Right-of-center sellouts: “What’s Left?” October 2011, MRR #341

Needless to say, politics suck.

Yet, in the wake of the recent debt ceiling Congressional debacle, nearly all of my liberal friends, and even some of my radical comrades, are making excuses. Obama made strategic blunders in negotiating with the GOP. Or, the president is congenitally weak due to his innate desire for consensus and compromise. Or, the office Obama occupies is constitutionally powerless, toothless, incapable of standing up to Congress in the debt ceiling negotiations.

Bullshit.

I agree with Glenn Greenwald who, on 8-1-11 on Salon (salon.com), commented: “The evidence is overwhelming that Obama has long wanted exactly what he got: these severe domestic budget cuts and even ones well beyond these, including Social Security and Medicare, which he is likely to get with the Super-Committee created by this bill.” Obama isn’t a progressive. He isn’t a liberal. He isn’t even a moderate. Obama is a right-of-center asswipe bent on destroying this country’s working classes, poor, and people of color. Drew Westen only scratched the surface when he took Obama to task in his article “What Happened to Obama?” in the 8-6-11 issue of the New York Times for abandoning the Democratic Party’s tradition of reform as advanced by Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt.

People forget history. They also forget some basic truths about American politics. The Democrats and Republicans are the two faces of a single ruling class. Each party acts when the other cannot. The party in power initiates the action that the party in opposition finds politically inexpedient. The Democrats were labeled soft on Communism, so the Republican Nixon opened relations with Red China. The Republicans were considered hostile to the poor, so the Democrat Clinton gutted federal welfare programs. It’s a symbiotic relationship, and Obama should be understood in this context.

The anti-political opposition to this status quo fares little better.
The tactical and strategic depth of the present day antiauthoritarian milieu is nonexistent. As a recent joke has it, two anarchists are hiding behind a dumpster, manufacturing Molotov cocktails. One anarchist turns to the other and says: “What exactly are we going to target with these Mollies?” The second anarchist retorts: “What are you, some kind of intellectual?”

Then there’s the recent crop of insurrectionists, a motley mix of anti-statist communists and insurrectionary anarchists who take their lead from the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, and who throw around slogans like “Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing” and “We Are The Crisis.” When radical autonomist feminist Marxist Silvia Federici was asked about the role of feminism in recent insurrectionary and occupationist actions, she commented: “The problem, I believe, is when these actions become an end in themselves, carried out, as ‘We are the crisis’ states, ‘for no reason.’ For in this case, in the absence of any articulated objective, what comes to the foreground tends to be the glorification of risk-taking.”

Loren Goldner, in describing why 60s radicals rarely returned to their Leninist, Maoist and Guevaraist origins once they got a taste of ultraleft politics, quipped: “Once you have played grand master chess, you rarely go back to checkers.” If American politics amounts to a game of checkers then, by analogy, today’s anarchists and communists haven’t even mastered tic tac toe.

Street fighting spirit: “What’s Left?” April 2011, MRR #335

Ev’rywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy
‘Cause summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy
But what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band
‘Cause in sleepy London town
There’s just no place for a street fighting man
No

Written about British Pakistani New Leftie Tariq Ali, this tongue-in-cheek Rolling Stones ditty remains a rousing anthem to a familiar type of political testosterone. I remember that, during the 1970 Isla Vista riots, a local record store hoisted massive speakers onto their roof and blasted “Street Fighting Man” full blast as students battled police in the winding streets of that soporific beach town. Covered by folks as diverse as Rod Stewart and the Ramones, the version done by Zack de la Rocha and Rage Against the Machine embodies the bombast, if not the fury, intended by the Stones.

An acquaintance once commented that politics is a young man’s game. From the Paris riots of 1968, which inspired my initial interest in politics, to the current Cairo riots, young people dominated the streets. And by young people, I mean young men. For while the 60s saw a considerable uptick of female participation in what, at the time, we all considered to be revolutionary activity, the campus occupations and street fighting were still a man’s world. Similarly, reports from Tahrir Square at the beginning of the anti-Mubarak uprising described a surprising sexual equality in the numbers participating in the occupation. But when Mubarak’s supporters, with the help of the secret police, assaulted the protesters with horses and camels, and then laid siege to the square with rocks, molotovs and guns, the complexion of the protest quickly changed to mostly male. Excuse me, but since I don’t give a flying fuck about what’s politically correct, I’m not beyond crediting biology for differences in strength, and testosterone for increased levels of aggression to account for the dominance of young men in street politics.

Hey! Think the time is right for a palace revolution
But where I live the game to play is compromise solution
Well, then what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band
‘Cause in sleepy London town
There’s no place for a street fighting man
No

Street politics is the crucial referent here. To be young, able to hurl abuse and more at the cops, then to outmaneuver and outrun their fat, riot-gear-encumbered asses; that’s what’s thrilling about being a street fighting man. It’s what, approaching 60, with bad feet and a bum knee, I can appreciate only vicariously, or as ever-receding personal memories. I mean, it’s not like I can’t participate in politics per se. Much like war, in which old men make the decisions while young men do the fighting and dying, politics entails the young in the streets and the old in the smoke-filled back rooms. But politics without the streets—the politics of meetings, deal making and compromise—was always an absolute bore to my way of thinking. So, that leaves me on the sidelines, taking in the only politics that truly matter—street politics—as a spectator sport.

Whether as a spectator or as a participant, being a partisan of those who take to the streets to fight the powers that be can produce a skewed view of things. Siding with rioters against the police is like being a Mets or a Red Sox fan in that you’re bound to be on the losing side most of the time. For every Cairo, there are ten thousand Tehrans. Yet such persistent defeat never seems to dampen an irrational optimism among sympathizers whenever and wherever rioting breaks out. I’m in a radical reading group whose ultra left members invariably go into paroxysms of adulation every time a bunch of students go on a rampage, break windows, block traffic, burn dumpsters, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. This exercise in youthful excess, in turn, has been elevated to the absurd heights of a revolutionary strategy by the current crop of insurrectionary anarchists and left communists. Oddly however, Glenn Beck seems to be the only one serious about a specter of permanent insurrection, seeing in Egypt the hand of the Invisible Committee and “the beginning of ‘the coming insurrection.’”

Such surprisingly naïve enthusiasm, and sadly infantile rebellion, is far better than the opportunistic instrumentalism of much of the Leninist Left. When not considered cannon fodder for the party and the revolution, street politics are judged progressive so long as they strike a blow against US hegemony, and insurgents, whatever their political persuasion, are defined either as “objectively anti-imperialist” or in terms of “the enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend.” Thus, Leninists of various stripes defended the Islamic students who took American embassy personnel hostage in Iran from 1979 to 1981 as radical, even as those students pledged their undying loyalty to Ayatollah Khomeini and his Shiite revolution.

Hey! Said my name is called disturbance
I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the king, I’ll rail at all his servants
Well, what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band
‘Cause in sleepy London town
There’s no place for a street fighting man
No

Leave it to Leninism to squeeze all the juice, all the insurrectionary spirit, out of street politics. If the Left were honest, they would take Bakunin’s infamous remark that “the destructive urge is a creative urge” and admit that the destructive urge is sufficient unto itself. There is something absolutely elemental about the whirlwind of destruction unleashed by taking to the streets, and taking them away from the powers that be, even momentarily. We’re not talking about simple hormones here, but about something deeper, Freudian, archetypal; something that transcends human biology to reach what is essential to life. The desire to reduce illusions to ashes, power to shambles, civilization to smoking ruin must be seen in the light of the sheer aesthetic joy in the conflagration itself. It is the stuff of the demiurge, which in Christian mythology goes by the names Satan and Lucifer. Or, as it goes in the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds,” which Robert Oppenheimer paraphrased upon witnessing humanity’s detonation of the first atomic bomb. I’ve communed with this deity of destruction perhaps a dozen times in my life thanks to my involvement in radical street politics. An intoxicating experience each time. Which is why this armchair stuff is such a drag.

To praise the modern world: “What’s Left?” October 2010, MRR #329

I enjoy the modern world.

I like brewing a cup of pu-erh tea, an aged, bricked leaf imported from China. I like catching up on current events by reading my Weekly Guardian or Christian Science Monitor in the comfort of my soft bed. I like typing these words on this cool 14-inch Titanium MacBook Pro, even though it’s nearly three years old.

This is all very civilized, and I’m a big fan of civilization, modernity, science, and all that. Call me a booster for modernism, I don’t mind. I’ve got my criticisms of Marxism, but I’m a Marxist insofar as I assert the importance of a concept of totality, and of the possibility for a theory of everything. I like to point out that postmodernism’s ongoing debate with modernism is occurring in the modern world, in a world of rampant capitalism, enshrined science, and mass culture. Whether or not there are any more “grand narratives” is rather incidental to this basic reality.

Equally inconsequential, for different reasons, is primitivism’s carny hokum. Sure, there are a half dozen ways in which modern civilization is teetering on the brink of collapse. The popularity of post-apocalyptic fantasies and survivalist/prepper milieus speak to these ubiquitous fears. The idyllic hunter-gatherer societies touted by primitivists is utopia in the literal sense of that word however. That is, no place. Nowhere, and not possible. Because this fantasy is consistently envisioned and proposed despite the inescapable fact that civilization’s collapse would produce suffering, brutality and slaughter beyond measure, my guess is that some type of delusional disorder is involved, at the very least. Actually, I’ve always suspected that the great human die-off is a secret primitivist wet dream, born of their profound misanthropy.

The anti-civilization critique offered up by certain ultraleftists, brought to the fore by the Invisible Committee’s incorporation of recent French intellectual currents, is much more nuanced. This critique accentuates the capitalist production of human alienation, and highlights the bonds of human community, friendship, and love destroyed by modern civilization. I clearly sympathize with, and take much from this assessment. But since the solution to civilization and its discontents is dependent on the equally unlikely prospect of international communist revolution, or as “The Coming Insurrection” would have it permanent insurrection, we are again left with a critique without teeth.

The challenge to modernity and the modern world that I take seriously is what I will broadly call anti-modernism. Anti-modernism is going to take a little while to unpack, so be patient. Let’s begin with how I encountered this anti-modernist perspective personally.

I was a sputnik kid, a child reared after the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite into earth orbit and the US went apeshit tracking youngsters into math and science so that we could beat the Reds in the space race. I was encouraged to be a nerd, before the word existed. I wasn’t big on math, but I did love science. I was twelve, in seventh grade at Barton Elementary in San Bernardino, California, and I did a science project for the school fair that wound up at the county-wide mega science fair, held at the Orange Show Fairgrounds.

Aside from elementary, junior and senior high schools, the US military, various companies, and the occasional individual had booths at the Fairgrounds. Not all of the exhibitors were strictly science-oriented either, with some definitely crossing the line into pseudoscience. I recall a rather dramatic stand with a working Tesla Coil spitting out miniature lightning bolts, alongside diagrams purporting to illustrate perpetual motion machines. The sponsors of the booth were into exposing the vast conspiracy to suppress Nikola Tesla’s supposed discovery of limitless wireless power, and they had an interest in virtually everything occult. I scrounged together all my change to purchase a rather shoddily mimeographed, stapled book entitled The Hollow Earth: The Greatest Discovery in History by Dr. Raymond Bernard, AB, MA, PhD, from their booth. That bizarre, smudged volume was my introduction to a lunatic fringe that, thanks to the internet, has become all too commonplace.

Occult, metaphysical, esoteric, paranormal, psychic, supernatural; these terms cover an immense and extremely nebulous territory. To give the subject some coherence, I’ll stick to my very narrow thread of fascination during those years.

My dad worked in civil service connected with the US military, and due to military base downsizings, he moved the family to Layton, Utah, where I spent nine miserable months when I was thirteen. The Hallow Earth became a secret obsession of mine in the Mormon wasteland. The book’s thesis was that the earth was hollow and possessed of a central sun, that access to the earth’s interior could be gained through holes in the north and south poles, and that this hidden world was inhabited by a superior race of technologically advanced beings who were responsible for UFOs. In the process of hacking out these themes, the book also touched on the legendary lost continents and civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria, the mysterious, unitary knowledge allegedly possessed by all ancient human civilizations, and the vast network of tunnels, caverns and underground cities rumored to exist between the outer surface and the inner world. Bernard’s The Hallow Earth claimed to weave these disparate ideas into a coherent whole, and even though I was a hardcore science geek, I was captivated by the audacity and quasi-scientific nature of the book’s assertions. I was also a fan of science fiction, and this was like science fiction that professed to be real, yet couldn’t quite be proven false.

Dad got us out of the Mormon hellhole as quickly as possible, and by fourteen, I was a student at Balboa Junior High in Ventura, California. Now, Ventura is near Ojai. Ojai is home to the Krotona Institute, established by the Theosophical Society, which was founded by Madame H.P. Blavatsky who was mentioned in passing several times by Bernard in The Hollow Earth. Theosophy is a wacky set of ideas, based on the teachings of Blavatsky, who believed in Atlantis and Lemuria, and who claimed to have discovered a secret, universal esoteric core of wisdom to all of humanity’s major and minor religions. In turn, Theosophy styles itself a synthesis of religion, philosophy, science and metaphysics. Theosophy was mystical, New Agey horseshit before mystical, New Agey horseshit existed. Thanks to very tolerant parents, I attended a number of lectures by prominent Theosophist J. Krishnamurti at Krotona. There I encountered a wizened old codger named Albert who took me aside after one of Krishnamurti’s talks, proclaimed that “Theosophy was for pussies,” and gave me a dog-eared copy of The Crisis of the Modern World by René Guénon, the founder of Traditionalism.

Finally, we’ve arrived at the most prominent form of anti-modernism, Traditionalism. Not all anti-modernists are Traditionalists, but all Traditionalists are anti-modern. Mistakenly equated with Perennial Philosophy, Traditionalism identified a “primordial tradition” which was directly inspired by on-going revelation from a transcendental source and from which all of humanity’s great religions were derived. All exoteric religious traditions, at their core, embodied a single, enduring esoteric truth or principle that made them different expressions of the same divine essence, and hence equally valid spiritual paths to enlightenment. This primordial tradition based on divine revelation was at the heart of an authentic spiritual civilization that Traditionalism identified with the ancient world, which meant that modernity was a degeneration and corruption of nothing less than a golden age. Indeed, Traditionalist anti-modernity rejected anything in the modern world that conflicted with traditional understandings of the universe, to include evolutionary science. And pre-modern social structures, like feudalism, were glorified because they were considered to be products of true Traditional beliefs.

Frankly, I found Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World so abstruse and alien, I didn’t develop an understanding of Traditionalism until much later, and then only through the side door by studying Henry Brooks Adams. Scion of Boston Brahmins, member of the famous Adams family (as in the 2nd and 6th US presidents), historian and man of letters, virulent anti-Semite, Henry Adams was born in 1838 and died in 1918. His life thus straddled the turn of the century.

Henry Adams was not a Traditionalist, but rather a traditional conservative, a Burkean conservative, much like his junior T.S. Elliot. Traditional conservatism is a political track that parallels spiritual Traditionalism so closely at times, it’s quite easy to step from one to the other. Once having understood Adams’s take on the modern world, I found it easy to grasp the Traditionalist ethos.

Obsessed with the erosion of faith by science, convinced that a world of order and unity was disintegrating into chaos around him, Henry Adams distilled the history of western civilization down to the metaphor of the Virgin and the dynamo in a curious duet of books; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. The first book, subtitled A Study in 13th Century Unity, is an historical and philosophical meditation on the 12th century Norman construction of the Mont-Saint-Michel cathedral and the 13th century cult of the Virgin at Chartres. For Adams, Europe in the century from 1150 to 1250 was “the point in history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe.”

This was the Europe of the Middle Ages; of manorialism and feudalism, chivalry and serfdom, the Holy Roman Empire and the Crusades; of nobility, clergy and peasantry unified in Christian holy war against infidel Islam. Adams admired the infusion of religious ideals throughout European economic, political and military institutions in this age when philosophy, theology and the arts were all informed by faith. In Mont-Saint-Michel he symbolized this organic unity of reason and intuition, science and religion in the statue of the Virgin Mary in Chartres cathedral. In turn he saw in the scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas, with its emphasis on human reason, the beginning of the destruction of this coherent, totalizing worldview.

The humanism of the Renaissance, the individual faith of the Reformation, the universal reason of the Enlightenment, and the egalitarian democracy of the modern era all furthered the disintegration of this organic unity, replacing the singularity of faith with the fragmenting logic of science. In The Education, Adams described this historical transition as one from “evolving the universe from a thought” to “evolving thought from the universe.” This movement from religious spiritualism to scientific materialism produced “Multiplicity, Diversity, Complexity, Anarchy, Chaos,” with no way to prevent the proliferation of conflicting, contradictory thoughts from scientific observation of the universe. Adams symbolized this atomizing scientific worldview in the mechanistic force of the dynamo he saw at the 1900 Great Exposition in Paris. A two volume philosophical and autobiographical reflection on the woeful inadequacy of his “education” for the modern world, Henry Adams subtitled the second book A Study of 20th Century Multiplicity.

When the Virgin was central man was at his pinnacle of unity with the universe, yet when the dynamo of human achievement replaced faith man was eventually subordinated to mere mechanical forces.

The primary paradox embodied in Adams’ Virgin/dynamo metaphor has been described by others in different ways. Friedrich Nietzsche decried the “collective degeneration of man” into the “perfect herd animal” of our democratic era when, under corrupt “modern ideas,” human beings behave “too humanely.” He maintained in Beyond Good and Evil that: “[e]very elevation of the type ‘man’ has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society-and so it will always be: a society which believes in a long scale of rank and differences of worth between man and man and needs slavery in some sense or other.” In his Revolt Against the Modern World, Julius Evola praised Medieval Europe for “its objectivity, its virile spirit, its hierarchical structure, its proud antihumanistic simplicity so often permeated by the sense of the sacred” which made man heroic. When the humanism of the Renaissance supposedly “emancipated itself from the ‘darkness of the Middle Ages’,” “[c]ivilization, even as an ideal, ceased to have a unitary axis.” Degeneration and decadence inevitably followed, marked by “restlessness, dissatisfaction, resentment, the need to go further and faster, and the inability to possess one’s life in simplicity, independence, and balance” in which man was “made more and more insufficient to himself and powerless.”

Julius Evola brings us back to Traditionalism. A contemporary of Guénon’s, an aristocratic metaphysician, Evola was cozy with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism as well. He’s become the darling of today’s neo-Nazis, his brand of ultra-right Traditionalism an inspiration to the New Right. Evola’s reactionary politics are by no means exceptional when we examine those who also called themselves Traditionalists (Schuon, Burkhardt, Lings, Coomaraswamy, Nasr, deLubicz) and those who sympathized with Traditionalism (Campbell, Eliade, Smith, Danielou). Hajj Muhammad Legenhausen makes the point that “Traditionalism is politically reactionary” in his essay “Why I Am Not a Traditionalist.” He argues that Traditionalism is a modern European reaction against modernism, and amounts to a modern ideology in every sense of that word, despite its disdain for modern ideology. Claiming to be concerned solely with metaphysics, as an ideology Traditionalism nevertheless “sets out a general program of social and political direction” that more often than not is rightwing, whether conservative, reactionary or fascist.

Legenhausen makes the case that Traditionalism was also simplistic, intellectually dishonest, and procrustean in its approach to religion, as when it conflates the anti-idolatry of the monotheistic Abrahamic religions with the ultra idolatry of pantheistic Hinduism. Mark Sedgwick’s recent book, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, makes the case for Traditionalism as “a major influence on religion, politics, even international relations” according to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, author of The Occult Roots of Nazism. “Famous scholars, theosophists and masons, Gnostic ascetics and Sufi sheikhs, jostle with neo-fascists, terrorists and Islamists in their defection from a secular, materialist West” as embodied in Traditionalism. Unfortunately, the neo-fascists, terrorists and Islamists have come to dominate this type of anti-modernism, even making common cause with particular elements of the far Left with pretensions of going beyond Left and Right. The Communist/neo-Nazi Red-Brown alliance in post-Soviet Russia is the most obvious example.

Shit by any other name…

Real existing socialism: “What’s Left?” April 2010, MRR #323

Real existing socialism.

This phrase, popular in the 1970s and ‘80s, was a bit of a misnomer. It was employed primarily by Marxist-Leninists and their fellow travelers to refer to those regimes that called themselves “people’s republics” or “people’s democracies,” two more horrible misnomers. For these true believers in, sycophants of, and apologists for what was once called the Communist Bloc, the term “real existing socialism” was a sly, propagandistic way of simultaneously asserting that this collection of totalitarian, state socialist countries was truly socialist while defending them from the often scathing criticisms of traditional socialists, ultraleftists and idealistic progressives.

“Our critics on the Left can argue endlessly about what socialism should be like; this is real, actual socialism in practice.”

The patent absurdity of this argument was illustrated well by the many conflicts within “real existing socialism” as to who was really, truly socialist—ranging from Yugoslavian Titoism versus Soviet-style socialism to Soviet revision opposing Chinese radicalism. This game of more-socialist-than-thou peaked when Enver Hoxha denounced the rest of the Communist world as revisionist and declared Albania’s Marxism-Leninism-Hoxhaism to be the only true, authentic form of socialism. A long list of incidents in which one type of socialism militarily suppressed another type of socialism in the name of “true socialism” also comes to mind. It begins with Lenin and Trotsky crushing Ukrainian anarchism and the Kronstadt sailors, and culminates with Soviet tanks smashing Hungarian workers councils and Czechoslovakia’s “socialism with a human face.” The Chinese PLA’s demolition of the Shanghai Commune is the bloody postscript. And need I point out that the number of real existing socialist regimes of this type has drastically declined since 1989?

Instead of arguing that Marxist-Leninist systems aren’t really, truly socialist however, let’s see what happens when we try to be more inclusive. What happens when we consider staunch social democratic countries like Sweden to be authentically socialist? What happens when even the sometimes extensive networks of producer and service collectives and cooperatives within capitalist societies are classified as valid forms of real existing socialism (from here on out referred to as RES)?

This expanded definition of RES does not cover all forms of socialist organization, and leaves out most political groups and parties, social/cultural associations, and militant unions. The somewhat fuzzy boundary crops up where union workers actually run their enterprises, political organizations provide services such as workers schools, and social/cultural groups delve into things like mutual aid societies. Still, this more inclusive notion of RES does have one particularly important ramification.

Marxism-Leninism, social democracy, and utopian socialism are all well represented in this larger RES. The representation of anarchism and left communism is practically nil. Of course, there is the occasional workers cooperative, collective or commune based explicitly on anti-state, anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian politics, but as viable movements and social orders, anarchism and left communism are non-existent within RES.

As a former anarchist who retains some identification with left communism, I wish this weren’t so. But it is. Anarchism and left communism both champion a number of historically brief revolutionary moments (Russia 1905 & 1917, Germany 1918-21, Spain 1936-39, Hungary 1956, France 1968, etc.) that, while exemplary, were fleeting, and failed to produce lasting, libertarian socialist societies. For anarchists and left communists, RES is not true socialism when compared to these ephemeral revolutionary examples. Yet no anti-state, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian RES exists as an alternative.

The reasons why anarchism and left communism have failed to produce lasting revolutionary options are myriad, and vary from the historically specific to rather universal problems. The important fact here is that, without exception, they have failed. At this point, we have three choices available to deal with this fact. We can go along with a seemingly eternal anti-authoritarian optimism to proclaim that, despite this dismal record, the next revolutionary uprising will somehow overcome all odds and be victorious. Second, we can argue that, with a little tinkering and some key changes, we can increase anarchism and left communism’s probabilities for future success. Or finally, we can declare anarchists and left communists perennial “beautiful losers” and pronounce their politics bankrupt.

The first is not so much an option as it is a description of insanity, of doing the same damned thing over and over while expecting radically different results. The second choice appears to be more tempered and realistic. Yet it is largely ineffectual due to what I call the Baskin-Robbins syndrome. Hang on, this is going to require an extended frozen desserts metaphor.

After the second World War, when geopolitics polarized between East and West, between the Communist Bloc and the Free World, there were several attempts to create a neo-anarchist/left communist politics that could function as a tertium quid. Paris in the 1960s produced a French ice cream called Situationism that became all the rage for decades to come. With its mixture of left Marxist analysis and anarchist spirit, along with a heavy dollop of subjectivism, Situationism was more than just one of thirty-one flavors, more like a basic, ubiquitous vanilla. To boldly mix my metaphors, a friend once described the Situationists as a motley theatre troupe that managed one mediocre performance in Paris 1968, and hasn’t done much since. They were no Cirque du Soleil, to be sure.

Returning to ice cream as politics, tastes changed and by the mid-to-late 1970s, Italian autonomist gelato became popular, followed in the late 1980s/early 1990s by the spumoni of Italian anarchism and “action without mediation.” Various flavors of anti-globalization dominated the late 1990s/early 2000s, and most recently we’ve seen a revival of French crème glacée. The Invisible Committee’s blend of insurrectionary anarchism and anti-state communism in “The Call” and “The Coming Insurrection” is covered with nihilist hot fudge, and topped with Theorie Communiste sprinkles, Michel Foucault jimmies and Giorgio Agamben crumbles. Study groups of youthful radicals can’t seem to get enough of this riotous confection.

[The post-left, anti-politics, anarchy crowd is all over this like flies on shit. Hell, even Diamond Dave Whitaker is doing a TCI study group. Talk about April fools! What more do you need to know that this stuff is doomed?!]

Invariably, these neo-anarchist/left communist concoctions are tried and found wanting. But that’s not why I predict that the current French mélange will soon fall out of favor. There’s a fickle Baskin-Robbins “flavor of the month” attitude to all of this that belies serious politics. Young revolutionaries flit from one faddish political fashion to another as they might flick between MP3s on their iPods. Needless to say, this is no way to make revolution. Further, it’s a guarantee that anarchism and left communism will find no place in RES.

At the risk of coming off as a naïve American pragmatist, I insist that a central criterion of any politics must be that they work. It does little good that insurrectionary anarchism and anti-state communism are now trendy, if they do nothing to advance successful revolution. It means even less if those who advocate such politics are willing to change them at the drop of a hat, just to be au courant, whether or not those politics can overthrow state and capital, let alone create and sustain a socialist society.

Which leaves us with our third choice, the bankruptcy of anti-authoritarian politics. I’m loath to consider this option, even as reality backs me into this corner. Maurice Merleau-Ponty contended, in Humanism and Terror, that all of Stalin’s crimes—his terror and purges, his forced collectivization and calculated famines, his show trials and gulags—could be forgiven if only the Soviet Union had achieved a truly liberated, humanistic socialism. Flipping this, can the emancipatory ideas of anarchism and left communism be countenanced in light of their shoddy, lackluster performance in the real world? I doubt it, given the paucity of a real existing anti-authoritarian socialism.

What we are left with are beautiful dreams that fail to become anything more than reverie, and dreamers who continually romanticize their own failures. That’s not enough.