Ironicality 101: Adbusters’ War on Your Little Sister’s Flannel Leggings
BHASKAR SUNKARA
Don’t get me wrong–I don’t envy young left-partisans from the 1930s. The high chance of ending up in a gulag or concentration camp or dead in a Spanish trench sounds a bit more terrifying than a paper cut petition-driving or a plastic-cuffing at a G20 protest. But–excuse the callousness–at least the ferocity of that era was mirrored in their polemics. A comeback doesn’t seem to be on the horizon. Eight years ago, bourgeois ideologues of all stripes found in the War on Terror their chance to defend Western Civilization from a new existential threat, but I could never imagine Islamists getting enough support to institute worldwide Sharia Law and deprive us of Baconnaise. I’m thankful, but can it be denied that our age is lacking in substance? Augmenting leftist reading lists can keep things lively. Alas, the latest issue of Workers Vanguard didn’t have enough exclamation points, so I spent part of the Sabbath reading Adbusters and an especially insane Crimethinc. book.
Headlining Adbusters today is, “Philosophy at Zero Point” by contributing editor Micah White. An excerpt:
We are in a moment of cultural stagnation where the only thing to say is that we have nothing to say. The great contemporary philosophers of our age are in intellectual retreat. Something about this historical moment is leaving the discipline of Western philosophy blind. The great minds seem aware of a presence, but unable to get to it directly. So they fill the air with empty words that, while philosophically interesting, simply serve as a placeholder, a time-filler while events unfold.
Besides for noting the irony of that passage, I don’t know enough about libel laws to reply further. There’s at least one edifying moment in the article:
The air was charged with political intensity and the most frequent subject of discussion was anarchism. The next year conversations tended toward discussions of political violence. Together, these years anticipated the reemergence of insurrectionary anarchism as a cultural force and heralded the publication of The Coming Insurrection. [emphasis is mine]
Edifying, because it reminds us that the Adbusters Media Foundation is the poster child for an intellectually bankrupt “left” that doesn’t even think in the most basic political terms and instead offers a lifestyle alternative to dropout into. A protest culture. Adbusters was founded in Vancouver two decades ago and labels itself an “anti-consumerist” movement. Its modi operandi includes propagandizing through their magazine (circulation over 120,000) in order to instill an anti-consumerist mindset in its readers and “cultural jamming” through some very creative detournement of corporate advertising. In short, Situationists sans intellectual rigor, Marxism or social relevance.
anti-consumerism
Fellow “neo-Situationists”, the more edgy “ex-workers” of the Crimethinc Collective openly proclaim their nihilism in their first book, Days of War, Nights of Love:
There is no universal moral code that should dictate human behavior. There is no such thing as good or evil, there is no universal standard of right and wrong. Our values and morals come from us and belong to us, whether we like it or not; so we should claim them proudly for ourselves, as our own creations, rather than seeking some external justification for them.
The glib, self-absorbed passage is reminiscent of the plenty charismatic, part anarcho-primitivist, part proto-fascist character in Fight Club, Tyler Durden. After an hour or so of pretty intense homoeroticism, his organization’s anti-consumerist manifesto is unveiled:
We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
Though the film has been embraced by many on the left, Richard Seymour exposes its underlying ideology:
The film reaches a euphoric climax with the implosion of the banking system – represented on-screen by two towers exploding in flames and collapsing, as the heroes spectate. In Fight Club, the critique of consumerism comes from the right. The longing for an adventure, for a catastrophe like the Great War, recalls the enthusiasm with which European rightists met that war. The idea that a life and death struggle, or an economic depression, would restore lost integrity is ironically one of the most commonplace tropes of bourgeois culture. You only have to recall the forlorn hope placed in a renewed civic nationalism in America after 9/11, and the relief expressed by commentators as diverse as David Brooks and George Packer, that an era of decadence was at last at an end.
Capitalism yields contradictions that can only be addressed by contesting its social forces directly, not the socially created commodities it produces. Instead of attempting to escape them or by seeking to light the alienating, emasculating stuff on fire, cadre of the authentic Left (including most anarchists) seek to empower individuals by overcoming inequalities of power in a society characterized by equality, solidarity and democratic participation. Primitivism and nihilism are antithetical to this tradition.
an ironic call for sincerity
I thought I was done with Adbusters after Micah White’s onanism, but coincidentally I had another article emailed to me that was considerably more interesting–Douglas Haddow decrying the hipster as “the dead end of Western Civilization.” Well written and coherent, one can sympathize with Haddow’s longing for sincerity in the sea of irony. It’s true that hipsters appropriate, almost incomprehensibly, the ascetics of past countercultural movements and bury the sterility of their lives with mass-produced commodities and often self-destructive behavior. Haddow is completely right to see the hipster within us as being a product of, and completely embedded within, late capitalism: “…marketers and party-promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.”
Yet has there even been a truly “authentic” counterculture? Michael Harrington, writing in 1972 about the iconic counterculture of his day, asked, “I wonder if the mass counterculture may not be a reflection of the very hyped and video-taped world it professes to despise?”
If anything, what made the 1960s feel more “real” were, first and foremost, a set of unique objective conditions. In part, higher education was expanded due to the shortages in the postwar economy for technicians and researchers. Mass institutions of learning greatly expanded during this time of heady economic growth. This growth led to conflict. Crowding, bureaucratization and paternalism aggrieved youths. Capitalist development had created a potential enemy in students that had time for leisure, relative privilege and the knowledge necessary to challenge racism and structural inequality. This coincided with an era of Third World nationalism and American barbarism in Vietnam. Politically, Marxism was still ostensibly a vibrant force for not only interpreting the world, but in its Leninist variants, for providing a blueprint for struggle.
One cannot exactly will into being the perfect storm that yielded May ’68 in France, the American anti-war movement and Blonde on Blonde. And, besides for maybe resurrecting pre-Jesus Bob Dylan, we shouldn’t want to. Even in an era of further regression and apolitical identity politics, it would be misguided to look upon the politics of the 1960s through rose-colored glasses:
Certainly the 1960s marked a political crisis, but one in which the Left, instead of evaluating the legacy of the 1930s Stalinism, reproduced those very structures and tendencies it sought to overthrow.
One reproduction that Khan refers to is that of Maoism, the “anti-Stalinist” Stalinism that played a corrosive leading role in large swathes of the New Left. She continues:
In his essay “Resignation,” Adorno emphasizes that even though the return of anarchism is that of a “ghost,” that is, of unresolved problems of Marxism, “this does not invalidate the critique of anarchism.” In his attempt to transcend both Stalinophobia and Stalinophilia, Adorno stressed the necessity of critiquing the contemporary form of Marxism and its problematic relation to its past.
I’ll temper my Adorno quoting by mentioning the one important lesson I picked up from Negri and Hardt, the importance of the joy of struggle. At its best, even while futile, the worst of anarchist actions and literature showcase an epicurean spirit and a cultural literacy that other leftists can’t match. 120,000 people subscribe to Adbusters Magazine and CrimethInc.’s publishing strength is surprising.
Yet it’s still high comedy that members of the Naomi Klein-left have such contempt for their lensless-rimmed peers. In a way, the decadence and glibness they decry are mirrored in their own brand of lifestyle. The fact that we have a subculture trying to express discontent with the banality of late capitalism without the political is a reflection of the zeitgeist of a contemporary Left that eschews introspection, political debate and organizational discipline. Once the Left turns the corner, I have faith that in this generation’s youth we’ll find folks that are not only less misogynistic and less racist than previous generations, but are willing to devote their time and energy to a worthwhile political project.
Back to present reality, at the very least one can note that hipsters are fully aware of the contradictions of a “counterculture” in a totalizing capitalist society. Not only does Douglas Haddow seem like terrible drinking company, he fails to see that it is his version of “emancipatory” politics that’s proving Fukuyama right. Adbusters: The Dead End of Western Civilization. Anti-capitalism, stripped of its subversion, mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. Leave the pretty girls wearing lariants out of it and take a good, hard look into the mirror.
Workers have the right to be greedy as they create most of the junk that’s out there in the marketplace. Of course, workers don’t control what they produce; that’s why they’re wage-slaves. Were workers able to grasp the fact that they, not the capitalists and corporate entities, are the producers of all wealth not already existing in nature, they might begin to become an active force for change, in their class interests, as opposed to the passive, cosumerist role they are assigned and ashamed into by a moralising liberal left bereft of a critique of political-economy that goes beyond TINA.
I’m self-conscious of the fact that I basically write the same piece over and over again.
PS: Kenny Grand and company’s OB’ Zine Magazine is an example of socialists “ripping off” the best of the anarchist aesthetic. It’s print, but there are a few scans online.
OB’ Zine: http://obzine.tumblr.com/
I don’t think that there is such thing as an “authentic counterculture” and I think this is a problematic idea. See Benjamin’s essay on Artistic Reproduction: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. This sounds very much like a false binary.
This problem, once again, comes up in your statement that zines are a part of the “anarchist aesthetic.” I disagree. If a deconstructive methodology (i.e. countering mass-media through underground media) is confined and labled through a linear approach to political analysis then leftists of all types would not be able to communicate.
I think the problem of hipster-consumerism, obviously a problem presented in the face of consumerism, is also a problem of outreach for Democratic Socialists and our branding and outreach efforts. Sure “Branding” is a capitalist idea, but yes we must detour our branding efforts to properly connect with hipster youth. Yes, it is ok to be critical of these folks, but we must also build spaces where these folks will begin to understand their privilege and start fighting for leftist pursuits.
Here in Denver/Boulder there are Co-ops, DIY art communities, and bars filled with leftist frames of mind. Can we use these venues to pursue the underground culture that has become mass culture- hipster?
Even in Williamsburg there are tons of these communities. They have ripped off the 1990s anti-world bank grunge culture, they have ripped off the politcal-history of zines, have organized co-ops, etc. Can we teach them what this means historically?
I am not trying to aruge that our base should consist of middle class white folks, but that mass popular culture must be considered and understood within our movement.
“I don’t think that there is such thing as an “authentic counterculture” and I think this is a problematic idea.”
I don’t disagree. But what I mean by the “Anarchist aesthetic” is a style clearly derivative of the Situationists that has been more or less monopolized by anarchists in America.
” Yes, it is ok to be critical of these folks, but we must also build spaces where these folks will begin to understand their privilege and start fighting for leftist pursuits.”
I don’t think hipster-consumerism is a problem and I think the idea that trying to get a whole group of people from widely different socio-economic backgrounds to “understand their privilege” is precisely the kind of “politics” we should be getting away from. Many of these folks are working as wage-laborers of some type, are getting plummeted into debt and don’t have any influence in the polity. Why would they understand their privilege? I will never understand this type of activity, besides for seeing it as some sort of flimsy construct to allay White-guilt. Left-wing politics is in the self-interest and class interest of most of the these folks.
Co-ops, art collectives are all fine and well, but without the backdrop of an organized Left it’s not organized political activity (still a worthwhile pursuit).
The point is that Adbusters-ism is dead-end— and it’s supremely ironic for them to attack the “vapidity” of hipsters. Ultimately, they represent what happens when anti-consumerism is conflated with anti-capitalism and lifestyle choices and pranks are confused with genuine radicalization.
I would argue that understanding the history of consciousness is critical to any political movement. I consider myself a hipster and working class, yet I also understand that I have white privilege and that I have social, educational, and political capital that many folks do not. I did not intend to homogenize any hipster movement, or alienate anyone by calling them out agressively, I just wish to make our political work internal. Every individuals subjectivities result in a spectrum of privilege and this must be understood on a variety of internal levels if you have a wide scope of political agendas. This type of consciousness (critical understanding of the intersections of race, class, and gender) is crucial to any intelligent approach to politics.
I think your scope of “organized political activity” is too confined. I think the formation of co-ops, DIY communities, vegan restaurants, etc are organized political activity. I don’t think that they are organized political “movements” but they are organized political activity. I think there is a big and important difference. There is a difference in consciousness between activity and movements.
Again though, my idea of politics comes from Walter Benjamin and is based on the history of consciousness. So our competing usage of “politics” may be the difference here.
I’ll read that Benjamin piece at some point and hopefully we’ll get a chance to discuss it at the winter conference or something.
Someone should hand adbusters a copy of Lipstick Traces.
Because I can’t contribute on the level that Andrew and Bhaskar can, I’ll just write that I brought up the article at lunch yesterday. The DSAer had actually read it. We both said we enjoyed it.
“Not only does Douglas Harrow seem like terrible drinking company, he fails to see that it is his version of “emancipatory” politics that’s proving Fukuyama right.”
Oi – my name is spelled with D’s and not R’s.
Cheers,
DH
Did you find that picture on Cobrasnake or something?
Once again: I suppose the social democratic alternative is to do as Harrington, and STFU and let Obama get his jollies pokin’ our uvulae.
How about this for irony: you social dems and the anarchists are flip sides of the same coin, always waiting for your respective masters to tell you what to do, then bitching about each other not doing it.
Several things that are notable:
Your assumption that since Adbusters is of the “left” that it should have certain traits (e.g. focus on social class, emphasizing progress, and having a materialist outlook) and that since it does not, then it is to be ridiculed is itself ridiculous. That the anti-consumerism of Fight Club arguably comes from a right-wing perspective is as irrelevant to anti-consumerism in general as the fact that opposition to, say, neoliberalism can also come from a nationalist or neo-fascist perspective. It serves no purpose in such a short article besides guilt by association, making it a charming little ad hominem fallacy.
If one wants to really describe the ideology of these organizations, one might try to be less intellectually lazy than you accuse them of being. Adbusters has an inchoate ideology, but one that seems (to me) to be closest to something like Narodism. The biggest political party that embodied this set of beliefs, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, was certainly different from the Marxist RSDLP, but they shared a common space on the “left,” and the Left SRs eventually joined the Bolsheviks. The “nihilism” of CrimethInc, on the other hand, can also be viewed through a comparative historical perspective as a reaction to a sudden introduction or expansion of capitalism (e.g. introduction of capitalism to Russia in the 19th century; cf. neoliberalism and consumerism over the past three decades in the United States).
That consumerism is something problematic for leftist activists should be obvious. From Marx’s writing on commodity fetishism to Lukacs’ elaboration thereof to any number of contemporary scholars (e.g. Benjamin Barber in Jihad vs. McWorld or Consumed), this process has been elaborated upon by “leftists.” Freedom of choice in consumption distracts from issues related to political or economic freedom. There is a correlation between the static or declining status of the middle and lower classes in the United States and the rising availability of consumer goods–the lack of corresponding discontent may reflect the distractions that consumer goods provide. At the very least, it would be difficult to separate the increasingly vapid and superficial politics of the United States from the vapidity and superficiality in society brought on via consumerism.
Ironcially, I agree with you in that I “don’t envy young left-partisans from the 1930s”–to me, the worst aspect of that era was that leftists reserved their most barbed criticism for potential allies, never leaving aside an opportunity to attack those who might otherwise be fellow travelers.
I don’t see how Adbusters can claim to be anti-consumerist, when they have the nerve to charge $40 a year for their subscription! Especially considering that they only put out quarterly issues. They’re not a bunch of f-ing anarchists, they’re a bunch of loser hipsters, just like the MTV culture they’re so pissed off about. Adbusters is only upset because no one is really paying attention to any of the blather that they drone on about.
It takes all types. There is no telling how many kids found the left through Adbusters and Crimethinc. Glamarchists (not the cool sexy ones, but the *I’m so cool* crowd) and champagne socialists will always exist. It takes more than intellectualism as well.
The kids in Little Rock who are planting public gardens and arts centers may not be going out and telling people that they are pushing for proper nutrition and worker autonomy and towards the abolition of subsistence anxiety. The people setting up the cultural centers and speakeasy cafes aren’t handing out pamphlets–but they are creating safe positive spaces for people to interact and build something more substantive than robot consumer culture.
Yeah, there has been no monolithic counterculture that wasn’t constrained by the fact that it was a kneejerk reaction to the world system. There have been no true revolutions, either.
But there are still pockets of people working all over the world in their own way.
If we want an organized left, we need to be putting our lives into chapter building, but all of this other stuff is still good.
The ‘zine that we compile down here is a way to examine our pasts and challenge ourselves and create some sort of cultural mouthpiece.
I’m heavily, heavily influenced by the situationists. It’s genius and hasn’t been completely explored. But ‘zines started with Martin Luther. The most influential ‘zine that I’ve read was written in the 1920′s by a cartoonist here in Arkansas.
However, the anarchists have their shit together in many respects. The kids at Lichen in Chicago have esl programs and GED tutoring. The kids in other collectives help in program administration at amazing culture centers where kids learn not to be ashamed to use their minds. Hundreds and hundreds of people have been fed over the past couple of years in Little Rock. Because of them, I DO have the ability to set foot in any major city in this country and have food, clothes, shelter, and organizing contacts.
Where are the reds? Where is our media underground? It’s fun to write ‘zines and make movies and throw parties and fix bicycles to hand out to people, to plant plots to feed people good food. It’s great. This little rag I’ve put out has blown open my intellectual and organizational horizons.
Not every person is going to be a Eugene Debs. If they choose to shop conscientiously or not shop at all and leave it at that, it’s a victory.
On the other hand, we need to get our shit together. There are grassroots organizational models to experiment with. We need to be setting up town halls, we need to be planting gardens, we need to be organizing volunteer canvasses with local labor, we need to be securing spaces for offices. As soon as we do that, maybe we can complain about others.
Adbusters needs to be a bit more explicit and constructive….but I still like that article on hipsters. What our job should be is to create things that if co-opted by the system or by the hipsters, would be viral and sharp and beautiful enough to be perpetuated and circulated without bastardization or absence of substance.
CRASH THE BANKS !!!
http://dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=10019
I’ve never understood the Anarchist hypocritical obsession with anti-consumerism. Anti-consumerism hurts working people far more than the consumers ever will. We organize working people into unions and such efforts for better pay, job security, benefits, etc., of course, consumerism aids the capitalist class, but without consumers there would be no foundation for the working class to organize and take control of the goods they produce. Workers (myself included) do not fight for democratic control and better wages for some anarcho-primitivist, wearing 20 year old clothes and driving a vintage bike to tell them they are wrong for consuming the fruits of their labor. In my opinion, all the efforts of the anarchist truly are self-defeating and have never even begun to aid the struggles of working people, and their “coffee-shop” bullshit never will help without any sense-full political base, along with bringing an end to general utopian obsessions. In my opinion, Anarchist ideals are more harmful to working people and their efforts than they are helpful in aiding their success.
It depends on which anarchists we’re talking about. I have plenty of respect for the old anarcho-syndicalist tradition, dead as it is, and I think that Murray Bookchin was one of the major left-wing thinkers of the 20th century, wrong as he was.
If “anti-consumerism” means “fight commodity fetishism” then I’m down with it. If it means “stop shopping” then it’s “classless”-intellectual nonsense.
I should of been more clear on my use “anti-consumerism”. When I was talking about the ridiculous hypocrisy of the anti-consumerist movement, I was directing it towards the seemingly growing movement outstandingly against shopping and consuming in general, for whatever purposes they think constitutes this belief, because their goals are counter-productive to the strides of working people.
“Workers … do not fight for democratic control and better wages [to be told that] they are wrong for consuming the fruits of their labor.”
Sorry, Sam, but you’ve smuggled in at least two unsupported claims there: (1) that the consumer goods you buy are the fruits of your labor; (2) that your wages represent the value of your labor.
In fact, as a “first world” worker, you represent the labor aristocracy, and are paid *more* than the value of what you produce. This is possible because you are the beneficiary of “first world” imperialism (hence the reactionary xenophobia of most unions). The lifestyle you enjoy is not the fruit of your labor — it is built on the backs of “third world” workers, who represent the only revolutionary demographic on the planet.
Your fundamental error is in viewing the world with nationalist blinders on. Take them off, and view the entire planet rather than just your own nation, and your error becomes clear. Remember: workers have no country. We live on a capitalist planet; when you benefit from the artificial divisions of nationalism, you can only end up serving the interests of reaction.
As long as you understand that you’ve got no argument against Crimethinc’s moral subjectivism, I can dig the rest of the post. I do get amused by the panicked shouts of “nihilist!” whenever one dares to state the obvious on that front. It’s the easiest route to exposing latent social-conservatism.
I have to take a break from holiday merriment to cut and paste what I’ve argued before, because I’ve heard this argument again and again.
***
You’re repeating a fallacy from (or echoing leftist “commonsense” that has its roots in) Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. It’s easy to see how Lenin made his mistakes, but in 2009, almost a century after the fact, its amazing to see this repeated.
For those unfamiliar: “Lenin’s theory contends that companies in the developed world exploit workers in the developing world (where wages are much lower), resulting in increased profits. Because of these increased profits, the companies are able to pay higher wages to their employees “at home” (that is, in the developed world), thus creating a working class satisfied with their standard of living and not inclined to proletarian revolution. Lenin thus contended that imperialism had prevented increasing class polarization in the developed world, and argued that a workers’ revolution could only begin in one of the underdeveloped or semideveloped countries, such as Russia.”
Lenin was wrong. The affluence of the First World did not depend on the exploitation the poor in the Third World. Lenin thought that the export of capital to the periphery is necessary because domestically surplus could not be absorbed because if it was incapable of mass consumption. This made sense in 1916, but Lenin could not anticipate the erection of the welfare state and the more equally shared prosperity of the post-War era. The post-war era saw a shift **away** from capital investment abroad and yet it sparked the “golden age” of American capitalism. (Also the “weak link theory” of peripheral revolutions sparking ones in the core didn’t exactly turn out either.)
To quote Harrington, “[the fact that Lenin was wrong] in no way meant that the North had become more benevolent in its behavior towards the South. The profits made from the wretched of the earth were now more a cruel convenience than a matter of survival.”
Don’t get me wrong. The rest of the work is important. The parts about the emergence of finance capital through the merging of industry and finance— what I am attacking is this notion that the affluence of the West is the complete result of colonial and neo-colonial extraction. No doubt Americans benefit from cheaply created goods made in China and elsewhere with hyper-exploited workers, but to totally discount the working class in core capitalist nations? I feel like we’ve been down this path before. The “labor aristocracy” nonsense in relation to ordinary workers is the road to a Third Worldism. The world needs a radical movement in the core capitalist countries.
***
Here’s a critique I saw posted a while back that goes into the economics of why that theory is bunk: http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/128
I’m not a Leninist, and haven’t read a word of him. I’m simply an an anti-capitalist with no line. All these ridiculous formulaic lines are absurd. What matters is boot-on-the-ground reality, and fighting on behalf of the oppressed. That can take a different form every day. In fact it will have to, and the surest sign that you’re dealing with a dogmatic religious movement rather than a workers’ movement is that the former will advise you to stop, or be quiet, when fighting for the oppressed would run counter to doctrine. I’ve no use for such blithering idiocy. I arrived at the obvious by observing reality, not by reading any holy text. But I’m glad Lenin agrees with me.
At any rate, you’ve shown nothing in your post. You’ve merely said “nu-uh,” and backed it up with a quote saying the same. Forgive me for not being convinced. The real meat of your “argument” seems to be more of the “nihilist!” mode of argument, except now it’s “third-worldist!” Well, so what if it is? What matters is what’s true, and it is transparently obvious that the “first world” exploits the “third world,” just as it’s obvious that objective morality is philosophically incoherent. These truths are self-evident to anyone who spends a moment considering them.
Anyway, good blog. I’m not a hater. Solidarity and all that.
Other self-evident truths include the the Sun revolving around a flat Earth. Read the Solidarity critique. US unions are not part of any “labor aristocracy”, and the American worker produces more value than she receives back in wages. This isn’t doctrine. It’s empirical fact.
and… on moral nihilism
“There is no such thing as good or evil, there is no universal standard of right and wrong”
Saying there are no *intrinsic* values or meaning is different than asserting that socially constructed “goods” and “evils” should all be discarded in pursuit of some personal liberation from the collective. “There is no universal moral code that should dictate human behavior.” That’s the deeply disturbing, objectionable part in my view.
Solidarity. Greetings. Happy New Years, etc.
“I’m simply an an anti-capitalist with no line.”
Of course you have a line. You just spelled it out above. A line is nothing more than a position. And your position is pretty damn close to the old Weather Underground position re: “First World” workers (or at least white ones).
My life would be much easier if I was paid above the value of what I “produce,” BTW (I put “produce” in quotes because I’m not an industrial worker though I’m damn well a wage-slave).
Firstly, Bhaskar Sunkara, you’ve articulated here perfectly what I and others have been mulling over in recent months regarding the cultural illegitimacy of the hipster sub-culture, and I look forward to reading your future posts.
That said, while I’m incredibly pleased to have found this site and other materials through the DSA and YDSA, I’ve begun to realize that all the clairvoyance and lucidity of these philosophical arguments, while profound to read, is tantamount to garbage for the average citizen– nothing more than highbrow bickering. Of course any serious political movement requires an intellectual foundation, and ours is not lacking. But, to parrot the rest–this seems to be about all we’ve got.
It’s easy to see why people turn away from democratic socialism at the start– with no unified political front, there’s no traction- and thus no legitimacy. Instantly brushed-off as utopian dribble, or good on paper, but paper only.
How do we change that?
I’m finding that cultural and economic issues must be addressed patently. No pretensions, and no reservations. And as such, political organization is paramount for garnering future public support.
So it’s worth mentioning that Adbusters, was, in fact, a stepping stone for me and others I know in developing an anti-capitalist perspective, and into further exploring the left as it is in the US today. Sure, it’s a rag- but a rag that gets read. The greater public discourse there is on the subject, the greater chance there is of having genuine political motion.
Well, the point of a piece like this is to address people on the left, not the “mainstream”. So yeah, it’s admittedly some esoteric stuff. I think it’s more than let’s unite politically and organizationally, as there are also serious intellectual and theoretical problems resulting from the experience of the left in the 20th century that needs to be addressed. But yes, a viable left “movement of opposition” is a necessity. We need an organization that can plant it’s flag and attract radicalized students, intellectuals and workers and work to slowly build public support. You are right on when you say “political organization is paramount for garnering future public support.”
Organization is key. The old Leninist slogan that “the working class is nothing without a party, but everything with one” isn’t complete drivel. The aversion to theory and organization go hand in hand in my book, let’s hope we’ll turn the corner before we are old, bitter cynics.
For the moment as a student activist, I’m quite happy with the recent strides that YDS has taken. I don’t think there’s much else going on in the student left that lends itself to optimism. (not SDS or USAS for example).
“So it’s worth mentioning that Adbusters, was, in fact, a stepping stone for me and others I know in developing an anti-capitalist perspective, and into further exploring the left as it is in the US today.”
I think reading authors like Chomsky is an infinitely superior way to be introduced to the anti-capitalist perspective. From a radical point of view, time sunk into Adbusters is just wasted time. While I concede your point that organizations like Adbusters do serve as “stepping stones” to radical politics, there are far more direct routes that can be taken, and an effective socialist movement should be able to make these routes more visible than they are. At any rate, it does not bode well for radical politics if the most visible routes to radical politics are petit-bourgeois organizations like Adbusters and Crimethinc.
“Infinitely superior” if to those who are already interested in an anti-capitalist perspective, perhaps.
“Stepping stones” is a terrible reflection on how people arrive at any politics– as if people see the opposite bank and strive toward it. The “direct route” only exists as such for those who know where they want to go.
What makes you think that anyone wants to go down your path and explore no others? Go ahead and close down any indirect routes. Build walls on either side, and a ceiling above so that the only choices upon your path are forward or back. I’m sure everyone with leftist leanings will say, “Well, I can perhaps see that little light at the other end of this tunnel. I have no idea what it means, but maybe I should give up my exploration of the world with its sun and rain and clouds and trees and commit to this one path. That way I will not be distracted by anything.”
Or maybe out of basic human curiosity they’ll keep looking for their own way across, and finding all other ways blocked, insha’allah, they will settle somewhere else entirely.
Brilliant plan.