The New Left’s theoretical turn reinforced this trajectory. The abandonment of the working class as revolutionary subject (supposedly too bought off, too racist, too consumerist, or simply non-industrial now and therefore not a proletariat somehow) in favor of students, minorities, and Third World national liberation movements reflected the class composition of the movement itself. If you’re a graduate student, you theorize students as the revolutionary vanguard. The turn toward cultural politics, toward ‘personal is political’, toward fighting on terrain where the petty bourgeoisie has advantages—credentials, cultural capital, institutional access—this all followed naturally from who was usually theorizing.

The defeat of the 1960s-70s upheaval thus produced a double deformation of the American left. The revolutionary movement was destroyed, and its liberal remnant was integrated into the petty bourgeoisie as the face of ‘diversity’. The white New Left retreated into academia and lifestyle politics, abandoning the material terrain where class struggle actually occurs. The ground was prepared for the neoliberal turn: a left that fights over representation rather than redistribution, that moralizes rather than organizes, that speaks the language of identity rather than class not because identity doesn’t matter, but because identity without class politics is compatible with capitalism in a way that class politics never can be.

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The latest war in the Middle East serves to highlight how contemporary radical left discourse, with all its Marxist pretensions, dissolves upon examination into a patchwork of petty bourgeois democratic clichés. Historian Salar Mohandesi’s “Organizing in the Heart of Empire” at the Verso Blog is a typical and instructive example.

According to him: The situation in Iran poses a political challenge for anyone who cares about emancipation.

Every Marxist should know that general claims about “emancipation” as an abstraction floating above classes are not forgivable in this day and age. We are always duty bound to ask; Emancipation for whom? To do what? Emancipation of the concrete proletarian from the bondage of the capitalist mercantile regime in the tradition of Stuchka or emancipation of the abstract man (or woman...) to participate in this regime in the tradition of Sieyes. There is no third way and there can be no ambiguity.

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We cannot understand the current period of comprehensive decomposition of the working class and a capitalist push, spanning decades and still far from finished, to erase the historic conquests of the prior period, defined by the October Revolution, without a severe criticism of the insufficiencies of those who attempted to go beyond the limits of that period. It was their failure to accomplish a leap forward which condemned us to the ongoing night of perpetual humiliation we still endure. As such we should have no support for those who make their influence over such a debacle into a claim for authority.

Rather we should carry out the closest and the coldest possible reading of the texts we inherit from them in order to understand and avoid the mistakes which constitute their legacy. Operaismo, the “area of autonomy”, the Little Red Book, the “Panthers” and the “armed struggle”, the NCM and the K groups, feminism and the “ultra left” these are not so much treasured heirlooms to be defended against reaction as the sad relics of the shipwreck of a generation. A shipwreck in whose wake we are still drowning.

Operaismo is one piece of flotsam from this wreck to which some continue to cling.

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