A recent letter from Doug Lain has attempted to criticize the left broadly for its failure to wake up to the reality of the spectacle which is being used by the state not just to silence public criticism, but to inhibit our ability to think for ourselves. To put it simply, Lain’s accusation is that we’ve become lemmings. The proof: the left’s response to such public scandals as Russiagate, the Covid lableak hypothesis and Hunter Biden’s laptop. My response, which I will elaborate on in detail, is that Lain has fallen for the very same spectacle he is decrying due to the simple reason that he fails to create a materialist account of the bourgeois state.
It is important to point out that I don’t necessarily disagree with Lain’s assessment on some of these issues, on the Covid lableak hypothesis, for example, there is certainly evidence that points in that direction, and I’ve previously written about how the state has used the false pretense of scientific authority to provide legitimacy for its policy decisions during Covid. What I object to is that it is necessary for Marxists to be transformed into partisans of these issues, that somehow, in deciding on the truth of these controversies we will have defeated the spectacle created by the state. There certainly is no shortage of such partisans – social media and news networks, where these issues are born and given animating life, make sure of that. If such partisanship was a marker of overcoming the spectacle then it seems that much of America is doing an excellent job!
The reality is much more bleak. There is not a particular position one can take, whether based on truth or on lies, which undermines the bourgeois state, as it is perfectly capable of absorbing all manner of contradictory positions and ideologies. This is a phenomenon Marxist theorist Nicos Polantzas referred to as “overcoding”, in which the state becomes a kind of rorschach test for the subjects it controls. Presidents have often been good examples of this phenomenon, as the historical event of their coming to power is accompanied by both a large number of observers and usually a varied coalition of direct supporters. For example, Trump represented one thing to conservatives, one thing to the working class which voted for him, and another thing to his capitalist backers. Marx had similar things to say about Bonaparte whose election and subsequent coup was backed by large sections of French society, and much the same has been true of Biden as well:
The other classes helped to complete the election victory of the peasants. To the proletariat, the election of Napoleon meant the deposition of Cavaignac, the overthrow of the Constituent Assembly, the dismissal of bourgeois republicanism, the cessation of the June victory. To the petty bourgeoisie, Napoleon meant the rule of the debtor over the creditor. For the majority of the big bourgeoisie, the election of Napoleon meant an open breach with the faction of which it had had to make use, for a moment, against the revolution, but which became intolerable to it as soon as this faction sought to consolidate the position of the moment into a constitutional position. Napoleon in place of Cavaignac meant to this majority the monarch, in place of the republic, the beginning of the royalist restoration, a sly hint at Orléans, the fleur-de-lis hidden beneath the violets . Lastly, the army voted for Napoleon against the Mobile Guard, against the peace idyll, for war.
We need not resort to such obvious cases as heads of state, however. Overcoding is also evident in Lain’s own letter, when he selectively chooses when and where to believe the American government – accepting the report by Special Council John Durham but rejecting the UFO whistleblower as a psyop, despite both being government officials at one point charged with coming to the truth of this shadowy deep state.
Does the state use “dirty tricks” as a means of social control? Yes, but this is hardly the most effective or powerful method of social control at their disposal. Far more effective than the police, homeland security, or the DoD, despite their general political idiocy, are the political parties, the mass media, the universities, and so on down civil society. Louis Althusser in his essay Ideology and State Ideological Apparatuses points out that we are socialized by these various institutions in society in order to reproduce bourgeois society, and that in order for this socialization to work these institutions must connect to us as specific, conscious individuals. In other words, it is just as much in the creation of partisans of contemporary issues, as in the obscurity of the truth by spectacle, that the state exercises social control over us. After all, where does this partisanship lead us? Back into the bourgeois parties, whether Democrat or Republican. The only partisanship that would represent a threat to the bourgeois state would be partisanship that leads to a proletarian party.
In comparison to the banality of socialization by the media, universities and political parties, the dirty tricks employed by the deep state are oftentimes more a method of social control intended for the intellectual laborers within the state itself than for the general audience outside of it. After all, no one was more beholden to the spectacle and grimy exercise of such power than the original dirty trickster, Nixon, who, despite winning in a landslide, could not help himself from attempting to use illegal methods to undermine the Democratic party. Ordinary bureaucrats cannot get enough of this stuff either – for such civil servants the secrets of government, and the dirty power of its authority, are a key motivator of ambition in a world where money and fame are strictly limited. There is a certain thrill, after all, that comes from feeling one has an inside track to history.
I suspect that these dynamics are at the heart of this recent UFO controversy. While we have received no evidence of real aliens or interdimensional beings, we do have persistent evidence, coming form a variety of sources, that there is a government program that believes it has real alien craft, and has potentially carried out illegal actions to cover up its activities. Considering the high standard of evidence required to prove there are such alien intelligences out there, it appears much more likely that there is a real government program, convinced with fraudulent or scientifically flawed data, that it has something alien. The lack of aliens doesn’t suddenly make the allegations of illegal covert actions, as well as breaking of US government contracting regulations, go away.
The mystique is almost never real, but the crimes usually are.
The Bourgeois State against Civil Society?
In his accusation against the contemporary Left, Lain says the following:
as the Spectacle tightens its grip on nations and individuals, the Marxists claim that championing individual autonomy and free speech is naive as there has never been free speech under capitalism. The implicit suggestion is that rather than resisting censorship, resisting the overturning of civil rights, and resisting the construction of a society-wide prison, we should instead assist the censors, the police, and the wardens.
Can it be contested that the modern bourgeois state has developed ever more sophisticated measures of social control which restrict individual autonomy and speech while increasing its own relative capacity for violence? I don’t think so. We should even take the additional step forward and point out that the left, even its most radical intellectuals, has often participated in the evolution of this social control through their roles in the state ideological apparatuses we mentioned previously. But, in that sense, we are all complicit, even Mr Lain, and especially the Frankfurt school theorists he cites to make his points. The old hat critique of social conformity was just as easily used to justify all manner of lifestylist, idealist and utopian practices among the new left, as it was to justify the breaking up of the big institutions enforcing such conformity, such as labor unions and bureaucracy that neoliberalism cut its teeth on.
But perhaps this is being unfair, after all it would be idealist to say this fate was determined by the content of these ideas. Rather, let’s take this content seriously as a specific claim about the state and, not just individual autonomy, but the individual capacity for reasoning. As Lain explains:
The entrepreneurial individual was replaced by a conformist cog. We ceased to think for ourselves but instead thought for and through the state bureaucracy.
From an empirical perspective, it’s simply not true that censorship and state power turns people into conformist cogs – some of the greatest works of literature, art and theory have been undertaken by those who, when faced with censorship, adapted and learned how to express important meaning in spite of these obstacles (including Marx himself). Although there have been historical periods where the use of state terror flattened all creativity I don’t think this is comparable to the current situation. What neither Lain nor the idealist Frankfurt school theorists could suffer was the thought that perhaps the destruction of autonomy was a direct fact of liberalism and its marketplace of ideas – the hope must be preserved that greater liberalism, more perfect marketplaces of ideas could save individual autonomy and human reasoning. Both Lain and the Frankfurt theorists might claim the alibi of a truer emanation of liberal civil society through socialism, but in practicality, they were always reduced to a somewhat reactionary position of defending existing bourgeois civil society or an earlier version of it, just as Lain does in his Letter.
Any corruption of this civil society must, from their perspective, come from the outside, their idealism demands it, or else contests in the sphere of ideas would become meaningless on their terms. So, Lain puts exclusive blame on the security state, which he suggests the left is secretly doing the bidding of. But the left was never directly shaped by the security state, it wasn’t Homeland security, the FBI or the DoD which molded us, it was schools and news organizations and so on – the civil society. The tendencies for censorship by the left he identifies were pioneered by students and journalists in the early 2010s as a means to spread liberal values through a cultural pedagogy, which then went on to be embraced by corporations and the rest of bourgeois civil society. Everything Lain despises about the left is the direct result of the civil society he wants to save, and this is the central contradiction of his thought.
What Lain doesn’t understand, because of his idealism, is that civil society is not some empty, open space for people to express opinions, the activity of producing information and arranging for it to be consumed is a material process. The intellectual labor of students and journalists which produces their speech and distributes it to the world has to be reproduced, which is handled by the infrastructure of the universities and the news organizations. That the left is the way it is comes down to the structure of these institutions, their incentives and political economy, which have shaped the evolution of our present civil society.
Does that mean it’s impossible for individuals to reason and overcome the limits created by present day bourgeois civil society? No, of course not. Individuals can create new frameworks for analysis, new ideologies, to present an alternative to what currently exists. The ultimate goal, in order to materially overcome bourgeois civil society, is to create an alternative, proletarian civil society which reproduces itself on different terms, and which should be premised on real commitments for freedom. This, I believe, is the project of Cosmonaut and the promise of looking at the lessons of the Second Internationale today.
Where does that leave the partisanship around the controversies Lain identifies? Here, I think a historical analogy is revealing, particularly in the case of deep state action against Trump. When Bonaparte took power he did so by outsmarting the moronic representatives of bourgeois liberalism in the name of the peasantry. If the bourgeois parties had been smart enough to use illegal measures against Bonaparte, would Marx have bemoaned such measures alongside the society of December 10th? Considering all the illegal actions taken by the bourgeois state of the 2nd French Republic against the international working class, I doubt it. After decades of illegal actions by the American state against the international working class, should we bemoan along with Tucker Carlson the fact that the bourgeois parties and their deep state collaborators were able to out maneuver Trump, the usurper representative of the militant petty bourgeois? I don’t think so.
For Marxists, while there might be propaganda victories that come out of particular scandals against the state, our critique is not subject to the vicissitudes of the cable news cycle. The partisanship created by bourgeois civil society is what allows Lain to put issues such as Hunter Biden’s Laptop, Russiagate and the Covid lab leak theory on the same level as the war in Ukraine and the Democratic Party’s co-option of socialists, the only two issues with actual historical consequence. On Ukraine and the Democratic Party, Marxists writing in Cosmonaut have been unequivocal about their opposition to the US involvement in the war and socialist involvement in the Democratic Party. Controversy should not be a barrier to Marxist intervention on a strategically important issue, nor should we be afraid of working with others to preserve freedom and civil rights, as Marx suggested we do with the petty bourgeoisie when liberal capitalism was still in its infancy.
The trouble is, the petty bourgeoisie, who Lain borrowed many of these issues from, are no longer interested in freedom, civil rights, or democracy even in the bourgeois sense. Complaints about big tech censorship are all well and good, but we’ve seen how they’ve become incoherent when the partisans of these issues, such as Elon Musk, take control of these platforms and begin collaborating with reactionary governments around the world to censor even more. So too are the petty bourgeois policy solutions, of allowing people to sue big tech for not publishing their content, more likely to atomize the means of communication than create a more open public square. Perhaps more pressing, the militant sections of the American petty bourgeoisie have become increasingly interested in banning free expression, especially as it relates to LGBT issues, and undermining parliamentary democracy. These days I have often been reminded of Trotsky’s examinations of the role of the petty bourgeoisie in creating fascism and Nazism:
The bonfires which burn the impious literature of Marxism light up brilliantly the class nature of National Socialism. While the Nazis acted as a party and not as a state power, they did not quite find an approach to the working class. On the other side, the big bourgeoisie, even those who supported Hitler with money, did not consider his party theirs. The national “renaissance” leaned wholly upon the middle classes, the most backward part of the nation, the heavy ballast of history…German fascism, like Italian fascism, raised itself to power on the backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organizations of the working class and the institutions of democracy.
All of this is to say, tailing the petty bourgeoisie, just as much as tailing the Democrats and the Republicans, is a dead end. Only the creation of a proletarian party and its accompanying civil society, founded on principles of freedom, can save free civil society from bourgeois civil society.
