Branching Out

What's Next for "The Antileftist Marx"

Now that you’ve read the initial series on The Antileftist Marx, you’re wondering: where does it go from here? Let me explain.

These first articles were only a necessary beginning. By clarifying a critical method and defining its terms of analysis, this foundation now frees me to apply my unusual approach to a range of other subjects. I can go forward confident that if a reader wants to know what I mean by “antileftist Marxism,” they only need to refer to these articles:

1. The Anti-Marxist Arrangement

2. Left/Right in Context

3. Leftism Old and New

4. Marxism is Antileftism, Part 1

5. Marxism is Antileftism, Part 2

6. Marxism is Antileftism, Part 3

These writings formalized claims that I first developed in response to political events through 2020, but my analysis has in the meantime evolved according to the further evidence of history. Although a theory of antileftism was provocative when I started down this path, an entire media landscape has subsequently emerged in which disillusioned leftists are busy recycling all their old premises in tantrums about the left that failed them. Such moralistic resentment indeed presents a new problem, and I have become just as critical of these proliferating (and deeply limited) criticisms of the left as I am of the left itself.

To this end, I am now preparing articles that, without the burden of serializing a thesis, will more flexibly address my evolving preoccupations and debates. The next release you can expect is a response to Chris Cutrone, who walked into my trap when he met my challenge to the Platypus Affiliated Society with the convoluted logic, “the left is the right.” I won’t let him get away with this so easily.

This will be followed by an explanation of the “ruthless criticism of everything existing,” a method that gets me in trouble with sensitive partisans who only wish to criticize some things, not everything, especially themselves, their causes, and their criticisms. As I will show, the total critique of existing society makes no such exceptions, however, and indeed only becomes ruthless when it criticizes itself.

In a subsequent article, I will recover “the lost meaning of ideology,” Marx’s critical concept, whose purely negative connotation has been eclipsed by today’s talk of ideologies as whatever belief systems individuals happen to select from the marketplace of ideas (liberal ideology, conservative ideology, Marxist ideology, etc.). In the lost meaning of ideology, there is no such thing as ideologies in the plural, only ideology in general, the consciousness that conceals contradictions in the interest of the dominant class.

I must thank those moved to subscribe by the initial slate of articles. Subscriptions remain the best way to support this project, but they are not the only way. You can also share the articles to promote discussion elsewhere or participate in the comments here. In conclusion, I invite you to leave a comment below with any lingering thoughts you might have about the argument of the completed series, or suggestions about what else you hope to see from this site as it branches out from there.