So, I wake up this morning to a beautiful white blanket and a phone call from the boss-lady letting me know that work is cancelled.
I also wake up to another SUPERDUPER POLEMIC from the Master of Modern Liberalism, Jonathan Chait. The title, “Reminder: Liberalism Is Working, and Marxism Has Always Failed” is obvious clickbait, but Chait is never content to let his headline editor get all of the deserved criticism. Chait is, essentially, a neoliberal troll nowadays.
First of all, I almost want to slap him in order to get the name of Jacobin out of his mouth. There is an extent to which I believe that, if your thinking is revealed to be as sclerotic and backward as Chait’s, you shouldn’t even be allowed to look at a beautifully-designed and written Jacobin–let alone read one.
Moving on from that relatively harmless quibble I possess, Chait goes on to flatly state that “Marxism is terrible.” That’s fine; arguments are typically structured “Claim–>Warrant–>Conclusion” or “Point–>Evidence–>Analysis”, so this is really just the start of a takedown of Marxism. Right?
Not quite. Chait spends the next block of text talking about Bernie Sanders because Chait is the op-ed equivalent of a squirrel or raccoon–he forgets the occasion for this flawed premise (Obama’s Cuba visit) and decides to go back to his favorite whipping Social Democrat.
When he finally gets done with his linguistic onanism, he manages to make the same tired point that “every communist country in world history quickly turned into a repressive nightmare.” He also manages to conflate “rights” and “control of capital” in a truly mealy-mouthed (mealy-brained?) passage about Marxist conceptions of rights.
He then manages to get to his pet topic, talking about how Marxists will purge and repress any ideology they deem “reactionary.” Ah, ol’ Jonathan “Free Speech on College Campuses is Under Siege” Chait. This feels better–feels familiar. He even manages to tie Marxism with political correctness, because of course he did. (Sidenote: if he’s allowed to do that, I am just gonna start telling people that the St. Louis Blues adopted the ideology of Nazi mysticism because both resulted in violent white guys in stupid uniforms).
But what Chait fails to realize in his “analysis” is that he’s ascribing a single, discrete political program to THE MARXISTS. If I’ve learned anything running one of the Jacobin Reading Groups (debatable), it’s that there’s no one way to be anticapitalist, no one single canonical interpretation of Karl Marx’s material. I’ll actually cop to wanting to repress ideologies and speech I find reactionary, myself. I am thoroughly illiberal, Mr. Chait, and I hope you fear what I want to do to your conception of your “free speech.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that any programmatic anticapitalist or Marxist government will settle on my answer as THE answer. Chait’s abiding fear seems to be that the Politburo, if it seizes the courts, the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, will *abridge his free speech rights*.
First of all, if that’s your abiding fear, look the fuck in the mirror and consider whether your perspective is, perhaps, just a tad privileged. Some people don’t have cushy media jobs that guarantee that they won’t starve.
Getting back to the material potential of the fear itself, Chait’s worry is nullified by a Jacobin passage that he quotes, in another flailing attempt to tar and feather a publication more vibrant and intellectually agile than he. “Sometimes a combative scrum — not the marketplace of ideas — is the face of democracy”, is the quote he pulled. He hates this and critiques this and holds his breath until his face gets blue and blah blah blah. Take a step back and read the passage. He quotes it in an attempt to fearmonger about loss of free speech; a combative scrum of ideas requires healthy fighters, people intellectually curious and quick enough to win a battle of ideology before being forced to fight a physical battle by the antagonists they’re attempting to defeat or beat back. Chait must know, on some level, that his pathetic neoliberalism will attract no champion to fight on its behalf in this arena of ideas that he’s envisioning. These dispatches in the past year are–in my estimation–the thinly-veiled diary of a man who made a living selling his intellect realizing that the market for his intellect won’t exist in a decade. It’s beautiful.
He may have served a purpose in a Bush-era America, where Liberals and The Left had to make tenuous alliances against Christian Conservatism and Neoconservatism–I’ll grant that. In an age when the distinctions between Leftism and Liberalism are being sharpened however, Chait is writing a portion of his own career obituary every time he thinks he can boot up the ol’ word processor and police the ambitions of The Left.