Brief Interviews with Dangerous Amateurs
Tablet | Jacob Siegel
An interesting interview with Christopher Lasch's Angry Ghost, an anonymous Twitter voice, on the power of anonymous media critics and public thinkers, communal voices, and a new left aligned with global capitalism and focused on the global multitude— there’s “a repositioning of neoliberalism and institutional legitimacy around the idea of inclusivity and equality…an attempt and perhaps a sincere one by corporations, universities, civil service…to reorient the mission of capitalism from profit-making toward saving the world.”
On political reorientation: “The interests of left activists have dovetailed with global capitalist and neoliberal institutions. There has been an absorption of activist, critique, and activist energy into capitalism itself, which then leads a kind of new legitimacy for the system… this emergent form of the left… is… essentialist and utopian.”
On exclusion, not exploitation: “The most dominant strain of the left at the moment obviously no longer sees the nation-based working class as the agent of change or the subject of history…Now it focuses on the global multitude and sees things far more in terms of exclusion rather than exploitation. So rather than seeing political organizing around specific classes being exploited by capitalism, you’ve seen activists organizing on the basis of which people or groups are excluded for one reason or another.”
On human suffering: “The exploited worker disappears from view, and human suffering comes more and more into focus. They develop the humanitarian impulse to reach out and help these excluded people…There’s been a kind of re-orientation of the left away from that kind of specific kind of class-based materialist understanding of how the capital as a system exploits workers toward a far more amorphous—but also, in a way, global or all-encompassing—kind of idea of exclusion.”
On saving the world: “[There is] a repositioning of neoliberalism and institutional legitimacy around the idea of inclusivity and equality. It’s an attempt and perhaps a sincere one by corporations, universities, civil service, and so forth to reorient the mission of capitalism from profit-making toward saving the world.”
