We don’t need an alt—critiquing the aff’s individual focus is sufficient

(Gregory, “The Treason of Intellectual Radicalism and the Collapse of Leftist Politics,” LOGOS, Winter edition)

In many ways this is the very product of the system they shallowly critique. The class basis of the new radicalism no longer sounds in key with working people; no longer is it the expression of organic intellectuals. With no movement to attach to, no working class politics to inform their political sensibilities, theory becomes a fetish. Exploitation and domination are real problems, but the words lose their meaning if they are not attached to concrete referents. This is a disservice to the exploited and dominated. It is to place them – as Bertolt Brecht wrote at the conclusion of the film version of his Threepenny Opera – back in the dark. They retain their ignominious invisibility. Radical theory should illuminate present social relations. Sadly, millennial Marxists only fetishize it. This purported revival of Marxian politics is not a revolt by the generations raised during the conservative Reagan revolution and economic complacency of the Clinton-era’s credit economy. Their Marxism is the product of the sensibilities cultivated by late capitalism. It’s facile and unreflective cant a mere sound-byte radicalism ready-made for and by a cultural consciousness mauled by Facebook and Twitter.

The thinkers we have mentioned and their ideas have had a disintegrating effect on the nature of progressive politics the critique of which ought to lead us toward a more lucid, more compelling account of what progressive political and social criticism ought to be able to achieve. The basic purpose of this effort should be to indict a style of theory and thinking that has become so esoteric and self-referential that it has divorced itself from the historic concerns of progressive politics: from remedying inequality, confronting forces eroding our public goods, or challenging the entrenched power of political and economic elites. Whether it is a rampant irrationalism, a rejection of any sense of realism in politics, naïve anti-statism, theories of power and oppression that have no empirical basis, or simply an incoherent, confused set of texts upon which one can project and read whatever one wants, this new radicalism has been able to seduce a generation into an understanding of politics that privileges an abstract, self-regarding “politics” over the concrete analysis of power and a politics based on the public good.

We believe that the appeal of these thinkers and ideas is symptomatic of a crisis in progressive politics – a crisis that cannot be simply solved. We hope that a new self-critique of the left by the left can lead to a more rationally informed, more realistic account of the nature and import of real politics and radicalism’s role in transforming it. Our fear is that the proliferation of these theories and the ideas that they make common will penetrate so deeply that an effective, politically relevant left will all but collapse. To renew radical political theory along rational lines will require much work, but we believe it begins with critique. With this in mind, we hope that those who encounter these new radical mandarins will reflect more critically on the false self-confidence of their ideas and political prescriptions, and realize that another, more satisfying and productive tradition of radicalism once existed and is once again possible.