The Harbinger: What lies beyond the cultural logic of late-capitalism? The revolutionary logic of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
FOR AS LONG as socialism constituted a genuine threat,
red-baiting remained a constant feature of United States politics. With the
implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, red-baiting eased-off. Global
capitalism was in a triumphant mood and its celebrants looked upon those who
still espoused the socialist cause with a mixture of condescension and pity. In
their eyes, at least, the socialists had missed history’s bus. The traditional
Left had been left behind.
Taking the place of the old-fashioned, Soviet-style
Marxist-Leninists in triumphalist capitalism’s new line-up of people to hate
were the so-called “Cultural Marxists”. Their mission was said to be nothing
less that the complete undermining of Western Society: its values; its traditions;
its institutions.
Exactly why the cultural Marxists would want to do this was
never made entirely clear. The traditional Marxists had sought to replace the
exploitation and individualism of capitalist society with the co-operation and
collectivism of socialism. Highly contentious though this goal may have been,
it was also reassuringly rational. Cultural Marxism, on the other hand, was
presented as being wholly negative. What the cultural Marxists appeared to want
was the utter destruction of the system which had defeated “actually existing
socialism” in 1991. It was a nihilistic quest for political vengeance – nothing
more.
What the triumphalist capitalists failed to grasp was that
the new philosophy they mis-named Cultural Marxism was in fact the ferocious
enemy of all grand ideological narratives – especially Marxism. Post-modernism,
far from being the enemy of the free market, was its principal protector. In a
famous essay, published in 1984, the American literary critic and political
theorist, Fredric Jameson, described post-modernism as “the cultural logic of
late-capitalism”.
Fittingly, it was Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of
The Communist Manifesto, who best
described capitalism’s terrifying capacity for cultural corrosion:
“Constant
revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois
epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train
of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all
new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid
melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to
face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his
kind.”
Post-modernism provides the sort of philosophical
architecture in which a ruling-class determined to strip society of its most
cherished assumptions can find refuge. The triumph of global corporate culture
has, however, left maladaptive conservative intellectuals stranded. To them,
the world feels as though it is under attack from their worst (i.e. Marxist)
enemies. The conservative mind, which clings so tenaciously to “ancient and
venerable prejudices”, simply cannot accept that it is capitalism itself which
is dictating the dissolution of moral certainty and the indiscriminate mixing
of the present with the past. Post-modernism is the surest means of keeping
“late-capitalism’s” opponents – the Right as well as the Left – off balance.
People cannot walk on air.
People can, however, “face with sober senses” the “real
conditions of life” and the real relationships within which they are enmeshed.
And it is precisely at such moments: when culturally and politically people are
freed from the myths that have constrained their lives; when the post-modernist
Wizard of Oz is exposed for the charlatan he is; when reality shatters the
screens onto which late-capitalism’s unrealities have been projected; that the
politically impossible happens and a 28-year-old Hispanic woman espousing “democratic socialism”
defeats the candidate of the Democratic Party machine in the primary election for New York's 14th Congressional District.
What lies beyond the cultural logic of late-capitalism? The revolutionary
logic of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Red-baiting is about to be given a new lease on life.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 3 July 2018.
