Centrists seem to wait patiently for the failure of the Left

I was interviewed by Gabriel Delacoste about the state of the US left and the resurgence of socialist politics for the weekly newspaper Brecha. Check out my recent discussion with Delacoste on Emancipations which was released this week.

Socialist politics are growing in the United States, and intense intellectual debates are going on around them. Those debates happen mainly in the Internet. Brecha talked with Daniel Tutt, philosopher, public intellectual and host of the Emancipations Podcast, about the situation of the American Left, its risks and its possibilities.

This is a very strange moment for the world. And it’s a moment in which American domestic politics is very important for everyone in the world. So, I wanted to start by asking a very simple question that is, how does it look from the inside?

Well, in the first Trump presidency we thought that the ambitious plan by Steve Bannon to destroy the American bureaucracy, to basically fulfill the long-standing aims of far-right think tanks to obliterate the remnants of the welfare state might happen. But the first Trump presidency came and went without that type of intervention. The second Trump presidency, led by Elon Musk initially, with the DOGE reforms, has brought this nightmare to our doorstep. Musk has been responsible for eliminating hundreds of thousands of government employees. I live in Washington DC, and surprisingly there was very little palpable response. In fact, it was a very muted response. I understand this paradox through the Freudian notion of latency period. So, in Freud, you have the idea that a traumatic event is not registered on the body until a period of latency. I think what we have now is a latency period of shock. The effect that this has had on the organized left has been somewhat mixed. On the one hand, we see the rise of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York. We see the expansion of the Democratic Socialists of America. They now number 120.000 members, which is somewhat of an accomplishment. If you compare organized socialism in America to India or to Latin America, you would, of course, laugh at those numbers because they are quite low. I’m not suggesting that we are seeing the unraveling of the liberal consensus, but I am suggesting that the liberal civil society institutions (nonprofits and NGOs), largely organized around the Democratic Party, are extremely brittle at this moment. They are ideologically illegitimate. Their popularity is surprisingly low, despite the fact that Trump, too, is extremely unpopular, and his popularity has plummeted further with the Iran war. In contrast, democratic socialism seems to be having a resurgence of popularity. Although, we’ve seen these movements before, these oscillations of popularity. And one of the biggest problems that we have here is that the DSA, the largest socialist movement in the United States, at the end of the day, organizationally and legally, is only a non-profit organization. It’s not a party. So, therefore, it does not have any true force to determine the situation. And, in fact, it’s in a clientele relationship with the bourgeois liberal party. This is a worry because socialism has basically become indistinguishable from the liberal progressivism of the educated professional class. This is a major problem. In order to have a renaissance in socialism, the workers would have to find something compelling in socialism. We’re not seeing that happen. We are still seeing the deterioration of organized labor. Only 11% of all workers in America are unionized. So, the condition of the working class in the United States tends to be apolitical and quite pacified politically. Now, what’s very interesting is that the hegemony of liberal ideology, what people call as a pejorative “woke ideology”, has also experienced some crisis of legitimacy unto itself. And this is born from the fact that Trump took a very strong move to systematically remove, at every institution, both private sector and public sector, diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. I think what the Democrats and the liberals have to decide in the wake of these destructive moves is whether all of that program was itself embedded with liberal reactionary content. I’m not sure that they will have the honesty to do this. This introduces a real stumbling block for socialism, which is precisely how do we reform the ideology of the professionals away from their competitive individual liberalism, their atomized elite liberalism, which is very overdetermined by the imperatives of the elite university.

It’s a very complex situation. Because on the one hand, you’re telling me that the socialist left is subordinated to the Democratic Party. And at the same time, Trumpism made the move to try represent some kind of working class element. But at the same time, you can see that there’s at least a rhetorically very intense conflict between the left and liberals.

Well, if we analyze it at the level of a discourse analysis, the Mamdani campaign stands out as exceptional. What’s most exceptional about it, at the level of discourse, is the fact that he was able to run on an unabashed socialistic platform. I’m not talking about policies that are socialistic. Let’s say, in substance, they’re indistinguishable from general progressive liberal ideas. Things like daycare, access to healthcare, affordability issues, rent control, etc. Nothing too ambitious. But he proposed all of that, not in line with liberalism, but in line with socialism. And that signifier is very useful, I think, to recognize that the working class, at least across New York, was prepared to follow him in this regard. That’s a very promising sign. But the urban-rural divide may very well prevent this expansion of socialism into rural regions. The socialists don’t have the institutional power to experiment beyond urban and coastal cities. What they need is to garner more power inside of the Democratic Party apparatus to push them left. That is, after all, the strategy of the Democratic Socialists of America, to ‘realign’ the strategy of the Democratic Party to the left flank, away from this kind of third-way centrism that we saw with Obama and Biden. The third-way centrists seem to wait in the wings patiently, waiting for the failure of the left, to use the left as a scapegoat when things go wrong. So the left is popular right now, but their popularity is constrained by their allies. Today we are seeing emerge a new Popular Front kind of strategy that doesn’t see itself as a popular front, in which the socialists get the raw end of the deal, because they lack both the resources as well as the institutions to hold elected officials accountable. Meanwhile the condition of the everyday worker is exhausted and beleaguered and hungry for some type of change to the status quo. So at the level of elections, socialists do very, very well. Once they are in power, it becomes a different story.

Where do all these socialists come from? Some time ago, I mean, there was Bernie Sanders, there was the anti-war movement, there was Occupy. But there seems to have been a qualitative change in the amount of, people talking about socialism and intellectuals who are talking openly in ways that actually sound very radical.

I think two things have happened. One, the extra-parliamentary militant radical left experienced its peak expression with the George Floyd uprising, which occurred right concurrent to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. It was the largest uprising of the black working class that we’ve seen in decades. It was a very energetic and hopeful moment of an unbridled, uncontrolled rebellion across many cities, which had the flavor of something organic and which expressed a repressed rage at the condition of the black worker. The liberal institutions over the course of the last five to six years have been able to radically recuperate this energy into corporate slogans, DEI, professionalization, and so on. And this has basically raised the question as to whether protest is fated to a kind of controlled opposition and tragic deadlock. Many militants that led the Floyd uprising themselves were very critical of Bernie Sanders when he ran in 2015-2016. But their perspective and their strategy seems to have faced a wall with the rise of Biden, the pandemic, and then of Trump part two, in the sense that there’s a feeling, as Deleuze talks about of the control societies, of a kind of envelopment. An envelopment which has crippled rebellion, crippled protest. Of course, we saw this with Gaza as well. And all of this, of course, happened under the watch of the Biden administration. But the liberals’ repression of protests over Gaza cost them the election. There’s a major scandal here, which is that the Democratic Party had a report, an autopsy on Kamala Harris’ run against Trump, which they have refused to share publicly, precisely because it reveals that they lost the election most likely due to Gaza. This means the American working class, broadly speaking, was enraged to such an extent that they abstained from voting for Harris. So we’re facing this horizon of the end of the efficacy of protest and combined with that we have a psycho-affective condition born from poly-crisis, from the war in Iran to the fact that social life has never recovered from the pandemic and the general trauma that it has introduced to everyday social life. All of this has lead to a situation where the Democratic Party is, I think, permitting socialism to function as a palliative over this social-wide depression. And it may be that socialists will function as a repetition of Obama, who himself was an affective political figure whose mantras of hope and change functioned as an appeal to the self-confidence of the citizen. And now I fear that socialism will be used disingenuously by the liberal elites to function as a kind of self-help palliative for youth who themselves have no material bargaining power. This is a real worry as I see it.

I wanted to ask you about the role of the Internet and streaming in all this. Because the birth of a new type of intellectual seems to be happening. There’s yourself, there’s Varn. There are other figures: Hasan Piker, Joshua Citarella. Very different, but they all call themselves some kind of a socialist, with respectable platforms. What’s that phenomenon?

Well, first and foremost, I think that much of the playing field of the Internet is manipulated by external agencies to some extent. Hasan Piker is constantly prodded and harassed by both wings of the establishment. So it’s very difficult to discern organic engagement to some extent. The Internet now has this element, after Elon Musk took over X, of a secret algorithmic mechanism which boosts some content over others. Speaking for myself, I have refused any advertisement, I only do purely organic engagement under the principle that I don’t want to be managed by those interests. So there’s that darker side to the Internet. Additionally, the actions of DOGE witnessed the removal of 100s of thousands American bureaucrats and the attempted liquidation of the critical humanities. For example, the New School in New York has stopped accepting PhD candidates. They’ve had to fire many staff. Multiple PhD programs in the critical humanities have ceased accepting new students. Even the University of Chicago is affected by this despite their endowments. And all of this converges with the sense that social mobility for the working class seems to have reached a place of stagnation. In this context, YouTube and streaming becomes a replacement for that kind of education. At best, that education may be able to talk about ideas without the same constraints, without the same taboos of the university. Much of this space of podcasting and streaming is providing entertainment, but not all of it. Some of it has a substantive educational pedagogy in which the streamer functions as a parasocial educator to their followers. And I take this to be quite positive. Perhaps something powerful at the level of thought and theory in fact can be derived by the interaction of thinkers and their audiences within this space. In other words, this space gives us something more dynamic than the university gave us to think about left-wing politics. Not to mention the fact that even before the decompartmentalization and defunding of the humanities, the university was facing its own liberal forms of irrationalism. And that can be avoided in the streaming space, but the onus is on the streaming space thought leaders to bring rigor. They have to impose that rigor on themselves. That doesn’t always happen, although that’s the ideal. I would want to envision the para-academic streaming community as the site for something that could be scaled once we have a growth of socialist institutions and resources.

Just now you talked about liberal irrationalism and before you had talked about woke and its crisis. There seems to be like a road back from post-Marxism back to plain Marxism. How changed does Marxism come back from that detour?

We could say that the class clientele basis of post-Marxism was a rising petty bourgeoisie at a moment in time in which the capitalist welfare state afforded certain provisions of leisure. This led to a practice of liberation based on a social surplus that had enlarged the potential for consumption and the proposals of social liberation tended to follow from this. The downside to this petty bourgeois form of liberation, though, was that it tended to formulate an alterity of its own conception of otherness to a working class other, which it projected as authoritarian. This led to a constrained and repressed leftism which saw the working class as somehow terminally reactionary. Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality and much of the proposals of Deleuze and Guattari fit into this model in terms of their understanding of fascism and micro-fascism. It led to a very foolish exclusion of the working class which was based on the view that structurally the class no longer functions as the revolutionary agent anymore and now they have become part of the problem. This led post-Marxism down the road to becoming an elitist Marxism that was often unacknowledged as an elitism by its main thinkers. I think that all of this praxis was forced to change as a result of the post-2008 political economic arrangement which brought intensifying austerity. We are now revisiting the centrality of the working class and a lot of these old post-Marxist proposals do not have any popular resonance anymore largely because they emerged at a time when the middle class was ascendant. What we’re missing is a proper and thorough theorization that would be capable of developing a proper balance sheet that would in fact absorb what was best about post-modern, post-structuralist leftism and post-Marxist leftism. I’ve tried to do this in my work. I think one of the things that it necessitates is that we be more humble about some of the insights that post-Marxists did in fact operate from. But instead of a critical reflection today we see some strange tendencies on the left that say we must reject all of post-Marxism and replace it with neo-Stalinism. This becomes a kind of a mirror to the populist right. At the same time, we see people talk about the post-woke horizon and somehow people assume that the second Trump presidency has killed this kind of excessive woke liberal ideology. I take a slightly different approach. I think it’s more likely the case that we will see a kind of resurgence of the woke tendencies once the liberal party becomes re-established. And some of this has to be sensitively understood through a prism of dignity in the sense that, say, with the trans community, when Trump is in power their social visibility is so severely ransacked and diminished that they are forced into a popular front with the liberal party in order to have minimal social visibility. So I think it is necessary to forge a bond where we critically analyze this immediate popular front reliance and construct socialist institutions which would be able to support those demands in ways that would be better than the liberals. I do not want to see the return of traditional socialism or orthodox Marxism as making a kind of alliance with the right wing and say we don’t care about the social visibility of minorities and trans people, when of course we do. So again, a civil society strategy must be prioritized in order for the resurgence of socialism to offer an alternative to the bad centrist paternalism that only recuperates truly leftist demands. The task ahead will require developing resources and institution building for the socialist left.

How would that look like or how is that looking like? Do you know interesting experiments?

It has to latch on to mutual aid networks as well as networks that are connected to objectives of socialist party-building. We have to construct civil society organizations that mix professionals with workers in a very intentional way, to obliterate the representational game of liberalism which is based on a different logic than ours. I think that for a long time post-structuralism had the tendency to lead the left into a rejection of representational politics completely. What I think we need to do is actually reintroduce some minimal commitment to it but with a firmer repertoire of principles. I think that there’s a number of organizations that are trying to begin to do this. The general principle I would insert here is that we must construct a party, knowing full well that there are legal barriers to the construction of a third party in the US. But what I would want to envision is something closer to what Gramsci was trying to do in his early period, namely to construct institutions in which the working class can begin to know its condition and begin to actually contemplate its relationship to the political economy. At the same time, when the Democrats are in power at a national level which may happen sooner than we think, all of these local experiments in socialist mayors from New York to Colorado very well could come to a halting end if they decide it’s not in their interests. So we have to keep this realpolitik and Machiavellian dimension in mind. I hate to think this way but if we don’t then you just get eaten alive. This is bourgeois politics, after all.