Preface

We live in dark times. Extreme-right populist movements are on the rise once again. Xenophobic sentiment is mounting in many quarters around the world. Strong-men political leaders are gaining power on the back of a global war on terror and years of neoliberal economic reform. As I write, the democratic process and inclusive politics in the United States—as faulty as they are—teeter on the verge of collapse, and it is no longer unimaginable that the country may be headed toward authoritarianism. Many even worry, not without reason, about the risk of fascism. The question on many people’s minds today is: What is to be done to prevent slipping into chaos and tyranny? Or, even more pointedly: What can I do, personally, to stop this dangerous descent?

Others before us faced similar dilemmas—and their fates are what worry many of us even more. France and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s. Chile in the 1970s. Russia and Turkey at the turn of the century. Democratic processes, it turns out—especially faulty democratic regimes that desperately need reform—are fragile, particularly when they are confronted by authoritarian leaders bent on fomenting political chaos in order to consolidate political power.

History reveals a number of conventional responses to these democratic crises: bolster parliament as a bulwark against an encroaching executive; build a more independent judiciary; enforce the rule of law; produce more and better facts to counter the propaganda; invigorate the public sphere; spark a grassroots counter-movement; or just get more people to the polls. And all of these are, undoubtedly, worthwhile undertakings in such critical times.

But for many critical thinkers, these remedies feel like band-aids and stand on fragile footing. They rest, for the most part, on illusions that may well have contributed to the crises we find ourselves in today. The rule of law, for instance, is far more malleable than its proponents imagine and can easily be distorted in the hands of autocratic leaders, as happened under the Third Reich or in post 9/11 America. (Recall the Bush torture memos that immunized unconscionable practices like waterboarding, stress positions, and inhumane deprivations.) Facts also—particularly social facts—are far more malleable than we would like to admit. Many legal facts, for instance, depend on contested notions of materiality, proximity, or intent that are more influenced by relations of power than by objective measurement. Truth, it turns out, is not immune to politics; there is no wall, but instead a tight relation between truth, knowledge, and power.

Now, dressings are of course useful to stop the bleeding. A more independent judiciary, a legislative check, honest law enforcement can have positive effects in critical times like these, and are surely more desirable than raw authoritarianism. They are necessary correctives in these times. But they are not solutions—and, in all likelihood, they postpone the reckoning, particularly when a right-wing populist wave engulfs parliament and packs the judiciary as well. These remedies are not bulwarks against encroaching right populism, but just temporary measures and are easily appropriated by the right. They are no more than stopgap measures in an ongoing political struggle.

Contrary to liberal tenets, there are no neutral principles or universal charters of civil and political rights that will protect us against a downward spiral to authoritarianism. There is no institutional fix, no permanent or lasting legal protection against tyranny. The rule of law will not save us—it is plied instead in the hands of brilliant lawyers to the will of their handlers, as we witnessed so starkly under the presidency of George W. Bush. As a result, putting in place these temporary remedies will not suffice.

The reason is that our political condition does not achieve the kind of equilibrium characterized by liberal political theory. Our political condition is, instead, a constant never-ending struggle to shape distributions of resources. It is an unending political competition, one that never reaches a stable equilibrium, but rather churns endlessly, dramatically, and often violently, redistributing wealth, security, influence, liberty, well-being—and, yes, life itself.

This is a central insight of critical theory, and it remains as sound today as it was one hundred years ago: our political condition is an unremitting struggle over values, ideals, and material existence. It is a constant battle to realize contested visions and ambitions for life and social existence. We are inevitably steeped in these ongoing political struggles. They cannot be avoided through institutional or legal fixes.

Another central insight of critical theory is that these struggles are fought, and often won, on the basis of illusions: by getting people to believe so deeply in the truth of social facts that they are then willing to sacrifice their lives for their beliefs. In recent decades, with the collapse of communism and the rise of neoliberalism, the illusion of free markets has done most of the work. But today, increasingly, the specter of immigrant invasion, of loss of white identity, and of the Islamification of the West are now converting many more people to extreme-right populist movements.

In times past, critical theory would have had a ready-made answer to these troubled times. In the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, Marxist thinkers dominated the critical Left. Traditional critical theory was tethered to class struggle and historical materialism. Critical practice—what became known as praxis—was oriented toward revolution. To be sure, there were internecine conflicts and rivalries over tactics. The heated debate between Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin on the question of what was to be done is a good illustration.¹ But the broad outline of the path forward was well defined: class struggle, international solidarity, and revolutionary social transformation. This vision of praxis shaped the first generation of the Frankfurt School and represented a common horizon for the critical Left in the early to mid-twentieth century.

But with peasant and anti-colonial insurrections in the East and South at mid-century, and in the wake of the repression following May 1968, many critical voices began to fracture the consensus of traditional critical theory. The decline of syndicalism and of more radical factions of the international labor movement gradually transformed and pacified labor movements during the second half of the twentieth century The events in the 1950s and 60s, especially in Hungary and the East Bloc, began to unveil some of the illusions of traditional critical theory itself; as did the streets of 1968 where the vitality of the student and worker movements slammed against the rigidity of leftist parties, especially Western communist parties still beholden to the Soviet Union. At that point, the grip of Marx’s philosophy of history began to loosen. And once that glue dissolved, the critical prescriptions got muddied. Since that time, critical praxis has lacked its earlier coherence—leaving many critical thinkers today somewhat disarmed in the face of renewed right-wing populism.

There is today no longer an intelligible critical response to the question “What is to be done?” Apart from a dwindling core, few critical theorists would explicitly advocate the answers that most on the critical Left would have imagined in the early or mid-twentieth century. Today, right-wing populist movements have cannibalized segments of the proletarian base of the former Left, turning old-style class warfare into anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and ethno-racist conflict. The cleavage is no longer between the workers and the bourgeoisie, but between a populist white class versus minorities and immigrants, or children of immigrants, predominantly of color. In the United States, it is between destitute whites and impoverished blacks and Latinos. The problems this raises are acute.

The questions are pressing—but critical theory no longer provides a straightforward answer. To the contrary, in recent decades, critical theory has been mired in internecine struggles of influence among its different branches—Marxist, Lacanian, Foucaultian, deconstructive, feminist, post-colonial, queer—or worse, in tribal politics and gossip around its illuminati. These internal wars of influence and political games have prevented critics from building on the core of critique and taking on the challenge of elaborating a contemporary critical theory of practice—a critical praxis for our critical times.

It is time, then, to rejuvenate critical theory and critical praxis for the twenty-first century. In these pages, I will set forth a new vision for critical theory and praxis, and answer the specific question of what is to be done today, here, and now. In brief, I will propose that we understand critical theory, at its core, as a pure theory of illusions that calls for a pure theory of values and entails a pure theory of tactics. Let me prefigure the argument as succinctly as possible.

Critical theory is the constant endless unveiling of illusions in order to demonstrate the distributional consequences of our belief systems, material conditions, and political economies. It traces the effects in reality of our beliefs and material practices, recognizing that, as it unveils illusions, it creates new ones that will need to be unpacked next. It is relentless in this way—this is its anti-foundational basis. It engages in a form of recursive unmasking—an infinite regress—that endlessly exposes the distributional effects of belief systems and material conditions. It entails, in this sense, a pure theory of illusions.

In the same way in which reconstructed critical theory, understood as a pure theory of illusions, liberates us from unfounded positivist foundations, it also frees us from the foundational constraints of traditional critical utopias. There is no unique form of political economy that will satisfy a critical utopian vision. All political economic regimes are regulated in unique ways and produce material distributions that are the direct effect of the specific rules and regulations of that particular regime, not of the abstract regime type. A state-controlled economy can distribute to its apparatschik, just as a privately-owned corporation can distribute to its workers: it is not the type, but the detailed mechanisms and regulations of the specific regime that shape the social order. All that we can judge, as critical theorists, is how close a specific regime approximates the values and ideals that the critical tradition shares. In this sense, critical theory calls for judgment about the values that a political economic regime instantiates through its material outcomes and distributions, not for a particular political economy. Hand-in-hand with a pure theory of illusions, reconstructed critical theory must be agnostic about the form of political economic regime, but adamant about its values. It entails, in this sense, a pure theory of values.

In terms of praxis, then, reconstructed critical theory calls for entirely situated, contextualized analyses of how to push specific, really-existing, situated political economic regimes—whether capitalist, socialist, or communist—in the proper direction. Each historical, temporal, and geopolitical situation will differ, calling for different tactics—with nothing off the table. This is an inherently combative enterprise because critical theorists are necessarily opposing and confronting the values and material projects of others. Politics is a constant battle over values, and we are all inevitably in a state of competition to realize our ideals. In such a contested space, it is only possible to develop tactics in a situated and contextualized way. Since there is no war to be won, but an endless series of battles, critical theory must focus on tactics. These are not portable or generalizable. What might have been appropriate in 1930s Germany was completely different than what worked in 1940s India. In the latter context, non-violent resistance may have been appropriate; in the former it would have been useless. Battle tactics cannot be universalized. In this sense, reconstructed critical theory calls for a pure theory of tactics.

The upshot is that there is no single or abstract answer to the question “What is to be done?” In the same way in which reconstructed critical theory overcomes unfounded positivist foundations, the question “What is to be done?” does not have a unique or correct answer in the abstract. The answer is not a vanguard party, a leaderless movement, non-violent resistance, or any general mode of uprising, in the abstract. There is no one right way to proceed in general terms. We immediately go off track when we seek one generalizable answer to the question. Instead, the question must be answered differently for each situation, specified and contextualized in space and time. There must be a GPS-, time-, and date-stamp to every answer.

In this book, I propose one such time, place, and date stamped answer to the question: “What is to be done in the United States on September 1, 2018?” That is the only style of question that is worth a critical response. I hope that others will answer the question with their own time, place, and date stamp wherever they are now—and I will facilitate a forum to post those answers. Critical theory cannot simply understand our crises and unveil our illusions. It cannot content itself with reflection or contemplation as a form of practice. It must articulate tactics and praxis.

Critical times call for radical revaluation. Earlier similar epochs were foundational moments for critical theory and praxis. The 1920s, especially in the Weimar Republic, gave rise to a whole generation of critical theorists—many of whom would emigrate in exile around the world and spawn a critical diaspora.² The 1960s, with its global student uprisings and government repression, stimulated another wave of critical theory and praxis, giving way to a formidable decade of critical thought during the 1970s. Our critical times today demand an equal response from contemporary critical theorists. That is what I propose here: a new vision for critical theory and critical praxis for the twenty-first century.

Bernard E. Harcourt, New York, September 1, 2018