The Grand Hotel Abyss on Little St. James
On microlooting, conspiracy theory, and why Gabriel Rockhill is the lumpen left's new guru
I’ll have a review of A.J.A. Woods’s The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy out in Compact early next week, in which I will address the enduring appeal of conspiracy theories about the Frankfurt School. What follows is a sort of sidebar to that, mostly a further reflection on the significance of Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, which has revived Frankfurt School conspiracy theorizing on the left. Although Woods doesn’t address Rockhill, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy provides some relevant back history on the origins of anti-Frankfurt School narratives within New Left sectarian disputes. (I’ll have more on that in my review). Reading it makes clear that Rockhill has simply resuscitated arguments first advanced in that context. I’d like to expand a bit here on what I take to be the significance of this revival.
Every time I (or anyone) post about Rockhill’s book, it prompts a stream of angry replies in his defense, mostly from low follower count anonymous accounts. Clearly, the man has attracted a decent following, especially given his relatively recondite subject matter. I’m going to hazard a guess that many of his newly minted fans haven’t shelled out $30 for his 416-page tome, yet they seem passionately attached to his thesis. Central to Rockhill’s argument is that critical theory is something like the organic ideology of the “intellectual labor aristocracy” of the imperial core; we might similarly ask to what class fractions his ideas are proving attractive.
My impression is that Rockhill’s fan base exists largely in the realm of what I will call the digital lumpen left. By that, I mean millennials and zoomers radicalized in online spaces over the past decade or so—a precariously positioned cohort passionately attached to political causes as a source of identity, but not necessarily part of any organized or structured left-wing movement. Many left-wing intellectuals of earlier generations—Rockhill’s “labor aristocracy”—found a cozy habitat in seminars, conferences, and faculty lounges. With the academic career path no longer a viable option for most, the younger lumpen left has found its natural environment in podcasts, streaming platforms, message boards, and social media sites. This cohort has decent reason to resent the mandarins of theory for their salaries and 401Ks. Rockhill’s message—that his fellow tenured radicals (but not him!)—are earning blood money therefore has understandable appeal in this milieu.
Perhaps Rockhill’s most prominent venue for book promotion has been Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith podcast, a media operation spun off of the Bernie Sanders campaign, for which Gray served as press secretary. (Her mysteriously vanished co-host, Virgil Texas, was also one of the hosts of the early lumpen left podcast sensation Chapo Trap House.) The failed-political-campaign-to-podcast pipeline usefully illustrates what the lumpen left has and hasn’t been able to achieve. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, this cohort’s most successful avatars, ironically given its proletarian socialist political rhetoric, are petty-bourgeois owner-operators like Gray.
In sync with this social position, the lumpen left’s guiding spirit is anti-institutional. Unsurprisingly, then, it is more adept at tearing down than building up; lumpen leftists are often sympathetic to tactics of “disruption,” from shitposting to shoplifting to vandalism and assassination (hence, the lionization of Luigi Mangione). Sixty years ago, portions of the New Left, especially Black Panther Party theoreticians like Huey Newton, argued that the lumpenproletariat—specifically, the most socially marginal elements of the black urban underclass—was a more potent revolutionary force than the traditional working class. By contrast, today’s lumpen leftists often seem skeptical of lumpenism in theoretical terms, even if they embrace its implications practically. Indeed, they often seem acutely cognizant of the limitations imposed by their own social and political disorganization.
In the much-discussed recent New York Times conversation about “microlooting,” the journalist Jia Tolentino explicitly addressed the shortcomings of a lumpen radical politics, albeit not using that term:
Microlooting—it feels akin to posting about something. As an atomized individual action, it’s useless. It’s much harder to get a job and accept $17.50 an hour and then to organize your colleagues, a process that takes years and is often unsuccessful. The thing about actual collective, direct action—it’s so much harder. And it often doesn’t profit you whatsoever, such as, you know, me getting an extra 10 bucks by grabbing my extra loaf of bread for Miss Nancy. We are also lazy as humans; we’re also selfish. We’ve lost not only the language and the union density and the structure to engage in things like this, but we have also lost the muscle that is built up to be able to engage in these sorts of things. We’ve lost the rooms in which these things are planned.
Her interlocutor, lumpen left superstar Hasan Piker, likewise remarked:
In the Marxist tradition, adventurism is the action that is oftentimes decentralized. Oftentimes, anarchists will say, “This is the propaganda of the deed.” The action itself, no matter how violent or how disruptive, is justifiable because the disruption is the point. I believe in the power of organized labor and labor militancy, and building these structures of power so that we can actually make more effective change, more longstanding change.
Neither Tolentino nor Piker deny that “building structures of power” would be a more effective political project than “atomized individual actions,” even if they seem at a loss as to how the former might be achieved by “lazy, selfish humans.” This is, roughly speaking, the reason Marx and Engels believed the lumpenproletariat was an intrinsically counterrevolutionary force to be regarded with suspicion: it was incapable of organizing and building, and (whether as cause or effect) was lazy, selfish, and thus easily co-opted.
If in practical terms, the lumpen left is inexorably drawn to “microlooting” and similar tactics, in theoretical terms, its preferred method is conspiracy theory. This is directly related to its disorganization. It doesn’t operate within complex “structures of power,” and it also doesn’t conceive of power in those terms, instead imagining global capitalism as little more than a two-bit gangster racket. This is why the Epstein mythology is so central to its worldview: It allows for the entire transnational power structure to be conceptualized as the extension of a singular personality. Just as podcast or Twitch stream is viewed as politically admirable because of the good politics of its host, the global power structure is presented as evil because it is the emanation of a sinister individual’s perverse proclivities.
Rockhill, though not a lumpen leftist in terms of his own class stratum, has unsurprisingly echoed elements of the standard Epstein narrative in some of his interviews. Likewise, his account of the Frankfurt School situates the failures of previous generations of leftists within the same framework for thinking about power, in effect relocating the Grand Hotel Abyss on Little St. James. Here as with Epstein, the fever dreams of the lumpen left mirror the reactionary fantasies of the online right; in the opening of her interview with Rockhill, Gray explicitly declares that it is high time for the left to take a critical stance toward “cultural Marxism,” much as the right has.
The incapacity to think systematically about power is also on display in Rockhill’s Third Worldism, another stance he shares with the broader lumpen left, which has improbably revived the doctrines of decolonization for an era in which there is no longer any meaningful “non-Western left” and many of the most potent anti-Western forces are overtly reactionary. Like the rest of this neo-campist contingent, Rockhill solves this problem by simply redefining any anti- or non-Western politics as ipso facto progressive. Once again, the effect of this move is to simply bypass the complexity of political organization and representation. It is simply taken as a given that Xi Jinping is the authentic tribune of the Chinese proletariat, and so on.
The grain of truth in Rockhill’s analysis is that accommodation within the institutional structures of Western power, specifically the university, helped domesticate and neutralize the radical left in the post-World War II era. This is something the right, with its zeal to purge the radical precincts of academia, may be ignoring at its peril. That said, it is also by no means clear that the lumpenized left will prove any more potent of a threat than its predecessors, especially if it takes figures like Rockhill as its gurus.
This week in Compact:
Ernest Jesuyemi on the limits of “diversity” in the literary world
Rob Lester on growth and de-growth
Eric Jager on why you shouldn’t do a humanities PhD
Forrest Bohler on the end of merit-based medical education
Juan Rojas on the Trump-Lula summit