You want Marxism?

Since I started this blog, I’ve read a lot of economic analysis and political commentary, much of it inane. But, I figure, it’s one of the services I can provide. Why should everyone have to work their way through that stuff when I can do it for them?

But you have to draw the line somewhere and, years back, I drew it at David Brooks. Talk about inane!

And then a friend comes along and sends me something I should take a look at. And so I did. It’s a review by David Brooks [ht: bn] of George Packer’s latest, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.

Thanks to Brooks, I’m actually going to go out and purchase Packer’s book. However, the review is interesting for a very different reason: Brooks actually waxes nostalgic for Marxism.

I wish Packer had married his remarkable narrative skills to more evidence and research, instead of just relying on narrative alone. Combine data to lives as they are actually lived.

When John Dos Passos wrote the “U.S.A.” trilogy, the left had Marxism. It had a rigorous intellectual structure that provided an undergirding theory of society — how social change happens, which forces matter and which don’t, how society works and who causes it not to work. Dos Passos’ literary approach could rely on that structure, fleshing it out with story and prose.

The left no longer has Marxism or any other coherent intellectual structure. Packer’s work has no rigorous foundation to rely on, no ideology to give it organization and shape. But the lack of a foundational theory of history undermines the explanatory power of “The Unwinding,” just as it undermines the power and effectiveness of modern politics more generally.

Much to my surprise, I actually find myself in agreement with Brooks. The Left, such as it is today, doesn’t really have an intellectual structure that one might call Marxism. There is, of course, a lot of Marxism out there—the traditional kind Dos Passos relied on in the 1920s and 1930s as well as a radically new kind of Marxism, of the sort one will find in and around the journal Rethinking Marxism. And, it’s true, many radical thinkers and activists today, in the midst of the Second Great Depression, are rediscovering the usefulness of Marxist ideas. But there’s still a big gap, at least in the United States, between Marxism and left-wing ideas and political activities—and a lot of work that remains to be done to bring them together.

But, David Brooks, if it’s Marxism you want, to give “organization and shape” to the critique of the great unwinding that is contemporary America, well, let’s do it. We have a whole world to win.