It does seem to me that the failure of Marx to sufficiently theorize the intellectual class (or PMC, or officer class, or what have you) is damning to the overarching framework on a profound level that simply can’t reconcile itself with observable reality. Once barriers to education and wealth accumulation were removed for smart, ambitious proles, you really do get a third class that “can’t go home again,” sometimes literally but certainly intellectually, even spiritually. Something like capitalism could probably survive without individually dominant bourgeoisie; probably not without the managerial elite (which is sort of what “state capitalism” is, no?). On the other hand, the kind of furious rationalism of PMC culture in the tradition of Robespierre is not *only* the province of a racially-obsessed identitarian Left in search of revolutionary subjects-of-convenience, but finds its dark twin (okay both are dark) in the hyper-meritocratic Silicon Valley eugenicists.
Yes, and the problem isn't this class's existence or even its cultural dominance, but both its excessive rationalism (on left and right, as you point out) and its blank-check dissimulation of its own power as emanating from or exercised solely on behalf of the oppressed (mostly on the left, though sometimes also on the nationalist right). The former justifiably makes it noxious to everyone else. The latter prevents it from even rationally defending its own self-interest, forcing it to pretend to be doing something other than producing knowledge or advanced pleasure and for some supposedly higher purpose ("the humanities" is cishet capitalist white supremacist patriarchy, "critical everything studies" is the revolution). And this makes it seem more arrogant than forthright claims to legitimate power would, as in, e.g., Anne Boyers's comically self-important resignation from the NY Times ("a hole in the news the size of poetry"), which, precisely because it elevates politics over poetry, makes the poet's politics sound absurd in a way that Shelley's or Emerson's far more aggrandizing claims do not.
I think my objection to Marxism is related but different-more that it’s usually so mechanistic and assumes a kind of demonstrable underlying formal logic of culture that I’m frankly not sure actually exists-at least in a form that has any political utility. More selfishly existing Marxist regimes generally don’t treat people like me particularly well, which is the line I usually give my ML and Trotskyist friends!
Yes, I think the mistreatment of the populace is entailed by the Platonic theory, the reign of one class over all others with no need to balance other forces and justified in whatever they do by their mechanical logic.
The side of me that has a certain attraction to the cultural logic has those Gouldnerian objections, while the side of me that thinks there’s something to what they say about injustice is uneasy about the way that orthodox Marxism has a tendency to bend back towards making the argument that the (if these words don’t make your eyes glaze over) cis-hetero-patriarchal industrial family unit is ultimately the ideal and only permissible form of the human.
I think that was Foucault's objection, that Marxism is very caught up, inextricably so, in the logic of industrial society. I don't know what "justice" is. I see no reason in the present state of technology that we couldn't eliminate poverty. Inequality, on the other hand...
Also I really need to read Possession.
It does seem to me that the failure of Marx to sufficiently theorize the intellectual class (or PMC, or officer class, or what have you) is damning to the overarching framework on a profound level that simply can’t reconcile itself with observable reality. Once barriers to education and wealth accumulation were removed for smart, ambitious proles, you really do get a third class that “can’t go home again,” sometimes literally but certainly intellectually, even spiritually. Something like capitalism could probably survive without individually dominant bourgeoisie; probably not without the managerial elite (which is sort of what “state capitalism” is, no?). On the other hand, the kind of furious rationalism of PMC culture in the tradition of Robespierre is not *only* the province of a racially-obsessed identitarian Left in search of revolutionary subjects-of-convenience, but finds its dark twin (okay both are dark) in the hyper-meritocratic Silicon Valley eugenicists.
Yes, and the problem isn't this class's existence or even its cultural dominance, but both its excessive rationalism (on left and right, as you point out) and its blank-check dissimulation of its own power as emanating from or exercised solely on behalf of the oppressed (mostly on the left, though sometimes also on the nationalist right). The former justifiably makes it noxious to everyone else. The latter prevents it from even rationally defending its own self-interest, forcing it to pretend to be doing something other than producing knowledge or advanced pleasure and for some supposedly higher purpose ("the humanities" is cishet capitalist white supremacist patriarchy, "critical everything studies" is the revolution). And this makes it seem more arrogant than forthright claims to legitimate power would, as in, e.g., Anne Boyers's comically self-important resignation from the NY Times ("a hole in the news the size of poetry"), which, precisely because it elevates politics over poetry, makes the poet's politics sound absurd in a way that Shelley's or Emerson's far more aggrandizing claims do not.
I think my objection to Marxism is related but different-more that it’s usually so mechanistic and assumes a kind of demonstrable underlying formal logic of culture that I’m frankly not sure actually exists-at least in a form that has any political utility. More selfishly existing Marxist regimes generally don’t treat people like me particularly well, which is the line I usually give my ML and Trotskyist friends!
Yes, I think the mistreatment of the populace is entailed by the Platonic theory, the reign of one class over all others with no need to balance other forces and justified in whatever they do by their mechanical logic.
The side of me that has a certain attraction to the cultural logic has those Gouldnerian objections, while the side of me that thinks there’s something to what they say about injustice is uneasy about the way that orthodox Marxism has a tendency to bend back towards making the argument that the (if these words don’t make your eyes glaze over) cis-hetero-patriarchal industrial family unit is ultimately the ideal and only permissible form of the human.
I think that was Foucault's objection, that Marxism is very caught up, inextricably so, in the logic of industrial society. I don't know what "justice" is. I see no reason in the present state of technology that we couldn't eliminate poverty. Inequality, on the other hand...