They Write Obituaries for the Post-Left. We Wrote a Book.
Tony Chamas (1Dime) and I announce our book, break down the leftist industrial complex, and take apart the "why not just Marxism" cope. Full episode on 1Dime Radio. Early copies at TUCON this August.
A certain kind of very-online political millennial associates the term “post-left” strictly with the Twitter accounts that revolved around Red Scare and the old What’s Left. They’re missing a bigger picture, fuller understanding and, crucially, the opportunity that comes from rethinking “post-left” beyond that moment and its personalities.
Compact Magazine has now published two obituaries on the “post-left” within a year’s time. The most recent installment was Geoff Shullenberger’s “The Obsolescence of the Post-Left” a couple weeks ago.1 Its argument: the post-left was a Twitter reaction to the failure of Bernie’s Our Revolution, and its whole content was “PMC bad.” Now that the PMC critique is being weaponized by the right and the center against Mamdani, the thing has expired. Past its sell-by date. If you’re still doing it, you missed the memo.
Cool. If the post-left was just a social scene from the early 2020s, a bunch of internet commentary, in-group shibboleths, and calling people “PMC” while missing the point of the theory, then I agree that it outlived its moment. As I’ve always been clear, using PMC as a slur was wrong all along.
The problem is, that scene was never the “post-left” in the first place. It was one loud wagon caravan mistaking itself for the territory.
As I put it Tony Chamas (Tony of 1Dime) this week:
“If you have a frontier that opens up, and all these wagon caravans that are moving into it, and you have this one wagon caravan of these people who react all the time and they’re very loud on Twitter, then they think, at the end of their exploration, that was the whole thing. They did it. They were it. What they don’t realize is that there were other caravans. There were other lone travelers. There were and continue to be all kinds of people out here in the wild wild west of this post-left frontier. And they’re trying to say, oh, nope, it’s dead, it’s buried, it’s gone... And I’m saying, no, the frontier is wide open.”
Tony and I just recorded this episode for 1Dime Radio. It was an opportunity to respond to the Compact obituary, promote a special IRL event, and announce something that ties all of this together: we’ve written a book on this very theme, and it’s coming out this fall: Post-Left Theory.
Most of it is unpublished material from both of us that converges on one theme, in print and audiobook. In this episode we give many of the themes a gloss: why the post-left is not an ideology, not a brand, not a political program, and why nobody who uses the term as a slur can define it.
We’re not just talking about being put out by the left, we’re talking about no longer being able to affirm the framework that the term champions in the first place. We’re not doing a “lefter than thou” socialite posture to put pressure on liberals or leftists, and we’re certainly not trying to resuscitate an Old Left.
“Remember why most people don’t take communism seriously, and the whole meme about ‘that wasn’t real communism’? Well, that applies here, too. What about actually existing leftism?... Where is this real Marxism? Where is the old left? What does that even mean, to be an old leftist today? That sounds pretty fucking conservative, if you ask me.” — Tony Chamas
My answer to the “that’s not left though” crowd is that they are appealing to an institution that no longer exists. The Second Workers International is gone. The material conditions that produced it are also gone, and by being gone, they render the whole Old Left ideal impossible. Reading books from 120 years ago does not give you the authority to speak on behalf of a dead church — all it does is cloud your perception of what’s going on now. It’s a weird kind of academic nostalgia, and using its own precious term, it is pure reaction.
Which is why the last stretch of the conversation goes where I think post-left theory has to go: through Marx, Heidegger, Bourdieu, Lacan, and Baudrillard, and beyond them by way of Lasch, Chesterton, MacIntyre, Illich, Postman, and Wendell Berry. We’re pushing it on towards the third term that both the nation-state worshipers and the family-values crowd are missing:
“No political big Other is going to come in and save you and give you community. Nothing that you vote for, and no party that could possibly ever do anything against capital or the machine, can give you community. Because community is made up of those relations of giving and receiving and dependency that necessarily cannot be mediated by some abstract institution without a face, or without an actual pulse... It has to be wrested from the jaws of capital by you, in your idiosyncratic and singular humanity.” — David McKerracher
The elephant in the room of “okay, if not left, why not right?” gets addressed in the Backroom on Tony’s Patreon. My short answer is: that’s just the other side of the duopoly. The duopoly runs on each supposedly mutually exclusive side being in total dependency on its other being its worst version of itself. Both sides get off on egging the other to be worse. Neither side has ever laid out a plausible path beyond the impasses of our moment. No political side, movement, party, or plan that we have encountered can hold water, much less hold together a legitimate mass in these times of fracture.
If you want to hear us go in depth into this book and get your hands on some early copies, come to TUCON at McKerracher Family Farm, August 27-29. Matthew Stanley will be there presenting on his new book coming out this year from TU Publishing: Dreaming Wide Awake: Christianity, Buddhism, Psychoanalysis.
There will be live podcasts, the official launch of Canon: TCG with early collectible cards, and presentations from fellow travelers. It’s all happening on a certified organic regenerative family farm in the woods. Camping is booked out, but the lodges and Airbnbs nearby are not. Tickets at canontcg.com/canonfest.
Thanks for reading.
