There’s much to be learned from studying movements that thought they were the wave of the future, and weren’t. To begin with, there’s a distinctive tone of strident triumphalism that most movements doomed to fail seem to adopt, some at the very beginning of their trajectories, others once they pass their peak and start down the long slope into irrelevance. Learning to catch that note when it appears in the political and cultural movements of the present, by listening carefully to past examples, is one way to get some sense of the shape of the future well before it happens.
Yet there’s a broader value to failed movements for change, whether they happen to be religious, political, economic, cultural, or something else entirely. It’s a rare movement of this kind that doesn’t have something useful to teach. It’s even rarer for such movements to fail to have important things to say about the unmet needs and unspoken passions of their time. In the case of the movement we’ll be discussing here and for several essays to come, Situationism, both these are even more true than usual, for reasons we’ll explore shortly.
The Situationist International was one of dozens of little fringe movements on the outskirts of European Marxism in the middle years of the twentieth century. Its total active membership could have found seats quite easily in a modestly sized Paris bistro, and the fraction of its membership who contributed anything memorable to the movement could show up for an evening of conversation in the living room of my apartment without any undue sense of crowding. It produced a few journals, a flurry of communiqués, and a handful of books, and made a modest contribution to the atmosphere of unrest that inspired the French student riots of 1968, after which it fizzled out of existence and was replaced by other, equally marginal groups.
I freely grant that none of this may inspire any particular confidence in the value of Situationist ideas. As it happens, though, some of those ideas are worth close study. To understand why this is, we’re going to have to situate Situationism in its proper context—and that, in turn, is going to require a close look at the social ecology of Marxism.
To do this, it’s helpful to start with one of the basic principles of systems theory: The purpose of a system is what it does. (The helpful acronym POSIWID has been coined as shorthand for this.) As the delightfully named systems theoretician Stafford Beer liked to say, “There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” Marxism is a fine case in point. Talk to any doctrinaire Marxist and you’ll be told that the purpose of Marxism is to pave the way for the inevitable overthrow of capitalism by the revolutionary proletariat, and thus to help bring about a utopian future in which private property will be abolished forever and each person will contribute according to his abilities and receive according to his needs.
This, however, Marxism has never done, nor is there any particular reason to think that this is something that Marxism will ever do. The rise of the revolutionary proletariat, the supposedly inevitable overthrow of capitalism, and the rest of Marx’s prophetic system still hover just as far in the indefinite distance as ever, as tantalizing and inaccessible as the Second Coming of Christ, on which the whole scheme was so obviously modeled. If the purpose of a system is what it does, rather, Marxism has two distinct purposes, depending on the nature of the society in which it operates. The purposes are different enough, and the social and organizational patterns that unfold from them are also sufficiently different, that it makes sense to speak of two different kinds of Marxism, which we will call alpha-Marxism and beta-Marxism.
Alpha-Marxism emerges in countries with little or no industrial sector and a large and politically powerful agrarian aristocracy—for example, Russia in 1917, and China and much of the global South after 1945. Its purpose in these contexts is to dispossess and destroy the landowners and the governmental system they control, replace them with a bureaucratic managerial aristocracy, and industrialize the economy. It does all this with tolerable efficiency, though extensive and brutal civil rights violations are also normally involved, and in the process it jumps over one step of the more usual three-stage process seen (for example) in western Europe and eastern North America: the replacement of landed aristocracies by capitalist “robber baron” aristocracies, which took place here in the late 19th century, and then the replacement of the robber barons by managerial aristocracies, which took place in the mid-20th century.
Beta-Marxism, by contrast, emerges in countries that no longer have a powerful agrarian aristocracy and have already made the transition to an industrial economy. Unlike alpha-Marxism, beta-Marxism never takes power or grows to anything much more than a fringe movement, but it still has an important purpose in the workings of modern society. In every generation, a certain number of youths from the managerial class are dissatisfied with the status quo. Beta-Marxist parties are among the marginal groups that absorb their energies and direct those into channels that are harmless to the managerial state.
Such groups also help stabilize society in an intriguing and indirect way. Where alpha-Marxists generally focus on effective means of seizing power and leave theory to the academics, beta-Marxists usually combine highly cogent theoretical critiques of the existing order of society with feeble and ineffective means of attempting to change that state of affairs. The critiques, shorn of rhe dead weight of ineffective technique, are then brought into managerial circles, once the formerly disaffected youths get bored of Marxism and settle down into the jobs their class status guarantees them. In this way the managerial state can sometimes get ahead of genuine movements for social change, handing out reforms to placate this or that dissatisfied group and stave off trouble. All in all, it has a certain elegance.
I should probably mention in advance—since some of my readers will doubtless bring this up—that a case could be made that the labels alpha-Marxism and beta-Marxism ought to be assigned the other way around, because beta-Marxism is actually the original form. It wasn’t until Marxist ideas seeped out of western Europe into Tsarist Russia and the global South that alpha-Marxism had a chance to emerge. I’ve chosen to use the labels as given, however, because of the meanings of “alpha” and “beta” in modern slang. Alpha-Marxists, after all, do tend to behave like alpha males, complete with the swaggering arrogance, the aggressive quest for privilege, and the tendency to outbursts of brutal violence in response to any show of opposition.
For their part, those beta-Marxists who stay in the movement for the long run and form the backbone of beta-Marxist organizations tend to be drawn from among the also-rans of industrial society, those who by temperament or talent aren’t well suited for a salaried position among the bourgeois enablers of the managerial aristocracy, and who exchange the prospects normal to their class for downward mobility and a place on the fringes. Those that are good enough at the game end up being supported by the broader society, because they provide the service described above—catching disaffected youth who might otherwise become a genuine danger to society, and redirecting their energies into some colorful but harmless form of eccentricity, while exposing them to various critiques of the existing order of society that may be useful to them later in life.
Of course Marxism is far from the only ideology that fills some version of this same role. Every complex society has an assortment of dissident belief systems, and these form a penumbra of alternative options out on the fringes of the culture. Some complex societies object to this state of affairs and try to get rid of the dissident fringe through one means or another, with recurring bouts of mass murder a common option. Modern industrial society, having learned a few things from history, takes a different tack and tacitly permits the fringe ideologies to exist and even thrive while overtly discouraging membership in them.
There are good reasons for this tolerance. Partly, campaigns of extermination are costly in terms of resources, and they also give a glamor to dissident groups that their own beliefs and actions do not always deserve. What today’s beta-Marxists resentfully call “repressive tolerance”—that is, allowing fringe ideologies to flourish unmolested while using propaganda and other means of controlling popular opinion to limit public interest in them—is much more economical and even more effective as a means of repression.
Yet there’s another factor. To borrow and rework a turn of phrase from Marx, the fringe constitutes a sort of reserve army of unemployed ideas, any of which can be drawn upon at need to fill gaps in the existing ideological structure of society. That possibility is anything but abstract. It quite often happens, in fact, that belief systems and their associated groups that once were part of the established order of society get eased out onto the fringes, while other belief systems that once survived on the fringes find their way into the establishment.
Consider the trajectory of conservative Protestant Christianity over the last century. It’s hard to think of any set of ideas more thoroughly hardwired into the social structure of the American mainstream in 1910; it’s hard to think of a set of ideas that had been more completely excluded from that mainstream by 2010. In the same way, but with the opposite dynamic, consider the trajectory of the gay and lesbian subcultures; it’s hard to think of anything more harshly excluded from the mainstream in 1910, while by 2010 both had been integrated into the mainstream. That conservative Protestant Christianity was affiliated with the Democratic Party in 1910, just as the gay and lesbian subcultures were in 2010, just adds a nice fillip of irony to the landscape of social change.
Now, in an interesting contrast, conservative Protestant Christianity seems to be moving back into acceptability just as the gay and lesbian subcultures seem to be moving out of it. That may not be a mere accident of history. In the late 20th century, many people in the United States were worried about overpopulation, and so it isn’t exactly surprising that belief systems that encourage propagation moved toward the fringes while those that discourage it became much more acceptable. Now that the population boom is ending and depopulation is on the horizon, popular culture is shifting in the other direction.
Meanwhile there are plenty of other groups and ideas that have been shut out of the mainstream for a very long time and show no signs of finding their way further in any time this millennium. Beta-Marxism is one of these, but far from the only one. There are plenty of alternative groups in that category, ranging from fringe religions to proponents of exotic economic theories to the fans of invented languages such as Esperanto. While they vary in some ways, notably in the level of hostility they direct toward the established order of things, the common features greatly outnumber the differences.
As all this may suggest, the penumbra of fringe ideas and their proponents is a social category I know fairly well. That’s not surprising, since I belong to it. I might have ended up a beta-Marxist, in fact, if I’d made a few different choices in my late teens. Back then I was an amused but interested spectator of the fringe Marxist parties in Seattle, whose antics I followed in some detail by way of their monthly newspapers, which could be purchased at the Left Bank Bookstore in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. In those days the two big fish in that very little pond were the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Freedom Socialist Party, though there were also even smaller parties that appeared and disappeared like mushrooms after a rainfall.
All this was grist for my mill back then. I read the doings of the local radicals fairly regularly, attended the occasional rally and protest march, and drew my own conclusions from the mismatch between their angry and grandiose rhetoric and their complete inability to make any kind of difference outside their own membership, and tolerably often, not even there. Mind you, I also paid attention to the equally unrewarded labors of wholly non-Marxist political groups such as Technocracy, which still had a presence in Seattle in those days, to a variety of other alternative scenes, and also to the occult scene, which ended up becoming the branch of fringe culture that ended up attracting my enduring attention.
The conclusions I drew were not exactly flattering to the pretensions of beta-Marxists. Life on the fringes has its consolations, notably a great deal of personal freedom, but it also has costs, and a lack of political influence is one of them. Thus beta-Marxists are no more likely than beta males to overthrow the system. One of the things that differentiates me from beta-Marxists is that I’m fully aware of that fact, and of my function in the wider structure of society, while their ideology forbids them from ever noticing this. Still, their limitation need not hinder those of us who hope to make more productive use of their insights.
Situationism was one flavor of beta-Marxism, and partakes of all the standard characteristics of that broader phenomenon. It emerged out of several rather less memorable micromovements that rose and fell just after the Second World War, among them Lettrism and Imaginism; like these, it had its birth from the fusion of radical politics and the arts that began with Dadaism during the First World War and arguably reached its peak with the Surrealists between the wars. That’s where the term “Situationist” came from: the Situationists began as an artistic movement that imagined the creation of entire situations for esthetic purposes, and then morphed into a political movement as the political implications of these creative acts became clear.
From its mixed parentage, Situationism picked up an equally mixed assortment of habits. One of them was the strident insistence that while there were Situationists, there was no such thing as Situationism, no ideology or set of ideas that united the movement. Of course this is nonsense—the ideas in question can be found set out in detail in books by leading Situationists—but it was a common pose of avant-garde artistic movements of the time, and it was also a helpful countermove to the obsessive fixation that more orthodox Marxists had on embracing the correct ideology (another of the habits Marxism borrowed from Christianity).
Another example was the systematic refusal of Situationists to embrace the organizational forms standard for radical movements of their time: the political party, the organizing committee, the trained units of brawlers ready to mix it up with rival groups, and the rest of it. Partly this was a recognition of the way that those forms so easily got coopted by the existing order of society if they got large enough to be noticeable, but partly it reflected the usual practice of avant-garde artistic movements, which gave each artist as much leeway as possible while still preserving a façade of shared identity. Mind you, none of this kept the Situationist International, the mostly disorganized organization that waved the banner of Situationism over a variety of European cities for a decade or so, from replicating most of the more embarrassing habits of beta-Marxist groups worldwide.
To see those in action, it’s helpful to read the articles and essays that appeared in the journal Internationale Situationniste and other Situationist periodicals, either in Ken Knabb’s capably edited collection Situationist International Anthology or, better still, in online archives of the movement which preserve the texts in their original settings (in French and English translation). Here you’ll find the sneering denunciations of alternative views, the acts of excommunication consigning an assortment of heretics to the abyss, the strutting self-importance of those who insist on seeing themselves as history’s vanguard even though nobody else notices their existence, and the rest of it. It’s all very reminiscent of a teacup poodle barking frantically at a Great Dane, trying to make up through sheer shrillness what it lacks in size and strength.
At the same time, other features of the movement come through here and there, like glimpses of an unfamiliar landscape seen through mist. Now and again, the Situationists took into account the realities of the social setting in which they operated, even when those contradicted (as they generally did) the precepts of Marxist dogma. Now and again they took on the flaws in Marxism itself, and reached toward ways of making change that didn’t just rehash the failed prophecies of proletarian revolution and the rest of it.
It’s important to keep all this in mind, so that Situationism can be seen as what it was and not what it wanted and pretended to be. What it was not, of course, was a means of overthrowing capitalist society, or even taking the most modest step in that direction. What it was, at its best, was a cogent critique of certain crucial features of modern industrial society (capitalist or socialist) that have not been as clearly recognized anywhere else, and a first tentative sketch of a set of strategies that leverages the strengths of fringe culture against the weaknesses of the established order to expand the possibilities for human freedom. We’ll discuss all this in upcoming posts.
What right wing ideologies today behave like beta-Marxism?
What a brilliant sobriquet: “beta-Marxist”. Not to mention your analysis around it hits on so much truth. Works on multiple levels and deserves wider adoption.
When I was at Cornell in the early 1980’s the most popular class from the most popular professor in the economics department was on Communism. At the time,this seemed surprising to me, that such a class would exist in an obvious training ground of the PMC.
But your explanation of the purpose of Beta marxism explains it perfectly. I never took the class, but it was talked abut frequently around campus. I still remember the most common comment from those who were taking the class, ” If you are not a communist, you are not really thinking”.
I look forward to the discussion of useful strategies that the situationists came up with. The conventional narratives seem to be cracking, and they desperately need a bit more shaking up.
Though they seem to have cracked more in some places than in others. My area of coastal BC seems to be one where the narrative is pretty solidly in place among the vast majority of the people I run into. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of them are mouthing platitudes they don’t believe, but it’s hard to even be silent here, let alone put forth different ideas among people I meet in the real world. I listen a lot more than I speak with almost everyone I know.
POSIWD is so obvious but rarely recognized. It is a useful tool for cutting through baloney. For example, if you looked at the system of slavery in the United States, all the grandstanding about uplifting and civilizing the negro is revealed to be a farce, the real purpose is the obvious one (producing cheap goods at a high profit).
Similarly, applied to industrial civilization, all the rhetoric about human progress evaporates and we are left with the real purpose: recklessly extracting natural resources as fast as possible to produce wealth for a small group of elites.
I like the fringe on my cut off jeans just fine… not bored at all… not bored.
…Lettrism, while of not much interest to many, does have its joys for those of us like me interested in these small artistic / political groups.
The excommunication reminds me of something from Robert Anton Wilson, where he made people popes, and then promptly excommunicated them so they could be their own popes… or something along those lines. I have a business card from him with something like that on it that came with the Maybe Logic DVD -and it had the motto “like what you like and don’t take [shale] from anybody.” So, in a way I can see this as a potentially useful habit of fringe groups excommunicating each other.
Guy Debord as the main ring leader, though he wouldn’t want to call himself a ring leader, was a major drunk, and I can see some of the interpersonal friction within that scene just coming from being an intoxicated intellectual jerk (you had a name for this in French culture, which they took for granted but us Americans don’t seem to get off the bat).
Asger Jorn was one of the excommuniques who I rather like. Especially his triolectic football. More broadly his notion of moving from dialectics to triolectics I find would be very useful!
Of the tools created by Situationism, detournement as culture jamming really got utilized to a high degree by media collective Negativland (who coined the term culture jamming, based on their work documenting / making art out of ham radio jammers in Berkely area) and others who followed their path of editing the fragments emerging from the media spectacle into new creations. Meanwhile psychogeography really got a hold in England, though not so much here. Other early culture jammers were influenced by the SI as well… people like the Billboard Liberation Front.
As another commenter mentioned, the punk subculture owes a large debt to the writings of SI, and key elements of Situationism can be traced in the Sex Pistols, Crass, The Clash, and others…
Speaking of fringe culture and the reverse osmosis of assimilation / excommunication, the next entry in my National Characters / American Iconoclasts series is up here. It’s about the Birth of Freeform Radio and the Crazy Wisdom of Wes “Scoop” Nisker who embraced paradox and ended his shows with “If you don’t like the news… go make some of your own.” Useful advice now as it was in his heyday.
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/the-birth-of-free-form-radio-and-the-crazy-wisdom-of-wes-scoop-nisker
I was a college-campus Marxist when I was in school, and the reason it turned out to be a five-gallon bucket of fail was that “politically correct” ideology rendered what you call beta-Marxism even more neurotic and dysfunctional than when it started out of the gate. I think I ended up being alienated from it because, while it initially fostered some good, solid questioning and thinking, it soon ended up entrenching my neurotic and dysfunctional tendencies that were preventing me from truly growing up. That is why I think Spirit pretty much arranged for me to become socially alienated from it immediately after I was done with school. Having to stand by myself in a steaming garbage-dump of a society without the armor of that ideology left probably the most enduring emotional impression of my formative years.
Anonymous, Dark Enlightment crowd, i think.
Do you think the fringe relates to what Yeats calls the antithetical tincture, and the lamestream as the primary tincture?
I too have looked at “beta-Marxist” over the decades. I still read well-written Marxist books that examine modern capitalism and imperialism. What I’ve seen is that as a group ordinary beta-Marxists tend to be misfits who because of lack of social skills, technical skills, or just inclination, cannot be part of mainstream bourgeoisie society. Their talk is grandiose, they talk of the impending revolution (at some unspecified time) and they tend to have a grossly inflated opinion of themselves, seeing themselves as a “revolutionary vanguard.” Very few of them have actually read even the first volume of Marx’s “Capital.” Some of them could be seen during the so-called Occupy movement of fourteen years ago. One more thing I want to mention in passing is that they seldom practice what they preach — if one of them were to win a lottery and come into $20 million he or she would promptly become bourgeoisie and forget his or her erstwhile radical leanings, just as a suddenly enriched pauper throws away the rags he has hitherto been attired in. Why do I say this? Because their selfishness and self-centeredness is clear to see beneath the radical rhetoric.
“What right wing ideologies today behave like beta-Marxism?” – I suspect that many visible right wing groups do not have much or a coherent ideology. The left tends to build theoretical castles in the air, and then when the ideas are picked up by a genuinely disadvantaged group who can use the ideas to validate their actions they become like alpha Marxists. Both National Socialism and Neo-Liberalism achieved this from the right, enabling a relatively small core group to change the direction of society. In the case of Neo-liberalism without a mass movement of support, thus creating one of the few genuinely revolutionary changes without mass violence (albeit plenty of covert non-physical violence). Both had a more or less coherent ideology.
The right wing groups we see waving flags on the streets of the UK today are more like movements without an ideology. Reacting to knee-jerk ideas rather than attempting action based on reflection like the beta-Marxists. Behind them the leaders are very much part of the establishment, stirring up a mass to promote their ambitions. To that extent they will seem to achieve more success than the betas could dream of, but it it will not be significant social change – the old order will persist.
The White Nationalist scene and related movements behave exactly like beta-Marxism, down to the impossible revolutionary schemes, the small groups gathered around one or two articulate leaders, and the catfights with related groups. Some of their ideas are being pressed into service now, to shore up the system at various weak points.
POSIWID has been strongly criticised as reductive and, ironically, Marxist. It all depends where you stand of course, since the judgement about what a system “really” does is inevitably subjective. My favourite example is the US military system, which provides direct employment to a million people, as well as medical care, indirect employment to millions more, and injects billions of dollars a year into the economies of other countries through overseas bases, and expenditures of soldiers in bars, discos and, um, other places. So in fact it’s purpose is a charitable one.
I think it’s also important not to reify ideas. Marxism is, after all, a system of thought and analysis which has no agency in itself. Individuals calling themselves Marxists, and seeking to justify their actions under that banner have formed movements and organisations, although as with most labels of that sort (“democracy” is probably worse) all sorts of different results are possible. “Marxism” as implemented by Trotsky would have been different from that implemented by Stalin, although the formal CPSU party structure might not have changed at all.
Finally, It’s important not to forget the French and Italian Communist parties, (“Betas”) in your terms, which were major political forces after 1945, regularly getting 20% of the vote in elections, and running important towns and cities (this hasn’t entirely finished.) Much of the postwar instability of Italy is explained by the need to put laborious coalitions governments together which excluded the Communists.
I’d be interested to see how your essays develop. I’ve tackled another aspect of the same subject– thepost-1968 life of many of the ideas of the era, in which of course the situations played a major role. I hope you’re going to let us have your thoughts on Guy Debord.
JMG, from the way you always express yourself, I’ve long known that you are a disappointed Marxist. Good to see you admit it. There’s a kind of determined cynicism in your attitude to The Left which is a dead giveaway. Quite understandable, of course.
Thank you for this post, which served as a helpful jolt to my own consciousness.
Did you ever encounter a set of ideas, internalize them, and then forget where you had learned them, all the while they’d been running in the background of your consciousness for years? I have that sort of relationship with systems theory. I studied it in as much depth as I could (admittedly, not very much) in college, and have had it running like hidden software in the background of my mind ever since. “The purpose of a system is what it does” is one of these immensely useful ideas which clarify a very great deal that seems otherwise mysterious.
I was never a beta-Marxist, because Marxism never appealed to me. Instead I was a beta-anarchist– or just an anarchist, since there have been few if any alpha anarchists outside of Spain in 1936, and perhaps Ukraine in 1918. Six of one, half dozen of another; the structure of the thing was the same.
It always seemed to me, though, that we had a perfectly good thing going, enjoying alternative lifestyles and genteel poverty in our networks of collective houses and the like. I enjoyed revolutionary talk as much as anyone– it’s nearly as good as an amphetamine– but would really have preferred to keep doing our own thing on the margins of capitalist society, and leave everyone else out of it. Of course, that’s exactly what everyone else wanted, too– but almost no one was willing to admit it. Oh well.
That was all many years ago. Recently I said to some friends that I’ve come to look on that time as one part initiation, one part inoculation. An initiation, because I learned skills which serve me to this day both in the realms of personal independence and interpersonal relations. An inoculation, because I’m largely immune to the pressures of radical politics of any stripe at this point. And according to your analysis, that was precisely the point!
Anonymous #1: the “White Nationalist” and “National Socialist” wings of the Dissident Right are absolutely beta-Marxist in spirit. Wearing swastika armbands and screaming racist slogans in public is a singularly poor way to gain political power. But it’s great for gathering a small, dedicated coterie of people who pat each other’s backs and feel superior to the Cuckservatives who aren’t hardcore enough to accept the Real Truth.
The Internet has also become a fertile breeding ground for every loony political cause. And of course you get the endless denunciations, excommunications, and internecine squabbling JMG mentions in his essay. While many people claim the Internet radicalized America, one might just as easily argue that the Internet is a giant pressure valve that lets people engage in performative radicalism without actually getting their hands dirty or endangering the social order.
I’m currently reading Adorno & Horkheimer’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment.” The Frankfurt School was more influential than most beta-Marxists, but it has the same dreary habit of trying to shove everything in a Marxist lens. A & H interrupt a thought-provoking essay on the roles of myth and reason in early history for a discussion of how the engagement between Odysseus and the Sirens is a harbinger of the bourgeois takeover of the systems of power and their willful deafening of the Proletariat. I gotta admit I got a hearty chuckle out of that passage, though I doubt very much that was what the authors were aiming for.
Alpha- and beta-marxism are excellent coinages! I hope your essay helps lay to rest those fears of somebody implementing “Communism!” or “Marxism!” in the near future in countries like Canada, the USA or Brazil.
I would add an additional category: ex-marxism (call it chi-marxism if you want). There are parties that originally espoused Marxist theory, but as their membership ballooned among the working-class population, they abandoned Marxist tenets for more pragmatic goals like universal health care, affordable housing and some degree of worker control of enterprises. The example I know best is the Social-democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which turned its back on Marxist revolution, in practice, in 1918/1919, and then even in theory at its Godesberg congress in 1959. I suppose the Scandinavian, Dutch and French social-democratic parties underwent similar transformations. It might be (though I am not sure) that even the French and Italian communist parties went a similar path.
Hello JMG and kommentariat. I can say Situationist poster is cool…Thanks for the links to Situ texts in original French and English translation. I used to read Situ stuff when I was a (late) teenager, although I thought sometimes they were a bit nuts, or they simulated being nuts. Am I explaining it well?
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(Slightly off topic) This is a message for Achille. I’ve read a lot of the web “virtud y revolución”, and well, I’ve realized soon they’re “traditionalist anarchist”, I suppose for “serious” Anarchists (if this cathegory exists nowadays, I doubt it). From my point of view, they’re partly right in their critics to established Left and Right. However, they are too radical for my taste…
NephiteNeophyte @ #5, speaking of POSIWID, the welfare agencies come immediately to mind, their purpose being a jobs program for the less competent among college graduates.
Existennial Comics is produced by some sort of establishment feminist anarchist, and it occassionally takes potshots at the ideas of Karl Marx.
I love “Communist Brainstorming” where radical philosophers think of ways to overthrow the bourgeise. The solution they come up with is unorthodox yet surprisingly effective:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/389
@Steve T: ” enjoying alternative lifestyles and genteel poverty in our networks of collective houses and the like.”
Sounds like a good time to me…
I always enjoyed reading anarchist philosophy, but was always bored by Marxism. The two were bedfellows often enough, but anarchism just as often had other inclinations as well.
I’ll think of myself as a theta-Anarchist to tie it in with the 8th letter of the Greek alphabet.
Anon, nearly all the neo-Nazi and neofascist groups, the Dark Enlightenment and Neoreaction scenes, and some of the right-wing Transhumanist groups, just for starters.
Tomfoolery, thank you, but it seems very obvious to me!
Clay, I think it was Churchill who said, “Anyone who is not a Communist at twenty has no heart; anyone who is still a Communist at forty has no brain.”
Pygmycory, that doesn’t surprise me at all, I’m sorry to say. I hope you find some of the Situationist insights and tactics useful.
Nephite, exactly. Apply POSIWID to everything, and especially to the ideas you believe in most strongly; the results are always useful.
Justin, oh, granted. Lettrism actually helped me develop my concept of the life cycle of artistic movements, though I think Isou badly underestimated the potential for creativity in the performance phase, when the creative space is filled — there’s more to be done than chiseling!
Mister N, it’s a common experience — glad you came through it more or less in one piece.
Justin, it depends on whether the collective phase is primary or antithetical. In collective primary phases — we’re in one of those now — the fringe is antithetical; in collective antithetical phases, the fringe is primary.
AA, you’re certainly right about how shallow the rhetoric is. A good many of the beta-Marxists I’ve known were trust fund tragedies — they denounced capitalism while living off monthly checks from trust funds invested in the stock market. It’s mostly just a pose.
RogerCO, we have a rightist movement of that sort here in the US, too — purely reactive, focused entirely on returning to something less toxic than the latest antics of wokery. It’s fairly powerful these days, not least because it helped put Trump in the White House. Look around, though, and you may find that there are also ideologically intense groups on the right.
Aurelien, the US military certainly isn’t in the business of fighting wars, a job it does very ineptly at best. I’d characterize it as a gravy train for corporate interests, with giveaways to other pressure groups; that’s what it does, and so that’s its purpose in POSIWID terms. I grant that reification can be problematic, but so can idealization — claiming that there’s this thing called “real Marxism” out there somewhere, doubtless rubbing shoulders with Plato’s ideas, is among other things camouflage for the way Marxist groups actually behave. As for France and Italy, that’s a valid point, but I’d note that after the war, French and Italian industries had been devastated and both nations were in a very real sense industrializing rather than industrial nations. As that process completed itself, the Communist parties in both nations transitioned from alpha-Marxism to beta-Marxism.
Ben, that’s not quite accurate, as I was never a Marxist. In my radical phase I was a democratic syndicalist with some influence from guild socialism via Chesterton and Belloc. The determined cynicism is there, to be sure, but it doesn’t take membership in a Marxist party to become very deeply soured on Marxism; in my case it was partly a matter of watching the antics of the parties I cited, and partly spending a couple of years in my mid-twenties working as a nursing home aide and talking during quiet hours with a young man from Cambodia who had the same job. He and his sister survived the Khmer Rouge regime. The other forty-odd members of their extended family did not.
Steve, I’ve had that same experience many times. For example, it wasn’t until I reread the Illuminatus! trilogy a couple of years ago, after about a decade during which it sat neglected on the shelf, that I realized how strongly it influenced The Weird of Hali! But you’re right that life on the fringes is partly an initiation and partly an inoculation; it can also become an enduring lifestyle, for those who can figure out how to make a living at it, as I have.
Kenaz, so you’re tackling Adorno and Horkheimer! One of these days I need to waste a year or so writing a book-length deconstruction and détournement of that sadly influential work– “waste,” of course, because the resulting book will be read by about fifteen people in the subsequent history of the universe, if that. Unpacking what A&H have to say from the standpoint of occult philosophy will nonetheless be a treat, at least for me.
Aldarion, “chi-Marxism” is funny and useful, as I don’t happen to recall what “selling out and cashing in” works out to in Greek. Yes, it’s an important factor, not least because there are also parties such as our Democratic party which borrow Marxist rhetoric but remain hopelessly bourgeois, and in fact grand-bourgeois, in their attitudes. I’m not sure what to call them — phi-Marxists, with the phi standing for “faux”?
Chuaquin, the Situationists were a bit nuts. That’s one of the reasons they’re valuable. In a late industrial society, going at least a little nuts is the only sane alternative. 😉
I will also put in another plug for Mackenzie Wark’s excellent history of the Situationist movement, The Beach Beneath the Streets, published by Verso Books.
Another interesting title from the Leftist press Verso was Breaking Things at Work :the Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job by Gavin Mueller. If it had more Luddism and a lot less Marxism I would have liked it more.