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Episode 448 - Class Struggle & Identity Politics
An interview with Marc James Léger
00:00 Introduction and Special Guest Announcement
00:13 Mark James Leger on Identity Politics
05:25 Personal Experiences and Public Secrets
10:21 The Impact of Identity Politics on Academia
14:22 Historical Context and Marxism
22:48 The Shift from Class to Identity Politics
29:29 The Professional Managerial Class and Cultural Shifts
40:45 Post-War Cultural Changes and Consumerism
53:32 Emergence of New Social Mores
54:16 The Cultural Impact of Barbie
54:54 Current State of Society
55:33 Challenges in Publishing
56:19 Slide1
56:28 Critique of Bernie Sanders' Campaign
58:02 Slide3
58:05 Obama's Official Portraits Controversy
59:51 Identity Politics and Class Struggle
59:51 Slide4
01:01:47 Slide5
01:03:43 The Rise of Fascism and Identity Politics
01:19:47 Slide12
01:21:28 Art and Identity in Academia
01:33:06 Slide6
01:37:08 Historical Perspectives on Art
01:39:11 Renaissance Humanism and Artistic Evolution
01:40:29 The Shift from Feudal to Bourgeois Art
01:41:39 Romanticism and the Bohemian Avant-Garde
01:43:22 The Rise of Autonomous Art and Van Gogh
01:45:30 Post-War Cultural Shifts and the Petty Bourgeoisie
01:49:06 The Professional Managerial Class and Identity Politics
01:55:41 The Left's Struggle with Class and Identity
02:11:10 Cultural Production and Critique in Modern Times
02:16:31 Slide30
02:17:27 Slide31
02:19:50 Slide33
02:22:59 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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Transcript
Welcome back to your listener.
Trevor:This is the Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove podcast, episode 448.
Trevor:Got a special one for you today.
Trevor:It's not the usual panel.
Trevor:It's just myself, Trevor, and a special guest.
Trevor:I've got Mark James Leger, who is an author and an academic and a scholar
Trevor:who talks a lot about Identity politics and, and the role of the
Trevor:left in its approach to this and class politics and all that sort of stuff.
Trevor:So Mark has written various books and articles and he's got a slide presentation
Trevor:and we're going to really get into the weeds when it comes to identity politics
Trevor:and what's happening in the world today.
Trevor:So Mark, welcome to the podcast.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Thank you very much, Trevor.
Marc:Um, and we're, we're fellow, um, Citizens are subjects of the Commonwealth.
Marc:So that puts us in a kind of grim situation at this moment
Marc:as we become kind of the axis of evil at this point in history.
Trevor:The axis of evil in terms of identity politics or just in
Trevor:terms of Western civilization?
Trevor:Yeah,
Marc:in terms of Western civilization and the role of Canada and the
Marc:Commonwealth in the world today in terms of imperialism and imperialism.
Marc:And, uh, Global Capitalism.
Trevor:Yeah, we've got, uh, well our monarch is currently visiting Australia,
Trevor:and I can't believe the number of people who are just falling over themselves to
Trevor:see our king and queen, so uh, that's happening in Australia at the moment, so
Trevor:yeah, so, so Mark, um, Before we get into it, do you want to just sort of say in
Trevor:a nutshell your view on what's happened with the left and identity politics, just
Trevor:as an overall sort of statement, if you like, before we get into details and,
Trevor:uh, and maybe why you're so interested in this topic and maybe a little bit
Trevor:of what you've done in terms of writing books and your efforts over the last
Trevor:few years, just to sort of a broad brush before we get into the details.
Marc:Um, sure.
Marc:Um, as I mentioned to you previously, uh, what I'm going to do today is present a
Marc:sort of, um, hard boiled detective, uh, version of this presentation in the sense
Marc:that, um, you know, you have the Sherlock Holmes Uh, type of detective who's, um,
Marc:kind of an Ivory Tower scholar, um, who's different from the, uh, Mike Hammer hard
Marc:boiled detective of the film Noir Genre, where, uh, you usually have a working
Marc:class, uh, detective who gets embroiled in a scenario in which he doesn't really know
Marc:what's happening, but at a certain point, he knows too much, and, uh, he gets caught
Marc:up, often roughed up in the process.
Marc:And, um, so this is my case.
Marc:Uh, this is, so I'm, I'm kind of offering a, a, a sort of a confessional.
Marc:Or a, no, not a confessional, a confidential.
Marc:Um, in the sense that what I'm talking about in my books and on an abstract
Marc:level is also something that I've lived through, that I've experienced.
Marc:Um, so, um, My interest, technically speaking, I'm not interested in
Marc:identity politics, um, but I am interested in culture, and of course
Marc:if you study contemporary art and art theory, um, you can't avoid
Marc:identity politics and identity issues.
Marc:They're not only the subject matter of much art, but it's also in terms
Marc:of how you study art methodology.
Marc:Um, it's essential in terms of your education.
Marc:And, uh, because of that, you end up working in departments where
Marc:people are coming to subjects.
Marc:from a very subjective points of view.
Marc:So you will be in a department with feminist instructors, feminist students,
Marc:you have instructors who are gay, who are teaching queer theory, you have
Marc:instructors who are teaching post colonial theory, um, and students who
Marc:are non white, Uh, who may be Indigenous or Black or other, um, and so a lot of
Marc:these, um, what we call academic culture wars have to do a little bit with the,
Marc:the, the people who are creating this knowledge and the students who are going
Marc:to take courses who are interested in it.
Marc:And almost inevitably, as in any field, there's competition.
Marc:And in some cases, the competition could be.
Marc:Somewhat, um, intense, let's just say, and, um, political differences can often
Marc:hinge on very, you know, what Freud refers to as the narcissism of minor differences,
Marc:very small differences when you consider When all things are considered, um,
Marc:but in theoretical terms, they can become sort of like dividing lines.
Marc:And, uh, so you get this kind of intense, you know, departmental competition.
Marc:Sometimes it's around new hires.
Marc:Sometimes it's around, uh, visiting, um, scholars.
Marc:It could be, Pretty much anything.
Marc:And, uh, in my case, I've been living, uh, and this is difficult to explain because
Marc:it, at a certain point, sounds, starts to sound like conspiracy theory or someone
Marc:with a delusional disorder of some sort.
Marc:Um, but I will tell you, and I've told other people this, that I've
Marc:lived a life as a, um, the target of a public secret for 26 years.
Marc:And it's a long time to be the target of a public secret.
Marc:And what that is, is you have a small number of people and decide,
Marc:they decide they're going to sort of give you a hard time, let's say.
Marc:So you're the odd man out.
Marc:What, what happens with a public secret is that this can spread to other people.
Marc:And then that can spread to more people, and so you're constantly almost like,
Marc:um, a Wicker Man, like that 1960s horror film, um, and, um, it's, it, it began in
Marc:a context in which people are studying postmodern theory, and at that time there
Marc:were shows like Survivor, Survivor, Like reality shows like Survivor Island and
Marc:these kinds of things on television.
Marc:And it's the sort of thing that you figure that, um, scholars who are studying
Marc:these things are not going to enact these kinds of things in their daily life.
Marc:But that's what happened to me.
Marc:And so I was placed in a kind of simulation situation.
Marc:Um, and, uh, you know, this was said to me directly, right?
Marc:But, you know, if somebody tells you this and other people behave that way,
Marc:there's not a lot that you can do.
Marc:You can cry wolf and you can scream to the heavens, but not much is going to change.
Trevor:So is this in the art world, you were an outsider because you
Trevor:weren't in conforming to To the way of accepted thinking and, and the sort
Trevor:of factions voted you off the island.
Trevor:Is that what you're saying?
Marc:Yeah, um, basically, yeah, it's, it's not so much that
Marc:I was voted off the island.
Marc:I was kept on the island, but I was made this sort of pariah, you could say.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:Or, or
Marc:the, the whipping boy.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:Because of your views on what we're about to talk about with
Trevor:identity politics and stuff, is it?
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:Or the approach to post modernism or whatever in the art world.
Marc:Yeah, it could be many things.
Marc:You'd have to ask the people who started this why.
Marc:I mean, technically speaking, you don't need a reason.
Marc:Um, there was a person before me in my program who had
Marc:been the target of something.
Marc:some of this kind of, um, you know, just gossip and what have you.
Marc:And then it seemed to have, seems to have transferred to me, uh, as he
Marc:moved out of the, out of the program.
Marc:Um, but, uh, what happened is that eventually it became, it
Marc:spread from one university to another, where I was working.
Marc:Uh, after 9 11, I was basically chased out of Rochester, New York.
Marc:I, I left my job in New York for the, for the sake of safety,
Marc:personal safety, me and my ex wife.
Marc:And I thought coming to Canada that that would stay behind me, but it managed to
Marc:seep back in, it managed to follow me.
Marc:And over the years, there's, there's been all kinds of, you know,
Marc:shenanigans, you could say, around me.
Marc:And at a certain point, um, it's a little bit like the Truman
Marc:Show, if you've seen that film.
Trevor:Uh huh.
Marc:Except there's no one in charge.
Marc:There's nobody, you know, pulling the strings.
Marc:It's, it's, it's spread horizontally through social media and what have you.
Marc:And, um, at a, at a certain point it became kind of like Breaking Bad.
Marc:You know, here we have a person, you can treat him almost like
Marc:a character in a reality show.
Marc:What are we going to do with him?
Marc:What could we make him do?
Marc:How could we change him in some way?
Marc:And, uh, this became very aggressive, very violent, there was a lot of criminality.
Marc:At a certain point, especially around 2016, after 2016,
Marc:things just became very nasty.
Marc:So I don't know what the cause, like in terms of like what the reasoning
Marc:was for the people who started it.
Marc:Um, I don't, I don't think they know.
Marc:People don't always have to have a reason to do something that's
Marc:just, you know, You know, cynical.
Marc:Um, but, um, over time, I, I kind of didn't talk about it
Marc:for a long time because I was hoping it would just go away.
Marc:Uh, but over time it just gets worse and worse at the point where you can't hold
Marc:down a job, at the point where your mental health is at stake, at the point where
Marc:you're being aggressed on the street.
Marc:I, I, I can go to, um, just today to the supermarket and I will
Marc:experience dozens of microaggressions.
Marc:between my home and, and the supermarket.
Marc:Um, so a lot of the things that we're talking about, uh, in terms of identity
Marc:politics and wokeism and the excesses, I've experienced this in various ways.
Marc:Uh, because my work as a Marxist does interfere with all of this, what you
Marc:could refer to as post modern culture.
Marc:I believe, I believe my
Trevor:So the microaggressions are because you're perceived as, as a
Trevor:crazy Marxist who's out to sort of bring communism about or something.
Trevor:What are they saying, that you're a, like a pedophile or a, or a, a crazy communist
Trevor:or what, what's, what's the actual?
Marc:Well, we'll get to the pedophilia, we'll get to the pedophilia in a moment.
Trevor:Oh, I don't, I mean, I was only, sorry, I was only just,
Trevor:that's okay, just some, I wasn't really thinking we're genuinely
Trevor:hitting that territory, but like,
Marc:We will.
Marc:We'll get there.
Trevor:Um,
Marc:but, but in Rochester, it could have been anything.
Marc:It could have been because I'm French Canadian.
Marc:It could have been because I'm working class.
Marc:It could have been because I'm heterosexual, it could have been
Marc:because I was the only married person in the program, that was odd to people.
Marc:And it could have been just, I think, just pettiness, you know, it's a boring
Marc:town and people are, uh, you know, working with high profile scholars and
Marc:they feel a little bit like in a rut, so they find some way to have fun.
Marc:That's someone's expense.
Marc:And it just, it fell on me.
Marc:I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Trevor:So, did that transition you from being a scholar in in art
Trevor:to then a scholar in the topics that we're about to get into?
Trevor:Is that sort of?
Trevor:No, no, not at all.
Trevor:And,
Marc:um, I, I did, uh, I did a degree in history and then an MA in art history.
Marc:Um, and this was in the nineties.
Marc:I was reading a lot of postmodern theory.
Marc:I had a, an inclination and an interest in knowing these things because
Marc:those were the predominant, uh, movements in terms of intellectual.
Marc:Um, trends, but also I have always had, uh, an interest in politics, in left
Marc:politics and in Marxism in particular.
Marc:So in that regard, when I was in the program in cultural studies,
Marc:uh, it, it was actually a visual and cultural studies program.
Marc:I was the odd man out to the extent that these ideas are considered passe.
Marc:These ideas are considered, you know, dead white men kind of material.
Marc:And I wasn't with the program when it came to getting rid of the Marxist approach.
Marc:So, for me, it was a matter of how to, like, basically learning what I could,
Marc:which was like, you know, courses on Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and, you know,
Marc:how to get rid of the Marxist approach.
Marc:Um, courses in various kinds of, uh, identity streams, queer theory, um,
Marc:so I was in all of these classes, but I, but I kept a, a Marxist, you could
Marc:say, resistance, um, to this knowledge.
Marc:Um, so it was almost, for me, a, something parallel, right, so you would
Marc:learn, you would learn what you could, but your investments remained leftist.
Marc:Um, and I think, um,
Trevor:I'm conscious I'm going to have to rein you in a little bit,
Trevor:Mark, on some of these things.
Trevor:So, just back to the initial one, in a nutshell, you've written some
Trevor:books on, um, your latest one is Class Struggle and Identity Politics.
Trevor:Prior to that, you edited a book, Identity Trumps Socialism, the Class
Trevor:and Identity Debate After Neoliberalism.
Trevor:So You know, what's the elevator pitch of the, of the ideas in this, in these
Trevor:books that when people say, well, what do you, you know, what's that about?
Trevor:And you've got 10 floors to tell them, what do you tell them?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Um, so as, um, somebody who's doing what's called militant research, engaged
Marc:scholarship, uh, the question I ask myself, I mean, a lot of this has to do
Marc:with ideas that were there in the 1990s.
Marc:But what was interesting is, in the 90s, you couldn't talk about capitalism.
Marc:You couldn't use the word capitalism in a class.
Marc:Um, because it had just been pushed so, so, so far into the margins.
Marc:Uh, but with, um, in the 2000s, with the 2008 banking crisis, with
Marc:Occupy Wall Street, and the rise of a number of prominent scholars,
Marc:including Hart and Negri on the anarchist left, and Slavoj Žižek and
Marc:Alain Badiou on the communist left.
Marc:There was a kind of renewal of interest in Marxism.
Marc:David Harvey, uh, um, did a series of lectures on Reading Capital
Marc:that went, that was online, a lot of people followed this.
Marc:So people wanted to come back to some of the basics, you could say, and
Marc:understood that post modernism had, had delivered us a kind of deficit
Marc:in terms of political, um, traction.
Marc:So there was a shift away from post modernism.
Marc:Occupy Wall Street, in a way, kind of encapsulated that moment.
Marc:And then soon afterwards, the way I understand it, Uh, the way I, I, I
Marc:experienced it, there was kind of like a rush back to, well, wait a minute,
Marc:post modernism post had always been interested in leftism, you know, like,
Marc:let's, let's in some ways not get too far into this, you know, class reductionism.
Marc:Let's keep the sort of intersectional combination of Identity issues
Marc:and class issues connected.
Marc:So the question for me, as wokeism, as we sometimes refer to it, developed,
Marc:and you really saw the excesses of this kind of, um, uh, identity orientation,
Marc:um, to what extent does identity politics today, um, affect the left?
Marc:So what are the, you know, how, does it benefit the left?
Marc:If not, why not?
Marc:If so, how?
Marc:And so in order to answer that question, you have to do a
Marc:lot of historical analysis.
Marc:I mean, anyone who's talking about these issues, they can go back to, you
Marc:know, the Enlightenment era, the era of slavery, the entire 19th century.
Marc:So you can always, in a way, Um, what's the, I don't, I don't want
Marc:to say hedge, but you can kind of hedge your conversation with
Marc:all of this historical material.
Marc:Um, but if you do it as a Marxist, you would have to do it as a historical
Marc:materialist, which means in some ways dealing with class struggle.
Marc:Uh, if you do it as a Foucauldian, a discourse theorist, you can, in
Marc:a way, place identity, let's say race, at the center of your analysis.
Marc:So that becomes the placeholder around which everything else revolves.
Marc:So you don't really have to question, um, the term or the concept in some
Marc:cases, um, and uh, so for me, the discussion is kind of around the
Marc:question of class struggle and the place of identity in relation to class
Marc:struggle, histories of class struggle.
Marc:And it's very easy to see if you, if you follow the conversation, it's very easy to
Marc:see that even when the left is discussed.
Marc:Um, you've discussed the book by Yasha Mounk.
Marc:Um, it's called The Identity Trap.
Marc:Um, even a book like Yasha Mounk's book, which discusses at times,
Marc:you know, Marxism and some of these issues of dealing with class,
Marc:they're really pushed to the side.
Marc:They're, they're really, you know, marginalized.
Marc:And that causes a lot of problems because on the one hand, it's It prevents you
Marc:from understanding post modernism, which is, in a way, the definition
Marc:of what he's saying is the identity synthesis, these are all post modern
Marc:ideas, but you can't understand post modern ideas if you don't understand
Marc:the Marxism they were reacting to
Trevor:and
Marc:in conversation with.
Marc:And so you have a lot of intermediate, um, stages.
Marc:So, for example, uh, Eurocommunism, the development of Eurocommunism in
Marc:the post war period, the, the impact of World War II, the rise of, um, the
Marc:counterculture, The student movement, in other words, all of the movements
Marc:we associate with the New Left.
Marc:Um, they were affinity groups that look a little bit like what we have
Marc:today, except in the 60s, there was a strong sense of Marxism.
Marc:There was a strong connection.
Marc:Red Diaper Babies had parents who were in communist parties or who
Marc:had fought, let's say, with, uh, the International during World War II.
Marc:So there was a connection to the macro political left.
Marc:Through the 70s and 80s, the counterculture became
Marc:much more conservative.
Marc:So by the 80s, the counterculture is something like yuppies.
Marc:They're not hippies.
Trevor:Is this kind of because stories come out of terrible things
Trevor:that happened in the Soviet Union?
Trevor:So people then went, okay, communism bad because gulags and
Trevor:oppression in the Soviet era.
Trevor:So that kind of put a bad light on Marxism or communism.
Trevor:They were sort of thrown in as covered by that sort of oppression.
Trevor:And I think maybe a little bit in the sort of 80s with Thatcher and Reagan, a lot
Trevor:of privatisation took place and people cashed in on the sale of public assets.
Trevor:And a lot of people kind of did okay out of that while, while the commons
Trevor:was sold off, um, people who bought shares in these utility companies
Trevor:that were privatised and things.
Trevor:So, um, It was kind of a combination, I'm just suggesting, of, of, of bad news
Trevor:coming out of Soviet Union about communism and Marxism, in a sort of a relatively
Trevor:prosperous 80s period, um, whereby it was sort of then accepted, well, capitalism
Trevor:and neoliberalism is the only economic, uh, sort of way forward and And it's only
Trevor:in recent times maybe with the financial crisis and, and what's going on in the
Trevor:world where there's perhaps a chance to revitalize Marxism or communism because
Trevor:people are starting to recognize that capitalism has run out of, of low hanging
Trevor:fruit and cheap tricks and is really starting to struggle in many places.
Trevor:But what do you think of that?
Marc:Well, it's fine, but it's very tight, right?
Marc:It's, it's so tight.
Marc:You know what you wanted, what you'd wanna do is you'd, you'd want
Marc:to open it up and let it breathe.
Marc:And you see a lot of elements there that, uh, you know, have been really condensed.
Marc:Um, I mean, and I, I, I, I, I mentioned that Mo's book kind of does that, it's
Marc:kind of a shorthand where Marxism equals a famine in China and a famine in Ukraine.
Marc:And then that's kind of like the black book of communism.
Marc:If you're anti-communist.
Marc:That'll suit you fine, uh, but if, but if you're Marxist and if
Marc:you're communist, well, there's, that story's more complicated.
Marc:Um, but what I, what I'm really interested in is how it is that the left
Marc:itself, right, in, in, um, developed countries, um, which isn't the same,
Marc:the case everywhere, but how, how the left itself in developed countries,
Marc:Abandoned that project, how it turned away from class, very deliberately,
Marc:labor parties, new democrats, but also communists, um, Euro communists, how
Marc:they turned away from the basic insights of Marxism, and they ceased to be uh,
Marc:revolutionary parties, they ceased to be committed to Marxism, except in name.
Marc:Um, so that's kind of, that, that's sort of what interests me, the cultural aspects
Marc:of this at the same time, you know.
Marc:The development of identity politics, and that, that would include for me
Marc:things like ecology, uh, it would include new age kind of movements.
Marc:It doesn't have to be strictly identitarian, but they're basically
Marc:single issue approaches to politics.
Trevor:So, so why, why did the left shift from, from class to identity?
Marc:Well, um, one, one, um, Question that interests me is that today, when
Marc:you talk about class, maybe not so much now, but at least 15, 20 years ago,
Marc:there was this kind of prevalent idea that we live in a classless society.
Marc:And this goes back to the 1970s.
Marc:It's not, it's, or even the 60s.
Marc:Um, that was the, one explanation for this that I like, that I'm interested
Marc:in, but I differ on certain points, is, um, a person called Barbara Ehrenreich,
Marc:who wrote a book called Fear of Falling.
Marc:And in the 1970s, her and her husband, John Ehrenreich, at that time her
Marc:husband, um, co authored an essay called, um, The Professional Managerial Class.
Marc:So, they invented a term to describe a way of thinking about the middle
Marc:class, the professional class.
Marc:And, um, it's not something that, um, was invented in the 60s, it goes
Marc:back to the turn of the century.
Marc:So, professionalism and the professional class really develops around 1900.
Marc:So, it's the managerial class and it's basically You know, a class that
Marc:you can distinguish from the majority of working people, as well as the
Marc:majority of upper class owners of the means of production, basically
Marc:the capitalist and bourgeois class.
Marc:And they're in the middle, they're about 20 percent of the population, and so
Marc:from a strict Marxist point of view, the middle class is working class, because
Marc:they don't own the means of production.
Marc:They're employees.
Marc:even though they're salaried employees, so they have more income than most
Marc:working people, and they also do work that is a little bit less tedious, a
Marc:little bit less repetitive, requires more education, more cultural background,
Marc:and these kinds of things, which makes it so that the middle class often
Marc:doesn't identify as working class.
Marc:They rather aspire to being part of the bourgeoisie.
Marc:So their sense of culture is bourgeois, and they basically come up with a
Marc:lot of different ways to distinguish themselves from regular working people.
Marc:And so Barbara Ehrenreich wanted to, uh, answer the question, how is it
Marc:that the, the PMC, the professional managerial class, went from being
Marc:relatively and largely progressive in the 1960s to hyper conservative?
Marc:in the 1980s.
Marc:Um, so that's an interesting question, uh, that we could get into,
Marc:uh, further, but I think that's, that's, that's part of the answer.
Marc:But there were obviously structural, uh, developments that made the professional
Marc:class change in some ways with regard to the question of this broader universalism,
Marc:a broader sense of Their, their mission and service is not to themselves as a
Marc:class, but rather to society as a whole.
Marc:And so that's one thing that shifted.
Marc:The PMC became more of a, a class for itself in that, in that time period.
Marc:And so that's where we get this kind of sense of like being managed by
Marc:a technocratic class that's post representational, post political.
Marc:They no longer stand for politics because they no longer stand
Marc:for things that are universal.
Marc:And, um, In that sense, they, they've abandoned the ideals of the Enlightenment,
Marc:but in a paradoxical, in a strange way, they've reproduced the Enlightenment.
Marc:Because, whereas, after, um, Enlightenment, you no
Marc:longer had a feudal monarchy.
Marc:You only had two classes, first and second class, right?
Marc:In some places, you go to England in some places, and you see
Marc:buildings from 1900, and there's two entrances, and it says, you know,
Marc:first class entrance, second class.
Marc:Um, and, you know, this was part of also the Marxist language, right?
Marc:Marxism defined everything in this two class system.
Marc:proletariat bourgeoisie.
Marc:Um, so with the, with the, the rise to what I would say, predominance of the
Marc:middle class, the petty bourgeoisie, in the post war period, because of
Marc:the disasters of World War II, of disasters of Stalinism, disasters of
Marc:fascism, a lot of young people who were from the middle class, they turned
Marc:against the middle class because they didn't want to work for capitalism.
Marc:They didn't want to work for the man, you know, in the 60s sense.
Marc:Um, and so they were criticizing their class, but at As
Marc:members of that class, right?
Marc:Not as, not necessarily as communists.
Marc:Um, and so this is kind of like an internal revolution within trying
Marc:to change society by changing lifestyle, by changing, you know, what
Marc:you're going to do on the weekend.
Marc:Uh, not in terms of organizing in a mass movement.
Marc:Um, so it was this kind of like almost, uh, sort of like hippie dream
Marc:kind of idea of a utopia, right?
Marc:And so, um, At that point, um, a lot of political parties
Marc:are thinking in the same way.
Marc:They're thinking, how do we address, you know, people who don't want to work in a
Marc:factory, people who would prefer to have more leisure time, who are conditioned
Marc:to a great extent by consumer culture.
Marc:They're influenced by rock music.
Marc:They're influenced by drugs.
Marc:Um, they don't want the lifestyle of their parents.
Marc:They don't want the Protestant work ethic.
Marc:They don't want the Puritanism.
Marc:And so there's a sexual revolution.
Marc:There's the feminist revolution.
Marc:Um, and so parties start to realign or redefine how they
Marc:think of their constituencies.
Marc:So we have the point today where the Democratic Party does not have a vision
Marc:for politics except for the donor class, uh, which is kind of behind everything.
Marc:But on the front, they Um, there's no, there's no vision for society.
Marc:It's just all of this piecemeal, fragmented, identitarian, um,
Marc:virtue signaling to different groups as it, as they come along.
Marc:Um, so, you know, the, the, it's not only the left that has abandoned
Marc:universalism, neoliberalism as such has abandoned universalism.
Trevor:So there was a period where there was a professional managerial class
Trevor:that did have its eye on The community overall and, and a class based sort of
Trevor:approach to things that changed that.
Trevor:So there was one at one point you're saying sort of pre in, in the first.
Trevor:Half of the, of the 1900s, and then a change sort of Well, let's say in the 60s,
Marc:in the 60s, this is, from the 60s to the 80s, you can see this shift.
Marc:And of course, you know, the, the, the revelations of Stalinist
Marc:crimes in the 1940s played a huge part on an intellectual level.
Marc:But on a broad, on a broad mass level, let's say for the middle class, um,
Marc:there was a sense, I mean, um, Aaron Reich makes a great deal of the 1968
Marc:Democratic Party, National Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, where
Marc:Mayor Daley, you know, brought out the police and beat up all the protesters.
Marc:Kind of what's happening now with the students who are
Marc:protesting the genocide in Gaza.
Marc:And what she argues is that the media Uh, discovered that a lot of the silent
Marc:majority, uh, middle America, working class Americans, were not on board with
Marc:this, with this student rebellion, that they didn't approve of it necessarily.
Marc:And so, um, there was this kind of like reflection, well,
Marc:How did we get that wrong?
Marc:How did we, we were all, all in with the students, but the rest of
Marc:America doesn't support them, so, you know, what did, what did we miss?
Marc:And so then there was this kind of investment in, um, the idea
Marc:of the working man, um, the blue collar working class male.
Marc:So, what she's arguing is some of this is a projection.
Marc:Right, so it became kind of convenient to think that the working class is
Marc:not with this new left tendency.
Marc:When in actuality, it was more than the journalists and the reporters and
Marc:the media realized or cared to know.
Marc:But, it provided a convenient explanation.
Marc:Um, and it was, and so then you get the creation of television
Marc:characters like Archie Bunker.
Marc:And you get this stereotype of the working class, the blue collar working
Marc:class, as being sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and not
Marc:really with, you know, not, not sort of a philistine, not cosmopolitan.
Marc:Um, and this served the conservatives, the neoconservatives who were coming
Marc:into being at that time, uh, because it said that here we have a base for our
Marc:conservative politics, even though they misrecognized that base, even though
Marc:to a great extent, they created it.
Marc:Um, they, they, it was useful.
Marc:And we saw the same thing repeat itself in 2016 when Trump got elected for
Marc:many years Articles in the Atlantic or the Nation or whatever it was.
Marc:The New York Times, the Washington Post were talking about this kind
Marc:of racist, uh, working class.
Marc:So, kind of a scapegoat character.
Marc:And, um, the, uh, the parallel to that was that the liberal class,
Marc:uh, is an elite, corrupt class that is mostly self interested.
Marc:They're not, uh, oriented towards, you know, what you can do for your country.
Marc:In fact, they just think about themselves.
Marc:And so the, it was creating this, I, this target, the liberal elite, that served
Marc:the new right, which was a political phenomenon that attached itself to
Marc:the, the neoconservative intellectuals.
Marc:And the new right did something that, um, the conservatives hadn't done previously.
Marc:Previously the Conservatives were running on policies like small
Marc:government, less taxes, um, less foreign involvement, um, you know, the
Marc:typical kind of fis like conservative policies, business interests, uh, cut
Marc:government spending on social programs and welfare and these kinds of policies.
Marc:But what the new right added to this conservative tradition, let's
Marc:say, is a whole host of cultural points, of cultural issues.
Marc:So you would add to that, uh, Family values, traditional values, uh, hard
Marc:work, and so, you know, the working man represented this kind of like hard
Marc:work ideal that is shared between the capitalists and the average person
Marc:that's not shared ostensibly by the hippies and the new left and the
Marc:liberal elites, the cappuccino slurping, uh, yuppies and, and those people.
Marc:Um, well, maybe not yuppies, actually, because the yuppies
Marc:were the, the result of all this.
Marc:Um, but, um, So, you know, uh, uh, religious values, uh, um, traditional,
Marc:uh, marriage arrangements, all these kinds of patriotism, all these kind of cultural
Marc:points that you can attach to traditional conservative, um, policy points
Marc:that were not necessarily previously popular with working class people.
Marc:And that was kind of a construction, it was a gambit, it was like,
Marc:let's, let's go with this.
Marc:See how, how far we can take this and if, if they'll take the bait, basically.
Marc:Um, and so with that, you have then the makings for the response, which
Marc:we're dealing with now in terms of the quote unquote postmodern left.
Marc:Uh, the postmodern left reacts to all of these points, right, against all of this,
Marc:Family values, like, you know, let's go back to women in, in the home, uh, gays
Marc:in the closet, um, you know, racism, xenophobia, um, so it reacts, it reacts to
Marc:this in a way that's kind of tailor made.
Marc:as an analog, as an opposition.
Trevor:And
Marc:when you, and when you end up with this kind of culture war
Marc:material, which was hugely popular in the 1980s and 90s, if you look at
Marc:culture in the 80s, it's all, it's all culture war, um, left and right.
Marc:And, um, so then you get into this kind of like bipartisan, uh, situation that
Marc:we have today with the, the neoliberals, Seemingly progressive, so you can
Marc:have extremely conservative Liberals or Democrats who are progressive on
Marc:social issues, but on everything else, they're basically imposing neoliberal,
Marc:neoconservative, not even neoliberal, but neocon think tank policies.
Trevor:Yeah, on economic matters and foreign policy, there's not
Trevor:a lot between them, both parties.
Marc:Exactly, yeah.
Trevor:And the same here in Australia, and no doubt.
Trevor:And, and, yes, the differences are in the bedroom issues these
Trevor:days, um, social issues, yeah.
Trevor:You mentioned that there was And bedroom
Marc:issues, integration, um, we talk about racial integration.
Marc:Should we have sexual integration?
Marc:Should we, should we eliminate the boundary between heterosexuality
Marc:and homosexuality as some queer radicals would advocate?
Trevor:You mentioned earlier that it was in the interests of the
Trevor:professional managerial class.
Trevor:to shift in this direction, but if in the 60s, 70s, they were still at that
Trevor:point, um, white, well educated, um, uh, heterosexual mostly What was it,
Trevor:was it a selfish thing for them to want to broaden, um, acceptance of, of other
Trevor:races and other gender identities and other sexual preferences and things, um?
Trevor:Of course not.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Um, when, when the communists came to power in the Soviet Union in 1917,
Marc:they, um, legalized sodomy, they made divorce on demand possible.
Marc:Um, they made, um, abortion available on demand.
Marc:Uh, they, they passed laws against, uh, racism.
Marc:Um, so a lot of these issues that we associate with the 60s are much older.
Marc:Um, so what happens in the 19 in the post war period that isn't the same
Marc:as previously is the, the civil rights tradition, let's say, from the 50s,
Marc:the black civil rights tradition, is organically connected to the labor
Marc:movement, and much anti racism in the United States in the first half of
Marc:the 20th century was oriented towards communist parties, supported by
Marc:communist parties, um, with all kinds of, like, difficulties and tensions.
Marc:I'm not saying it was an easy connection, but it existed as such.
Marc:So if you were anti racist in the 30s, a person might call you a communist,
Marc:for example, because the two things were associated and well understood.
Marc:And with fascism, of course, this kind of racism, this kind of discrimination,
Marc:becomes, you know, anathema for liberal democracies, even though it persists,
Marc:right, with Jim Crow, for example.
Marc:Um But, um, from my perspective, what you, what really changes in the post
Marc:war period from the previous is that in the 1920s and 30s, let's say, there
Marc:was a strong sense, if you were working class, there was a strong sense that
Marc:you belonged to that class and that you didn't belong to, with the well to do.
Marc:You were on the wrong side of the tracks.
Marc:You understood that and you fought from that side.
Trevor:Can I just interrupt?
Trevor:My father was very working class and, um, my, uh, siblings and I do not
Trevor:have middle names because my father considered we were working class stock
Trevor:and middle names were for rich people.
Trevor:Upper class people.
Trevor:So, uh, that was, that was his identity, that we were working class, and that was
Trevor:one of the identifiers of the working class, was to not have a middle name.
Trevor:You're
Marc:the Iron Fist, right?
Trevor:Yes,
Marc:yes.
Marc:And so the other fist is the Velvet Glove?
Trevor:Yeah, Scott is the Velvet Glove, yes.
Trevor:Yeah, okay, but,
Marc:but you're one body, no?
Trevor:In terms of the name of the podcast, is that what you mean?
Marc:I'm, I'm, I'm just, uh, I have a middle name because, um, I went to a high
Marc:school where there were five Marc Legers.
Trevor:Right,
Marc:yep.
Marc:So, um, there was, um, Marc Legers.
Marc:So we needed to distinguish ourselves in one way.
Marc:So there was Mark Paul Leger.
Marc:Um, there was Mark, myself, James, also known as Jimmy and Jim Bob.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Um, Mark Beans, Mark Jaime, who's a tall guy, uh, with black hair, um, who's
Marc:named after a character on the TV show.
Marc:That gets smart.
Trevor:Yep.
Trevor:Yep.
Marc:And then there was this other guy called Mark Leger.
Marc:Who didn't have, nobody used a middle name for him, he just kind of was nondescript.
Trevor:Right.
Marc:And so, like, he's probably on a beach in Florida
Marc:somewhere today, taking it easy.
Trevor:Yeah, anyway, sorry, I interrupted you because I was just, um, when you
Trevor:were saying people were aware of their class, um, my father certainly was, yes.
Marc:Yeah, and it changes a lot in the post war period because a lot of the
Marc:working class in the post war period is, is being kind of, um, treated a
Marc:little bit like, not a threat, right?
Marc:More like a childish class that's sort of susceptible to, you know,
Marc:whatever and kind of delinquent.
Marc:Um, so in the post war era, a lot of the culture is petty bourgeois in a sense that
Marc:it's not trying to do something grand, masterful, Like in the tradition of high
Marc:art, museum art, but it's doing something that's pop cultural, like the Beatles.
Marc:And so it's, it's really sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and all of these
Marc:things are associated with delinquency.
Marc:And this really serves the ruling class perfectly, because their only worry about
Marc:the working class is, is their children.
Marc:and the delinquency, the graffiti that they might do, but they're not really
Marc:interested in changing the system.
Marc:So you had a lot of this with the beatniks who, for example, on Ken Casey's bus, you
Marc:know, the bus was, the bus wasn't going anywhere, it just said further, right?
Marc:So we're just along for the ride, we're on a trip, and we
Marc:don't know where it's going.
Marc:So this kind of like replaces the modernist utopias of the early
Marc:20th century because they had turned out to be so disastrous.
Marc:And so the, the 60s left, the May 68 kind of, this generation of 68, they
Marc:were neither Washington nor, nor Moscow.
Marc:They wanted nothing to do with capitalism and nothing to do with
Marc:communism in terms of a state project.
Marc:Um, so a lot of the postmodern thinkers that we were discussing, um, they were
Marc:on the one hand leftists, but they didn't want to be indoctrinated into
Marc:what they referred to as Diamant, which was this Orthodox reading of dialectical
Marc:materialism, and the primer on this, uh, materialism was written by Stalin.
Marc:He wrote a, an essay, Historical and Dialectical Materialism, which
Marc:is a perfectly good explanation of Marxist theory in a nutshell.
Marc:Perfect for education.
Marc:Perfect for secondary school education.
Trevor:And they didn't want that because?
Marc:Uh, well, for one thing, it's unsophisticated.
Marc:And Marx is a towering figure, an intellectual figure of the 19th century.
Marc:You can't understand Marx if you can't understand Hegel,
Marc:and you can't understand Hegel.
Marc:You try to understand Hegel, but it's very difficult, right?
Marc:So, German idealism is the premise for Marxist theory, which is why Marxism
Marc:has nothing in common with any set of instructions, any kind of instrumental
Marc:knowledge on how to get from A to Z.
Marc:It's not utopian socialism.
Marc:It isn't pragmatic.
Marc:It isn't mechanistic, because it's Hegelian in inspiration.
Marc:When you say it's
Trevor:Hegelian, what do you mean?
Marc:It's influenced by the ideas of Hegel, who's a German philosopher.
Trevor:Which means?
Marc:It means that, um, I mean, the sort of, the tradition of philosophy
Marc:that is before the Enlightenment is referred to sometimes as metaphysics.
Marc:Or, or naturalism in the sciences and in philosophy.
Marc:So this is the Baroque era, the 1600s.
Marc:In the 1700s, you have the development of the enlightenment, which is,
Marc:uh, based on a critique, right?
Marc:You have the right and the ability to critique, um, the powers that be.
Marc:And you know, you had salons in the 18th century where enlightened despots
Marc:would invite bourgeois philosophers to, to discuss these kinds of things.
Marc:Sort of
Trevor:rational thought could work things out.
Marc:That was the idea, but from the point of view of, of the
Marc:bourgeois, the bourgeois thinker, not from the point of view of the
Marc:enlightened despot who is merely entertaining them for the fun of it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Um, but I wouldn't want to overestimate rational thought,
Marc:even among enlightenment.
Marc:Uh, thinkers, especially if you think of, uh, people like Schiller
Marc:or, uh, Immanuel Kant and Hegel.
Marc:Those are three of the, the more sort of influential thinkers because
Marc:they're, they're not postmodern anti foundationalists, but at the level of
Marc:philosophy, they're post metaphysics.
Marc:So, what they're moving away from is the dualism that had defined
Marc:thought for so long, largely due to its anchoring in religious thought.
Marc:So the notion of universal moves away from this kind of, uh, uh, Saint
Marc:Paul idea of, you know, there's no, there's no Jew or Gentile, we're all
Marc:God's children, we're all part of the same spiritual, um, substance.
Marc:You move away to some extent from this idea and you move more towards this notion
Marc:of subject, which is a very abstract idea.
Marc:It's, it's almost religious, uh, but it's, it's trying to, in a way, get
Marc:away from superstition and dogma.
Marc:Um, so you have a subject of, of becoming, basically.
Marc:In, in Kant's, uh, terms, it's the kingdom of ends.
Marc:In other words, you have the idea.
Marc:The idea that you, society is a project in this Rousseau social
Marc:contract sense that, uh, we can create our own destiny, that there isn't a
Marc:divine providence that has already decided what that project would be.
Marc:Now you had these debates already between Catholics and Protestants
Marc:to, to whatever extent, free will and determinism, but now this whole
Marc:dichotomy is taken out of the religious, uh, And it's brought into a quote
Marc:unquote scientific realm, so that's it.
Trevor:Sorry, just circling back, we're at the late 60s, and you said that they
Trevor:didn't want a sort of a Marxist communism, and they didn't want a Marxist state.
Trevor:Capitalism, is that right?
Trevor:In the late 60s?
Trevor:But they kind of got to the capitalism anyway by the time they got to the 80s.
Trevor:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So just on that, on that, that thought.
Marc:Was that the
Trevor:triumph of just Thatcher and And, um, economists from the Chicago School
Trevor:and propaganda, sort of, um, amongst, no?
Trevor:No, this
Marc:is, this is before, uh, Thatcher.
Marc:I mean, it's almost kind of what made Thatcher in some ways possible.
Marc:It became, Thatcher was possible because the left had already
Marc:abandoned its revolutionary project.
Marc:It had become reformist.
Marc:And so the conservatives, what they did is they, they saw an opening.
Marc:You know, they thought, well, they're abandoning the working class, we can like,
Marc:find a way to, to get them to identify, on the one hand, through patriotism,
Marc:you know, Thatcher invaded the Falkland Islands for the sake of, you know, Iraq,
Marc:And so that gave a lot of people this sense of like, you know, um, make England
Marc:great again, kind of like empire thinking.
Marc:Um, but, uh, so, you know, that's just like, uh, that's chicken feed, right?
Marc:In terms of like what you're getting from it.
Marc:You're getting basically what, uh, W.
Marc:E.
Marc:B.
Marc:Du Bois refers to as a psychological wage.
Marc:You know, meanwhile, uh, the strength, the organized labor is being decimated.
Marc:Meanwhile, uh, you're, you're in the process of de industrializing.
Marc:You're moving in the direction of de industrialization and globalization.
Marc:But, you know, before that became kind of more, uh, um, concrete.
Marc:But the, the whole, what interests me is in the post war period, like
Marc:starting in the 40s and 50s, um, and you have this, you know, kind of
Marc:coinciding with McCarthyism, for example.
Marc:Um, I mean, you had, of course, before all that, you had basically The
Marc:eradication of the organized left with the Taft Hartley Act, with the anti
Marc:communism, you know, leftists had been, um, chased out of the country, put in
Marc:prison, um, and then at the same time, after World War II, A lot of these
Marc:Nazi figures were, you know, brought into North American and Western nations
Marc:and given kind of like, uh, havens.
Marc:And so, you know, you had a very deeply capitalistic, deeply anti worker tendency.
Marc:And so the problem is, is that the left that had supported The resistance to this
Marc:and the promise of a different system, a better system, was on the one hand, uh,
Marc:sidelined by Keynesianism, on the one hand, because you had what's known as
Marc:Les Trente Glorieuses, the, the 30 years of post war prosperity where people's,
Marc:um, standard of living was increasing year by year, right, in the 50s and 60s.
Marc:If you were working class You were, you were doing quite well.
Marc:You could have a house in the suburbs.
Marc:You could have a house and a car and a nuclear family, uh, and cars
Marc:were, were, were cheaper every year.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Household goods, like refrigerators, were becoming cheaper every
Marc:year for quite a while.
Marc:So, um, consumer culture in the West, advertising, was all about
Marc:eradicating the tradition of working class thrift and self dependence.
Marc:Um, and getting workers to buy into the fact that, you know, if I'm a company
Marc:man, Uh, my wages will go up, I'll be able to buy a car, and that's good for
Marc:my family, and they'll be able to go to school, they'll be able to go to
Marc:college, which I never was able to do.
Marc:And so they saw that prosperity in that period.
Marc:It's really with the 1970s and the economic decline that that starts
Marc:to be brought into question and then the conservatives have to find a new
Marc:approach in order to continue making the money that they want to make.
Marc:But taking some away from welfarism, some away from wages.
Marc:And so wages have stagnated effectively since that time.
Trevor:Um,
Marc:but at the same time, um, and this is what interests me as a cultural
Marc:theorist, as somebody who studies art at the same time, you have, like, was
Marc:what I was mentioning previously with high art, like before World War II.
Marc:There was low art and high art, and you had these kind of like posh spaces like
Marc:museums and the opera house, um, and workers didn't go to those places, mostly.
Marc:Um, they may, they may have, they could have if they wanted to, because these
Marc:were public institutions, like public libraries, but they disidentified.
Marc:Because they weren't seen as places for them.
Marc:Uh, in the post war period, with, um, television, advertising, and marketing,
Marc:and the baby boomer generation, which was the first generation to be advertised
Marc:to directly as a youth market, you had an identification with consumerism.
Marc:And so, consumerism is, is not going to offer you Avant garde art.
Marc:It's not going to offer you Brechtian theatre.
Marc:It's not going to offer you the most surrealist or, uh,
Marc:informalist kinds of art.
Marc:Those are really rare and we only really started studying
Marc:those things in the 1980s.
Marc:Um, and so what you have is a development of a petty bourgeois
Marc:culture, um, a middle class culture.
Marc:Which is competing with the upper class tradition of high art and high everything.
Marc:Now if you look at it historically, you realize that even the high
Marc:things were not so exclusive.
Marc:But nevertheless, that is part of people's perception of high low.
Marc:So well before post modernism tried to blur the boundaries between popular
Marc:culture and high art, let's 1980s, um, well before that, The culture that was
Marc:dominant, uh, hegemonic, was no longer the culture of the bourgeoisie, it
Marc:was the culture of the middle class.
Marc:And so the middle class in the US especially began to see itself as the
Marc:definition of American culture, like as if it was universal, ignoring the difference
Marc:between themselves and the working class.
Marc:What the working class does is basically what we're doing.
Marc:They'll do it tomorrow or in a few years.
Marc:Um, you know, they'll catch up, they're late adopters.
Marc:And so what the working, what the middle class becomes.
Marc:really good at, they become specialists at this, um, in terms of them being,
Marc:you know, more cultured and educated, is the creation of new social mores.
Marc:In addition to, uh, let's say inventions in science and technology and engineering,
Marc:in the level, at the level of culture, inventing new things that you can do.
Marc:So, for example, um, you could have, instead of a nuclear
Marc:family, you could have threesomes.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Uh, you could go to orgies.
Marc:Uh, you could have, you could get a hula hoop for your kids.
Marc:You know, these things are almost in the same kind of nudist beaches.
Marc:Uh, Playboy magazine.
Marc:They're all in the same kind of headspace of the culture, uh, which is one of the
Marc:reasons I was, um, mentioning the Barbie, uh, to you because, uh, when Barbie first
Marc:appeared in 1959, she was very racy as a doll, if you compared her to the, to
Marc:the dolls on the market at that time.
Marc:It was sexy.
Marc:She was wearing a bathing suit.
Marc:She wasn't a Victorian doll, which is a child, basically, which, which encourages
Marc:the girl, the little girl to be more like a mother towards the doll, rather than
Marc:imagining herself becoming a sexual being.
Trevor:Hmm.
Trevor:Hmm.
Trevor:So, um, So we've been dealing with our kind of history of, of progression,
Trevor:particularly through the 1900s.
Trevor:So, I don't know, Mark, is this a point where we want to start talking
Trevor:about where are we at right now?
Trevor:And, um, or I'm open to you, if you want to talk about some of your
Trevor:slides or, um, what do you think?
Trevor:Where do you want to go?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think if I, if I bring in the slides, uh, we'll be able to discuss
Marc:some of the points where we are now.
Trevor:Yeah, yep.
Marc:Um, so, okay, so this has been an hour.
Marc:I'm going to, I'm going to skip my diatribes about my, my books, um, because
Marc:I had great difficulty publishing my books that are, it's related to this public
Marc:secret, um, and my books have become a way for people to torture me, basically,
Marc:at this point, by putting typos in them by reversing some of the things that
Marc:I've said so that, um, you know, when I, when I sign off on a design PDF for
Marc:publication, basically the last draft before it goes to print, I get something
Marc:back that I didn't actually agree on.
Marc:So this, this is part of the shenanigans, and also having
Marc:difficulty finding publishers.
Marc:So, uh, anyways, I'm gonna cut that diatribe short, but Okay, for people
Trevor:who, for people who are only listening to the audio of
Trevor:this, uh, on the screen we've got a book, Bernie Bros Gone Woke.
Trevor:So, um, basically, your critique of Bernie Sanders campaign and
Trevor:Mixing class with identity didn't work, or he didn't, is that right?
Marc:Yeah, yes and, yes and no.
Marc:Um, on the one hand, Bernie Sanders as an individual, um, his, um, platform,
Marc:his, his, his approach to issues was always the same from, you know,
Marc:before 2016 through, through to 2020.
Marc:Um, but because of the criticism, Black Lives Matter criticism, um, of his
Marc:first, uh, campaign and also because Hillary Clinton Was, was referring
Marc:to his campaign as Bernie bros.
Marc:These are all like these socialist white males, um, trying to sort of like get
Marc:the edge on Sanders through identity.
Marc:Um, they emphasize identity issues in the campaign of 2020, especially
Marc:at the level of advertising.
Marc:So the book is a little bit addressing this, this issue,
Marc:but it does a lot of things.
Marc:One of the things that it talks about is the PMC, the
Marc:professional managerial class.
Marc:What does it want?
Marc:Um, why does it operate this way?
Marc:So it, some of what we were talking about is discussed here.
Marc:And also, um, the fallout of the, the, how, how Bernie Sanders was
Marc:pushed out of the, um, election race.
Marc:Um, and I just, I have, this is the same book, but it's
Marc:also available, uh, paperback.
Trevor:And then you had another one, Too Black to File.
Marc:Too Black to Fail, which is a book about the Obama portraits.
Marc:Every president has official portraits made before leaving office, and
Marc:Obama hired two post modern artists.
Marc:The Obamas and the White House hired two post modern artists.
Marc:One is Kehinde Wiley.
Marc:I was bringing this up too in relation to academic freedom.
Marc:Normally when you request images, As an art historian, for an
Marc:essay or a book, the artists will ask you for a copy of the book.
Marc:They may ask you for a fee, but they will not ask you to read your
Marc:manuscript and to vet your manuscript.
Marc:So just in terms of academic freedom, these artists, Amy Sherald and
Marc:Kehinde Wiley refused me images of these paintings, even though they're
Marc:in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, which is a public
Marc:collection, and they were paid anywhere between 300, 000 and 500,
Marc:000 a piece for each of the works.
Marc:So even though they were well paid, even though these works
Marc:are in public collections, I wouldn't, I wasn't given permission.
Marc:to use those images because I didn't allow them to vet the manuscript as a
Marc:condition for receiving those images.
Trevor:Presumably that they'd done a portrait, they were, um, had a favourable
Trevor:view towards the Obamas, and they knew that you were going to write a book
Trevor:that was not going to be favourable.
Trevor:Is that?
Trevor:I think judging by that,
Marc:yeah, and because I'm this, um, I'm this public figure, um, freak show,
Marc:reality show, they probably know more about me than I, than I would guess.
Trevor:Yeah.
Trevor:Okay.
Trevor:And then there was, uh, Identity Trump Socialism, which is a
Trevor:collection of essays that you edited.
Marc:Correct.
Marc:And, uh, the subtitle was changed, but the original is The Politics
Marc:of Emancipatory Universality.
Marc:So that's, uh, when we talk about universality, I distinguish the
Marc:universality we have, which is the universality of liberal capitalism, and
Marc:the universality that is emancipatory.
Marc:If you consider that liberal capitalism is a system of domination, then you would
Marc:want to, uh, create a new universality, one that is better than the one we have.
Marc:The contributors to this book are, uh, leading, leading scholars on the left,
Marc:um, so, um, that includes, um, just quickly, Alain Bruno Bastille, Barbara
Marc:Foley, Vivek Chibber, Nancy Fraser, Adolph Reed, Cedric Johnson, Walter Ben
Marc:Michaels, Jody Dean, and David Harvey.
Marc:It doesn't get better.
Marc:Um, nevertheless, one publisher Uh, got back to me after six months and
Marc:said they couldn't find anyone to write peer reviews for this book.
Trevor:Wow.
Marc:So
Trevor:It must have been heartening at least to get those writers to agree
Trevor:to a book that you were organizing.
Trevor:Yes.
Trevor:So that must have been some heartening moment for you.
Trevor:It means,
Marc:it means I haven't been abandoned by the left.
Marc:Entirely.
Marc:Um, so yes, it is absolutely heartening.
Marc:It's, it's, it's a vindication of some of the suffering
Marc:I've been through needlessly.
Trevor:Mm.
Trevor:Yep.
Trevor:And then the car But
Marc:that's, that's, that's not what's important.
Marc:I mean, what's, what's important isn't my, you know, my, my situation, my condition.
Marc:What's important is these, the issues that affect all of us.
Trevor:Mm.
Marc:And so I, I do want to keep the emphasis on, on that.
Trevor:Yeah, and then your latest one is Class Struggle and Identity Politics,
Trevor:which fills in some of the gaps in the previous collection of essays.
Marc:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:Uh, when I, when I worked on the previous book, I thought there were terms like,
Marc:um, terms that are in, in, uh, Uh, widely, widely circulated, um, that are being
Marc:discussed that are not necessarily covered by that book, and I thought maybe I should
Marc:add a glossary, but then I thought if I add a glossary and they're not discussed
Marc:in the book, then what's the point?
Marc:So I wrote an addendum.
Marc:of about 50, 000 words.
Marc:Um, and then it was decided with the publisher that that addendum could become
Marc:a book on its own, a monograph on its own.
Marc:So that's what I did with this book.
Marc:And so you have in the first section a discussion of The most sort of
Marc:popular concepts on the so called woke left or postmodern left, and
Marc:that would be privilege theory, intersectionality, critical race theory,
Marc:decoloniality, and there's one section on identity politics, uh, proper, and
Marc:then in the second section, I, I go through, um, I, I, it's, it's a, the
Marc:political spectrum from right to left.
Marc:So you have fascism and conservatism, liberalism and neoliberalism.
Marc:Anarchism, Postmodernism, Populism, Social Democracy, and Communism.
Marc:And I look at how all of these different political tendencies
Marc:don't approach the issues in the first section in the same way.
Marc:They really have like a different take and a different gloss on all of these points.
Marc:And so in the third section, as a Marxist, I discuss what the problems
Marc:are with postmodern concepts and why, ultimately, these are not the same.
Marc:Marxist ideas.
Marc:They will not likely advance the cause of class struggle.
Trevor:I noticed in what you've sent me, um, quite a few references to
Trevor:fascism and If we can just divert to that, um, I guess my thinking is that
Trevor:when, um, identity politics emphasises differences, then we shouldn't be
Trevor:surprised when people take that line and use it in a nasty way, um, i.
Trevor:e.
Trevor:in a sort of a fascist way, that, that, that the sort Emphasis on identity, do
Trevor:you think has led to a rise in fascism or has made it an easier resurgence
Trevor:because of this focus on identity?
Marc:Right.
Marc:So, um, I mean, the, what you said and the way that you said
Marc:it has, um, um, two, two points.
Marc:Two valences.
Marc:Um, one is the critique that when we talk about identity politics, usually
Marc:we're talking about the post modern left, let's say, or new social movement left.
Marc:Um, So the, the image disappeared, I see.
Marc:Sorry,
Trevor:yeah, I'll put it back up when we, Oh, okay.
Trevor:Do you need, did you need that to read, sorry?
Marc:No, that's fine.
Trevor:Okay.
Marc:Um, so, obviously, if you think of, uh, um, nationalist,
Marc:chauvinist nationalism, um, or white identitarianism, you could say
Marc:that's an identity politics as well.
Marc:Um, but these, I mean, these often don't conceive of themselves
Marc:as identity politics, right?
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Uh, right wingers don't write.
Marc:They don't, they don't, they don't work in the same field.
Marc:They're not using the same ideas.
Marc:They're not part of the same line of thought as identity politics.
Marc:For example, if you think of the way that the Akhi River collective defined
Marc:that in 1977, or the traditions that pre-exist, the Kaki River Collective.
Marc:So basically for me, identity politics is something like, let's
Marc:say, feminism or women's rights.
Marc:And so, you know, you had suffragettes, first wave feminism in the late 1800s,
Marc:early 1900s, second wave feminism in the 1970s, and then you have in the
Marc:1980s and 90s, third wave feminism.
Marc:And third wave feminism is not in the tradition of universality, and it's
Marc:not in the tradition of civil rights, therefore it's not part of what you could
Marc:refer to as the democratic invention.
Marc:So when democracy was invented, by and large, rights were reserved
Marc:for propertied white males.
Marc:They excluded workers, they excluded non whites, they excluded foreigners.
Marc:Um, and so, The democratic invention is the expansion of what's understood
Marc:by liberal democracy over time to include issues that affect groups within
Marc:society, women, racial minorities, religious groups, um, sexual minorities.
Marc:So identity politics, this is basically the identity
Marc:politics that I'm talking about.
Marc:Um, I do in the section on fascism, um, refer to the question of, uh, this right
Marc:wing identity politics, but it's not really identity politics, it's, it's, um,
Marc:yeah, well, I mean, you could consider it a politics focused on identity.
Marc:And that brings you back to classical fascism.
Marc:Now, classical fascism always has a scapegoat, let's say.
Marc:It could be, uh, like, if you think of World War II and Nazi
Marc:Germany, who were the scapegoats?
Marc:Primarily Jews, uh, but not exclusively.
Marc:So you had, uh, Blacks, You had handicapped people.
Marc:It was a eugenics, white, um, Aryan race notion.
Marc:So people who were unhealthy and sick, you know, there were ideas that we
Marc:can, we don't have to like help them, you know, we don't have to supply,
Marc:uh, medical services to these people.
Marc:Um, intellectuals, artists, there were a lot of people who were
Marc:scapegoated in Nazi Germany.
Marc:It wasn't strictly speaking, uh, an identity thing, though
Marc:the notion of the Aryan race.
Marc:in Germany, which is a bit different from what you find in Italy, um,
Marc:was, you know, one of the myths around which you galvanized.
Marc:Uh, uh, a demogra a demagogical project, but if you look at the, the
Marc:development of fascism as an ideology, where does it come from, and what
Marc:is its, um, its self understanding?
Marc:You would have to go back to the late 1800s and early 1900s in France.
Marc:Where many of the key figures who developed fascist ideas were coming
Marc:out of the left, they were coming out of the syndicalist movement.
Marc:They were all trained in Marxist theory and historical materialism.
Marc:Now, they weren't necessarily very good philosophers.
Marc:They weren't like Lennon or Trotsky.
Marc:They weren't like, you know, writing the best theory, but they were using
Marc:these ideas and they could communicate with regular working people with
Marc:those ideas because they were perhaps somewhat already familiar with, with
Marc:it, with, The notions of class struggle.
Marc:The same notions that led to the Russian Revolution led the, um, Soviets
Marc:to choose Lenin as their leader.
Marc:They understood in the Soviets what class struggle was.
Marc:They understood basic Marxism, um, and what the fascists realized after World
Marc:War I or what they, what the, the key takeaway from World War I for the fascists
Marc:was that workers would rather go to war against other workers from other nations.
Marc:Going against the Marxist idea, workers of the world unite, workers have no country.
Marc:Um, and instead they would, they would fight for the French bourgeoisie
Marc:against the, the workers of Germany.
Marc:And the Germans likewise, they would work for the German bourgeoisie
Marc:who are making profits off of war.
Marc:So they were going to war against each other rather than organizing
Marc:against their respective bourgeoisies.
Marc:You have the, a repetition of this.
Marc:Identity politics.
Marc:So you have conflict between men and women, gays and straights.
Marc:Blacks and whites, for example, and often people feeling very inspired
Marc:if somebody from their group makes it into the bourgeoisie, makes it into
Marc:the millionaire or the billionaire class, as though somehow that's going
Marc:to lift you and raise you into, raise you, lift you out of poverty, if only
Marc:as a psychological wage, because that's likely all you're going to get from it.
Trevor:If
Marc:you watch, if you watch a Hollywood film, for example.
Marc:So you have a conflict that ignores class.
Marc:Basically, what for Marxists is the fundamental contradiction
Marc:between labor and capital, which is displaced onto a scapegoat.
Marc:So instead of the conflict with capital, you have the conflict with,
Marc:you know, workers from another country.
Marc:Um, and so, um, the problem is the, the level of complexity is that
Marc:you can never encounter the labor and capital contradiction directly.
Marc:It's always mediated by other factors, many other factors.
Marc:Ecology is one factor today.
Marc:National differences is another factor today.
Marc:So let's say the conflict between labor and capital is influenced by nationalism.
Marc:So for example, American workers may or may not welcome Workers coming from
Marc:Latin America and Mexico into the U.
Marc:S.
Marc:because the idea is that they'll be taking away our jobs, or that
Marc:they'll be driving down wages.
Marc:Um, so nationalism is something that, in this case, benefits the working class.
Marc:The ruling class either way, regardless of how many immigrants
Marc:are here, and very often the ruling class wants more immigrants.
Marc:So the working class ends up being put in a xenophobic situation where,
Marc:because they feel that they're going to bear the brunt, even if it's not true.
Marc:They feel they may be the ones to bear the brunt, so they don't
Marc:show class solidarity, which is what they should be doing.
Marc:And so maybe they're not getting the right kind of cues from their leaders.
Marc:If that's the direction they're going.
Trevor:Yeah, so is one of your critiques of this movement that, that the left
Trevor:gets distracted by these issues, which is an advantage for capital,
Trevor:because the issue of, of the power imbalance between capital and labour.
Trevor:Is always pushed to the side by these, these other fights that are confusing
Trevor:and distracting the issue, taking away from the root cause of the problem?
Marc:That's the million dollar question, right?
Marc:That's the, that's the real question.
Marc:And this is the question that is tearing the left apart right now.
Marc:Um, and because it's tearing the left apart, it's bad for society altogether.
Marc:Um, and this is basically the question that I ask myself and that I want to
Marc:be able to answer as best as I can.
Marc:And, um, in the book Identity Trumps Socialism, I have an essay
Marc:that I contributed to that book.
Marc:It's called The Uses and Abuses of Class Reductionism.
Marc:for the left.
Marc:So, um, there, there are many ways that you can answer that question.
Marc:And that's why if you have a definition of woke or a definition of identity
Marc:politics, it really won't serve you because it's, it's too, it's too packed.
Marc:First of all, you have a whole historical development.
Marc:You have many moving parts.
Marc:You have a system, a process that's not complete.
Marc:So it's not as though you can.
Marc:You can sort of, like, map out the history of what happened in the
Marc:70s and know all of the parts and put them all in the correct place.
Marc:Because for, for one, the person doing the analysis is coming to it from a certain
Marc:perspective, and they're a living subject.
Marc:They're, in a way, interacting with that history.
Marc:So that history is being, uh, rewritten, as it were.
Marc:But this is the question that I would want to answer, and the essay
Marc:I sent you, uh, by Ellen Mikeson's Wood, she, for me, is one of the
Marc:leading thinkers on this question.
Marc:It's called, Why Class Struggle is Central, and so the the key
Marc:point is that class struggle for a leftist is central to the analysis.
Marc:It's not exclusive.
Marc:So because you're doing class analysis, it doesn't mean that you're ignoring
Marc:questions of gender and race and sexuality and nationality and religion,
Marc:but it means that you're going to be thinking about these issues in relation
Marc:to the development of capitalism.
Marc:Um, so you, in the Obama book, there's a chapter I wrote called,
Marc:um, Racialism and its Discontents.
Marc:And, um, in that book I, I propose a kind of almost, um,
Marc:abstract, ahistorical typography of different types of racialism.
Marc:And so that would be people who make race politics.
Marc:Um, uh, essential rather than class politics.
Marc:They would make race politics essential and central to their analysis.
Marc:And so I look at different, uh, types in relation to the Obama era and afterwards.
Marc:So you have, uh, race activists, race managers, race brokers.
Marc:Um, you have intellectuals who are anti racialist.
Marc:And you have the section that I, that I developed as Cultural Marxism, because
Marc:Cultural Marxism, not, and I'm not using the right wing understanding of that
Marc:term, I'm using the Cultural Studies version of that term, which pre exists
Marc:its appropriation by the far right.
Marc:And, um, yeah, I kind of, I'm skipping this, but, um, I was cancelled by
Marc:a publisher because I had a chapter on cultural Marxism, and they said
Marc:that I didn't explain that it comes from the right, and why should
Marc:I when it comes from the left?
Trevor:Wow.
Marc:But people who are being influenced by this woke stream, they're
Marc:afraid, basically, to get into the weeds on these points that are really
Marc:deeply well developed in the world of postmodern and cultural theory.
Marc:But it's just at this moment, at the moment of Black Lives Matter,
Marc:it was as if it was a mot d'oeuvre.
Marc:You had to center Black lives.
Marc:And if you were progressive, you were doing that, and you
Marc:weren't questioning that.
Marc:And so that really isn't my project as an intellectual.
Marc:My project as an intellectual is to say, well, what does it mean to
Marc:center black lives rather than class?
Marc:Is it going to help black people if you center black lives rather than class?
Marc:My argument is that it will not.
Marc:So on that level, I agree with Yasha Munk.
Marc:On that level, I think if you have a gender first or a race
Marc:first agenda, you're going to get in all kinds of problems.
Marc:And one of the problems these days is that the problems you get into are quite
Marc:amenable to the establishment, right?
Marc:So you have a figure like Obama, which Yasha Moonk has no problems with.
Marc:And I can't, I can't understand that.
Marc:How can you be a liberal and agree with a person who condones torture?
Marc:Agree with a person who condones, uh, banksters who
Marc:make off with everybody's money?
Marc:Um, et cetera and so on, who, who destroyed Libya?
Marc:Um, so it makes no sense, but you know, this is the, the, the man, one of the
Marc:many paradoxes that we live in today.
Marc:Um, so the, the, the term that, uh, Nancy Fraser uses to define this is
Marc:kind of like, um, toxic mix of identity politics with neoliberal policy.
Marc:She refers to it as progressive neoliberalism, uh, which
Marc:is kind of an oxymoron.
Marc:But what you have is basically Wall Street interests.
Marc:Pentagon interests, um, the tech industry in the United States, combined with
Marc:identity issues affecting women, um, sexual minorities, LGBTQ, um, IA and trans
Marc:issues is a hot topic these days, um, and all of, and, and, uh, race issues, so
Marc:all of these things can be combined with, um, neoliberalism in a very toxic mix.
Marc:And one question, one question we're asking ourselves is Uh,
Marc:these days is, is Wokeism over?
Marc:Is Wokeism finished?
Marc:Um, it seemed that, it seemed as though it's, it's, like it's heyday, let's
Marc:say, was, I agree with Monk about this, was like, not, 2014 until about
Marc:nine, uh, 2020, when I was writing all these books, around 2019, 2020.
Marc:Um, So why has wokeism fallen out of favor, is a good question.
Marc:Has it fallen out of favor?
Marc:Um, one of the ways that Well, we've had a, we've had time to catch up
Marc:with some of this and to see where it leads and to see what it offers us and
Marc:how, what kind of damage it can do.
Marc:Um, so, um, and I'm, I'm sure many people are, continue to be committed to it.
Marc:I gave you in the, um, The PowerPoint, um, statistics from my association,
Marc:the University's Art Association of Canada, where you look at the topics
Marc:that are discussed at conference
Trevor:and, uh, Let's bring that up.
Trevor:Do you remember what slide number that one was?
Trevor:There it is.
Trevor:That's it there.
Marc:So, um, these are themes that are discussed at conference by
Marc:the University's Art Association.
Marc:So this is art history professors as well as studio artists, like
Marc:painters, sculptors, and so on.
Marc:Um, and looking at the, there are a few, a couple of them.
Marc:maybe two, three hundred presentations at conference every year.
Marc:And so I just looked at the themes that were discussed.
Marc:I have breakdowns that are more subtle than this one.
Marc:This is the most basic of all the breakdowns, but you see at the top there
Marc:that labor and class issues are at 3.
Marc:7%.
Marc:Now, if you add, um, neoliberalism, activism, you could add, um,
Marc:another four percent there.
Marc:But those people talking about class are not necessarily talking
Marc:about it from a leftist perspective.
Marc:Um, and if they are talking about labor, let's say, there's going to be a variety.
Marc:Most likely, it's going to be a social democratic leftism.
Marc:It's not going to be a socialist or Marxist communist leftist.
Marc:Leftism.
Marc:So already there's that.
Marc:But then if you look at the identity topics, race is at 54%,
Marc:then nationality, diaspora, uh, 9%, gender, 9%, LGBTQ, other identity.
Marc:If you get into body politics, very likely you're still talking about,
Marc:uh, race and sexuality and gender.
Marc:Most likely.
Marc:Not necessarily.
Trevor:Mark, this is all from, what, what's the conference?
Trevor:It's an art conference, is it?
Marc:It's the, uh, annual conference of the University's Art
Marc:Association of Canada, uh, in the U.
Marc:S.
Marc:It, the equivalent is the College Art Association.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's the official, it's the University.
Marc:Association of University Professors in the Arts.
Marc:So that would include art history, visual studies, as well as studio arts.
Marc:So the practicing artists, in addition to like art critics and theorists.
Trevor:Do people not create art anymore that doesn't have some sort
Trevor:of underlying statement to make?
Trevor:Do they not create art just because it looks beautiful?
Trevor:Like is everything got to have an underlying
Marc:cause?
Marc:This, I mean, this, uh, this pie chart is beautiful.
Marc:Um, I made it using Canva, so the design was made by somebody before me.
Marc:But, um, yeah, it's, uh, ever since the 1980s with, uh, post modernism, in
Marc:the 60s and 70s, uh, you had a lot of what was known as neo avant gardists.
Marc:And all of these, uh, very important figures of that
Marc:period, they were all theorists.
Marc:So, they wrote essays that explained their work, and in that
Marc:way, they bypassed criticism.
Marc:So, they would, instead of writing criticism, they would
Marc:support each other's work.
Marc:They wouldn't say, this is good or bad.
Marc:They would explain what they're doing.
Marc:So, a minimalist sculptor, for example, would have an essay, uh, uh,
Marc:somebody doing institutional critique would have an essay with his work.
Marc:So, you'd have really good work, or her work, and, and good writing.
Marc:And so, what happened in the 1980s, after that Is that the period of theory it's
Marc:it was sort of like theory Overboard and a lot of art became I mean since the 60s
Marc:and conceptual art art was dematerialized So you moved away from uh objects
Marc:instead to situations and happenings You know like hippie kind hippie kind
Marc:of events and then you had a lot of uh artists who were trying to bypass
Marc:um And then we had the museum system.
Marc:So you had conceptual artists who were making, uh, multiples
Marc:instead of unique objects.
Marc:Uh, this is on the radical side let's say of art.
Marc:And then, uh, performance art.
Marc:So like, Yoko Ono was a performance artist, in the avant garde sense, and she
Marc:influenced John Lennon for example, made his work His bed in, I don't know if you
Marc:remember his Give Peace a Chance bed in.
Trevor:No.
Marc:Um, this would have been late 60s.
Marc:Is this like
Trevor:an interview where they're lying in bed?
Trevor:Is that what you mean?
Trevor:Yeah, yeah,
Marc:exactly.
Marc:And it was about It was about peace and so they were doing a news
Marc:conference and so it was basically it was a form of performance art.
Trevor:Ah, I thought that was just an interview.
Trevor:There we go.
Marc:Yeah, it was an interview but it also had a poster campaign,
Marc:Give Peace a Chance, uh, and this was all over the place, you know.
Marc:Um, And, uh, so that's an example of this kind of, uh, you know,
Marc:post museum kind of art practice.
Marc:And so, a lot of art today, since around 2000, is in, is in the
Marc:area of, uh, socially engaged art.
Marc:So it, it, it looks more like social work.
Marc:actually, than it does anything that you'd see in a museum.
Marc:So it's artists working in collectives, they'll go, they'll work
Marc:with City Hall, they may work with homeless people, they may work with
Marc:people needing abortion services.
Marc:That's referred to as socially engaged art.
Marc:Um, but um, that's not necessarily what's driving all of this, and I'm saying
Marc:here you've got more than 75 percent dedicated to identity topics, but it's,
Marc:it's a little bit more complicated because It isn't just identity, it's
Marc:also movement, moving away from any kind of left, right, and center.
Marc:Well, there's never really any right wing analysis of art anyways, but moving
Marc:away from, moving away from liberal and left analyses of art, um, towards, these
Marc:would be macro political tendencies, like socialist interpretations of art.
Marc:Um, so moving away from that kind of Marxism.
Marc:and phenomenology and structuralism and semiotics, which were all like part of
Marc:the postmodern mix, towards these new tendencies, like intersectionality,
Marc:very trendy, decoloniality, very trendy.
Marc:So if you're doing intersectionality, you can't discuss just
Marc:gender, let's say, in art.
Marc:You're going to want to discuss gender and race, maybe the histories of racism in a
Marc:country, in relation to specific artists.
Marc:Indigenous artists, a lot of, uh, discussion on of decoloniality.
Marc:So, for example, um, on this point, uh, if you go to the uac, the, the,
Marc:the, the previous website for the UAAC, um, it would have, uh, um.
Marc:Some writing in an Indigenous language.
Marc:Now, I looked it up and I couldn't find which Indigenous language,
Marc:so I don't know if it's a mixture.
Marc:I couldn't, I couldn't do a Google translate.
Marc:Um, and also, at conference, you'll have, um, people, before
Marc:they give their presentation, they'll do a land acknowledgement.
Marc:It, it became very trendy.
Marc:to do a land acknowledgement.
Marc:And so now, like, you're going to hear a land acknowledgement by
Marc:about 150 people at conference.
Marc:And you have to ask yourself, like, what is this?
Marc:What is this about?
Marc:You know, it's very strange.
Marc:I'm sure Indigenous people find it very strange.
Marc:And, um, on this point, um, there was some request and a little bit
Marc:of pressure put on the board of the association to make a statement,
Marc:uh, regarding the genocide in Gaza.
Marc:So what they came up with is, because, uh, you know, there you also
Marc:have a settler colonial situation.
Marc:So the UAAC, when it comes to settler colonialism in Canada, they're
Marc:completely, of course, against it and completely in favor of decolonialism.
Marc:But when it comes to the Gaza genocide, They couldn't make a statement against
Marc:Zionism, against settler colonialism.
Marc:They, they made a statement respecting the rights of everyone
Marc:to their opinion and students.
Marc:So, you know, you get these kinds of, um, these for me are, are the problems
Marc:you have when the field as such hasn't really come to terms with the limitations.
Marc:of postmodern theory.
Marc:It hasn't understood what the attack on universalism and enlightenment
Marc:and progress, notions of progress, what does it mean when you, when
Marc:you turn away from these, um, not accidentally, programmatically, right?
Marc:And that, so that, that includes liberalism and it includes
Marc:socialism, both of them.
Trevor:We have in Australia very common for any public event to begin with an
Trevor:acknowledgement of the traditional.
Trevor:Indigenous owners and, uh, particular tribes are often mentioned in
Trevor:that and, uh, respects are paid to Elders past, present and emerging.
Trevor:And that happens, uh, football events, um, meetings of any sort, um, uh, Not
Trevor:only at the start of the meeting, but then each individual speaker that gets up
Trevor:will commence with a reference to this.
Trevor:Very, very common.
Trevor:I mentioned earlier that our King and Queen are in the country.
Trevor:And apparently at Parliament House, one of our Indigenous parliamentarians
Trevor:basically got up and made a scene and told him to give back the country.
Trevor:The end.
Trevor:And what the hell was he doing here, sort of thing, and people are shocked
Trevor:by this, and I sort of think to myself, well, how can you, on the one hand, be
Trevor:fully accepting of, of, uh, these sort of acknowledgements of country, and then be
Trevor:shocked when one of these people then, um, you know, comes out and says to the king,
Trevor:um, not happy with your colonial project, and, um, yeah, people would just, um,
Trevor:Double standards, I guess, in that sense.
Trevor:Not acknowledging the contradiction inherent in, in observing these
Trevor:niceties all the time, but then inviting the king who represents
Trevor:the complete opposite and expecting people to remain silent about it.
Trevor:So, yeah, so, um, There's, um,
Marc:yeah, there's a slightly different case in Canada.
Marc:I'm not a specialist on on the question, so I don't want to say the wrong thing,
Marc:but I've heard Indigenous scholars do the opposite in the case of Canada, saying
Marc:that hunting and fishing rights were guaranteed by the Queen, and so in that
Marc:case they're quite happy to acknowledge the monarchy, which isn't necessarily
Marc:recognized by contemporary governments.
Trevor:Um,
Marc:so, you know, it, it, it can, it can vary, but I, I, we, Canada can
Marc:do you one much better, um, in 2023.
Marc:Yeah, in September or October, I don't remember the date.
Marc:The entire, The Canadian House of Commons rose up and applauded a
Marc:Ukrainian Canadian member of the Waffen SS, the Galicia Division in Ukraine.
Marc:Um, and of course Canada's involved with Ukraine and NATO against, uh, Russia
Marc:in, at this moment, mostly in Ukraine.
Marc:Um, so obviously that's the reason for it.
Marc:And then there was a little bit of a scandal, barely a scandal.
Marc:Um, and it's, you know, kind of makes sense because the Deputy Prime Minister,
Marc:Chrystia Freeland, is someone who has a family background associated
Marc:with this, uh, Ukrainian Nazi past
Trevor:that
Marc:happened.
Marc:She has renounced to some extent, but she's also held up signs that say
Marc:Slava Ukraini, which is a right wing term in Ukraine that is associated
Marc:with the Banderists and so on.
Marc:So she hasn't fully dis dis separated herself from it.
Marc:Um, and then the question was, did the Trudeau government know who this man was?
Marc:They claimed afterwards that they didn't, but clearly they did.
Trevor:And
Marc:so that's kind of an interesting sort of Trump, basically a Trump
Marc:moment in the Canadian, in Canadian politics, because what they said
Marc:before the parliamentarians got up and applauded was that this man fought
Marc:against the Russians in World War II.
Marc:And so after that, they all got up and applauded.
Marc:I guess they don't know.
Trevor:The Russians were on our side.
Marc:They were.
Marc:And they liberated Europe at the expense of about 20 million Russians.
Trevor:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Trevor:It's that sort of gaslighting, isn't it?
Trevor:Okay, let's get back, um, I mean, we've got all the time in the world, but I
Trevor:am sort of wanting to gear it towards some, um, where do we go from here?
Trevor:If, if we are saying that, that the left has made big mistakes, and is
Trevor:continuing to make those mistakes, how does it turn around in a direction that
Trevor:you think would be Could we go, um,
Marc:yeah, could we go to the slides again?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And
Trevor:go,
Marc:and go backwards a little bit?
Trevor:Go backwards, yeah.
Marc:Um, like, I'm interested in this question, obviously.
Marc:But, uh, I think you can't, you know, you can't really talk about the future
Marc:if you don't talk about the past.
Marc:Oh, right, this one here.
Marc:Um, and, uh, and the present, right?
Marc:Because if we don't know where we are, we need to have what Frederick
Marc:Jameson, a Marxist scholar, referred to as cognitive mapping.
Marc:Right?
Marc:We need to have a big picture of what's happening in the world.
Marc:Right?
Marc:And where we are, and on that basis, we might be able to move forward, but
Marc:if we misrecognize where we are, we're going to have a lot of, I really kind
Marc:of, I'm always annoyed with this, let's have a national conversation about race.
Marc:Right?
Marc:On, um, the Oprah Winfrey show or something.
Marc:And so the question is, why do we have to begin at zero every time we have
Marc:a national conversation, or worse?
Marc:Like, why do we have to begin at minus ten?
Marc:Now, there's a, a need for that simply in terms of basic pedagogy.
Marc:Basic pedagogy, you have to not presume that the people you're
Marc:addressing know what you know or know very much about the topic.
Marc:So the idea is to assume.
Marc:Uh, you know, help people, um, you know, come to a sense of where to start with
Marc:some of these and maybe where to go.
Marc:However, when you get to university, it's a completely different game.
Marc:When you get to graduate school, MA programs, PhD programs, there it's a
Marc:very different game as well, because there you're really creating the
Marc:leadership class when it comes to the middle class and the professional
Marc:managerial class of the future.
Marc:And so this is where, um, you know, you're going to have what you might
Marc:refer to as window dressing, like, you know, all of these woke topics, and then
Marc:you're going to want to know, well, is there something behind it, like, is this
Marc:really a class agenda that is, you know, presented as a, an identity agenda?
Marc:And this is what a lot of people would tell you.
Marc:For example, Adolph Reed, they'll say that the, the culture
Marc:war is a class war, right?
Marc:And it's a class war against the working class.
Marc:So how do, you know, how do you understand that?
Marc:And you'll have very sophisticated identitarians and diversitarians.
Marc:And racialists who will oppose this vehemently.
Marc:And they may have good grounds to do so.
Marc:Indigenous people may have good grounds to do so.
Marc:And so you need to hear those arguments.
Marc:And you can't always, um, you can't always in some ways, you know, address
Marc:them exactly on the same terms.
Marc:So this is where you get what's known as theoretical noise.
Marc:Right, like ideology clash.
Marc:Um, but, um, one of the things that has inspired my work, um, when I, when I
Marc:stopped teaching around 2006, um, it was interesting because at that point I was
Marc:sort of compelled by the need to offer courses to students to discuss new ideas.
Marc:But when I stopped teaching in 2006, I can kind of just focus.
Marc:on what I want to do.
Marc:Like, you know, what is, what do I find interesting for a research project?
Marc:And so one of the things I wanted to do is get back to, um, thinking about
Marc:class and class analysis in relation to art and culture, which had been pretty
Marc:much, um, bankrupted to the extent that the only kind of Marxism that you
Marc:had with post, the postmodern left was what's, what's known as cultural Marxism.
Marc:For good or bad, that term is a term you could apply.
Marc:A cultural studies approach, in other words.
Marc:So this is one of the things I came up with, which is a combination of
Marc:the ideas of two different people.
Marc:One is Peter Berger, who's a theorist of the avant garde, the historical avant
Marc:garde, and the other is a sociologist, French sociologist called Pierre Bourdieu.
Marc:Um, both are very well known, one in art history, the other one in sociology.
Marc:And what I did is I combined their ideas.
Marc:So what you see as the fourth section of this graph is not in Peter Berger.
Marc:The first three, the graph itself and the first three parts were invented by Berger.
Marc:And the fourth one is what I gleaned from Bourdieu that I added.
Marc:to Berger's analysis.
Marc:So he's interested in how the, how art has changed over time, how we
Marc:understand art in the way that it's made.
Marc:So in the first, uh, section you would have, um, sacral art, so
Marc:the Middle Ages through to about the Renaissance and even earlier
Marc:Dynasties, like let's say in China.
Marc:In the Baroque period, starting with the Renaissance, you have classical courtly
Marc:art, and it isn't the same kind of art.
Marc:One of the reasons it's not, is because much of the older art
Marc:was made for religious purposes.
Marc:And so, for example, a painting or a sculpture that's in a
Marc:cathedral is made as a cult object.
Marc:It isn't made as a work of art.
Marc:It isn't made There are a lot of
Trevor:images of the Virgin Mary and that sort of thing.
Trevor:Is that what you meant?
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Or, or, um, even the church itself.
Marc:The Gothic cathedrals, let's say, or Romanesque cathedrals.
Marc:Um, and the mosaics, let's say, in a Byzantine.
Marc:Uh, or Eastern Orthodox Church.
Marc:Um, so with the Renaissance and, uh, the Baroque period, which is this next
Marc:section here, you have people like Louis XIV, Who's a humanist, right?
Marc:He's influenced by the Renaissance humanism.
Marc:He's going back to the age of the the ancient Greeks when it comes to sculpture.
Marc:So he's doing things like Michelangelo was doing, which is basically naked human
Marc:bodies, you know, in the Sistine Chapel.
Marc:You would never have seen this in the Middle Ages because it was sinful.
Marc:But with Renaissance humanism, you have this reinvestment in antiquity
Marc:and pagan themes, and basically the achievement in terms of art on this kind
Marc:of humanistic level, which celebrates the artist as almost a divine figure,
Marc:like Michelangelo or Raphael or Leonardo.
Marc:And so, and these are, um, these are also sponsored by the court, but they,
Marc:they have a more secular orientation, and you have the development of academies,
Marc:So, the artist is no longer working in a medieval guild, the artist is now
Marc:working or being taught in an academy, and you're really looking for the best
Marc:artists, you know, and so the courts of Europe will be competing between
Marc:themselves to see who can attract the best artists, and if they have something
Marc:like this, then we want something like this, and of course that continues today
Marc:with museum competition and biennials.
Marc:Um, that shifts around.
Marc:1800, when you have the, basically the end of the feudal era, the beginning of
Marc:the liberal democratic bourgeois era.
Marc:So you're moving away from academies that were, um, sponsored by the monarchy.
Marc:Let's say like Shakespeare, who was, uh, uh, one of the, the king's players,
Marc:kingsmen, uh, working for the queen and not doing anything that would
Marc:offend the queen or the monarchy.
Marc:So then you have the bourgeois period.
Marc:So the patron is no longer the monarchy, it's no longer the church, it's the
Marc:average middle class person, and they want paintings for their home.
Marc:So these are basically commodities.
Marc:They're no longer cult objects, they're no longer objects that
Marc:you find in the palace of a king.
Marc:They're everyday objects in a sense, and they're on a commodity market.
Marc:Now there were markets for art before this time, but what changes is that the artist
Marc:is no longer thinking about what they're doing in terms of You know, something
Marc:that is oriented towards, um, the academy and the kind of training and the kind
Marc:of criticism you find in those places.
Marc:And they become, in a way, detached, uh, much as the Gothic novelists
Marc:like Mary Shelley or, uh, Byron, um, you know, the, the authors of
Marc:vampire and Frankenstein novels.
Marc:in the early 1800s, or Charles Baudelaire, the poet Maudsit.
Marc:These were all what you can consider the spoiled brat children of the bourgeoisie.
Marc:So they were all romantic.
Marc:They didn't believe in superstition and they quite enjoyed insulting society.
Marc:They quite enjoyed insulting the bourgeoisie with their
Marc:philistinistic, materialist values.
Marc:The bourgeoisie are oriented more towards making money and justifying that need
Marc:to make money in terms of the wealth of nations, in capitalist, liberal terms.
Marc:But the children who are culturalized are, or they don't have to be children, they
Marc:can simply be, you know, on their own.
Marc:They're thinking more in terms of individualism, which comes out of the
Marc:Kantian definition of art, and a little bit the Hegelian definition of art.
Marc:And as the 19th century becomes more Uh, informed by Marxism and
Marc:Socialism and Anarchism, they more decidedly turn against the bourgeoisie.
Marc:And so they become radicalized, and this is what's known as the Bohemian, uh, era.
Marc:And, uh, the Bohemian avant garde, so, all of the art movements we study,
Marc:like Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, um, they're all doing
Marc:radical art that changes every five years and it doesn't look like anything
Marc:the academies are doing, which is considered this kind of, you know, very
Marc:expensive for nothing bourgeois stuff.
Marc:So you'll get a figure like Van Gogh, who comes out of that, uh, that moment
Marc:that we still today identify as avant garde and making art that's autonomous.
Marc:He's not even making his art for the, for the market.
Marc:The market's not interested in Van Gogh.
Marc:They won't buy, nobody will buy his paintings.
Marc:His brother is, you know, pulling his hair out trying to find buyers for his,
Marc:his crazy brother's crazy paintings.
Marc:But he thinks they're good, you know, he thinks they'll
Marc:be maybe recognised later on.
Marc:Well his brother
Trevor:was an art dealer of some sort I think, is that right?
Trevor:Yeah, exactly.
Trevor:He had some sort of expert eye for these things.
Marc:Absolutely, yeah.
Marc:And there's a logic to what Van Gogh is doing, and if you're following
Marc:Impressionism, you see how they're breaking down, they're making their
Marc:brushwork visible, It's not about the subject matter, it's about the
Marc:form and the treatment and the color.
Marc:So if you take those concepts, it's easy to understand Van Gogh.
Marc:It's simply what would have been considered shocking at that time because
Marc:it had this whole idea that art should innovate and that should it it should
Marc:do something different every decade wasn't was a new phenomenon at that time.
Marc:Today, it's so cliche that no artist would, would even think to
Marc:talk about their work in that way.
Marc:A postmodern artist has nothing to do with that.
Marc:So this is the autonomous idea of art.
Marc:Art for art's sake, basically.
Marc:And that leads into end of the century decadence.
Marc:Um, you have the decadence movement, a lot of these artists who are symbolists, for
Marc:example, they go back to representation, but with all these weird themes, you know,
Marc:these kind of like strange mystical themes that the bourgeoisie loves to indulge.
Marc:So if you see the film Moulin Rouge, for example, uh, this is kind of like
Marc:that period where the bourgeoisie is going to the Moulin Rouge and hanging
Marc:out with these bohemian artists.
Marc:Maybe smoking opium and living a kind of offbeat lifestyle away from
Marc:the, you know, the wife and kids.
Marc:And so, you know, that kind of continues through to around the post
Marc:war period, to about the 1940s and 50s.
Marc:Then you have a shift to what I'm describing as The moment
Marc:at which the petty bourgeoisie, um, gains cultural ascendancy.
Marc:So, you know, you could think of popular culture in a way as petty bourgeois.
Marc:Um, you have mass culture on the one hand, which isn't the same thing
Marc:exactly as, um, middle class culture.
Marc:Um, so the petty bourgeoisie is more likely to be familiar with
Marc:classical novels, for example.
Marc:Uh, they may like, uh, classical music.
Marc:But they may not have the time or the interest in reading a lot of
Marc:novels or in going to the concert.
Marc:And so they might be looking for an easy version of these ideas.
Marc:And so you get a kind of cultural watering down.
Marc:Uh, where on the one hand, the working class has more access to culture.
Marc:And on the other hand, the upper class has the same culture as everyone else.
Marc:They have this kind of popular culture, mid cult.
Marc:And so that's why postmodern ideas are so popular, because everything
Marc:these days is kind of in the middle.
Marc:Nobody wants to be, um, you know, the kind, nobody wants to be confused
Marc:with, you know, Somebody who thinks they're avant garde or that they're
Marc:like a master artist or, you know, so all these things you learn in
Marc:college to not, to not reproduce.
Marc:So we have a situation today where culture is networked through social media.
Marc:It's culture industry in the traditional sense.
Marc:Culture is not an autonomous art, it's an industry.
Marc:And, you know, there's government grants for art, there's biennials,
Marc:there's museums, it's a system, and it includes universities.
Marc:And people in these, Uh, industries are like workers.
Marc:Some of them succeed, some of them become blue chip artists,
Marc:but that's only about 2%.
Marc:The majority will not, they're like people who want to be
Marc:basketball players in the NBA.
Marc:Only a few will make it.
Marc:The majority will not be known, the majority won't make it, and they'll get
Marc:jobs at a lower level, let's say working in a museum or something like this.
Marc:And so, they may They may choose to organize in an artist union, um, they
Marc:may choose to collectivize in some way in order to have representation with
Marc:the government, but they're basically, they're not living from their work.
Marc:They're living from another job and they'll make their work in
Marc:their spare time, most likely.
Marc:But also at the level of ideas in the mode of consumption, the
Marc:mode of consumption has changed.
Marc:I refer to this as post enlightenment.
Marc:It's not only that.
Marc:Uh, today's culture rejects the Enlightenment, the notion that we're
Marc:moving towards progress, the faith that we're moving towards progress.
Marc:There's, there's a lot of despair in the 20th century with fascism
Marc:and Stalinism and with the culture industry that makes it seem as though
Marc:these are all systems of domination.
Marc:These ideologies and these industries, they're really systems of domination.
Marc:Um, and so, you know, where do you go if not in this traditional
Marc:avant garde van Gogh direction?
Marc:You don't really want to go in that direction.
Marc:You want to not repeat the same things that have led us to this moment.
Marc:And so, at the level of, um, the middle class, the professional
Marc:managerial class, the way I understand it is you have a conflict.
Marc:You have, uh, what I refer to as a conflict between two factions
Marc:of the same middle class.
Marc:Um, on the one hand, the creative class, Basically the educated,
Marc:apolitical faction who identify with progressive neoliberalism.
Marc:They think Obama was a good president.
Marc:They think Clinton would have been a good representative because she's a woman.
Marc:Um, they're kind of They're basically kind of in the tradition of what you
Marc:might consider, um, a yuppie or a hipster.
Marc:Um, so for example, many of these people are against the genocide,
Marc:uh, in Gaza, because it's a clear case of, uh, human rights.
Marc:abuse and criminality.
Marc:It's deemed a genocide by the ICC and the ICJ.
Marc:They don't have a problem with it.
Marc:But then you ask them about what's happening with NATO vis a vis Russia
Marc:and China, you ask them about the half a million people who've died in
Marc:Ukraine and they don't have an opinion.
Trevor:They,
Marc:there are no protests for what's happening over there.
Marc:It's almost as though because Putin is so anti gay, he's so
Marc:regressive and reactionary.
Marc:that it's okay to be against Russia.
Marc:It's good to be against Russia.
Marc:And the goal is to decolonize it.
Marc:So to basically take a federation and to divide it into smaller nations.
Marc:So that's NATO's plan.
Marc:And a lot of the creative class is, I think, uh, you know, lacking
Marc:in wherewithal when it comes to some of these kinds of points.
Marc:Basically, they're, they're interested in what, um, puts butter on the bread.
Marc:And then, against this, you have an activist, uh, class in the PMC.
Marc:So, this activist class is more the people in the tradition of the 60s student
Marc:movement, who understand these kind of geopolitical the problem of imperialism,
Marc:of neocolonialism, but also very oriented to identity issues at the same time.
Marc:So they want to combine all of these things in, you know, what you can think
Marc:of as an intersectional, uh, combination.
Marc:So a lot of the colleagues I've had who are in, uh, socially
Marc:engaged art, for example, um, I came up with this graph in 2008.
Marc:So, I've been on this class critique of identity politics since that time, but at
Marc:that time when I was writing my essays, no one was offended by any of my work.
Marc:In fact, I was being asked to contribute to projects and so on.
Marc:And it's only around 2016.
Marc:Uh, after Black Lives Matter and after this kind of like great awokening,
Marc:as it's known, that I, and this cancel culture phenomenon, that I
Marc:started getting the cold shoulder.
Marc:I started getting, you know, more aggressive kinds of, uh,
Marc:responses and so on and so forth.
Marc:Um, so I haven't, I haven't changed my, changed my tune,
Marc:but the culture has changed.
Marc:Now, it could be that things will change again, but, so here you have,
Marc:um, the petty bourgeoisie So you
Trevor:just described two versions of the, of the creator class, or
Trevor:the managerial professional class.
Trevor:One, well, one that, um, understood Palestinian Gaza as a genocide, but
Trevor:didn't see Um, sort of understand Ukraine very well, and one that did,
Trevor:but both of them still shackled by, um, identity issues, is that right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Absolutely, yeah.
Trevor:Yeah.
Marc:Um, the main difference is that, let's say the creative class,
Marc:the hipster faction, the yuppie faction, they understand identity
Marc:issues in this very kind of self, self, uh, selfish kind of like.
Marc:Uh, yuppie notion of advancement.
Marc:So it goes along with entrepreneurialism, it goes along with, let's say,
Marc:black capitalism, Lenin feminism, red capitalism, this kind of thing.
Marc:Um, and also these very woke kind of films and topics, let's say.
Marc:And one of the reasons I wrote the Obama portraits is in 2009 when
Marc:they came out, or whatever year, No.
Marc:Um, 17.
Marc:Um, no.
Marc:Was it, is it 17?
Marc:What, what, what was Obama's last year?
Marc:2016, right?
Trevor:Yeah.
Trevor:We had, uh, Trump for four years and we've just had Biden for four,
Trevor:so it would've been exactly right.
Trevor:So,
Marc:so
Trevor:end of 2016, brain relapses.
Trevor:Obama is finished.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And so after his two terms, after doing like all of the terrible things
Marc:he did, I was reading articles.
Marc:In this racialist, uh, BLM sense that we're, you know, very laudatory.
Marc:And I, I couldn't understand it, you know, how can, how can people writing,
Marc:um, uh, for Hyperallergic and other websites be so, like, forgetful so soon?
Marc:And it was because, you know, after a film like Black Panther came out,
Marc:I don't know if you, if you know this film, Black Panther, it was the
Marc:first Marvel, is it Marvel Comics?
Marc:It was the first Marvel Comics superhero film with a lead black figure.
Marc:Black Panther.
Marc:And so it was kind of like this, um, you know, finally we've arrived, you
Marc:know, finally in terms of Hollywood and in terms of like the presidency, you
Marc:know, black issues are on the table.
Marc:But I mean, for the majority of working class black people,
Marc:it's not really an advantage.
Marc:In fact, it's quite the opposite because Obama oversaw At that point, it's now
Marc:been superseded, but at that point, Obama had overseen the largest transfer
Marc:of wealth from the working class to the billionaire class in human history.
Marc:Um, so, you know, these things are, these things are kind of like symbolic
Marc:achievements more than anything else.
Marc:I'm not discrediting them.
Marc:I'm not saying they don't have, um, But I'm just saying, don't
Marc:be, don't be bamboozled, uh, you know, by, by this culture.
Marc:And so, um, what was your question again?
Trevor:Um, well, I was really like, where do we go to from here is where
Trevor:I was, you know, wanting to get to is, Is there a, a way of, of fixing
Trevor:the left to bring it back to, um, class issues as a central concern?
Trevor:And capital and labour and understanding that and spending more
Trevor:time on that than on class issues.
Trevor:Is there, is there a way that that can happen?
Trevor:Um, perhaps as people see more and more, um, You know, a key goal of
Trevor:identity politics is representation.
Trevor:You know, we want more.
Trevor:Black women in power, for example, but you see cases where, um, you know, a daughter
Trevor:of an immigrant becomes the immigration minister in the UK and then wants to
Trevor:send, um, illegal aliens to Rwanda.
Trevor:Or you see, um, uh, women get into position of power, but
Trevor:then want to institute policies that are very anti women.
Trevor:And, uh, Obama gets into power and, you know, uh, looks after
Trevor:Wall Street, not Main Street.
Trevor:So, you sort of, I see that we're going to be just disappointed by a lot of minority
Trevor:people in power, that people might begin to understand, you know what, just getting
Trevor:one of these people in power isn't enough, they have to be there with the right, um,
Trevor:ideology in their head, um, to actually change things for the better, so, um,
Trevor:maybe if enough of that happens, people will say, Okay, we've got representation
Trevor:but we still have a problem.
Trevor:It's more an ideology change that needs to happen here.
Trevor:I don't know.
Marc:Yeah, the, the, the thing is, one of the things is the, the left
Marc:has an advantage in terms of numbers.
Marc:But the right has an advantage in terms of capital.
Marc:They have, with the billionaire class, a lot more money than we do at the moment.
Marc:And so they can influence a lot of media, um, especially mainstream media.
Marc:And so if you, if you bring that back to the, uh, the PMC, the middle class,
Marc:what I'm arguing is that, I mean, Ellen Mikeson's wood, um, her work's very good
Marc:because what she was saying is that.
Marc:These identity topics, one of the problems with them is that
Marc:they obscure these class issues.
Marc:David Harvey has said the same thing.
Marc:David Harvey's a Marxist, uh, geographer who wrote one of the first
Marc:books on postmodernism, one of the first critiques of postmodernism,
Marc:and Fred Jameson wrote one in 1984.
Marc:So the Marxist critique of postmodernism goes back to the early 80s.
Marc:Um, and a person who influenced me, Henri Lefebvre, a French Marxist
Marc:philosopher, he was criticizing people like Foucault, um, Derrida,
Marc:who influenced Spivak, uh, Lyotard, he was criticizing these French thinkers.
Marc:as they were coming out, as their books were coming out in French back in the 60s.
Marc:Um, so there's been Marxist criticism of postmodern ideas, as long as
Marc:there have been postmodern ideas.
Marc:In academia, especially in the United States, less so in the
Marc:UK, um, in academia, the Marxist critique was kind of waylaid.
Marc:To a certain extent.
Marc:And by the 1990s, you didn't hear about it much anymore.
Marc:And if you think of people like, um, Harvey and Jameson, there was a feminist
Marc:feeding frenzy against these two guys.
Marc:And Mike Davis, for being reductionist, for being, for having a, a kind of naive
Marc:understanding of reality, which itself was kind of a, Uh, a flawed argument, but it
Marc:was coming from feminist psychoanalysis, and it was coming from post structuralism.
Marc:And so all of the fancy doodads that you can want from academia, you can use those
Marc:to dismantle and deconstruct the Marxist left, which was in some ways viewed
Marc:as this kind of white male preserve.
Marc:Um, and so that didn't really shift until after the 2000s.
Marc:And so with Black Lives Matter and the Women's March and Me Too around 2014,
Marc:all the post modernism came, came rushing back and Hollywood has jumped on it,
Marc:for example, like going after Polanski.
Marc:Polanski, we hadn't heard about his rape case.
Marc:You know, for many years, then lo and behold, he's become public enemy
Marc:number one for the, on the Me Too, uh, radar, along with, uh, Woody Allen,
Trevor:uh, for it.
Trevor:So, so, so Mark, when does it change?
Trevor:Does the left just keep doing what it's doing?
Trevor:Well, what I, what I want to Or how will it change, or when will it change?
Marc:What I want to address, what I want to address is the liberal
Marc:class has a need for this view of the working class as being unsophisticated.
Marc:So they need that because you're going to want to teach them courses,
Marc:right, at the undergraduate level.
Marc:So you have to think that I've got something to offer these unwashed
Marc:worker type people who are like, masturbating to porn too much, uh,
Marc:which is, you know, we're not going to get to it, but that's kind of like
Marc:one of the themes in the Barbie movie.
Marc:Ken with his, Ken with his, um, Ken, when he tries to recreate, um,
Marc:uh, Ken world or whatever it is to take over Barbie world, he's kind of
Marc:coming from this working class, you know, porn scape universe, right?
Marc:And that's kind of like the way the film introduces.
Marc:A class element into, uh, the film without addressing it directly.
Marc:Um, but what, so the liberal class has a need to see the working class.
Marc:as on the end of their pedagogical imperative.
Marc:And that pedagogical imperative can change every season with new directions
Marc:like intersectionality and decoloniality.
Marc:You're always going to have the edge as the middle class because you're constantly
Marc:changing the things that are problematic and the ways of going about it.
Marc:And there's a whole sort of social media feeding frenzy where people are, uh,
Marc:uh, uh, uh, what's the word, prosumers.
Marc:They're creating the content.
Marc:The platforms are reaping the benefits, but every person gets to create content.
Marc:So if you're being interpolated, not at the level of solidarity, but at the level
Marc:of allyship, then you have something special that you can bring to Twitter.
Marc:You have something special that you can bring to Facebook, which is
Marc:yourself, right, your embodiment.
Trevor:So you're saying the incentives are working against the professional
Trevor:class in Educating up and coming No,
Marc:in favour of the professional class, insofar as they think of
Marc:themselves as a class in itself and not a class for a new social project.
Trevor:Yeah, but working against them from providing a class
Trevor:critique, and rather, so they're incentivised not to provide the sort
Trevor:of thinking that you're providing.
Trevor:Yes,
Marc:they're incentivized to avoid class analysis to a large extent.
Marc:I mean, that's why I had a lot of problems.
Marc:I couldn't finish my PhD thesis on this ground.
Marc:But ignoring that, um So should we be
Trevor:pessimistic?
Trevor:Should we just be
Marc:It's worse than that.
Marc:It's worse than that.
Marc:Because if you want to have a class analysis in addition to these other
Marc:issues, which are all important issues, There's a myriad of methods.
Marc:Radical democracy, left populism, autonomous Marxism, intersectionality.
Marc:There's tons of ways that you can include class that are not Marxist.
Marc:In fact, they're anti Marxist.
Marc:In fact, they're part of the reactionary anti Enlightenment tradition.
Marc:And so I refer to this as micro fascism.
Marc:It's micro politics.
Marc:that has a culture war, fascistic, anti universalist, anti human rights dimension,
Marc:but it's completely legitimate if you think of it in terms of empowerment,
Marc:if you think of it in terms of discourse theory, which is premised on
Marc:Nietzschean nihilism and will to power.
Marc:And so all of this kind of subjectivism gets, gets legitimized through theory.
Marc:And so this is a complicated academic series of layers that makes it so
Marc:that people who are on the activist wing, let's say the diversity, um, DEI
Marc:mandating, uh, shifts to, to departments and universities, they're legitimized.
Marc:They're, and not only that, but, I find it, it's odd that they don't
Marc:see the contradiction between what they're doing and what's, you
Marc:know, what's happening with, let's say, the charge of anti Semitism.
Marc:Because this kind of like Zionist anti Semitism is the apex of wokeism.
Marc:I would say, you know, and so one might hope that this would enlighten some people
Marc:as to its, its limitations, you know, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Marc:And I guess that was
Trevor:my question.
Trevor:It is, you've answered it there is, you just don't see it happening anytime soon.
Trevor:Because you have,
Marc:you have such zaniness.
Marc:on the far right, right?
Marc:We have, we have far right movements popping up all over the place.
Marc:Um, we have one in Canada with Pauly Eve.
Marc:And, uh, can you imagine Trump, the person who tried to coup his
Marc:own country, up for election again?
Marc:And then, if you legitimately go after him with an impeachment attempt, Or with
Marc:court cases, you have people on the left, in the DSA, the, you know, these are, this
Marc:is the left in the US, the DSA, who, who are criticizing lawfare against Trump.
Marc:It's like, if you can't use lawfare against a fascist who tried to
Marc:coup his own country, I mean, you know, what do you love about it?
Marc:Yes, they say this has never been done before.
Trevor:And the answer is, well, nobody's ever done what he's done before.
Trevor:That's why, that's why it's unique.
Trevor:Or
Marc:he doesn't really mean it.
Marc:Or he's not really a fascist.
Marc:Because he was just recently at a Catholic church fundraiser, accompanied by, you
Marc:know, people from the Democratic Party.
Marc:Um, and they're in the same, and he used to be a Democrat.
Marc:So arguably, the billionaire class, the money class, all this fascism.
Marc:It's just a different kind of window dressing.
Marc:It's just a different form of symbolic, um, culture war type nonsense.
Marc:And so I think a lot of people don't realize the threat of, uh,
Marc:this, these far right movements.
Marc:But the point is, is, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a saying that goes,
Marc:um, every fascism is a failed revolution.
Trevor:Right.
Marc:And so what we're seeing is, Not only a left that is programmatically
Marc:non revolutionary, right, they don't want to talk revolution,
Marc:that's the old left, so ever since World War II we've been new left.
Marc:And so we don't even have revolutionary theory on the table.
Marc:If you talk about Antonio Gramsci, who was a leading intellectual in the
Marc:Italian Communist Party, he invented the notion of hegemony, concept of hegemony.
Marc:And he said, you know, the revolution worked in, uh, Russia for very
Marc:specific reasons, because they had to do their own anti feudal work.
Marc:Revolution.
Marc:They hadn't gotten rid of their monarchy at that point.
Marc:So really the Communist Revolution was kind of like their
Marc:bourgeois revolution in a way.
Marc:And, uh, but the same thing, the Communist Revolution can't happen
Marc:in a European country that is more developed, where people are more
Marc:educated, and where the working class by and large gets by a little bit
Marc:better and a bit, a bit more easily.
Marc:They're more likely to be tempted.
Marc:Either, if they're not conservative, like the, the problem with the
Marc:south of Italy at that time, in the north of Italy, where there's a lot
Marc:of workers and they're unionized, they're not going to be revolutionary.
Marc:They're going to be tempted by social democracy.
Marc:And so basically what you see in the US with the United Auto Workers and with
Marc:unions, uh, like the, the, uh, Teamsters.
Marc:identifying with the Trump Republicans, the Metal Workers Union, identifying
Marc:with the Trump Republicans.
Marc:You have the American Federation of Teachers, identifying with the regime
Marc:in Kiev, which is a far right regime.
Marc:The UAW, the same.
Marc:So basically what they're presenting American workers is
Marc:what's known as corporatism, where the social democratic left, the
Marc:unionized left, is the left wing.
Marc:Of the neoliberal agenda.
Marc:And so it's, it's not surprising that, you know, when it comes to the DSA uh,
Marc:they're kind of, they're, you know, they're saying, class class class.
Marc:But their main representative is the, AOC, she's a member of the DSA, they
Marc:should have kicked her out a long time ago, because she's going along
Marc:with these genocides and these NATO World War III plans, um, and this,
Marc:you know, failed Biden administration where nothing was done for health care,
Marc:for student debt, for infrastructure.
Marc:It's a disaster.
Marc:It's one failure after another.
Marc:Um, you know, you know, she's towing the line.
Marc:So this is the best that the DNC has in terms of a representative,
Marc:not at the local level, but at, but at this major ideological level.
Marc:Why didn't they dump her?
Marc:They should have dumped her a long time ago.
Marc:Um, so, you know, they're trying to sort of maintain this sort of like,
Marc:we're not going to achieve anything with revolutionary sectarianism.
Marc:We have to stay within the mainstream.
Marc:We have to operate.
Marc:You know, on terms that are not of our choosing.
Marc:And so it's always this kind of, um, it's always this game of kind of
Marc:positioning, which is a very middle class or aspirational, uh, middle class kind
Marc:of rhetoric, which is very good because you can have all the social criticism.
Marc:in the world.
Marc:You can be the best and the brightest when it comes to social criticism, but
Marc:really when it comes down to it, your, your function, your structure in the
Marc:system is to maintain the middle class as a kind of de facto intellectual
Marc:cultural establishment, which is basically working against the working
Marc:class because you're working against the radical left, program, programmatically.
Trevor:Mark, I want to head to winding up, so Did you have anything
Trevor:key idea that you wanted to get across that we've missed so far?
Trevor:Was there any one thing, um, that you feel that we just didn't get
Trevor:to, that you would like to, or flag for a discussion at another time?
Marc:Could we look at some of my cartoons just before we go?
Trevor:Yeah,
Marc:yep.
Marc:One of the things that, um, I, I lament, if we, we can go forward.
Trevor:Yep.
Marc:One of the things I lament is that there isn't a lot of good
Marc:cultural production of films.
Marc:Um, and I, I was cancelled for this cartoon, um, by a publisher.
Marc:Um, There aren't a lot of good films that are addressing the
Marc:contradictions and the problems with these issues we're discussing.
Marc:Um, I don't know very many.
Marc:If you look at a film from the 60s, I think it is, called Putney Swope.
Marc:Very good film by Robert Downey Sr.
Marc:It's a, you know, you could use that film to criticize, uh, Ibram Kendi
Marc:and his mismanagement of his well founded School at Boston University.
Marc:20 million dollars, I think, you know, sort of completely wasted or I don't know
Marc:the specifics, but something like this.
Marc:You have, we can go forward a little bit.
Marc:You have the film American Fiction, which is about a black writer and they
Marc:won't let him write his books unless he makes them more sort of street.
Marc:You know, so he ends up calling his, he ends up calling his book,
Marc:Fuck, because that will sell.
Marc:Whereas, you know, something more subtle won't do as well.
Marc:But you know, I know a few examples, but I don't know very many.
Marc:So, you know, once in a while, I, I, I, I just tinker around with memes
Marc:that I put on the internet, hoping that they'll, hoping that they'll,
Marc:you know, maybe, you know, Um, make someone, make someone think and laugh.
Marc:And so, um, moving, moving on again.
Marc:Um, I just want to show a few from my Ken Lum series, which are named
Marc:after a Vancouver artist called Ken Lum, who made photo conceptual art.
Marc:And, uh, I thought these would be kind of interesting as, uh, PMC
Marc:types, like today's PMC types.
Marc:Um, just kind of a few.
Marc:What do
Trevor:PMC?
Marc:Well, there's a tradition in the, if you can go forward, PMC
Marc:is Professional Managerial Class.
Marc:Oh, sorry.
Marc:So, these kind of contradictions between the kind of activist and
Marc:the creative sectors of the PMC.
Marc:Just a few more.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Yeah, so this is, you know, this was about kids, uh, LGBTQ constituencies
Marc:being, uh, referred to as children.
Marc:It's one of my, uh, pet peeves, but we'll just, we'll
Trevor:just skip it.
Trevor:Keep going?
Trevor:Uh, yes, please.
Trevor:So we're looking for cartoons, is that what we're looking for?
Trevor:Um,
Marc:well
Trevor:I'll just keep going until you tell me to stop.
Marc:They're kind of like editorial cartoons, uh, but they're,
Marc:they're not actually cartoons.
Marc:They're, they're more, uh, Okay, so this one here is, um,
Marc:I'll, I'll do the forwarding.
Marc:This one here is, uh, this was by Ken Lum.
Marc:So he's a photo conceptual artist from Vancouver, and this is,
Marc:uh, an example of what he does.
Marc:So he has a photograph with a text.
Marc:So this is in the, um, Vancouver School of Art, like Ian Wallace
Marc:and Jeff Wall, for example.
Marc:I can't really describe it to you, but this is the inspiration.
Marc:And so I did a kind of poor man's Ken Lum, and these are real works.
Marc:Um, is this advancing?
Trevor:Uh, it just delays about four or five seconds, I think, so it should do.
Trevor:We'll just Or if you want to I'll do it then.
Marc:Can you advance one, please?
Marc:So, you know, Ken Lum's, these are real pieces, they're quite large
Marc:and they're in, they're in museums.
Marc:So if you wanted to glue your hands to them, or throw, uh, tomato
Marc:soup on them, you could do that.
Marc:I'm not suggesting you should, but I'm saying you could.
Marc:Uh, whereas the things that I do, they're just digital, they're
Marc:on, they're, they're only online.
Marc:Um, so, um, one more.
Trevor:Yep, um, there we go.
Trevor:Uh, one more from that.
Marc:Uh, one more from
Trevor:that.
Trevor:Yep.
Marc:And one more.
Marc:Uh, yep.
Marc:And one more.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:So, um, what comes after this is what I refer to as my Ken Lumpen series.
Marc:In other words, uh, the middle class as a Lumpen.
Marc:Uh, Middle Class, the Lumpen Petty Bourgeoisie, borrowing a phrase from,
Marc:a term from Marxism, Lumpenproletariat.
Marc:So, this, this person, she's saying, um, I'm a specialist in
Marc:diversity and sensitivity training.
Marc:I work for DNAology.
Marc:com on how to market the notion of hybridity and flexible identity training.
Marc:In ways that do not offend specific groups of people, there are many problems in
Marc:the world, but one of them is that people don't know who they are or what they want.
Marc:That gives our products and services an advantage on retailers, hardware
Marc:stores and travel agencies, since what we offer goes to the core
Marc:of a consumer's sense of self.
Trevor:Right, okay.
Trevor:Next one?
Marc:Yes, please.
Trevor:Yep, I think because
Trevor:the um, thing was so large it's
Marc:It could be the 14 hour time delay.
Trevor:Yeah,
Marc:but it should be.
Marc:So this young woman, uh, this young woman says, I'm homeless now because
Marc:my parents can't afford my rent.
Marc:It's hard to keep my laptop charged to finish coursework.
Marc:I'm not against the privilege theory and whiteness studies I'm learning in
Marc:social science class, but I don't think that because I consider capitalism
Marc:to be a more determining factor in social life Than Heteropatriarchy
Marc:that I'm socially conservative.
Marc:I can do without some of the people in my classes, they can go fuck themselves
Trevor:The problem is though, mark, nobody's got an attention
Trevor:span or a vocabulary to, well, this
Marc:is how a person might person with this, do they this?
Marc:This is how a person might feel in a situation of distress.
Marc:Uh, where on the one hand, you know, you're, you're being taught.
Marc:I, so the previous image when I posted it on my blog, um, shortly after, or
Marc:almost the same day or the day after, a book, a proposal to a publisher,
Marc:a leftist publisher, was refused.
Marc:And in my paranoid universe, when I'm cancelled or refused
Marc:something, it could be because of something I said or something I did.
Marc:So I was trying to imagine who is this person who saw the previous Cartoon and
Marc:and you know didn't didn't accept my book for publication because I said they can go
Marc:fuck themselves You know anyway, so this guy he's a publisher He's a commissioning
Marc:editor, and he says it's true I do very well as a course instructor and publisher
Marc:of books even if sometimes I get called a trot and a tanky Basically, I see my
Marc:work as managing a plurality of interests and constituencies Into something that
Marc:approximates a leftist social movement.
Marc:The days of armed struggle are over, and I think that the revolution is confronting
Marc:our traumas about race and sexuality.
Marc:Human rights are overrated.
Trevor:And this is, you're saying that this is just a common, sort of,
Trevor:common person that's in the PMC class.
Trevor:Well,
Marc:these are, these are types, these are, these are people who are, you
Marc:know, sort of dealing with this creative class, uh, uh, lifestyle class structure.
Marc:They're, they're in the middle class, but they're also dealing
Marc:with these, um, uh, activism issues.
Marc:So I'm a left wing freelance journalist.
Marc:It's a tough market, and the best way to survive is to cover all the
Marc:bases and avoid making enemies.
Marc:This business is basically game theory applied to your social and work life,
Marc:which means that Cold War liberalism is still the name of the game.
Marc:I've decided to settle for social democracy and intersectionality
Marc:so that I can pay my rent.
Marc:So, um, if you think of, uh, Yasha Munk, because I just read his book, a lot of
Marc:what he's proposing, uh, if you think of his discussion of prisoner's dilemma,
Marc:for example, he's basically advocating that we use things like game theory and
Marc:prisoner's dilemma, these very formal.
Marc:paradigms to think our way out of wokeism.
Marc:And so this is, you know, an example of somebody who would be doing
Marc:just that, but maybe not, maybe not in the way that one might hope.
Trevor:I mean, that one does have a point though.
Trevor:One of our problems is that, uh, if you're a journalist who wants to,
Trevor:um, um, promote ideas that are not approved of by the owner of the of
Trevor:the media organization, then you just won't have a job for much longer.
Trevor:So people are forced to sort of toe a line.
Trevor:Um, and if they're not independently wealthy, they just have to toe a line
Trevor:that comes down from above, don't they?
Trevor:It's difficult for journalists to be, to go against the grain.
Marc:Well, I would take that as a compliment.
Trevor:So, um, Mark, I am conscious of, of sort of trying
Trevor:to wrap this up, so Oh, could we
Marc:do just one more?
Marc:No, not the next one.
Trevor:Next one, okay,
Marc:yep.
Marc:I think this, um, the one after the next one, because I think that's my best one.
Trevor:Yep, next one.
Marc:Yeah, oh no, not that one, the next one.
Trevor:Okay, so not this one, next one, yep, okay.
Marc:Yeah,
Marc:yeah, I don't know if this one's gay or not gay, he might be gay.
Marc:Um, I have a PhD in gender studies, but what I work in now is a new
Marc:fifth wave feminism field called critical comedy studies, which
Marc:is also known as revenge studies.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Most comedy pretends to quote unquote tell it like it is, but what an intersectional
Marc:approach reveals, regardless of your standpoint, is that most comedy
Marc:is a form of epistemic violence.
Marc:Although comedy is impossible to escape, and you wouldn't want to live in a
Marc:society that takes itself too seriously, only socialized forms of punishment
Marc:are able to bring about equality.
Marc:We're working with the campus human resources department to root out jokes.
Trevor:Ah, the new left has no sense of humour.
Trevor:Is that what we're saying, Mark?
Marc:It has its own form of humour, and some of it involves torturing people.
Trevor:Yeah.
Trevor:Alright, Mark.
Trevor:Well, I do need to wind this up, so, Well, we've covered a fair bit, I think.
Trevor:Um, I'll have some links in the show notes.
Trevor:Um, and we do chapters with this podcast.
Trevor:So people listening to the audio would have been able to see some of the images
Trevor:on their app as they're listening.
Trevor:listening to the audio podcast, so that's good.
Trevor:So, well, Mark, good luck with your writings and your work.
Marc:Could we ask, do we have any questions in the chat?
Marc:No,
Trevor:that's, all we've got is just what's on the right there, so nothing.
Trevor:Okay, well,
Marc:hello to Don, Tuvi, Alison, Cordis, James, Leanne, and Don Tuvi.
Trevor:Yes, thank you for watching in the chat.
Trevor:Um, yeah, so yeah, well Mark.
Trevor:That was something different and your knowledge on on
Trevor:these things is encyclopedic.
Trevor:That's for sure.
Trevor:So thank you for that.
Trevor:Um, I'll have links in the show notes for some of your stuff so people
Trevor:can see what you're up to and um, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Marc:Thank you very much, Trevor.
Marc:It's my pleasure.
Trevor:No worries.
Trevor:Okay, everyone.
Trevor:We'll be back next week with the usual panel discussion.
Trevor:Bye for now.
