Cold Leftovers
I.
There’s no way to prove to you that the words we use are busted, because we’re using busted words to make the point about the bustedness. But start somewhere, start with the power of the cult. Both of the authors have had experience in organizations that other people would describe as “communist cult.” One was called Platypus and the other had different names, one was the Midwestern Worker’s Alliance. What does it mean to call these cults? The word is related to culture, yes, but also opposed to the church. The church is the true real old belief, and the cult is the special new belief. You can see how dangerous this gets if you have ever felt that small green leaf feeling: the sense of newness.
Platypus felt this way to me because it was, then, in 2007, new, barely formed, a discussion group circled around a charismatic graduate student and his oddball nongraduate student friend. Their motto was THE LEFT IS DEAD and the Left did Seem Dead to me. I wasn’t just a cadre, but an architect, or an attempted architect of this cult, and my thought indexes are probably still inside the DNA of this beast, and so when I write about it, the little Platypi will come out of their sticky holes and try to attack something that doesn’t exist anymore: a decoy, an icon. A sculpture of Marx, Lenin, Engels, Adorno, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, and all of their second tier followers, from L. Ron Hubbard to our old cults, these cults that never quite realized that Marx, Lenin, Engels, Adorno, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao were and are faces of Moloch: of the state god that demands we sacrifice ourselves to his collective wrath glory and might.
But in 2007, in Chicago, this Moloch with the Marx mask appeared to be dead. Nobody was a Marxist anymore. Everyone was postmarxist. Postmodern. Power was all around, a confusing, vital and dark vivid force field. The cult offers a clear story. Once there was a left and then it was defeated on the banks of the river Vistula in 1920 and ever since then it has been decline decline decline: and now the left is dead, a zombie that must be killed, like all the zombie movies that we are watching at the time. This is the great Zombie renaissance of the late Bush era.
If you’re a marxist you have your own little cult story, a story about how the true teachings of Marx were lost at some point when people went to worship the new god, the fake god, instead of the real Marx God, the God of Class Struggle or Capital itself. Ferdinand Kronawetter is the likely source of the quote "Der Antisemitismus ist der Sozialismus der dummen Kerle”” - anti-Semitism is the socialism of dumb fucks, which is true, but this also makes socialism the anti-Semitism of smart fucks, which is also true.
Foucault still pisses Marxish people off by pointing out that both Marxism and Scientific Racism are fruits of the same nasty ontology of internal, perpetual, undisclosed social strife. This is still true, and the truth of this observation doesn’t rest or fall on whatever actions the person Foucault did in their life in this beautiful divinating meatspace.