This is interesting, and I was totally unaware of it. I try to stay up on left-liberal discourse, but of course that means I miss a lot of left-illiberal discourse. Not on bluesky, etc. So Geoff if you've got time to share some examples of the discourse around this that'd be really illuminating!
On the substance, hasn't this argument about the Frankfurt school been made before? I see it as a pretty central thesis in e.g. Musa Al-Gharbi's project in We Have Never Been Woke. You can even see it in Rufo's stylized history of America's "Cultural Revolution."
Could the hand-wringing really just be that the illiberal left is reckoning with the following trilemma: either they continue their current anti-anti-imperialist complicity that prioritizes identity politics over class politics; or they go all in on historical materialism; or they abandon the revolutionary critical project and just become incrementalist liberals.
They obviously don't want to grasp the second horn because that'd be too professionally and socially de-stabilizing, nor do they want to compromise their moral convictions and grasp the third. So they'll end up in a position where they need to frantically deny Rockhill's arguments.
There isn't one "illiberal left." The identity politics people and the anti-imperialists are not the same people. Their interests may overlap, especially on Palestine; and to their enemies to the right and center, they both appear to "hate America" or what-have-you – but often they do not agree. The latter can be so unwoke, you could be forgiven for categorizing them as right-wing. Sometimes there's little daylight between them and Tucker Carlson.
The argument about the Frankfurt School is a hoary old one; dozens have made it before, but I'm not a books guy 😏. "Synthetic Left" is a particular derogative that was in favor a few years back. It's old hat to call the New Left a CIA op
Appreciate seeing Al-Gharbi mentioned. I don't understand your trilemma
"Respect," "defend" – that's just semantics. I'm not dug in to my position here. What standard we ought to apply when evaluating the USSR across its lifespan is a hard question to answer. Comparing it to "true socialism" is impossible because true socialism is global and does not exist (I'm not at all sure it can). Whereas, comparing it to more gentle experiments in social democracy is comparing apples to oranges, because of the obvious differences in underdevelopment, encirclement, exposure to existential threats. As for achievements, those you listed are pretty big, and there's one other worth mentioning, which is that the USSR helped keep socialism and anticolonial struggles alive in the Third World
Silly clickbait title, but it worked on me. This piece acts as if a central tension of the American socialist movement, obvious and glaring to all involved, is some kind of a revelation, and strangely chooses to focus on a random historian as opposed to much more influential "neo-campist" figures. Why not pick someone more famous and more interesting, like Parenti of Hudson? The Left doesn't have a Nick Fuentes, which should also be obvious, but its most popular entertainers are adjacent to what you're talking about in their attitude towards empire – have you listened to TrueAnon, Chapo on any foreign policy topic, or Radio War Nerd? I suppose I'm giving ammunition to the enemy here, but I support better understanding of all political movements, and more honest dialogue
Anyway, all this has been going on for decades and has been a thru-line of the millennial Left. Five years ago, the schism of the day used to be about whether Assad deserved “critical support.” (Then the Ukraine war fractured the Left again)
>For Rockhill and his allies, the correct political path is a sort of neo-Third Worldism aligned with Beijing, Havana, Caracas, and the other redoubts of “actually existing socialism”—
That's retarded. None of those countries practice a socialist mode of production except, very tendentiously, Cuba. Maybe you could claim Cuba still practices a form of the centrally-planned Soviet system. Maybe. They've made market reforms too!
Beg to differ. It's not retarded. These countries would look very different if they weren't under sanctions and the threat of CIA coups. This position is only a shade removed from defending the USSR, which also made market reforms
You should not defend the USSR. Its political economy sucked and it did not achieve socialism. Hell, most of the time, under its more honest leadership, it never even claimed to have achieved a socialist mode of production -- as China doesn't today.
The reactionary support of China by "anti-imperialist leftists" is so ironic to me. China basically practices one-party state capitalism now, and is quickly trying to catch up to the US's history of imperialist moral catastrophe in both it's own ethnic minority regions and places all over the globe including Africa. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a garbage take for a leftist movement to stake it's future on.
The USSR is worthy of respect despite the flaws that you mention, even the horrors of Stalinism. It's not a model, but some of its achievements could be
Indeed it is worthy of respect, but respect is not defense. Respect means engagement with the substantive project of communism in the Russian/Soviet context. To "respect" them by observing that the Soviet Union industrialized Russia and its former dominions to turn them into a geopolitical great power is to hold them to the standards of developmental capitalists, not those of the communist project.
They were supposed to achieve a new mode of production, not industrialize a semi-peripheral country.
This is interesting, and I was totally unaware of it. I try to stay up on left-liberal discourse, but of course that means I miss a lot of left-illiberal discourse. Not on bluesky, etc. So Geoff if you've got time to share some examples of the discourse around this that'd be really illuminating!
On the substance, hasn't this argument about the Frankfurt school been made before? I see it as a pretty central thesis in e.g. Musa Al-Gharbi's project in We Have Never Been Woke. You can even see it in Rufo's stylized history of America's "Cultural Revolution."
Could the hand-wringing really just be that the illiberal left is reckoning with the following trilemma: either they continue their current anti-anti-imperialist complicity that prioritizes identity politics over class politics; or they go all in on historical materialism; or they abandon the revolutionary critical project and just become incrementalist liberals.
They obviously don't want to grasp the second horn because that'd be too professionally and socially de-stabilizing, nor do they want to compromise their moral convictions and grasp the third. So they'll end up in a position where they need to frantically deny Rockhill's arguments.
There isn't one "illiberal left." The identity politics people and the anti-imperialists are not the same people. Their interests may overlap, especially on Palestine; and to their enemies to the right and center, they both appear to "hate America" or what-have-you – but often they do not agree. The latter can be so unwoke, you could be forgiven for categorizing them as right-wing. Sometimes there's little daylight between them and Tucker Carlson.
The argument about the Frankfurt School is a hoary old one; dozens have made it before, but I'm not a books guy 😏. "Synthetic Left" is a particular derogative that was in favor a few years back. It's old hat to call the New Left a CIA op
Appreciate seeing Al-Gharbi mentioned. I don't understand your trilemma
"Respect," "defend" – that's just semantics. I'm not dug in to my position here. What standard we ought to apply when evaluating the USSR across its lifespan is a hard question to answer. Comparing it to "true socialism" is impossible because true socialism is global and does not exist (I'm not at all sure it can). Whereas, comparing it to more gentle experiments in social democracy is comparing apples to oranges, because of the obvious differences in underdevelopment, encirclement, exposure to existential threats. As for achievements, those you listed are pretty big, and there's one other worth mentioning, which is that the USSR helped keep socialism and anticolonial struggles alive in the Third World
Silly clickbait title, but it worked on me. This piece acts as if a central tension of the American socialist movement, obvious and glaring to all involved, is some kind of a revelation, and strangely chooses to focus on a random historian as opposed to much more influential "neo-campist" figures. Why not pick someone more famous and more interesting, like Parenti of Hudson? The Left doesn't have a Nick Fuentes, which should also be obvious, but its most popular entertainers are adjacent to what you're talking about in their attitude towards empire – have you listened to TrueAnon, Chapo on any foreign policy topic, or Radio War Nerd? I suppose I'm giving ammunition to the enemy here, but I support better understanding of all political movements, and more honest dialogue
Anyway, all this has been going on for decades and has been a thru-line of the millennial Left. Five years ago, the schism of the day used to be about whether Assad deserved “critical support.” (Then the Ukraine war fractured the Left again)
- meant Michael Parenti (RIP) (though his son is interesting too) *or* Michael Hudson
>For Rockhill and his allies, the correct political path is a sort of neo-Third Worldism aligned with Beijing, Havana, Caracas, and the other redoubts of “actually existing socialism”—
That's retarded. None of those countries practice a socialist mode of production except, very tendentiously, Cuba. Maybe you could claim Cuba still practices a form of the centrally-planned Soviet system. Maybe. They've made market reforms too!
Beg to differ. It's not retarded. These countries would look very different if they weren't under sanctions and the threat of CIA coups. This position is only a shade removed from defending the USSR, which also made market reforms
You should not defend the USSR. Its political economy sucked and it did not achieve socialism. Hell, most of the time, under its more honest leadership, it never even claimed to have achieved a socialist mode of production -- as China doesn't today.
The reactionary support of China by "anti-imperialist leftists" is so ironic to me. China basically practices one-party state capitalism now, and is quickly trying to catch up to the US's history of imperialist moral catastrophe in both it's own ethnic minority regions and places all over the globe including Africa. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a garbage take for a leftist movement to stake it's future on.
The USSR is worthy of respect despite the flaws that you mention, even the horrors of Stalinism. It's not a model, but some of its achievements could be
Indeed it is worthy of respect, but respect is not defense. Respect means engagement with the substantive project of communism in the Russian/Soviet context. To "respect" them by observing that the Soviet Union industrialized Russia and its former dominions to turn them into a geopolitical great power is to hold them to the standards of developmental capitalists, not those of the communist project.
They were supposed to achieve a new mode of production, not industrialize a semi-peripheral country.