Why I Am Not A Marxist, or: Beyond Old vs. New Left, Why Left At All? What About Something Else Entirely?

Why the situation is different from what Marx was looking at or responding to, how this calls old solutions into question, and what any new perspective, proposals, or plan of action must first take to

Driving from the applewood orchard, where I had been cutting dead trees all day in 2022, I said, “I could, at this point, probably write up 7 pages that bring together all the reasons why I’m not a Marxist.”

Mikey said, “Then hang up, pull over, and write it now.”

So I did. On the side of the highway with my hazard lights flashing, I speedily wrote this out.

That’s how most of my writing comes out, because someone asks me a specific question or makes some kind of request that relates to something I’ve been over-thinking. The magical moment gets unlocked by the concrete Other’s request aligning with my own labor (with all the pregnancy connotations that work can carry).

What follows is something I cannot “work through” properly. It is rough. It is raw. It is true. Hell, it might even be good. But it’s not everything. My recent work on the Post Class Fractured Mass takes certain aspects of this and provides a much more sturdy basis with more of the context and stakes. ALL of the work at Theory Underground goes “further” in various ways.

I’ve had a kind of writer’s block about this piece because I wanted to polish it, but I can’t find the time or energy to do so.

If I had an editor it would be different, but go read the TU Publisher’s Statement if you’ve forgotten that most of what you will see here is in its first draft mode. Go read the “Writer’s Block” and “The Fuck It Button.”

Suffice it to say, I KNOW there are kinds of Marxism that could recognize what I’m pointing out here. I know there are Marxists who are big brained enough to contend with these changes. The axe I have to grind is with those Marxists with whom I have organized in the past. Even then, I respect and appreciate their principled take on the world. I just think it is missing the point.

What follows are my reasons why I am unconvinced that the Old or New Left has the correct diagnosis of our situation, much less a plausible or preferable way forward.

High Modernism

High Modernism is wrong, pseudoscientific, and worse of all for Marxists, utopian. What is “High Modernism”? The belief that all problems can be rationally solved by formalistic procedures, top down administration that works in one place and therefore should work everywhere else, where one person or group can dictate what ought to be done and, because they are the most scientific, those proposals will work everywhere.

James C. Scott shows how this comes from a specific time of scientific optimism bolstered by the tremendous gains and astonishing horror ignited by the march of industrialization. What high modernism runs up against are the limits of formalistic knowledge, science, and planning. What works in one county does not in another. The corn that grows best in Massachusetts does not grow well in Idaho. The shit that can be grown everywhere is less tasty and is literally empty of nutritional content, i.e. dead calories. Though this is common knowledge for ecologists today, it was not something the likes of Lenin, Ford, or Le Corbusier could fathom. All they saw were the successes of High Modernism immortalized in the cathedrals of labor known as factories.

The Soviet attempt to clear cut forests and then grow only the kinds of wood they immediately needed was just one example of this failure to understand the base-complexity in nature, of the “seemingly useless” flora and fauna that sustain growth while evading direct empirical function. Though postcolonial thinkers have in many ways taken this analogy too far with their neo-reactionary conception of organic cultural structures that have their own sense of time and language habitation, they nevertheless see and acknowledge something lost on Marxists who, like Christian yankee evangelicals, would prefer a world where everyone speak the same language–and preferably one without metaphor, poetry, or much cultural particularity outside of their own.

The same High Modernists who saw difference as something to be overcome saw nature as disorderly. Nature proved this wrong and it resulted in tremendous hardship for the Soviet Union just as it did Mao’s China. Likewise, humans prove to not be programmable machines who simply need the correct inputs to make the world revolution. Difference and infinity get overblown by Derrida and Levinas, but they are counteracting the opposite, which is a mode of theorizing that was stupid and destined to fail because it was simplistic, pseudoscientific, and utopian.

We’re In A New Timeline

We do not live in the world of Charles Dickens. The working class is as fractured as modern slums, which is very different from how they did things in old cities that had ghettos. Modern slums are subdivided, dispersed, and hidden away so that those who live in these ghetto shards are not interned en masse. I mean the mobile home parks hiding behind random industrial buildings and department stores across the newer cities. Developers learned a long time ago to not put all the poor people in one place. The “proletariat” is likewise dispersed across the globe, and the internet does not actually raise the possibility of us seeing one another and feeling our power. 

See what I did with this idea in this video:

Cyber History

Radical anarchist programmers saw a tremendous potential in the internet. The construction of open-source software, for instance, tends to lose sight of the way these are presupposed and coopted by companies who rely on this free labor. More importantly, the internet is irredeemably anti-communist. The handful of looney tune online influencers who keep saying they represent the interests of the workers while acting like nothing has fundamentally changed in the last hundred years only prove the point for everyone else who knows in their gut that these people are out of touch. But this is still only the tip of the iceberg: Insofar as there is a working class that could gain mass it is fundamentally incapable of coming to self-consciousness and organizing in any previously tried ways because of the following factors:

Functional Illiteracy

Nobody reads anything but advertisements and entertainment, or if nonfiction, then usually as a literalist who is paying attention to a specific ideological line seriously for the first time ever. [Retroactive insertion: I recently republished my classic piece on functional illiteracy, which you can read here.]

With functional illiteracy, reading takes the form of memorization to bolster a presupposed view, i.e. as apologetics, not for understanding critically from a variety of perspectives that fundamentally call into question the frames, subjects, and contexts of the texts in question. This is a problem for everyone because of timenergy stultification, as well as the next thing:

The Education System

That’s right. Our education system was constructed not to empower but to divide, subdue, and coopt revolutionary potential into a kind of class society that had to be constructed through a regime of public education that was inconceivable in Marx’s time, though the seeds had been planted by German Idealists like Schelling.

Whereas the early conception was one that would make people more legible to the state, easier to predict and therefore preempt or control, the U.S.’s adaptation of that Prussian model was done in light of socialist organizing, with the express purpose to create two classes of people.

As Woodrow Wilson put it 1910, in direct response to labor organizing, "We want one class of persons to have a liberal [read liberating] education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal [read liberating] education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

[Retroactive insertion: I did not cite anything here because this is a quick note, but I think you can find most of this in Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto]

This first class is made up of accomplished, competent, and even sometimes intelligent try-hards who reify meritocracy and presuppose this division of labor in everything they say and do, no matter how much they might purport to want the abolition of class. Whether right or left, the PMC is self-assured that they have earned their place and that it is simply the other side’s fault that more genuinely deserving like-minded people are not in their department, bureau, or C-suite. 

Consumerism!

Capitalism adapted in ways unforeseen to Marx by producing an endless variety of new addictions than could have ever been imagined (though of course I do believe that McGowan’s Zizekian critical understanding of how this works combined with timenergy as a master signifier deal a blow to this, but that is necessarily not something that will come with a rushed revolution any time soon because

1. “Revolutionaries” seem the least capable of understanding the necessity of timenergy or the problems that it counters,

2. Rushed revolutions undermine the conditions for socialism, and

3. It takes time for a concept to become viral in a way that detonates a regime of commodity fetishism. 

Subjectivity IS Complicated

Part of consumerism, but deserving its own place in this list because it was a problem independent of consumerism: Marxists had no theory of subjectivization, social reproduction, desire, or ideology, beyond the homo economicus who is under false consciousness. These, as well as what gets called “postmodern” critique of representation all are developed by post-Marxist French theorists often called post-structuralists or “postmodern.” Every single one of these theorists has their own theory of how Marxism failed to adequately conceptualize, formulate, or work through each of these lacunas. I am putting all of these onto one point when in reality each theorist who develops a theory or critique on the basis of these issues, or their correlates, is a force to be reckoned with who sees things that must be taken into account for any revamped project that aims at genuinely plausible social engineering. These so-called postmodernists are not trying to foil Western society as Peterson and Hicks think, but are merely diagnosing the changed conditions that the Old Left failed to acknowledge, theorize, or address, which resulted in the general incredulity towards metanarratives… this takes us to the next point:

The Post Trust Era

Distrust i.e. we live in a post-trust society where the only people who believe ideologies or institutions wholeheartedly are dupes, literalists, fundamentalists, unhinged weirdos, or wannabe heroes stuck in the past desperately clinging to a worldview that will explain everything.

Cynical ideology factors in here. Moreover, simply the fact that no amount of “lesser evil” contrivance makes any “side” less the liars, the media more believable, or will cause the overwhelming masses to feel less gaslit by the “it’s just so simple” crowd. This relates to the next one outside of this subcategory of factors that irredeemably fracture the working class:

THE MEDIUM

McLuhan is correct that modern media developments invert the base-superstructure relation in a way lost on traditional Marxists. Baudrillard saw the writing on the wall, but everyone else is acting like they didn’t get the memo—perhaps it is buried in their 10,000 unread emails? Probably, considering the fact that the age of information oversaturation (TMI) necessitates tactics that subjectivize us in ways that make mass unification on or around much not only impossible, but really only impossible for anything that seeks to counter or replace capitalism by way of unification on the basis of an understanding of complexity. 

Marxists practically invented propaganda, but they never mastered it. Insofar as great aesthetics and shutting down the press of your enemies goes, fascists perfected that model. However, both communists and fascists lost the propaganda war, because repression coupled with calls for loyalty and othering only get you so far for so long (as the wokes are beginning to realize).

The true winners of that game were advertising and capitalist “democratic” (duopoly) media, which both learned a long time ago that reasoning with audiences matters less than populating the horizon of possibilities and references with false choices. Make everyone have to choose an identitarian stand vis-a-vis your logo and it does not matter if they subscribe, what matters is that insofar as X number will not, the next one will. It is simply a numbers game where consent is not the only thing manufactured, but desire, identity, and ressentiment too. This works for churches and commodities, for ideological spinoff groups who pose themselves as cult-like solutions to the mainstream, but this does not work to unify despite difference, especially not for the working class who is, like everyone else now, born again consumers. 

The Internet is NOT What It Seems

The internet exists and is irredeemably anti-communist. Too often the internet is proposed as some kind of fantastic new opportunity that would have worked in favor of the workers of old. “Had they only this communication architecture they would have succeeded! Now we can truly be the international working class!” Except it was invented by anti-communist cyberneticians, i.e. security state think tanks applying the new science of control (cybernetics) in a way only dreamed of by Machiavelli or Schelling.

Big Data, rendering the population legible, and machine-learning, are not just about elaborate lists of people and ways of keeping a step ahead of their revolutionary potential, it is not just about spying or psyopsing, it is also about the construction of desires and identities, i.e. subjectivization. 

The Deep State Is NOT A Nation

The Deep State serves anti-communism more than it serves some bullshit like “democracy” or “America.” As such, it is more attached to a reactionary version of global capital than it is to any nation, and it definitely does not serve the U.S. government. The U.S. government serves corporations, but is ultimately answerable to the CIA. No such apparatus existed in Marx’s time. Nor in Lenin’s.

Lenin walked into the Winter Palace. Like the January 6th guys, except when they got in there, they had the levers of the state. The thing those January 6th guys will never understand is that the levers of the state are not in the Capitol, and the FBI used them to expand its controls. In fact, every seemingly radical act that simulates previous revolutionary moments proves nothing more than a media event to reify the duopoly’s interdependent identarian reliance on the one hand, and on the other, to give the security state opportunities to expand control, practice its response tactics, and more importantly, keep the radical left and right operating under this assumption that these spectacular occasions amount to something more than sacrifice and baptism for some true believers and weirdos to solidify the silent majority in its post trust cynicism.

The Old Left Is Beyond Redemption

Not only was Marx and Co. able to presuppose an already partially self-aware and concentrated proletariat that was involved in various forms of labor struggle that we today lack, all the preceding points not only factor into the liquidation of that working class power, but the Old Left’s failure to contend with these changes combined with the long-term failures brought on by bold sacrifices for short-term gains have resulted in the Old Left appearing worse than what it seeks to replace.

[Retroactive insertion: Despite what the Daniel Tutts and Gabriel Rockhills will tell you]

To some degree this is the result of Cold War propaganda. To some degree this is on those remaining veterans either selling out or failing to take responsibility for those failures. But in any case, what remains is a hyper-fractured-intra-class-divided-identitarian-consumer silent majority only unified by its distrust of institutions, ideologues, and purported representatives. Those are not the conditions for Democrats or their rebellious college students to win more than an election, much less for a real fundamental transformation of society that abolishes the commodity form of labor and, more importantly, replaces it with something better than forced labor.

Because the last serious revolution demanded forced labor and generations of sacrifice from the blood, sweat, and toil of the overwhelming masses in those revolutionary societies, and because those sacrifices were preyed upon by layers of cynical bureaucracy who purported to represent their interests, “You’re just going to need to work harder and sacrifice for generations so that your children’s children’s generation can enjoy socialism” is just not a convincing proposition. Not only because the priesthood, religious or secular, ancient or modern has, throughout history, been more or less fine with any configuration of society so long as it can play the role of ideological purveyors, representatives, shepherds, guides, or influencers.

That alone is enough to raise a valid populist eyebrow at any movement that purports to lead this regime of labor meant to out-compete capitalism, whether from behind or in front, from top down or from below, either democratically or in an authoritarian manner, these options are all unconvincing when the confident wannabe leaders and bureaucrats will be at least as fine and comfortable in that society as they are in this one, when the sacrifices being demanded are of labor while those who do the demanding stand to gain power and prestige for themselves and their families.

Even if they could secure for the working class fair pay, technical ownership of the means of production, increased say and stake, shorter working days, and a longer weekend, it seems implausible that the PMC is ever going to see, much less feel, the problem of timenergy the way it is viscerally understood by laboring people everywhere [Retroactive insertion: That’s why we also need a theory of energytime, which was presented briefly (and recently) here at a Philosophy Portal conference, thanks

Cadell Last

!].

Even if the PMC could represent the interests of the working class, it seems impossible that the PMC could genuinely center timenergy as the public good that needs to be actualized. Part of the reason, beyond failing to understand it at the visceral level, is that the sheer will to abolish bullshit jobs and redistribute shitty work that cannot be automated out of existence will only come from those who lack timenergy, prestige, and the power to have relative power over labor and capital flows.

Even the handful of PMC individuals who see the importance of the abolition of value still talk about “forty year” plans, while Amazon warehouses, drones, self-driving cars, and increasing production is either already automated or within reach of automation if only the political will was there. But it will never be there with these guys. Marx did not see his name get used as the justification for a regime of forced labor and indefinite terror. If he did, this idea of indefinite deferral of the abolition of class and the labor form specific to capital by PMC, whether democratic or not, would not be a proposition to accept uncritically. 

[Retroactive insertion: Not only do I question what I wrote above, I actually think I might have it backwards. But that’s for another time.]

THE EXPANSE

What I’ll call “The Expanse” is not something that anyone seems to have seriously registered. “Infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible” is something said by people who are for all practical purposes living in a previous century. They might as well be geocentric. Their ideology and perspective is incapable of registering the fact that we have already landed on the moon, Mars, and asteroids.

Mining missions are already in motion. These people think we will run out of oil before we find new forms of energy to harness for space travel [Retroactive insertion: Shout out to Evan, James, and Chad Hag as names that come to mind]. They do not understand that capitalism could keep doing its thing for another million years.

Socialism might have its place on some space ships or Earthly communes, but those will be among a plurality of other existing social experiments going on, like the space Mormons in the TV show The Expanse, or the Earthly Amish in our current reality. 

Considering the fact that all of these problems or new conditions were either not present for Marx, or else remained in their germ state at his time, we are, in our historicity, responsible for reassessing the situation. 

Back To The Drawing Board

When engineers keep failing to construct something, they go back to the relevant physics and math. When social engineers fail to organize society, radical theory must be renewed through critical history and philosophy that takes into account the failures and changed conditions from a plurality of perspectives. It is otherwise quite obviously doomed to failure and farce.

The Old Left did not simply fail because it tried too early, because of outside sabotage, or due to the bad personalities or motives of corrupted insiders. Those all had their place in its downfall and obviously any repeated attempt to do as Lenin or some other revolutionary did would have to show how the conditions are more ripe, how the plausibility is more sound than before, and this would have to be articulated by people capable of taking to heart the above listed changes. 

To “take to heart” does not mean simply deflate, dismiss, or attempt to debunk each point in isolation from one another. It means taking the PFCM pill and sitting with it—allowing oneself to let go of immediate application and objectives, to see the world through the eyes of those who had to come to terms with, or first articulate, the changes and problems unseen or left out of prior theory. It means doing a period of moratorium on revolutionary and personality politics. It means take our specific historical situatedness seriously. Take failure seriously. Don’t brush it off and act like we can just jump back up and keep going. 

The idea that “we don’t have time to think” is a marketing ploy by people who think we’re too stupid to realize the universe is basically infinite in scope and resources. The insistence that we act now is the motto of arrested development, but maturity understands that if we do not have time, then we certainly do not have time to act like we do not have time. 

Considering the above listed facts of our unique historical situatedness, Marx’s purported solution, i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat, which he never rigorously theorized, is clearly one that must be suspended and critically worked through. Obviously if the situation changes then the solution might prove no longer plausible, preferable, or wise. 

If the proletariat is not a concentrated mass, then what is meant by this term? Is the dictatorship simply of, or also by, the proletariat? To say it is by the proletariat ushers in working class identity politics, as though working class people have some angelic consciousness due to social position, i.e. social standpoint, that necessarily means “they know what’s best.” It should not take much to disenchant your average Marxist of this notion, considering the fact that identity politics and standpoint epistemology are obviously not the solution. 

So what, then? A dictatorship that purports to represent the interests of the proletariat? This brings in all the problems of representation in a post-trust society where generalized skepticism is a valid response to the fact that anything can be simulated, including sincerity, authenticity, recognition, and interests. 

If the situation is different and the solution proves complicated in ways that must be addressed, there is then the fact that the goal itself, irrespective of the means, has itself not been adequately thought through, i.e. “freedom” has been ill-conceived by past iterations. The concept of timenergy is, I would argue, essential to fleshing out a substantial theory of freedom. 

Left vs. right are ill-conceived reifications of bourgeois society (psychological gerrymandering). 

No theory has dialectically sublated the most essential moments in all previous movements or worldviews that follow from the bourgeois revolution. Liberalism was correct in its core assertions, though many of those proved contradictory in ways the Old Left would articulate.

Conservatism was correct in its base assumption that institutions take time to prove themselves, that rituals and beliefs might serve purposes not fully known to their practitioners, and that hasty bloody change undermines the harmonious conditions taken for granted, yet desired in more abundance, by revolutionaries.

Conservatives would be fine if they did as the Amish do, but they err in trying to do some radical society-wide revolt against modernity. The Old Left was correct about the true basis of cultural oppression (the value form and labor), but its solutions were all insufficient to the task of addressing those base causes, much less the identitarian feuds created by those causes that live on irreducible to their origin in production, resulting in societies nobody would choose to live in.

The New Left was right to focus its energies on more immediately pressing and long neglected struggles, but wrong in its failure to seriously reconstruct a critique of Capital that maintains the babies from those previous ideologies and movements, just as it was wrong to throw out all conservative values as essentially reactionary, when only the specific modes and articulations as currently formulated by existing conseravtive institutions are problematic, not the values or base-assumptions themselves.

All of the above failed to take the Das Kapital project as seriously as our situation demands. The only people who took that project seriously were dogmatic Marxists, either of the traditional, Orthodox, or Althusserian veins, but in all of these cases they failed to consider either Marx’s method (Grossman, Mattick, Heinrich), his focus on the abolition of the form of labor itself (Postone), the fact that his project was a critique of political economy, not a political economy or a history (Postone, Grossman, Mattick, Heinrich), and most importantly they all, including their disciples today, fail to seriously consider the fact that Capital could exist for another thousand years.

A million years! And it could do so without capitalists! The universe is big, but they act like evangelicals who think the earth is young, or idealists who think fossils are a mental construct. Marxists and socialists alike fail to seriously consider The Expanse, or the related concept of Deep Time. Marxists from Engels to Stalin believed in an evolution of leaps and bounds, which has now been thoroughly debunked. They failed to realize that change also happens slow enough to occur right before our very eyes, yet just slow enough to go missed by the inattentive, distracted, untrained, or purely action-oriented eye. 

If, beyond the Old vs. New Left, there is to be, instead, a “Next Left,” it is going to have a longer-game in mind and The Expanse in its sights. But it will not force everyone to go. Those who seek to remain on Earth and be Amish or back-to-earth types will get to. The women and children of “both sides” will have safe havens to escape to if they are oppressed in their little cultural experiments.

The work for progressives who wish to remain on Earth will be to try to maintain peace between various traditionalist and secular “Natural” experiments while tending to the construction and development of safe havens for the runaways.

Any “leftist” who is against this formula doesn’t care to get off this planet, is libidinally addicted to scapegoating a strawman of the regressive Other, and has no positive project that does not require a thousand years of civil-to-world-war that annihilates the only good possibilities inherent to Capital while simultaneously strengthening its most scary, reactionary, and evil versions. 

The question I want to end on is this: Must there be a “Next Left”? Could there be something else that does not necessarily include an excluded placeholder to scapegoat? Might the only way to make sure something human makes it into the near future be an approach that is inclusive of left and right tendencies while simultaneously cutting off those influences that would have us be mutually exclusive?

Maybe we need to move beyond left vs. right when it comes to larger-scale projects. Leave those to town hall meetings and inter county disputes. Any great nation, much less empire, will have to represent more or less everyone, or at least function in such a way so as to give its citizens that sense.

Author bio:

David McKerracher (M.A.) is the organizer for, and founder of, Theory Underground, a teaching, research, and publishing platform by and for dropout workers with earbuds and burnt out post-grads who want to understand The Situation as a means towards figuring out the conditions of possibility for The Good Life. McKerracher’s background is in critical theory, political philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology. All of McKerracher's work revolves around a single question: What is the Good Life? McKerracher's questioning into the conditions of possibility for living The Good Life led him to an M.A. thesis on “Timenergy, the existential basis of labor power.” This work draws heavily from Marx and Heidegger. McKerracher developed this concept further in his first book called Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Social Change, and his second book simply titled Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Because “Timenergy Theory” requires a more robust theory of libidinal economy and ideology, McKerracher has spent the last few years learning Žižekian and Lacanian theory of ideology from his compatriot Michael Downs. Instead of pursuing a doctorate, McKerracher founded Theory Underground, a vehicle for cultivating the kind of research and conversation necessary to take timenergy theory to where it needs to go, the long-term goal of which is to pave a way forward for humanity to maintain the conditions of a robust cultural plurality, harness automation-for-all, and ultimately, explore the universe.

What’s on the other side of the paywall? Just the words thank you.