in the academy and the culture industry – newspapers, magazines, radio, cinema, internet platforms and advertising, along with the legal and governmental regimes that regulate them – limit the potential of radical critique and the democratic reorganization of cultural production that could serve revolutionary forces.
Second generation Frankfurt School thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Oskar Negt with Alexander Kluge, or Marxist sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu, considered that the progressive dimension of bourgeois humanism has been exhausted by the conditions of capitalist production that transform the sphere of public deliberation and critique into mediated publicity, or what the Situationist Guy Debord referred to as the conditions of spectacle. These postwar thinkers viewed the democratic potential of New Left movements – the student movement, the anti-war movement, second-wave feminism, black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, Third World anti-imperialism, the gay rights movement and the ecological movement – as generally progressive but limited at best since most of these had abandoned Marxist class struggle for greener pastures. This is the context in which so-called “postmodern” approaches – phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, semiotics, deconstruction, discourse theory, schizanalysis – came into use on the academic left and within social movement thought. More concerned with social change than with socialism, these movements could barely be distinguished from the structural transformations brought about by transnational capitalism – the consumer society, information society, the post-industrial society, late capitalism, post-Fordism, etc. The consequent notion that the goal of social movements is to force their message into the mainstream capitalist apparatus – the university, the press, the museum, advertising, social policy – is only one example of the lowered expectations of the countercultural left, who came to consider any form of closure or normativity, including the commitment to socialism, as totalitarian. However, the real measure of defeatism and pessimism on the Western left in the 1960s and 70s is the prestige and prominence given to postmodern theories that were intentionally difficult to understand and sceptical of Enlightenment notions of universal progress.9 Instead, postmodern intellectual “interventions” were concocted in ways that would cause some kind of doubt or instability within the status quo, which was conceived as a reified system (system of reification) or machinic apparatus (society of machinic control). The conceit of playful and recondite postmodern theories, in contrast to Enlightenment knowledge, is that one can never know anything for sure because one can never know anything in advance. Althusserian determination in the last instance never arrives and Minerva’s owl has gone the way of the flightless and extinct Dodo.
It is postmodern theory and not Marxism that fetishizes the notion of social construction. While the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir wanted women to have economic independence from men, and in this way applied Marxist historical materialism to the condition of women, now defined as a social class, postmodernist thinkers like Judith Butler are never certain about gender categories and are not especially concerned with economic inequality between gender groups. In this regard, identity is defined as a social construct that is continuously negotiated and renegotiated in relation to changes in culture, politics and society. The universal politics of rights and emancipation that formed the historical background of women’s liberation and socialist feminism is replaced by postmodernism with a hermetic or “baroque” logic of language games within relations of power that, in the terms of Michel Foucault, are discursive and diffuse. The goal of “left” politics is no longer to get rid of capitalism but to assail social norms and mobilize the new identities that are subjectivated by the deterritorializing flows of capitalism, or what Gilles Deleuze referred to as desiring production in desiring machines. What came to be known as difference politics shifted the Marxist concern with socialist production and meaning to populist consumption and the proliferation of situated knowledges. The postmodern project was by and large endorsed by cultural studies, which reacted unevenly to the renewed interest in anarchism, communism and socialism in the late 1990s. Theoretically justified in their embrace of institutional power, the postmodernists of the 1980s and 90s accepted the neoliberalization of the academy and the museum, hedging their bets and their career reputations on the logic of market fragmentation they thought would facilitate a new cultural politics of difference and representation. As university administrators created new forms of evaluation where the customer is always right, well-paid professors defined themselves as facilitators rather the instructors. In one class I attended at the Université du Québec à Montréal, a university professor, who was considered a model to be emulated, played mood music at the start and end of his class, awarding door prizes, like Oprah Winfrey, to students who correctly answered his pop quizzes. In my day, it was enough to be allowed to bring coffee to class. Another neoliberal model of success, this one at the Rochester Institute of Technology, taught his class in such a way as to train his students for his easy tests, reassuring them, with his fist raised, that he was showing them “how to take care of that bitch.” This high-priced education in capitalist violence now wears the mantle of social justice. Contemporary Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies in government and business reflect the neoliberal strategies adopted by those second-generation postmodernists who staked their claims against the “modernist” left, in most cases turning against the Western Marxist and Frankfurt School thinkers who paved their way. And they are the progressives in the bunch.
It took some time, but after several decades the right wing caught on to the fact that it is the theoretical sophistication of cultural Marxism and not countercultural delinquency that defines the intellectual horizon of most scholars on the postmodern left. However, it is not cultural studies that define the resurgence of the left since the 2000s. It is rather the rejection, or at least the critique, of postmodernized and neoliberalized cultural studies by leftists who have regrouped around socialist, communist, social democratic and anarchist traditions. This focus on radical sources is something that most progressive intellectuals have not dealt with very successfully. They have instead opted for flaccid versions of new social movement activism, which, alongside postmodern approaches to cultural representation and discursive power, enables an all-of-the-above approach to progressive issues without handicapping anyone with commitments that would be too divisive or embarrassing. The failure of this programmatically weak left-liberal, liberal pluralist and postmodern strategy is evident in so many ways, least of all the current attack on the right to denounce Israeli genocide, which provides a clear picture of how far down the neoliberal rabbit hole the academic establishment has travelled.10
With the reactionary agenda of the political right now advanced by neoliberals to prevent the rise of grassroots and labour insurgencies, ideologues on the alt-right have latched onto postmodern cultural studies topics to not only trigger plebian resentments, but to divide the left against itself. This happens in two ways: on the one hand, by heightening the political rhetoric around identity issues, which finds fertile soil in the U.S. especially, and on the other, by heightening the class dynamics that separate the middle-class intelligentsia, in the knowledge and culture industries, and the media, from the class and labour-oriented socialist left. And so, not only does the right-wing bogeyman version of so-called cultural Marxism give the right a platform with which to propagate nationalist, populist and fascistic demagoguery, but real debates within genuine cultural Marxism continue to cause political paroxysms within a progressive movement that for good reason is desperate to gain traction. To prevent the right from exploiting these weaknesses through to nuclear and climate Armageddon, the left must address its own intellectual problems as best as possible. This effort is hampered not only by the prevailing conditions, but by the alt-right attack on cultural Marxism, which disingenuously traces the sources of postmodern cultural studies back to the Frankfurt School, Western Marxism, Marxism and Hegel, retroscoping postmodern approaches that are not only anti-Marxist, but that reinscribe conservative and fascist anti-Enlightenment principles in seemingly progressive developments such as intersectionality, decoloniality, left populism, critical race theory and afro-pessimism. By attacking these trends as Marxist, the political right helps progressive neoliberals delude themselves into thinking that these approaches are radical. The neoliberal postmodernists are rather the loyal anti-essentialist opposition of the ethno-nationalist right. Neither of these groups is socialist. The obvious problem with left postmodernism is that by avoiding radical leftism it contributes to worsening social conditions for humanity at large, especially those minority groups and de-developed nations it claims to be concerned about. Bewildered socialists who want some attention and possibly a career in neoliberal institutions are compelled to defend the postmodern theories that they should instead be challenging while at the same time building a movement of the working class outside of and against the two-party consensus.
The rest of this paper is available on my academia page at:
https://www.academia.edu/113064683/Bugaboos_of_Baroque_Marxism_Class_and_Identity_in_Cultural_Theory
Notes
1. Zine Magubane, “The Class Politics of Race,” Jacobin (December 21, 2023), https://jacobin.com/2023/12/kenan-malik-not-so-black-and-white-book-review-class-race-1619-1776-political-economy, reprinted from https://catalyst-journal.com/2023/08/the-class-politics-of-race. Gabriel Rockhill and Zhao Dingqi, “Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism,” Monthly Review 75:7 (December 1, 2023), https://monthlyreview.org/2023/12/01/imperialist-propaganda-and-the-ideology-of-the-western-left-intelligentsia/.
2. See Frank Ruda and Agon Hamza, “Introduction: Class(es) Today,” Crisis & Critique 10:1 (2023) 4-7. I have written about this issue in a forthcoming project on the class critique of the petty bourgeoisie.
3. For a discussion of cultural Marxism in the context of race politics, see the last section of the chapter “Racialism and Its Discontents” in Marc James Léger, Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation(Ottawa: Red Quill Books, 2022).
4. Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origin of Cultural Studies(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Note also that Social Text, which is an imprint of the Duke University Press, published an essay by John Brenkman, “Theses on Cultural Marxism,” in a 1983 issue of the journal. See John Brenkman, “Theses on Cultural Marxism,” Social Text No.7 (Spring-Summer 1983) 19-33. For a discussion of the appropriation of the term cultural Marxism by the alt-right, see Marc Tuters, “Cultural Marxism,” Krisis #2 (2018) 32-34, and Joan Braune, “Who’s Afraid of the Frankfurt School? ‘Cultural Marxism’ as an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory,” Journal of Social Justice Vol.9 (2019), https://transformativestudies.org/wp-content/uploads/Joan-Braune.pdf.
5. John Hutnyk, Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies, London: Pluto Press, 2004.
6. Compare Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988) to Lawrence Grossberg, We All Want to Change the World: The Paradox of the US Left, A Polemic(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2015). See also Stephanie LeMenager, “High and Dry: On Deserts and Crisis: Interview with Dick Hebdige,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 1:1 (Winter 2013), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/565575/pdf.
7. See Doug Kellner, “Cultural Marxism, British cultural studies, and the reconstruction of education,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 55:13 (2023), 1423-35. See also Douglas Kellner, Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies (New Delhi: Critical Quest, 2013).
8. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976).
9. Pluckrose and Lindsay make a valuable but nevertheless incomplete critique of the misconstrued “application” of postmodern theory in third-wave social justice activism. See Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (Durham: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020).
10. Consider for example the anti-democratic removal of three university presidents in the context of Congressional investigations into the critique of the Zionist settler colonial and genocidal policies of the Israeli government, construed as campus anti-Semitism. See for example Len Gutkin, “A Decade of Ideological Transformation Comes Undone: What the congressional antisemitism hearing really means,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (December 22, 2023), https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-decade-of-ideological-transformation-comes-undone.