There is a specter haunting the discourse on Left Twitter. The specter of the “Post Left.”
Perhaps you, dear reader, are not brain poisoned enough by social media to even know what I am talking about. In which case, I both envy you and wish you well. Feel free to go about your business with the limited time you have left on this earth, with the most probable scenario being that any sense of yourself is a chemically-induced mirage, and that upon your death, you will be indifferently obliterated for all time, never to return to this or any realm.
For those whom that truth offers no relief from the addiction of ideological warfare of the lowest order… Read on.
What is the Post Left? Its critics certainly think they know. It’s a rival left media clique! It’s red-brown “Strasserism!” It’s just a bunch of neocons in their larva stage! It’s a psyop from Pine Gap!
It should also be noted up front that these critics are not referring to what is called post-left anarchism, which is, like all anarchist labels, just a way of saying you are a liberal who really resents your father for giving you that trust fund.
No. The Post Left is a reference to what could, I think, be fairly called a group of orthodox-ish Marxists furious at the emergence of identity politics as the dominant ideology among what today can be called The Left. This group of post leftists are often attacked as “class reductionists". In other words, people who reduce everything to class and ignore the smorgasbord of oppressed groups and issues that intersectionalist/critical theory/idpol people claim to champion.
I am forced to wonder if part of this confusion is partly the post leftists’ fault. Because while it is fair to push back against a term like reductionist, the criticism is fundamentally correct. Really, it is not a criticism at all, but a reasonable understanding of a position many Marxists hold - including most of the older generation of Marxists who attacked white supremacy and racism way before anyone was “woke”.
Those Marxists did not have a portfolio of color-coded Oppression Olympics charts, or some strange revenge fantasy where previously established racial hierarchies would be inverted. They sought to reduce political action to class struggle because they saw race and other supposedly intractable biological divisions between their fellow humans as artificial distinctions imposed by the ruling bourgeois class to divide the working class.
Agree or disagree with that claim personally, but it is the Marxist view of identity politics. The working class is not an identity in the Marxist framework, it is a relationship to production. It is not a fixed immutable position in time and space, but a synchronous association that exists in a fluctuating dynamic where people can, at least in theory, enter and exit classes based on their location within the system of capitalist production.
For example, you could win the lottery (lol, no) and receive enough money after taxes to quit your call center job and buy a sufficient amount of financial assets to live off other people’s productivity. And guess what friendo? In that scenario, you just jumped from prole to bouj. You changed classes. No new identity necessary. You’re still pretending you liked Get Out, same as before.
To respond to the point you already made in your head (don’t @ me), yes. There is more to maintaining a superior class position than just wealth. You are not going to fit in to bouj society initially. But, as_a_Marxist, you would realize all these silly little ruling class customs and systems of etiquette are just evolved social status games among the (capitalist) elite. There is no particular reason that fork is the salad fork and that one is not, other than that knowing the difference provides social cache in intra-elite competition. See the ever-evolving woke lexicon for a more contemporary example.
There is a reason all those striving petty bouj helicopter parents put down their crouching tiger mom, hidden law of attraction books, and started reading White Fragility. And it was not because they had a sudden onslaught of empathy. Diversity and Inclusion is now the adorning rhetoric to the uniform path of exclusive opportunities. So don’t worry, you can just Do The Reading and your wealth will do the rest.
OK. So the “Post Left” is just old school Marxists who hate identity politics? Yes and no. And here is, in my humble opinion, where the gas meets the flame.
A critique has emerged from a certain corner of Marxist discourse that goes beyond targeting the 1%, or the bourgeoisie proper. Building on the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, this class analysis has broadened to include the so-called professional managerial class (PMC):
The notion of the“PMC” was an effort to explain the largely“middle class” roots of the New Left in the sixties and the tensions that were emerging between that group and the old working class in the seventies, culminating in the political backlash that led to the election of Reagan. The right embraced acaricature of this notion of a“new class,” proposing that college-educated professionals — especially lawyers, professors, journalists, and artists — make up apower-hungry“liberal elite” bent on imposing its version of socialism on everyoneelse.
The PMC grew rapidly. From1870to1910alone, while the whole population of the United States increased two and one-third times and the old middle class of business entrepreneurs and independent professionals doubled, the number of people in what could be seen as PMC jobs grew almost eightfold. And in the years that followed, that growth only accelerated. Although avariety of practical and theoretical obstacles prevent making any precise analysis, we estimate that as late as1930, people in PMC occupations still made up less than1percent of total employment. By1972, about24percent of American jobs were in PMC occupations. By1983the number had risen to28percent and by2006, just before the Great Recession, to35percent.
The relationship between the emerging PMC and the traditional working class was, from the start, riven with tensions. It was the occupational role of managers and engineers, along with many other professionals, to manage, regulate, and control the life of the working class. They designed the division of labor and the machines that controlled workers’ minute-by-minute existence on the factory floor, manipulated their desire for commodities and their opinions, socialized their children, and even mediated their relationship with their ownbodies.
As anyone who has ever attended a DSA meeting or had any in-person or virtual left wing discussion knows, this is the actual class most leftist activists come from. Which raises some rather interesting questions.
Are PMCs really members of the working class? And, if not, can they really advocate for the worker class?
If you are a Marxist, the answers to the second question is decidedly no. This is not a moral claim or an attack on people’s motives and virtue, but simply a recognition of one of Marxism’s most basic principles. Namely, that no class can ever truly advocate for the interests of another class. That classes always act in their own interest. Do you even class struggle, bro?
So that leaves the litigation of the first question, which the “post left” (such that it exists), answers in the negative. Therefore the PMC is categorized not as members of the working class, but as part of the petite bourgeoisie. In other words, the post left believe the PMC are not only not part of the working class, but that they are a class enemy of the working class.
Are you bored yet? I know I am. But let us continue anyway. If you have gone this far most of your human parts are dead, and the only joy left in your life is watching your enemies suffer. Here for it.
So why is this ostensibly minor disagreement over classification causing such a fuss? Well, because if you consider the PMC and their failchildren (PMC-FC, if you will) members of a rival class to the working class, your analysis of their behavior takes a decidedly sinister interpretation. Which is not to say it is wrong.
If the PMC is a rival class, then the current wokeness crusade looks less like sincere social justice activism, and more like a power play by the PMC-FC to set themselves up as the next generation of managers within the capitalist system. Identity politics is then a class project by the PMC-FC to escape becoming the working class, and to enshrine themselves as a new clergy with the power to bless or condemn - rather than oppose - capitalist power.
This blessed ecumenical order of the human resources department is not opposing the exploitation of the capitalist system, but trying to extort their way into a having a seat at the table: Nice corporate brand ya got there, be a shame if someone called it racist. Perhaps for a few donations to my NGO and employing a few of my guys on the premises I could save you from such embarrassment.
Essentially, the critique is that the PMC-FC are pretending to advocate for working people’s interests, when they are really auditioning to become the next generation of managers for capital. And, to achieve that end, they Do The Work of mystifying class relations by continually reframing materialist class struggles as tests of personal morality.
Which is to say, the PMC-FC are really flattering the pretensions and aligning with the interests of the bouj establishment who, of course, are liberals.
Liberalism always attempts to make the individual ultimately responsible for all political problems (wear your mask!), and works to de-politicize all political issues by transforming them into either technical or ethical quandaries. When political issues can not be de-politicized easily, they are privatized again into concerns of “civil society,” i.e. problems to be dealt with by power systems that rely on the patronage of the bourgeoisie via philanthropy (politics by other means).
I know. I know. How much longer can this piece really go on? You could have backed out before, but now you kind of feel invested having read this far. Don’t. Just go. You really don’t need this in your life. You can literally do anything else. I’m trying to do you a favor here… Fine.
It should be no surprise that identifying the class many leftists belong to as a class enemy of the working class has ruffled some rose emojis. But then going even further and claiming that their performative woke activism is really masking a pursuit of their own material class interests, which entail trying to show they can discipline workers for the bourgeoisie to maintain their superior class position, well, that is going to lead to some of the typical idpol leftist crybullying: This is violence. This is the patriarchy. This is white supremacy. This erases trans lives. I’m literally shaking right now. I’m. So. Tired.
To be clear, this does not mean the PMC-FC are not socialists. Socialism precedes Marxism and even has a tradition of coming from the upper classes and proudly being absurdly idealistic and obnoxiously puritanical. Commonly referred to as Utopian socialism, this form of socialism would have no trouble squaring the circle of having one class surrender their own interests and advocate for another. It is under the Marxist version of socialism, and the concept of class struggle, that this is considered an impossibility.
Aye, there’s the rub. Many of the PMC-FC claim to be Marxists and that they are waging a (don’t laugh!) revolutionary struggle to liberate the proletariat and crush the bourgeoisie. First we take the HR departments, then the world! Woke corporate functionaries of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your privilege (just kidding, you get to keep that if you learn the lingo and camouflage it appropriately)!
In reality, we all know how this story ends. A portion of the PMC-FC gets absorbed into the higher tiers of management within the capitalism system, and a much larger portion falls into the working class. The PMC-FC that make the cut will extol the virtues and social justice of woke capitalism - not perfect, but thankfully the elect are Doing The Work from the inside - then point at “fascists” as the cause of the continued misery of the working class. Rinse, repeat.
Whether this is a sustainable model is an open question. As Ehrenreich herself notes, the professional managerial class is being sliced and diced by neoliberal capitalism and its unrestrained monopolistic tendencies. Doctors have to join larger provider networks. Lawyers are forced into conglomerated corporate law firms. Factory mangers and engineers are watching production go elsewhere thanks to the internet and “free trade”. And journalists are being squeezed on all ends by the uncompensated sharing of their work by tech monopolies and no real protection from being the playthings of private equity banksters.
Then again, the professional managerial class is arguably a relic of the (rapidly disintegrating) post-World War 2 capitalist order anyway. Under that order, the United States had almost 50% of global GDP. A large managerial class was needed to discipline workers at the heart of such a massive industrial economy. But with neoliberal globalization, new technologies to assist production, and the rise of the Asian economies, such a class - in the United States at least - may have outlived its usefulness to the bourgeoisie. What’s left to manage?
It is far from obvious that the current PMC has a future, let alone that there is one for their failchildren. Grifting, emotional blackmail, and reputational racketeering may be all the PMC-FC have left. But those parasitic activities do not employ a sufficient amount of people to sustain a class large enough to be politically relevant. Expect the whining to go nuclear in the years to come as more and more of the PMC-FC find themselves at the lower ends of the economy and fewer and fewer institutional players in government and business even pretend to care.
This also means the conflict between Leftists and “Post Leftists” is set to get even more intense as the contradictions heighten. As identity politics/PMC-FC leftists become increasingly precarious and dependent on bouj patronage they will also become increasingly distant from anything resembling a working class agenda. Post Leftists will see the disconnect and note it, and The Left will have no choice but to post through it and ignore the critique because they have no serious answer as to why their purportedly radical agenda perfectly aligns with the interests of billionaires and multinational corporations. How can you call me a tool for capital when I am literally a communist, you idiot?!?! Welcome to the future, the same, but more.
OK. So... What have we learned?
There is arguably such a thing as the “Post Left.”
It can be defined as old school Marxists who object to identity politics and see the PMC failchildren promoting it as enemies of the working class.
In so far as The Left is trying to integrate within the capitalist system as a new managerial class they will perpetually provoke the ire of the Post Left who believe in class struggle.
Wow, does this not really matter, at all. This will only impact you at all if you spend way too much time online and your brain has been deranged beyond repair.
Every second you read this post is time you can never get back.
