The following paper was presented under the title “Bugaboos of Baroque Marxism” at the second annual Rethinking Gramsci: Global Perspectives on Gramsci conference, held May 8-10, 2024, at the Instituto Italiano di Cultura in Montreal. Since I have used this title elsewhere, I have changed it here. The text was revised in August 2024.

The Hegemonic Party in Times of Anti-Communism Left, Right and Centre

The cancelling of Russians in different fields of endeavour in the context of the NATO proxy war in Ukraine and the censorship of Palestine solidarity protests since the War on Gaza are examples of what has been happening in postmodern academia for the last forty years now being applied to geostrategic state politics. In his 2017 archaeology of the “H-word” (hegemony), and in the chapter on “Cross-Cutting,” Perry Anderson identifies the context in which this could take place.[1] Discussing the writings of Robert Cox in Production, Power, and World Order, Anderson mentions that for Cox any global hegemony must extend the internal hegemony of the hegemon’s dominant class.[2] An international system that can claim to represent universal interests and secure the acquiescence of weaker states requires not only material capabilities – productive, distributive, financial and military – but must also exert ideological influence, like for example the liberal ideology of free trade that coincided with the British empire’s command of naval power. For any historic bloc, according to Cox, norms and institutions must feature more prominently than the disciplinary elements of a hegemonic system. The problem with U.S. hegemony, he argues, is that it is declining into mere dominance – coercion without consent. If the U.S. has since the 1980s operated as a global hegemon, it is due to its ability to embed its inequitable social power into the ideological, cultural and political norms of other states. Today, the disciplining of labour through lower wages, higher prices, downsizing, automation and offshoring, the financialization of the economy, and the forcing open of speculative markets can be found in even rival BRICS countries, which indicates global alignment with the Washington consensus.

As William I. Robinson describes it, globalization, post-Bretton Woods (1971-2008), has been capitalism’s solution to trade deficits and the decline in growth rates, with new opportunities for accumulation through transnational economic regimes of integrated production, foreign investment, free trade and privatization, all of these facilitated by the new information and communication technologies.[3] While geopolitical competition intensifies, politics remains tied to the level of the nation-state and inter-state formations that repressively control workers and social movements, making it more difficult for societies to address military, economic and ecological crises, pandemics, food emergencies and the plight of refugees. The transnational capital that relies increasingly on the financialization of assets rather than the real economy – which Yanis Varoufakis refers to as the ‘global minotaur’ – resorts to the militarization of accumulation, leading to a crisis of this American-led hegemony that is global in scope, as evidenced at this moment by the repression of Palestine solidarity worldwide, where the interests of the billionaires, the political class, the military-industrial complex, big oil, big tech, the corporate media and the neoliberal knowledge industries coincide.[4] How then does the transnational ruling class secure the consent of societies that are increasingly in revolt after the dismantling of Keynesian and New Deal welfarism?

Unlike Antonio Gramsci’s nationalist concern with communist hegemony in post-WWI Italy as part of an internationalist movement of the proletariat, today’s “hegemony of the civilization of [global] capital,” according to Cox, involves two ideological forms of neoliberal hegemony: on the one hand, the ideological discipline of neoliberal austerity, based on increased deficits designed to make economies scream – to put it in the Henry Kissinger-inspired words of Richard Nixon in his orders to the CIA with regard to American foreign policy in Chile, now in evidence in Argentina under the autocratic rule of Javier Milei – and on the other, an ideological compensation, like for example family values, patriotism, religion or small business entrepreneurialism, on the right, or professionalism, NGOism and identity politics, on the left. According to Wang Hui, also discussed by Anderson, the simulation of representative forms in today’s neoliberal hegemony depoliticizes politics and cancels resistant popular agency but does not eliminate the realm of ideology that supplements the rule of deregulated markets.[5] Global neoliberal hegemony and the mantra of TINA (there is no alternative) is not effective by itself but relies on an ideological apparatus that one could sum up with the word consumerism. This could include, for example, advertising, media, shopping, subcultures, lifestyle politics, heritage and tourism, gentrification, multiculturalism, global brands, culture wars, cultural politics, yuppy values, indie values, journalism, scholarship, and so on. For Hui, consumerism is the linchpin of global capital, which, for the vast majority, remains a system of alienated production.

The set of issues that have impacted the organized left since the postwar era could be neatly summarized as a shift from a culture of ‘Marx and Coca-Cola,’ to use the phrase coined by Jean-Luc Godard to refer to social conditions before the eruption of May 68, to the current culture of ‘Gramsci and Pepsi,’ as I myself coined this phrase to refer to the status of the theory of hegemony on the postmodern left in the era after Thatcher and Reagan, a generation for whom there is no outside to capitalism (TINO), and which disseminates pseudo- or post-Gramscian theories like counter-power, radical democracy, privilege theory, whiteness studies, critical race theory, intersectionality and decoloniality.[6] While the stakes in Gaza are essentially geostrategic, the clampdown in Germany on Palestinian and citizen rights as a matter of Holocaust reparations, or in the United States as a matter of campus safety, only makes sense in a context in which revolutionary theory and universality have been thoroughly bankrupted, first by Cold War cybernetics, which limits liberalism to the economic realm, and second, by the postmodern left, an offshoot of the latter, for which “hegemony contests” within pre-scripted culture war scenarios reflect a “repressive desublimation” of intellectual, cultural, moral and political standards in the name of what Gramsci referred to as the kind of “baroque” Marxism that fails to “raise the working class to a higher level of cultural life” in favour of the “purely material contact and external unity” that one today finds within, to use a convenient but now also politically charged phrase, wokeism, or, the new reform movement of a now decadent counter-cultural liberalism and postmodern petty-bourgeois nihilism.[7]

Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis teaches that purely material contact is not limited to empirical questions but also relates to language and ideational expressions that are manipulated through ciphers, metaphors, subtext or other disingenuous uses of “practice” that for Marxism cannot impose themselves in all of their complexity until after the creation of a communist State. Until then, the attitude taken must be a “critico-polemical” approach that is purified of metaphysics and that is based on the conception of immanence defined in Vladimir Lenin’s study of the three interacting sources, or “moments,” of Marxist theory: German idealism, French revolutionary politics and English political economy. This triad is used by Gramsci to dispute the purely autonomous understanding of political science passed down from the time of Machiavelli and to propose instead a “modern prince” that is advanced critically by addressing problems within civil society at a time when social democracy was leading the trade unions into corporatist alignment with fascism. Against the “baroque way of thinking” at work in Nikolai Bukharin’s study of historical materialism, wherein the “technical instrument” of material forces is developed in a purely “material” direction, Gramsci also criticizes the “abracadabra” of idealism, defined as an “infantile deviation from the philosophy of praxis.”[8] How does one know when something is genuinely Marxist or not? Against sophistry, facts cannot be superseded by their direct translation into ‘sociological’ facts but must be assessed according to the singular criterion of communist hegemony. Matter is socially and historically organized. Gramsci gives the example of atomic science that is used by Bukharin to suggest that this new discovery proves the disappearance of the individual, referring in this case to Marx’s sketch of the Robinsonade as a non-corrupted pre-social state of being. One might think the same today with regard to something like Artificial Intelligence, which a Foucauldian theorist might add to the list of reasons why the humanist subject is little more than an effect of the discursive apparatus. For Gramsci, this superficial understanding of science, which presumes that individualism has been sundered, provides a demonstration ad absurdum according to which individualism is somehow an anti-scientific mistake of history, rather than itself a product of history and a stage in human development that is superior to organic theories of community – not only the kind that was mobilized by fascism but also by communist collectivism in its worst excesses. For Gramsci, it is human history that explains atomic theory and not the opposite.

The negative impact of the “passive revolution” that followed the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the Non-Aligned movement is evident on the contemporary post-left, especially in the realm of post-structuralist cultural theory. Not unlike Bukharin, this dogmatic post-left demonstrates its undialectical and baroque mode of thinking at every turn because it has wrongly convinced itself of two things: 1) the wrongness of individualism in the form of an autotelic bourgeois subjectivity, and 2) the conceit, on the basis of the latter, that this post-left has: a) rid itself of humanism, universality and individuality, and b) represents a higher stage of critico-political activity than Marxism. In this sleight of hands, an essentially liberal petty-bourgeois class makes strategic use of what appears to be a Marxist critique of bourgeois ideology to advance an anti-Marxist and post-communist perspective. Because this post-structural approach tends to ignore the specificity of fields of knowledge like science, politics, aesthetics or love, to take Alain Badiou’s definition of the four realms of truth, it makes a facile use of them for the sake of symbolic articulations that are shorn of Marxist understandings of social relations. To take for example the question of activist art on the postmodern left, Philipp Kleinmichel mentions that the instrumental reduction of aesthetic discourse for the sake of political effects that resemble social protest, social work or social movement activism, raises socially engaged art to the level of artistic simulation, which he defines as the generation of “models of political activism” that precede non-artistic political activism.[9] One might consider in this regard the way in which Just Stop Oil actions in museums, for example, were prefigured by art activist actions against Museum sponsors and trustees. Kleinmichel contrasts this with André Breton and Leon Trotsky’s advocacy in 1938 of a true human culture produced under the condition of independent science and art, wherein the faculties of imagination, intuition and individuality are given free play.

Surely, Just Stop Oil activists also have this utopian horizon in mind. However, concepts that smack of idealism get short shrift in contemporary progressive movements. Terms like human, freedom, independence and individuality are viewed with suspicion if not derision in today’s deflationary scholarship, as is the case for instance in the discourse of the socially engaged art specialist and advocate of dialogical aesthetics, Grant Kester. The American sculptor Richard Serra died on March 26, 2024. As a defender of his “controversial” work Tilted Arc (1981-89), I wrote a few days after his death a piece about how this avant-garde work was not only destroyed by neoconservative government agents but had been intellectually dismantled in subsequent years by activist art theorists, including Kester. I submitted this essay to Monthly Review Essays/Online for publication on March 29. It was turned down by their editors a few weeks later. I then submitted on April 15 a longer and modified version of the essay to the editors of a publication project edited by the organizers of the FEINARTS lecture series, to which both Kester and I have contributed.[10] A few weeks later, on May 6, Monthly Review Online published an interview with Kester conducted by Scott Ferguson and William Saas of the Money on the Left podcast.[11] In Vanguardia and elsewhere I have offered criticism of Kester’s writings, while defending the concept of the avant garde in contemporary art, but the favour has never been repaid.[12] In any case, the interview was prompted by the publication of two new books by Kester, titled The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (2023) and Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (2023). The subject area is similar to the ground tread by the cultural theorist Sven Lütticken, whose books I reviewed in Monthly Review Online in March 2023.[13]

The interview with Kester has two topics that I wish to emphasize: Tilted Arc and communist politics.[14 ]The article begins by suggesting that Kester’s work prevents aesthetics and political economy from being “cordoned off,” which is hardly an innovation since this has been the case in Marxist theory since the nineteenth century and moreover can even be said to inform the best of bourgeois theory as such, despite its limitations, in ways that are often more complex than some of the new approaches proffered by contemporary scholarship. Kester mentions an early essay of his that I rather appreciate and discussed in a recent critique of his work written for the fiftieth anniversary issue of the journal Afterimage.[15] Shibboleths are generated with strawman arguments about Lockean notions of “self-possession” and “world mastery” in ways that are not just a little mechanical and hyperbolic. The leitmotif of this postmodern thought is to champion relativized “weak” notions against “strong” absolute bogeymen. As for Tilted Arc, the refusal of my essay by Monthly Review Essays/Online and the untimely handing over of this topic to a liberal thinker must make for some amusement for somebody. I nevertheless understand perfectly why Kester used Tilted Arc as a foil for dialogical community art, and it is also no accident, as a theorist of the avant garde, that I have defended the work. Kester defines the sculpture in terms of behaviourism, which I think is a mistake. Titled Arc is not, for example, a Dan Graham video installation or a Valie Export performance. Without repeating my analysis of Tilted Arc here, I do agree with the notion that the work was conceived as an intervention in public space, but then, I disagree that this should be treated with suspicion, as Kester puts it, “awakening” or “enlightening” the public to alter their consciousness. A critical work does not presume such a rudimentary form of pedagogy, but to think so serves Kester’s postmodern anti-Enlightenment purposes since Serra, he argues, did not consult “the people who would come into contact with the work ahead of time,” a requirement for critical work that I dispute.[16] The tactic here is the avoidance of Enlightenment instrumentality for the sake of anti-Enlightenment instrumentality. The secreting of the intellectual resources of the mainstream into a neo-bohemian activist camp constitutes a petty-bourgeois rather than Marxist critique of Enlightenment. Beyond the problem of class reduction, this political and cultural agenda hinges on the rejection of universalism, which is why it should be questioned and challenged by leftists. Knowledge is to be shared, not monopolized. The reason this happens, however, is that post-structuralism teaches leftists that they can have their Marxism and eat it too.

Tilted Arc was the product of a commission for a General Services Administration federal building project that was overseen by the National Endowment for the Arts. Serra is hardly the only GSA-commissioned artist who did not crowdsource his sculpture or its intentions, and why it is that this rather than far blander works earned the enmity of government thugs should not be ignored. The artist is belittled by Kester as having had an “epiphany” or “enlightenment of some kind,” which smacks more of religious conversion – Saint Paul on the road to Damascus – than the kind of art education and historical development that one can and should ascribe to an artist as sophisticated as Serra. Kester states:

Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc was supposed to make the government workers see this huge barrier, and say, Ah, the barrier is a symbol or metaphor for the constraint of government bureaucracies. And I see I’m an apparatchik that’s employed by this entire oppressive system, I get it. Right. So conventional art is all about transformation of consciousness, but it always has to be limited to the individual. There’s never an understanding of how that might expand or become scalable.[17]

 

Why should art be tasked with the replacement of politics? Kester’s description here comes closest to what I wrote in my unpublished text than anything else he has written about the work, but it still misses the mark. In contrast to Kester, I believe that the meaning of the work is both more complex, as a reflection on the general notion of justice and also the specific activity of the surrounding government buildings, which concerns the people who work there or who pass by, all of which is open to interpretation and adaptable to contingencies, which in no way requires that viewers ignore the sculpture itself, the artist’s work in general as well as its materials and methods of manufacture. It is this question of freedom, both at the level of production and reception, that postmodern leftists are unable to address without appealing to a social constructionist approach to the notion that universalism masks interests, which does not make for a strong commitment to the possibility of radical social change but rather reflects the pessimism of an intellectual class concerned primarily with status. Neoliberal postmodernists, who have adapted to the relativist rhetoric of empowerment, prefer the devil they know – capitalist reality – to the prospect of socialist transformation.[18]

The manufacturing of controversy around Tilted Arc is not something that Kester explores in any detail in his 2004 book Conversation Pieces.[19] Instead, his first monograph generally ignores the meaning of the work, as well as its dismantling, by focusing instead on its supposed unpopularity. Serra’s way of going about making his work at that time, whatever you think of it, can also be said about most of the world’s art, including popular formats like music, literature, architecture, photography, cinema, fashion, design, and so on. This is not to suggest that modes of production do not change over time but simply that consumption cannot be conflated with production, not to mention all of the stages in what David Harvey has identified around the production, reproduction and destruction of culture, including: bourgeois and popular demand, state spending, consumer demand, social needs and desires, the realization of value in the form of money, luxury commodities like artworks, wages and means of production, the reproduction of labour power (which is not insignificant to the materials and methods used by Serra), producer demand, materials derived from nature, and the distribution of money by taxes, profit and interest. The destruction of Tilted Arc acts as a potlatch of sorts, where the managers of this process expend some of their prestige by destroying important and valued material culture. Postmodern scholars do the same by deconstructing important concepts and principles as a matter of course.

The exception in this scenario is not Serra but Kester and likeminded relational artists. While I have no quarrel with dialogical forms of practice and in fact respect this way of working, I do believe it is a mistake to allow this approach to set the criteria with which to evaluate all other practices. The notion that production and reception should be ascribed individual rather than social, cultural, historical, philosophical, and economic significance in cases like this has been challenged by new art historical and cultural studies methods for decades already and are standard fare in art education. These were rightly opposed to the culturally conservative aspects of liberal humanism. However, as the raft of postmodern approaches have become official discourse – phenomenology, structuralism, deconstruction, discourse theory, schizanalysis – the formalistic aspects of post-structuralism, which rely on mind-numbingly limiting binary frameworks, such as individual and collective, are simply inverted to make critique seem more radical than it is, much like the way Judith Butler’s theory of performativity relies on the hypostatization of gender norms to then make drag performance seem (potentially but not necessarily) more radical than, say, masculinity and femininity. In sociology, the binary distinction between agency and structure is a starting point for more complex analysis. The privileging of structure over and against agency is not a very important lesson. This goes as well for base and superstructure in Marxist dialectics. Since the 1990s, unfortunately, a rather mechanistic approach to social construction has become the modus operandi for much of the bureaucracy in the neoliberalized culture and knowledge industries.[20]

One has to ask why it is that Kester seeks to make an idiot of an exceptionally sophisticated and universally recognized artist who pioneered new methods in the realm of sculpture, reduced by Kester to the category of “plop art” rather than site specificity. Sadly, the answer is obvious enough: to deny the value of (traditional) art education and the field of (modern) culture to finesse an anti-humanist reversal that makes the critic and the academy the focus of the analysis, with social efficacy as the self-justification of a cliquish sector of class society. Kester also states:

 

I was interested in practices that involve actually opening yourself up to the unexpected insights, that the artist might in some way learn from, be transformed by, the specific conditions of site, and public and space and community in ways that maybe would problematize all of those terms.[21]

 

Why must artists and theorists problematize everything to feel relevant? Why should anyone learn anything about one site, work or method and not another? Should teachers, within the frameworks set by pedagogy, be in the business of controlling what can be learned or studied and what cannot? Kester’s language is here more behavioural than anything that could be attributed to Tilted Arc. Any rejection of these premises, which have much in common with Cold War cybernetics, would be ascribed by him to problematic notions of “autonomy” and “sovereignty,” not to mention matters of rights, principles and notions of equality that are perhaps too banal for the managers of offbeat trends in social justice, such as, with no finger pointed here at Kester, “rape on the barricades,” to be meted out to “heteronormative” comrades by the Sally Ann. Such Incel logics for which no consent is required – because consent is not even conceivable when sex is (wrongly) conflated with revolutionary politics – is now extended from subcultural terrain to professional milieux as well as academic hiring and firing practices, much of this, here again, under the neo-bohemian auspices of a postmodern nihilism turned micro-fascist. The will and desire to hurt others is blessed by onlookers in this twisted academy as a matter of ethics, since, after all, power is diffuse, sexual minorities, the Aztec codex, drugs, trauma studies, animals, etc. and so on.

Given all of this, and as far as the interview is concerned, one is not surprised that Kester can only produce an anxious definition of the radical left. Populist appeal is made to the notion of common sense, which was critiqued by Immanuel Kant in relation to universality and later radicalized in Gramsci’s preference for good sense, which is not simply a matter of opinion or democratic pluralism. Not surprisingly, political change in the form of something like the Russian Revolution, a relatively bloodless change of regime when compared to the carnage of the First World War, is rejected by Kester since it supposedly clears away everything that came before. Instead of this rubbish, should a student of history not be offered the explanation that the Bolsheviks promised bread and land reform? This play of reformism against revolution, being only one of countless bugaboos, is deployed in dualistic terms in Kester’s interview responses. The thought that Soviet communism was simply Tzarism in a different guise is not put forward to enlighten the editors and readers of Monthly Review, who simply know better, but to play to some presupposed gallery. Marxism is then said to be a critique of the bourgeois revolution of 1789, which is not only a partial reading of Marx, but a confused one at that. Marx and Engels are not Laclau and Mouffe, who mostly want to make good on the bourgeois promise of freedom, equality and brotherhood within capitalist parameters. Lenin, who was gladdened by the fact that the Russian Revolution lasted longer than the Paris Commune, is caricatured as having done “a little dance” to celebrate the fact, as though a child at heart. The same Lenin, later described as a “cold-blooded aristocrat,” is said to be convinced of the correctness of everything the Bolsheviks did – a storybook version of the Revolution if ever there was one – only later to be said to have worried the Revolution would not be possible before a preliminary bourgeois revolution. So many Lenins to choose from could have led instead to an appreciation of dialectical materialism, the combined and uneven development of possibilities within historical circumstances.

As with aesthetic autonomy, Kester’s discussion of revolutionary politics is simply another sleight that is used to lend credibility to postmodern post-politics. Does Slavoj Žižek really desire a Leninist revolution? Kester does not seem to have paid any attention to Žižek’s writings on Lenin or his countless presentations. Does Alain Badiou really celebrate the Khmer Rouge? The author is known to have viewed the Khmer Rouge as a wrongminded but justified reaction to colonial domination. Kester jokingly suggests that his own blather might come across as so much “liberal humanist claptrap” but it is closer in fact to anti-humanist, post-liberal, post-modern claptrap. Major events, we are informed, “don’t come from the consciousness of the individual theorist or Vanguard leader but from human Praxis in a myriad of ways.”[22] What insight! “We’re all flawed and imperfect revolutionaries, for sure.”[23] What modesty! And so what then is to be done? “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”[24] Fine, but is this the relativistic will to power that subtends so much contemporary cultural theory? Kester is certain that social change will not come from a Greenbergian avant-garde artist isolated and alone in the privacy of his studio. If important change can come from Rosa Parks refusing to sit at the back of the bus, as he suggests, can the revolution get more than just a nudge and a nod from these well-paid faculty members? One could do worse than put more stock in flawed and imperfect figures like Žižek and Badiou, among others, who have devised vigorous frameworks for radical and progressive praxis that bridges the periods before and after postmodernism.

 

The demobilized state of the left in postmodern post-politics accounts in many ways for the popularity of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, or domination through consent. Hegemony contests are a kind of Clintonian wink: “I smoked the Gramscian notion of hegemonic contestation but didn’t inhale the toxic Marxist orthodoxy.” Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s radical democratic and left populist advocacy of social movement affinity without universality and without the dialectical understanding of historical materialism combined difference with contingency.[25] It did not, according to Žižek, combine contingency with class struggle. The Saussurean overlap between contingency and equivalence in a politics of articulation avoids the Marxist materialism that identified the working class as the agent of emancipation. In his exchange with Laclau and Judith Butler in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Žižek described the current predicament as a blackmail in which one must defend liberal capitalism or else be said to support totalitarianism.[26] Although there is no labour and capital conflict without an excluded third element, and the cultural politics of the petty bourgeoisie becomes one of the many possible displaced modalities of class conflict, such conflicts prevent us from dealing with the most determining contradictions. For Žižek, this contingency of plural political struggles is presupposed by the totality of capital. One now gives these struggles the name wokeism.

An even more hoary term than wokeism is that of “cultural Marxism,” whose use by the alt-right has had a chilling effect on academic and public discourse. It is unfortunate that the academic left has not taken advantage of this buzzword to address longstanding issues within Marxism that continue to animate cultural theory, critical theory and cultural studies, but it is understandable that the postmodern left has conveniently used its misappropriation to avoid dealing with Marxist theory for the simple reason that, as Žižek argued in his April 2019 debate with Jordan Peterson: “they’re not Marxists.”[27] Non-plussed by the conspiratorial ramblings of scholars like James Lindsay, academic progressives readily abandoned the field to the likes of Stephen Bannon and Anders Breivik. The refusal to choose between identity politics and labour politics, between liberalism and socialism, has been put forward instead as a way to avoid what we might argue is a Gramscian problem: how to overcome left and right deviations in a hegemonic articulation of identity and class? In other words, what is the best formula in a war of movement that lacks a social base? Intersectionality, decoloniality, privilege theory and critical race theory are clearly the right-wing deviation to be avoided. The latter’s generally postmodern anti-universalism is against liberalism and socialism in equal measure. The “do both” admonition to focus on anti-exploitation as well as anti-oppression that one finds on the social democratic left, with for example black Marxists producing disorienting concepts like “racial capitalism” or anti-imperialists upholding nationalist agendas worthy of Stalinism – like Amazon Labor Union leader Chris Smalls meeting with officials in the (Stalinist) Communist Party of Greece in May 2024 – make for strange bedfellows with the kind of state powers and business interests that also consign Marxism to the dustbin. A class only approach is non-existent. A universalist Marxist approach, as Gramsci conceived it, which views social democracy as the left wing of capitalism, will have little appeal in a polity where class politics has been reduced to populisms left and right. I will return to this question of leadership below but note here that its practical impossibility is what structures most of what people have cut out for themselves as options on the post-left.

In a 2017 essay published in American Affairs, titled “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump,” Nancy Fraser refers to the combination of free-market ideology and new communications technologies with the tradition of reform liberalism as a new hegemonic bloc that she refers to as “progressive neoliberalism,” a powerful alliance, she argues, that is based on the odd coupling of an expropriative globalization agenda with a liberal politics of recognition:

 

on the one hand, mainstream liberal currents of the new social movements (feminism, antiracism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and LGBTQ rights); on the other hand, the most dynamic high-end “symbolic” and financial sectors of the U.S. economy (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood).[28]

 

There is no reason to not add the military-industrial complex to this list. The concept of progressive neoliberalism brings to light the problem addressed by Ellen Meiksins Wood and David Harvey that capitalism makes use of various forms of oppression like sexism and racism but that these oppressions are not inherent to a system that can just as easily use anti-oppression, as is now evident with DEI policies and mandates in government, business, schools and the media.[29] In the case of the U.S., progressive ‘New Democrat’ or ‘Third Way’ neoliberalism divides the traditional Democratic coalition of professionals, workers and minority groups by dismissing its left wing. While providing symbolic recognition for identity and minority groups within a politics of upward mobility for a few, the distributive element of welfarism and the realities of class division are avoided in favour of liberal-meritocratic status seeking. Globalization and the financialization hierarchies that hollow out working-class and middle-class living standards, and that transfer wealth to the transnational billionaire class, are the inescapable material conditions that now shape the left movements that have abjured the war of manoeuvre in favour of mechanistic models of resistance and reform.

The main competitor of progressive neoliberalism is what Fraser refers to as the “reactionary neoliberalism” that is associated with the Republican Party, with its rhetorically populist overtones and fascist scapegoating of minority groups. Progressive neoliberalism’s attacks on democratic institutions and the socialist left have greatly facilitated the rise of this far right. Against both forms of neoliberalism, Fraser identifies “progressive populism” as the most likely alternative on the left. Based on infrastructure spending, criminal justice reform, a progressive social justice politics of inclusion, free universal education and health care, this anti-corporate agenda – as represented by the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and the Podemos and Syriza governments – is the only candidate, she argues, for a hegemonic bloc that is able to offer a serious challenge and unite the working class, especially if it manages to win large enough segments of youth and the middle class.

On the ultra-left, and in those new social movement, anarchist and localist sectors that are supposed to be the only space remaining for left radicalism, themselves the result of New Left and Eurocommunist trends that separated politics from the critique of political economy, the rejection of the working class as the privileged agent of change and the championing of single-issue campaigns and affinity groups is very tenuously linked to what Gramsci advocated as praxis. In his contribution to the reader The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce, Fabio Frosini mentions that for Gramsci, the “fact of hegemony” was first conceived by Lenin, rather than Marx, and that because of this, Gramscians must consider the mutual translatability of politics, philosophy and economics against reductionist, mechanistic, analytic and positivist materialisms.[30] This production of a hegemonic apparatus is rejected by today’s post-workerists who privilege the overdeterminations of fixed capital against that of living labour. My concern here is the adoption by this sector of the anti-humanist trends of methods like intersectionality that is found within movements like Black Lives Matter and in the years after Occupy Wall Street. In “Empire: Twenty Years On,” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri follow the Stuart Hall school of reductionism – class lived as identity – to argue for a homology between the global economy and subjectivity, defining proletarian politics as feminist, decolonial, queer, anti-ableist, and so on, recomposed as multitudes that do not presuppose the centrality of class.[31] Against the postulates of Wood, they argue that racism and patriarchy are in fact constitutive of capitalism, a highly complicated and problematic assertion that nevertheless makes for good marketing to a “millennial” left, as Chris Cutrone refers to is, that feels itself unconnected to the traditions of communism.[32]

This new tack by autonomist Marxists is best expressed by Maurizio Lazzarato, the co-founder of the journal Multitudes and originator of the concept of immaterial labour. In his 2023 book The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution: Minorities and Classes, Lazzarato seeks to build continuity between anti-globalization struggles, the Arab Spring, Occupy, Black Lives Matter and the Gilets Jaunes.[33] Reiterating the populist trope that the working class can no longer be the subjective force that would carry forward the revolution, Lazzarato adds that, on the evidence of the importance of peasant movements in communist revolutions, it never was a privileged force. Along a post-68 mode of thought, he replaces the concept of class in the singular with classes in the plural, a passage from “class struggle” to the “struggles of classes” that combine the political revolution with the social revolution. Here, sexism and racism are reconceived as modes of production that can only be overcome through the disappearance of gender and sexual differences, along the lines of Marx’s withering of the state. Just as for autonomists economy equals subjectivity, class here equals identity. What Trotsky rejected in his writings on fascism as “zoological materialism” adds weight to the charge that the autonomists lack autonomy, making random social truths, in Gramsci’s words, the basis of political action.[34] That the common sense of Black Lives Matter has led this movement directly into the maws of the foundation-funded NGO sector, if not Wall Street and Hollywood, is only one indication of how Gramsci’s revolutionary Marxist understanding of hegemony can be misappropriated as a philosophical and political concept.

Against Gramsci’s Machiavellian conception of the modern prince, one could instead propose a communist production of organization that need not be feared, but that, unlike Erasmus’ rejoinder to Machiavelli, need not be loved either. Is the Marxist notion of a communist overcoming of contradictions simply the forward projection of Marxism’s tendency to read history backwards, such that capitalism, as Wood argued, is (wrongly) understood as the progressive removal of feudal obstacles to bourgeois power?[35] This tendency, one could argue, is active in Gramsci’s discussion of the Risorgimento’s failure to produce a centralized national bloc. What are the implications of this for the post-Gramscian and micro-political notion of hegemony, which, in the opposite direction, seeks the extirpation of Marxism-Leninism in the “liberation” of social forces, understood as agencements of power and assemblages of whatever singularity, only to inscribe a demotic brand of social constructionism that has no strategy to overcome let alone challenge capitalist social relations? Without the slightest hint of irony, this manifest disorientation is referred to as prefigurative politics, as with for example Mario Tronti’s class-based notion that ‘resistance is primary’ now being applied to anyone with an attitude. The privileged figure of this progressive populist bloc is the “diverse, multicultural working class,” which is opposed, willy-nilly, to the progressive neoliberalism of the extreme centre, inclusive of black capitalists, lean-in feminists and homonormative metrosexuals. This antagonism is not so neatly parsed since, seated at the little table of the bipartisan big table is the left-wing activist class and right-wing creative class factions of the global petty bourgeoisie, meaning, those whose conflicted relation to the average worker – not just university staff and adjuncts – requires that they elevate themselves and their kind as the cause of change.

Without faulting anyone for calling out a genocide when they see one, did the 1,500,000 deaths in Ukraine and the ongoing threat of nuclear exchange not warrant more demonstrations than youthful activists – the last hope of ageing boomers – have mustered to date? Much of the silence on this other disaster is because resistance from below has avoided the question of state and hegemony. Instead of dual power, the counter-power of garden variety liberal-leftism legitimizes the “economic-corporate” leadership proposed by figures like congresswoman and Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (as representative of identity struggles), an avid supporter of Genocide Joe and confidante of Nancy “all roads lead to Putin” Pelosi, or United Auto Workers president Sean Fain (as representative of labour struggles), whose “arsenal of democracy” policy binds the organizations of the working class to the imperialist bourgeoisie. Likewise, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, not only supported the NATO war in Ukraine but condemned the protests against Israeli genocide in Gaza as antisemitic hate speech. The Teamsters bureaucracy, for its part, was busy in Spring 2024 double-dealing with the Biden Democrats as well as neo-fascist Trump republicans, only later to block a strike by Canadian railway workers.

Another peripeteia in Anderson’s history of the H-word offers me an unexpected framework for thinking about the role of the Party in building hegemony.[36] Ranajit Guha, the co-founder of the journal Subaltern Studies, which was at one time dedicated to popular struggles outside of official communist parties – peasants (especially), workers, the non-industrial urban poor and lower sections of the petty bourgeoisie – was concerned to show that popular consciousness escapes official narratives. This non-Marxist theory of ideology and peasant insurgency nevertheless provides a formal model with which we might further develop the Lacanian understanding of Party politics. In Guha’s Dominance without Hegemony of 1997, which Anderson considers to be, perhaps, “the single most striking work ever inspired by Gramsci,” the fact of hegemony is divided between Dominance and Subordination, which we could define as the axes of manoeuvre and position.[37] The axis of Domination is itself divided between Coercion and Persuasion. The axis of Subordination is divided between Collaboration and Resistance. Every society is dynamically divided by a variable composition, or “idiom of order,” of these four elements, which makes it open to change through resistance. Its advantage as a model, according to Anderson, is the avoidance of liberal-utopian conceptions of the state as well as the representation of politics as a concrete historical relation informed by force and consent.

Against efforts on the post-political left to have politics without politics, the fantasy that a new prince would come about through immanent democratization, as Hardt and Negri proposed in Empire, and also against the tendency to qualify the left project as ‘New’ and Marxism as ‘Black,’ or whatever other presentation of “alternatives” to internationalist class struggle, could the communist party not follow Guha’s scheme in conjunction with Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses?[38] Instead of the Party as either Analyst or Master, why not integrate all four?[39]

The Discourse of the Master (Coercion) accounts for the leadership position the Party must take, Hystericizing (through Persuasion) the masses and producing hegemonic consent. As Lacan puts it, “the Master imposes his will through consent.”[41] There is therefore no Master Discourse without first the masses, defined in Lacanian terms as “the reality of a discourse that is already in the world.”41 The knowledge of the masses, however, takes the form of repetition, for example through tradition, rituals, or jouissance in identity. From Badiou’s perspective, we must add that the Master in a political truth procedure cannot be the figure of social difference, whether pluralist (capitalist) or chauvinist (fascist), nor can it be the representation of the archi-political organic community but must be a (generic) universal figure of emancipation. Without this, the Party cannot intervene in knowledge as it relates to the realm of truth (alèthosphère), defined by Lacan as a “thirst [drive] for meaning” that departs from the Master discourse.[42]

There is no Master Signifier (S1) without the subject ($) as its presupposition, which for communism is the figure of the proletariat as the singular universal. The maintenance of class consciousness and the management of social relations, or para-politics, occurs at the level of the Discourse of the University, which here marks the Resistance of the professional-managerial class to problems in social reproduction – i.e. ecology, health care, transportation, etc. For Lacan, such knowledge, or truth, is “immanent to the political as such.”[43] Lacan defines this discourse as the “all-knowing” “bureaucracy”![44]

The Discourse of the Analyst maintains the level of transference-Collaboration, or dual power, with the organized masses that is needed to pursue the course through to a communist overcoming of social relations that are trapped in capitalist property regimes, melioristic reformism and state repression. For Lacan, the modern Master is unlike the classical Master because capitalism renders the knowledge of the worker useless.[45] However, the Party cannot know for the workers what they want, and so consciousness cannot be limited to dogma or programme. This Gramsci would agree with insofar as he viewed Marxism as a worldview rather than a doctrine, adaptable to new knowledges that are themselves inscribed in reality. What the communist Master nevertheless understands is that the Discourse of the Capitalist makes knowledge obscure as a “tyranny of knowledge” that remakes slavery into consumer society.[46] Nothing in the Four Discourses presumes the replacement of civil society by the Party, as would be the case in a totalitarian regime. On the contrary, the essence of Collaboration, as a moment of Subordination, defines the conditions of comradeship as a wager on equality and a humanity emancipated from global capitalism, from identitarian units, and eventually, from the structure of hegemony.

Notes

1. Perry Anderson, The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (London: Verso, 2019) eBook. See also Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review (November-December 1976) 5-78. It is instructive that the prominent conservative critic of wokeism and cancel culture, John McWhorter, has managed to twist U.S. state censorship of progressive anti-genocide speech into its opposite. See John McWhorter, “I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice,” The New York Times (April 23, 2024), https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opinion/columbia-protests-israel.html.

2. See Robert Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

3, William I. Robinson, “Living through the Perfect Storm: William Robinson with Zhandarka Kurti,” The Brooklyn Rail (April 2024), https://brooklynrail.org/2024/04/field-notes/Living-through-the-Perfect-Storm-William-Robinson-with-Zhandarka-Kurti.

4. See Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy (London: Zed Books, 2011).

5. See Wang Hui, “Depoliticized Politics, From East to West,” New Left Review #41 (September-October 2006), 29-45. Referenced in Anderson.

6, See Marc James Léger, Vanguardia: Socially Engaged Art and Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019) 208.

7. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Goeffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971) 397.

8. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 461.

9. Philipp Kleinmichel, “The Symbolic Excess of Art Activism,” in Karen Van Den Berg, Cara Jordan and Philipp Kleinmichel, eds. The Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019) 227, 228.

10, See https://feinart.org and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwYewMMAJl7Rq1wBPEDP7LQ/videos.

11. Scott Ferguson and William Saas, “Aesthetics after Autonomy with Grant Kester,” Monthly Review Online (May 6, 2024), https://mronline.org/2024/05/06/aesthetics-after-autonomy-with-grant-kester/.

12. Very likely the discussion of Tilted Arc in this interview with Kester was intended as countercriticism of my as of yet unpublished piece. If so, the element of academic shadowing explains why I cannot be mentioned by name. It is no longer a secret that my life and work have been subjected to institutional repression and public persecution.

13. Marc James Léger, “Post-Political Post-Aesthetic,” Monthly Review Online (March 30, 2023), https://mronline.org/2023/03/30/post-political-post-aesthetics/.

14. A third, subtextual element is sexuality. Given that this theme is discussed in haphazard covert terms – like for example the code XYZ (for sadomasochism), or the notion of being “scared straight” by “poor” (profligate, promiscuous) people, etc. – they can be countered to a satisfactory extent on their own stated terms without falling into the inuendo of an extended or controlling metaphor. While the purpose here is not to cleanse discourse of sexuality, or of sexual inuendo, which would be a fool’s errand, one can at the same time reject the inflated notion of sex as a public secret, which is merely one of many ways that post-structuralism seeks to catch the tiger by the tail, leading discourse in the direction of sophistry and nonsense.

15. See Marc James Léger, “Aesthetic Pragmatists,” Afterimage 50:4 (2023) 108-13. See also Grant Kester, “Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art,” Afterimage 22:6 (January 1995) 5-11. The business about being “scared straight” by “poor” people comes into his discussion of this essay of his. The critiques I raised in my piece are not addressed directly.

16. Kester cited in Scott Ferguson and William Saas, “Aesthetics after Autonomy with Grant Kester.”

17. Kester cited in Scott Ferguson and William Saas, “Aesthetics after Autonomy with Grant Kester.”

18. On this subject, see Susan Neiman, Left Is Not Woke (London: Polity Press, 2023).

19. Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

20. On this, see for example Marc James Léger, “The grey matter of decolonial activism, or, socially engaged art as professional-managerial class,” Art & The Public Sphere 11:2 (2022/2024) 227-49.

21. Kester cited in Scott Ferguson and William Saas, “Aesthetics after Autonomy with Grant Kester.”

22. Kester cited in Scott Ferguson and William Saas, “Aesthetics after Autonomy with Grant Kester.”

23. Kester cited in Scott Ferguson and William Saas, “Aesthetics after Autonomy with Grant Kester.”

24. Kester cited in Scott Ferguson and William Saas, “Aesthetics after Autonomy with Grant Kester.”

25. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). See also Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005) and Chantal Mouffe, For a Leftist Populism (London: Verso, 2018).

26. See Slavoj Žižek, “Postmodernism or Class Struggle? Yes, Please!” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000) 90-135.

27. See Jordan B. Peterson, “Marxism: Zizek/Peterson: Official Video,” YouTube (May 15, 2019), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsWndfzuOc4.

28. Nancy Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond,” American Affairs 1:4 (Winter 2017) 46-64.

29. See Marc James Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics: A Guide (London: Routledge, 2024).

30. Fabio Frosini, “‘Vilici’: The Theoretician of Hegemony in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks,” in Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn and Patrick Anderson, eds. The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce (Wakefield: Daraja Press, 2024) 104-6.

31. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Empire, Twenty Years On,” New Left Review #120 (November/December 2019), 67-92.

32. Chris Cutrone, The Death of the Millenial Left: Interventions 2006-2022 (Portland: Sublation Media, 2023).

33. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution: Minorities and Classes (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2023).

34. See Leon Trotsky, “What Is National Socialism?” (1933), https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 171.

35. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997).

36. This further refines the analysis in my essay, “The Idea of the Party” International Journal of Žižek Studies 13:3 (2019) 0-26.

37. Anderson, The H-Word, 63. See also Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

38. The Four Discourses are discussed in Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969-79, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Griegg (New York: W.W. Norton, [1991] 2007). See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, [1983] 2000).

39. On this subject, see Slavoj Žižek, “The Impasses of Today’s Radical Politics,” Crisis & Critique 1:1 (2014) 9-44.

40. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 29.

41. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 14.

42. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 15.

43. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 31.

44. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 31.

45. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 31.

46. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 32.

August 27, 2024.

 

Featured image: Courtesy of the author.

Marc James Léger