But. Regarding the rift between the working class and the left. Yep. It's there for sure. I just disagree with how the rift happened. To me, it's that the intellectual left is just a residual development from the American cultural front of the 30's. And that movement was totally working class (with a funding boost from the USSR, of course). The welfare state saved capitalism, and so american intellectuals turned from Herbert Spenser to John Maynard Keynes to offer up apologias to the new social structure. Now that the Welfare State is dying its last gasps, I expect the residual left-wing intellegentsia to die too, in time. But to me it's all a bunch of residue. And once this pseudo-elite of college professors retire and give way to Koch foundation endowed chairs, we'll be back to Herbert Spenser before you know it.
What you point out that is especially interesting to me is the way the Fox News and right are able to leverage the intellectual left as a wedge against the working class. Such that it is these intellectuals who are called 'the elite'. Not the actual elite: the people with economic power like the bezozes and the musks. They say: "The intellectuals think they're better than you. They put sweaters on their dogs. Let's show them by getting rid of food stamps."
Your intellectual history of the left is flawed because it is liberal. You give us a 'great man' theory of history. The idea that marx came up with marxism or that bakunin came up with anachism is bullshit. That shit was in the air. Those dudes wrote down some stuff, sure. But the basic ideas were part of the zeitgeist. Which is a part of history. Which comes from the working class. The majority of people. How they live their lives. Their hopes and dreams. The whole idea of marxism is that ideas come from material changes in the world. Disturbances in the force, young Luke. Nowhere is this problem worse than in your characterization of the Frankfurt school as a bunch of rich foreign professors. The frankfurt school involved intelligencia, sure But this was Jewish-German intelligencia in the late 20's. The working class in germany was split between the real socialists and the national socialists. The national socialists sounded just like the socialists. Plus Racism. A recipe guarantee to win an election (just ask trump--racism by itself will frequently win an election). Anywho--these young jewish intellectuals no longer had a jobs in Nazi Germany where they could be part of a viable communist party hoping to gain power. They had to run for their lives. They became leaders without a movement. Professors without a university. Without a country even. The working class had betrayed the left in 20's germany. Now the question became: what happens when the left-wing superstructure, created by a left-wing proletarian movement, becomes abandoned by the movement that created this superstructure? The professors and leaders of the movement are left. But where do they go? What do they do? It's not that the frankfurt school was invented by a bunch of foreign rich white dudes. They were who they were because of a movement that had now abandoned them for Hitler. They were leftist exiles who had to struggle with the idea of how to live an ethical life in an unethical world. How to produce counterhegemonic superstructural/cultural work in the absense of a workers movement. Hence Beckett and Alban Berg and all that stuff. And Adorno's famous categorical imperative: To live in such a way that prevents another holocaust. To be a splinter in your eye.
For simplicity's sake, I'll respond to both your comments in this one:
Interesting critique! It's unfortunate that my description of Bakunin and Marx could come across in a "Great Man" kind of way-it certainly wasn't my intention to suggest that Bakunin "founded" anarchism (even according to Great Man logic, that would have to be credited to Proudhon) or that Marx founded socialism. Nevertheless, I don't think their contributions can be reduced to mere commentary on the "shit in the air." I mentioned Bakunin in relation to the Spanish Anarchist Movement because, regardless of where he got his ideas from, his collectivist form of anarchism was the one presented to Spanish workers initially (at least if Bookchin's history of the movement is to be believed), and they acknowledged him as the primary ideological influence on their movement, one they obvious diverged from over time, incorporating ideas from other intellectuals and creating their own. While I would agree with the need to dispense with the Great Man approach in general, it is nevertheless true that certain individuals and texts do have outsized influences, although traditional history often overstates their role in my opinion.
That being said, I'm not a historical materialist either-changes in history cannot be reduced merely to changes in material circumstances. I regard myself as a dialectical naturalist; in short, shit is far too complicated to reduce to a relatively uniform set of causes (class struggle, material circumstances, modes of production), but rather a wide array of developmental processes bumping into each other in countless ways which are difficult to predict or reconstruct in retrospect.
As far as the Frankfurt school, my point wasn't to dismiss them because they were "rich white dudes," or to dismiss them at all; only to point out that the philosophical framework of German philosophy which they were operating from was highly alien to a working class American mindset, particularly in the period in which they were active, and that Marcuse's work in particular was frankly insulting to a typical non-academic American viewpoint. That doesn't make it wrong, it only highlights how it was one of the ways in which American followers of his work became alienated from the working class-it was literally an analysis of what was wrong with the American working class, and advocates trying to avoid behaving like them.
I don't mean to step on toes: my analysis, at least in this essay, is not moralizing these various developments (Marcuse's critique of the American working class, for instance, is largely correct in my opinion), only arguing that they played some role in the distance that has opened up between the left and the working class.
I'm intrigued by your analysis of Keynesianism. Seems to me it's seen quite the resurgence in the form of MMT post-COVID, and it hasn't paid off, largely because the amount of money being printed has not translated into public spending to keep up with it (thanks Joe Manchin). Perhaps we will see a return to something like Spencerism; I don't feel like I can make any predictions on that front.
Keynesianism has only made a resurgence in the sense that Biden is an old welfare-state liberal. His stuff isn't getting passed by Sinema and Manchin and the dems are about to lose their majority in both houses. The dems have no ideas except to moderately defend the dregs of the welfare state. Let's face it, even though Bernie says he's a socialist he's really just a proponent of FDR's Second BIll of Rights: https://www.ushistory.org/documents/economic_bill_of_rights.htm
But. Regarding the rift between the working class and the left. Yep. It's there for sure. I just disagree with how the rift happened. To me, it's that the intellectual left is just a residual development from the American cultural front of the 30's. And that movement was totally working class (with a funding boost from the USSR, of course). The welfare state saved capitalism, and so american intellectuals turned from Herbert Spenser to John Maynard Keynes to offer up apologias to the new social structure. Now that the Welfare State is dying its last gasps, I expect the residual left-wing intellegentsia to die too, in time. But to me it's all a bunch of residue. And once this pseudo-elite of college professors retire and give way to Koch foundation endowed chairs, we'll be back to Herbert Spenser before you know it.
What you point out that is especially interesting to me is the way the Fox News and right are able to leverage the intellectual left as a wedge against the working class. Such that it is these intellectuals who are called 'the elite'. Not the actual elite: the people with economic power like the bezozes and the musks. They say: "The intellectuals think they're better than you. They put sweaters on their dogs. Let's show them by getting rid of food stamps."
Your intellectual history of the left is flawed because it is liberal. You give us a 'great man' theory of history. The idea that marx came up with marxism or that bakunin came up with anachism is bullshit. That shit was in the air. Those dudes wrote down some stuff, sure. But the basic ideas were part of the zeitgeist. Which is a part of history. Which comes from the working class. The majority of people. How they live their lives. Their hopes and dreams. The whole idea of marxism is that ideas come from material changes in the world. Disturbances in the force, young Luke. Nowhere is this problem worse than in your characterization of the Frankfurt school as a bunch of rich foreign professors. The frankfurt school involved intelligencia, sure But this was Jewish-German intelligencia in the late 20's. The working class in germany was split between the real socialists and the national socialists. The national socialists sounded just like the socialists. Plus Racism. A recipe guarantee to win an election (just ask trump--racism by itself will frequently win an election). Anywho--these young jewish intellectuals no longer had a jobs in Nazi Germany where they could be part of a viable communist party hoping to gain power. They had to run for their lives. They became leaders without a movement. Professors without a university. Without a country even. The working class had betrayed the left in 20's germany. Now the question became: what happens when the left-wing superstructure, created by a left-wing proletarian movement, becomes abandoned by the movement that created this superstructure? The professors and leaders of the movement are left. But where do they go? What do they do? It's not that the frankfurt school was invented by a bunch of foreign rich white dudes. They were who they were because of a movement that had now abandoned them for Hitler. They were leftist exiles who had to struggle with the idea of how to live an ethical life in an unethical world. How to produce counterhegemonic superstructural/cultural work in the absense of a workers movement. Hence Beckett and Alban Berg and all that stuff. And Adorno's famous categorical imperative: To live in such a way that prevents another holocaust. To be a splinter in your eye.
For simplicity's sake, I'll respond to both your comments in this one:
Interesting critique! It's unfortunate that my description of Bakunin and Marx could come across in a "Great Man" kind of way-it certainly wasn't my intention to suggest that Bakunin "founded" anarchism (even according to Great Man logic, that would have to be credited to Proudhon) or that Marx founded socialism. Nevertheless, I don't think their contributions can be reduced to mere commentary on the "shit in the air." I mentioned Bakunin in relation to the Spanish Anarchist Movement because, regardless of where he got his ideas from, his collectivist form of anarchism was the one presented to Spanish workers initially (at least if Bookchin's history of the movement is to be believed), and they acknowledged him as the primary ideological influence on their movement, one they obvious diverged from over time, incorporating ideas from other intellectuals and creating their own. While I would agree with the need to dispense with the Great Man approach in general, it is nevertheless true that certain individuals and texts do have outsized influences, although traditional history often overstates their role in my opinion.
That being said, I'm not a historical materialist either-changes in history cannot be reduced merely to changes in material circumstances. I regard myself as a dialectical naturalist; in short, shit is far too complicated to reduce to a relatively uniform set of causes (class struggle, material circumstances, modes of production), but rather a wide array of developmental processes bumping into each other in countless ways which are difficult to predict or reconstruct in retrospect.
As far as the Frankfurt school, my point wasn't to dismiss them because they were "rich white dudes," or to dismiss them at all; only to point out that the philosophical framework of German philosophy which they were operating from was highly alien to a working class American mindset, particularly in the period in which they were active, and that Marcuse's work in particular was frankly insulting to a typical non-academic American viewpoint. That doesn't make it wrong, it only highlights how it was one of the ways in which American followers of his work became alienated from the working class-it was literally an analysis of what was wrong with the American working class, and advocates trying to avoid behaving like them.
I don't mean to step on toes: my analysis, at least in this essay, is not moralizing these various developments (Marcuse's critique of the American working class, for instance, is largely correct in my opinion), only arguing that they played some role in the distance that has opened up between the left and the working class.
I'm intrigued by your analysis of Keynesianism. Seems to me it's seen quite the resurgence in the form of MMT post-COVID, and it hasn't paid off, largely because the amount of money being printed has not translated into public spending to keep up with it (thanks Joe Manchin). Perhaps we will see a return to something like Spencerism; I don't feel like I can make any predictions on that front.
Keynesianism has only made a resurgence in the sense that Biden is an old welfare-state liberal. His stuff isn't getting passed by Sinema and Manchin and the dems are about to lose their majority in both houses. The dems have no ideas except to moderately defend the dregs of the welfare state. Let's face it, even though Bernie says he's a socialist he's really just a proponent of FDR's Second BIll of Rights: https://www.ushistory.org/documents/economic_bill_of_rights.htm