Critical theory is a school of thought that stresses the examination and the critique of society and culture by applying knowledge from the social sciences and the humanities.
Curious what this sub thinks of the magazine. I know people here have accurately criticized Zizek’s recent writings on gender/sexuality there and his polemics against “woke” culture. From what I can tell the magazine garners some possibly silly conservative/trad pieces like this, but I’m not opposed to at least reading conservative viewpoints if argued with good faith and scholarly credulity. The fact that the magazine hosts so many left-leaning polemics alongside seems like a good sign. Is it a magazine worth reading for unconventional approaches to social issues and for a diversity of perspectives on liberalism, or does it tend to be poorly argued? Are there better publications with a similar ethos?
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Critiques of the left from the left are great. That is not what Compact is. It's 'people pretending to be beyond ideology' which is literally the dumbest, most self-deluded shit imaginable.
Do you have a source for them claiming to operate beyond ideology, instead of critiquing the effects of it?
Critical theory is arguably the attempt to operate outside of ideology, however possible that might be wholly or partly
Some critical theorists are trying to understand how ideology works rather than going beyond it; others reject that ideology even exists (Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari)
What's wrong with that? Especially when they are heterogeneous in outlook (certainly compared to the likes of Quillette)?
I am followed by the founder of compact on twitter. I am surprised at how many people follow them and their mean spirited tweets.
It's basically "Cancelled, Inc" isn't it? It is similar to the previous Edwin Aponte project, "The Bellows". It was originally funded by some Catholic dude. It is as close as you'll get to an outlet explicitly devoted to the preoccupations of the viral "post left" of four or five years ago: lots of editorials about Lasch, narcissism, the "professional-managerial class", class first or class reductionist angles, sideswipes against post-colonial, decolonial and critical race theory, etc.
I wouldn't read it … the "post left" amounts to a consolatory publishing category within the overall landscape of podcasts, patreons, grifters, culture magazines, and its politics are a dead end. I don't deny this is also true of other left publications that have other politics. But here the texts do no work other than flogging and demoralising the rest of the left, boosting the profile of various writers whose whole schtick is being corrosive to solidarity and supplying their own readers with the means to do so, and encouraging nostalgia for historical situations that can't be restored.
Anyway if your answers to the problems are a muscular trade union movement, the "ordinary working family", a restoration of faith to politics, pretending that marginalised theory postdocs are in the same economic class as corporate executives, and cosying up to national capital, I'd say your credulity's off the charts.
Getting a bit of predictable blowback, so let's have it then.
If only "class first" analysis did what it says on the tin. Instead it is a systematic misrepresentation of the economic category of worker. It genuflects to an unempirical and nostalgic imaginary proletariat, pursuing a variably premeditated and chauvinist exclusion of a large fraction of workers today: women, people of colour, queer and trans people, migrants and temporary workers; and also glosses the legal, social and ideological apparatus that continues to fractionate the working class: the overturn of Roe, New Jim Crow, "essential workers" during the pandemic, multifarious oppressive legal initiatives, the carceral state, visas, border bans, exploitative labour hire arrangements, zero hour contracts … and the rest.
This "class first" thought wilfully misrepresents the actually existing interests and desires among workers capable of building mass solidarity. To do so it pursues a corrosively non-conjunctural analysis. It is propagated by the sort of mouth-breather who vows Marx (or Debs, or Lenin, or take your pick) would offer the same diagnoses and prescriptions today as they once did.
Its Nagle-brained advocate will happily make arguments as if the post-WWII decolonial movement, globalisation and the end of Fordism didn't happen. This thought inexorably slides back to its happy place, the last time the labour movement had any sort of strength, the 1960s—as if a necromantic revival of the organisations and movements in place immediately before "it all went bad", those razed without effort by capital through to the end of history in the 90s, offer a panacea.
The resulting cohort of learned idiots, grifters, Marxological pseud litigators and hacks have wildly misunderstood where the New Left and others writing from the 60s to the 70s got it wrong. The errors made back then weren't so much in the diagnosis, but in failures of praxis and the subsequent vacuum of serious thought about method.
In short, this "class first" thought, which dissolves immediately on contact with any worthwhile attempt to organise the presently stratified and separated class, should be reserved for outlets like Compact.
Selma James wasn't wrong mates: you all are.
Wish this place would move beyond kneejerk votes, up or down, and engage with an argument if it’s in good faith. Libcom had this on the forum and it tended towards saying ‘the right line’ which is as dull as you imagine. Proper lazy as well.
I take a class first approach, but sublating intersectionality, ecology, anarcho synthesism, outer philosophies. The balancing act and modes of praxis of those is tricky. On the other hand, spinning too many plates in of themselves results in a multitude of dead ends; national liberation, race liberation, etc etc. Post all the New Left struggles, it’s largely rudderless ships not talking to each other going in different directions.
A class first approach should herd all these tendencies together while underlining material realities; you’re not enduring shit living conditions because this group is trans or black or X, deforestation isn’t because of Z, you get the idea. Class is then a way of internal policing which you can always refer to, but not a stone tablet. I’ve in mind previous labour disputes in Belfast for example; Catholics and Protestant/republican and unionist/Irish and British/liberal and conservative ultimately set aside in struggle. Build class power, then power is redistributed to our constitutive parts.
Not read enough yet, but I am seduced by post proletarian theories, Nihilist Communism, Jacques Camatte, Andre Gorz. The last sees the lumpen as the revolutionary agent, which probably shares more with the 19th/20th century proletariat: precarity and criminality, temporary and immediate consumerism rather than established, no home ownership. Not saying it’s right or wrong but these are roads that need to be travelled. Lenin’s trade union consciousness definitely has some weight though difficult to say what.
But we live in a time of contradiction so we need to embrace that. Material realities, speculative realism. People need new worlds and communism needs to give it to them. If God is dead, invent new ones. The methodologies and strategies definitely are dead, so create others.
I'm interested in everything you're saying, not that I have reflected on it, as your comments are very wide-ranging. The issue I take with the "class first" analysis that's published on Compact and similar venues is that it isn't interested: it exists in a sealed container. My comments above are harsh but I mourn the energy that's been wasted on the "post left".
As you say, the bigger analytic gap remains not who, but how.
That's because absolutely none of those post-left dorks have an actual class struggle background. They're all from the same "PMC" class they claim to hate, so their entire project is just an exercise in intellectual self-flagellation and performative rebellion against their overly liberal mommies and daddies.
For example, I just wandered over there and checked out the "left wing" article advertised on the front page about unionism in the South. It's a topic I'm familiar with as a Southerner, and the article was so... basic. It might as well have been written by taking a UAW press release and asking ChatGPT to pad it out a bit with three paragraphs of Southern history. There were no interviews with actual workers, nothing about any conflicts in union politics or how hard the fight is going to be, just a bland optimism. And when I got to the end, it turns out the writer is actually a professional union press release writer, not one of the abovementioned tradcath dorks, so it feels as though his one article was awkwardly shoehorned into Compact to provide cover for the other nine "these kids with their green hair and pronouns need to get off my lawn" articles.
I’m with you on the content of the existing ‘post-left’, it’s dogshit. But still interested in a (post?) class first approach that avoids the pitfalls. The PMC obsession does refer to something other than their personal failures in academia though. In person and online, anarchist and libcom groups/CT et al. tend to be dominated by white middle aged men, with plummy accents, been to uni and can thesaurus you to death. I’ve never met these outside or in workplaces. That being the face of radical politics is a problem.
This is the beginning of a great essay critiquing this cultural/political tendency.
Is there much of a post left movement where you are? I’m seeing it form in Australia. Marginal but present and taking hold in formerly interesting journals such as Arena. Mostly essayists and philosophers who entered it via terf nonsense.
Yeah, I'm in Australia myself … the home of the person who went by "Aimee Terese" among others. It definitely exists here, I've seen it in Arena and previously in Overland (not under the current editors). Guy Rundle is another decent example. See also former left blogosphere types like Tad Tietze and Piping Shrike. Some of these writers are almost openly on the right due to how disaffected they became.
I don't follow the "post left" in the discourse any more, probably 3 or 4 years ago I decided it wasn't worth the engagement.
Very sane. Thanks muchly.
Tells me all I need to know thanks
the absolute state of leftism in the twenty-first century ... Marx must be rolling in his grave
Why are you all using post-left in such a weird way? Post-leftism is a still strong anarchist tendency that originated with Bob Black's 1997 book Anarchy After Leftism. It is a critique of leftism but it does not stop critiquing everything that leftism critiques as well - see e.g. the queer black anarchist Flower Bomb's recent essay Towards Terra Incognita, where they embrace a race nihilist stance outlining how the more we embrace racial politics and identity on the left the more we reinforce white supremacy as a structure. It attacks certain concepts like cultural appropriation which are used to reinvent ethnonationalism and suppress individual liberation. Post-leftism disagrees less with the goals and analysis of critical theory than it does with the praxis.
What you're saying - trade unions, the family, faith in politics - are not things that I have seen anyone in the post-leftist milieu do anything with but critique as obsolete.
From Wikipedia:
It's with great regret I must inform you that yet again, the same term has been used, even widely used, to refer to more than one thing. Sad state of affairs.
Well, if you're against the very concept of cultural appropriation, you presumably wouldn't be bothered at all when randos jack your political tendency name.
That critique of cultural appropriation isn't a critique of telling someone they're doing it wrong, or negotiating the Schelling points we call language or consensus reality. It's about how the concept of cultural appropriation is leveraged to reinforce racial and cultural essentialisms that divide people based on arbitrary factors like the color of their skin, and how that paradigm is steering us towards a world with more racism and a more entrenched white supremacy than stances that we should increasingly minimize race as a concept in our society until it is as relevant to your overall perception of a person as their eye color is. And how these identity categories we are entrenching are used by capitalism in the further commodification and territorialization of our bodies and the social landscape.
It is an extension of the assault against fixed or assigned identity that queer anarchism and post-left anarchism have been mounting for decades now, especially in regards to gender - Flower Bomb repurposes those same tools in an assault on race as a concept.
So "post-left" is an acceptable cultural expression to defend against appropriators, but "Blackness" isn't?
I know exactly what their argument is, I just think it's dumb as hell, aside from being hypocritical, and would like to fully reserve my right to think that white guys with dreadlocks are cringy.
Right, that job is already taken by the aforementioned Post-Colonial and Critical Race Theorists
I just see it as doing what fascists have long done of co-opting the left’s critiques in order to promote a right-wing agenda, while claiming to be post the left-right divide. And I see leftists who write for the mag to be either dupes or just desperate to be published in hopes of increasing their readership. If I’m not mistaken, there are a few critical articles about Compact Mag and one in which it’s reported that the original leftist co-founder decided to go his separate way.
Great thanks for the insight
It’s on the same tradition as projects like Quilette, the Intellectual Dark Web, and Bari Weiss’s University of Austin—in theory healthy liberal skepticism of the left, in practice reactionary.
“Healthy liberal skepticism of the left” is already reactionary in theory, not just in practice
i'd disagree with a lot of the comments here: from what i've read from compact magazine, i'd say it's a pretty okay fisherian-left/anti-idpol or idpol skeptical left magazine, that just so happens 2 have some dumb articles written inside it
Compact was explicitly founded as a "work, family, nation" left wing journal. Left nationalism basically.
They got rid of Aponte (the "Marxist populist", albeit also very, very silly) not long after they launched. Note the "scrambled ideological lines" thing: third position curious.
The source is this puff piece published in the NYT soon after Compact rolled out. You'll find some interesting biographical material on the other two founders and a few links.
There was a really great Citations Needed episode recently about The Atlantic, in which one of the hosts said something to the effect of “The Atlantic exists to launder rightwing ideas to centrists/liberals” and I think the same thing can be said of NYT (probably in even stronger terms).
Definitely. An example that comes to mind is The Atlantic repeatedly platforming David ("axis of evil") Frum's elite liberal-fascist fear-mongering about migration in the wake of Trump's election. Frum had set himself up as anti-Trump, so pursued the usual "legitimate concerns" angles on the topic.
If you look in Compact I'm sure you'll find carefully worded pieces about the birth rate and the migration rate. Contributors such as Michael Tracey, Paul Embery, Tinkzorg are all specialists in that kind of tendentiousness. Zizek is another who steadily writes thinkpieces of which the conclusion turns out to be that we need to concede something to far right demands.
This is how liberal and fascist discourses are sold together. Similar patterns are normal in Australia, the UK and Europe.
In the "far right" discourse you find a steady churn of nationalist, racist identity-formation. Then in the liberal media, you get statistics and charts of socioeconomic decline and ominous polls, hand-wringing about the longitudinal challenges of social reproduction, and dread about the fortunes of social democratic parties if they don't heed the growing rumble of barbarism (at the "Red Wall" or the red States or the mortgage belt), and respond by rolling out technocratic border policy and infrastructure, capping welfare, funding more police and the MIC, and so on.
The right-wing views don't, in fact, even need to be laundered. The desired practical effects on politics can be achieved while the liberal reader continues to treat the right with a self-exonerating distaste.
These dyads of editorial appear often enough on the same page (under the rubric of "diversity"), or if not then on the opposed pages of publications owned by people who play golf together. Seems fair to treat it all as a double act.
That was kind of the impression I had, good to know
Fifteen years ago, "I'm socially conservative but economically liberal" was a joke on 30 Rock, now it's an entire niche faux-Marxist ideology represented by terrible magazines funded by rich tradcaths.
Pretty sure the mag's generally not economically liberal...
You have 25% actual marxists, then 50% varieties of 'post-liberal' ( between (a) normal social democracy with additional corporatism & more socially conservative 'social good' centred policy-prescriptions around the edges, or (b) the left-edge of European ordoliberalism) and then the odd weird 'nat-con' who are economic-liberals (in the sense of classical liberal or neoliberal assumptions) but with a bit of sinophobic protectionism and the odd public works project thrown in but who largely want to launder their reputation; finally you get one or two (nick land mainly) genuine 'illiberal' but also 'hyperliberal' types, basically economically accelerationist hyper-capitalists who've been smuggled in because of their 'based'/provocative social views.
It's not Quillette, which is almost universally and smugly 'classical liberal' all the way down, plus the odd yarvinist who wants 'classical liberalism + monarchy', and the very occasional jaded leftwinger who wants to vent about losing their position in the internecine wranglings of faculty/ grant funding politics and extrapolate larger social trends from that.
Exactly, mostly non-liberal...
“Economically liberal” in this expression means agreeing with the party classified as liberal in the US (the Democratic Party) in supporting a social safety set.
I think the majority of Compact editors dislike the liberal Democratic party, even if (like anti-liberal Marxists) they end up actually voting for them.
Right. I'm not saying that they are supporters of the Democratic Party. It's a paint-by-numbers own-the-libs mag. I'm just saying what the term "economically liberal" means in that old expression in the peculiar US context, unlike what "economically liberal" means on paper and what liberal means in most of the world.
I thought Zizek's thoughts on the matter were actually on point. I didn't see anyone critique his arguments beyond simply that he was being mean and rude.
I think people were pointing out that by using the term Woke Culture as a catch-all, he is ironically buying into the Big Other.
Bad argument against Zizek. I think this is usually a tactic used by illiterate progressives who often say stuff like "woke doesn't even mean anything, you can't define it!", nor did he use the term as a catch-all. When he was using the term woke he meant a form of etiquette-as-politics, specifically that it is an approach to politics that it's basically exclusively about personal bigotry, and that is becoming incredibly damaging to any sort of project of emancipatory politics.
I don’t disagree with you, I’m on the side of universals over particulars, but anyway here’s the thread criticizing https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/s/05Qy3RTAkc
That makes two of us, thanks for link!
One word: Librohl.