Rev Left Radio - Gothic Marxism: The Horror Genre and the Monsters of Neoliberalism

Episode Date: December 10, 2017

TheLitCritGuy is a precariously employed, struggling academic and the internet’s foremost literary critic, bringing literary theory and criticism to the widest possible audience. He writes for a variety of online platforms about things as diverse as theory, philosophy, gothic and horror literature and film, the internet, politics and pop-culture. In his academic research he writes about gothic literature, theology, continental philosophy of religion and monsters and will be submitting his PhD in Sept 2017. He lives somewhere in the north of England, with his beautiful wife and their many books. Jon sits down with Brett to discuss Gothic Marxism. Topics Include: Gothic literature, Karl Marx, Neoliberalism as a mode and style of vacuous politics, Nihilism, Nostalgia, Postmodernism, Centrism, Films as Cultural Dreams, Zombies, Vampires, and much, much more! Here is Jon's website: https://thelitcritguy.com Find him on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheLitCritGuy Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheLitCritGuy Outro Song is "Song of the Dead" by Sea Wolf. You can listen to and support his wonderful music here (it is perfect winter music): https://seawolf.bandcamp.com Intro Song by our comrades The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen to and support them here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/releases Support Rev Left Radio on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio/posts   This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition and the Omaha GDC. 

Hello, friends and comrades. I am Brett O'Shea, and this is Revolutionary Left Radio. Today we have on John, aka the Lit Crit Guy, to talk about Gothic Marxism. Now, this is a topic that when I first was in contact with John, I was not even quite aware of what the term meant. And I had to do a lot of studying to kind of figure out what it was. But once I started diving into this issue, I found it absolutely fascinating. And I think it really gives us a unique perspective on what we're going through now in the late capitalist neoliberal period. and I'm also a huge fan of the horror genre and the gothic genre as well, so it fits quite nicely into my personal interest.

So, John, I want you go ahead and introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background for people that don't know who you are. Yeah, hello, thank you so much for having me on. My name is, my name's John. I'm an academic and a writer from the north of England. I spend a lot of time on Twitter where I tweet as at the Lickrit Guy, where I try and make kind of literary theory and criticism as accessible and widely distributed as possible.

So I kind of feel a good deal of affinity for the kind of thing that you do here. I describe myself as a kind of non-dogmatic Marxist. So I'm an academic critic, and I come from things from a kind of Marxist point of view, interested in materialism, in emancipatory politics, and in the critique and analysis of culture.

Yeah, and I think now that you say that, that we do have some overlapping goals because very much what we try to do here is take theory and philosophy and history and bring it down to working class people so it's not stuck up in these ivory towers, but it can actually be accessible to regular people out in the world today. And I think we both kind of share that goal with our separate sort of projects. Yeah, 100%. I mean, a lot of the things that I talk about are, I think really exciting, really important. ideas, but a lot of the people who maybe follow me on Twitter, who have listened to some of my other work, or read some of my other stuff, have maybe never gone to university. I've never, you know, had the chance

to kind of climb up into that ivory tower. So it's, I think it's essential to sort of distribute knowledge as widely and as excessively as possible. Absolutely, absolutely. All right, well, let's get into it, because we have a lot to cover, and this is super interesting, so I'm really excited to have you on, and I'm really excited to talk about this.

So first, let's just, yeah, let's just ask you, what first got you interested in the Gothic genre. What do you find so interesting and worthwhile about it? Well, I think, like, I was just always one of the people who were kind of drawn to that sort of thing. Ghost stories and horror movies were always a big part of the culture that I really enjoyed. And it wasn't until I actually started studying it seriously that I kind of began to click that there was some real political and kind of cultural significance to it. So I finished my undergrad. And, you know, in the kind of wake of the Great Recession.

And so I immediately thought that I needed to kind of delay searching for a job for a little while. And I realized that the university I did my undergraduate degree at was one of, at the time was the only university in the UK that offered a taught master's in the Gothic. So that was what got me into kind of graduate level work on Gothic literature. And the more I studied, the more I realized that it had. some really fascinating resonances with contemporary politics, with the wider interactions of culture and economics, and I just carried on with it. So I've just finished my PhD on 19th century Gothic writing. And I'm just beginning a new project, which is exclusively dedicated to this idea of Gothic Marxism.

Yeah, and that's what we're going to get into next. And I think the combination of of the Gothic and the Marxist is super interesting. So let's start with that definition. What exactly is Gothic Marxism? Okay cool. So first of all, I think may be useful to say what it is not.

It's not like a particular leftist tendency or there is no kind of Gothic Marxist party as it were. You know, that doesn't, as cool as that would be. That doesn't exist. What it is is a particular way

of reading and responding to culture from a Marxist point of view. There's a great book by an expert on the German philosopher Walter Benjamin by Margaret Cohen, and she says that Gothic Marxism is a way of treating the kind of marginal practices and low culture of a society seriously and as socially meaningful rather than as a kind of allusion to be dispelled. You know, we're not trying to get rid of the kind of irrational aspects of our culture or the things which don't seem to quite make sense in a neat materialist model. We're trying to work out what's actually going on with these moments of the weird and the strange. We're not trying to ignore it. We're trying to bring it in and broaden Marxist analysis.

Yeah, and we'll get into the cultural analysis and what Gothic Marxism brings to it later on in this episode. But, you know, Karl Marx himself, you could tell when you read the specter of communism, talks about, you know, dead labor, living labor, stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. What influence did Gothic literature have on Karl Marx, and in what ways do those influences appear in his thought and his work? Okay, so one of the big metaphors that I think Marxists should be really interested in is the figure of the vampire. So there are a number of occasions in Marx's work where he explicitly references the figure of the vampire as a kind of horrific figure. I want to get into a few more details about that, but there's a famous quote, right?

There's the famous quote which is like straight out of a horror movie where in towards the end of Volume 1 of Capital, Marx says that if money comes into the world with a congenital bloodstain on one cheek, capital comes true. dripping from head to toe from every pore with blood and dirt. Again, like I say, it's an image straight out of a horror film, right? There are two other kind of horror moments within capital. There's the section that discusses the kind of bloody, violent legislation against vagabonds, talking about the way that kind of agricultural peoples were driven from the homes, turned into vagabonds, whipped, branded, tortured by laws, grotesquely terrible, Marx calls it, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.

The second kind of specific moment of horror in capital is the horror is experienced by people in colonized nations. You know, he talks about the enslavement of the colonies, the extirpation of indigenous peoples, the entombment in minds of the Aboriginal population, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black people. So Marx is very attuned to the kind of horror of 19th century capital. But there is also this figure of the vampire,

which kind of runs throughout lots of Marx's work. there is a moment in his inaugural address of the working men's association where he describes British labour as vampire-like living off blood and specifically children's blood so there is the famous quotes of course that capital is dead labour which vampire-like lives only by sucking living labour and lives the more the more labour it sucks so throughout capital and lots of other works by Marx he constantly gets drawn back to this figure of the vampire now you know everyone knows the most famous vampiric figure is Dracula Dracula is published in 1898 but the year before the Communist Manifesto is published there is an enormously successful

vampire novel by James Michael Reimer called Varney the Vampire and that runs to something like 800 pages. It's stillized and is enormously popular. Vampires are really kind of, we think that they're sort of invented at the end of the 19th century, but Marx was well aware of the kind of vampire panics that had happened throughout the Enlightenment, and the figure of the vampire was beginning to emerge

into literature and popular consciousness. Yeah, and I think that sort of gothic influence in the use of vampires comes up a lot, and people that don't even know that it stems from Marx. For my part, I use the term vampire, the corporate vampires. And a lot of, you know, my posts, and when I talk about these ideas, I refer to these, a GOP tax bill, I refer to these people as vampires.

There's that famous Matt Taibi quote about Goldman Sachs in 2009, where he says, quote, the great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. And he was kind of praised for that wonderful quote. quote, and I think you can trace that directly back to Marx's Gothic influence in some sense. Oh, absolutely. I think what's important, though, and I think maybe this is something to really drive home is that

it's very easy to dismiss the kind of literary flourishes to Marx's writing as kind of a rhetorical trick or just a metaphor. And there's an extent to which maybe you can say it's just a metaphor, but really, I think, it's really important to emphasize the extent to which these kind of horrific images are central to Marx's overall critique of political economy. Yeah, that's extremely interesting. So moving on a little bit about Gothic Marxism, in what ways can Gothic Marxism equip us with unique tools and insight into the nature of neoliberal late capitalism?

I think the biggest thing that it can help us to do is get over, there's this long kind of strand in sort of Marxist, communist thought, which is a bit suspicious of imaginative forms of expression, right? I mean, the most famous example is

Lukash, the great philosopher of Bolshevism, who you know, railed against non-mimetic art. You know, art was supposed to be kind of realistic. Anything that was too out there was maybe a bit suspect.

One of my favorite kind of moments, stories in history that kind of relates to this is Nadezda Kripskaya, Lenin's Widow, was a kind of important figure in the literary culture of the Soviets. And she issued this really stern criticism of a Russian fairy story called the crocodile and describing it as bourgeois fog, guilty of distorting the facts about animals and plants. because crocodiles don't smoke cigarettes or walk on two feet, which is what this children's story featured. So I think Gothic Marxism helps us, helps Marxists generally get over this kind of suspicion of things which are not immediately concrete. It also helps us to have an insight into ideology, which, in essence, what I see Gothic Marxism is doing is being against, I would pose it against the kind of rather arid, dry materialism, because what it allows us to do is to illustrate and emphasize the mechanics of capital in a way that resonates with both people's economic experiences and the other kind of. kind of emotional, effective experiences of what living under, in our case, late neoliberal capitalism is actually like. Yeah, absolutely.

And I really think that there's a difference between, you know, kind of the cold academic writing and something that speaks to people. And Marx was really great at using that imagery to speak to people because through the centuries, you know, in our culture especially, those images conjure up visceral feelings and it gives a new perspective on what's happening. It allows sort of popular culture to sneak in and emphasize and highlight what it is we're criticizing. And I think it resonates with more people. I really like the term bourgeois fog because I think that's ideology. I think so I think we're living in a period of immense bourgeois fog. And absolutely. Yeah, it's hard to kind of make

out what's really happening a lot of the time with that fog in place. But to emphasize, I mean, you said kind of insight into the nature of neoliberal lake capital maybe one of the best figures to turn to here is the figure of the zombie

I mean post 2006 2008 you've seen an explosion a kind of huge proliferation of texts whether they be like books, comics, films

games explicitly concerned with zombies right every game has had like a zombie mod added to it and you can say that that's just a sort of a quirk of cultural history you know maybe that's what we find scary right now some people might say but you know as as as a Marxist my response is well what is it about now that has made the zombie the figure that we all fear and it as film directors like george a Romero have proven the zombie is a fantastic metaphor for discussing the alienation of some of the subjectivity under capitalism. You know, we are alienated from ourselves. We're reduced to, as Marx puts it, we're prayed upon the very life of our being is sort of sucked out of us by capital. You know, Mark Fisher, the late great Mark Fisher, a British communist writer who I really admire said that one of the kind of shocking truths about capitalism is that the zombies, the

dead labor that it kind of is fed by is our labor and the zombies that it creates are us. So I think if you look at that figure of the zombie, you suddenly get a new and really effective and affecting insight into just what it's like to be a subject in this era of capital development. Yeah, and it has strange resonance with, in philosophy, there's a thought experiment centered around philosophical zombies. And it's this idea. It's this idea that, yeah, that on the inside, there's no lights on, that there's no subjectivity, and it's just a sort of external process of a being going about the world with no inner light at all.

So that kind of speaks that a little bit. And it's so striking, right, that so many modern corporations have made such a big deal about the fact that it isn't enough that you give them your labor. You actually have to give them yourself, right? you have to love your job so even even when you know we might just go to work and go through the motions and you know our mind can be occupied with something else it can be thinking about a life back home it can be it can be thinking about ideas which are interesting to us and we can we can put on a facade for for for our boss right but increasingly uh you know the corporate world is unhappy with that kind of zombie that they that they've got you know now they want you

to be happy. They want you to, you can't seem as if you're repeating a scripts that we've given you. You know, I used to work as a waiter and there was a set number of phrases that we had to say to every customer. And it's the most alienating experience because you eventually feel so disconnected. There is no, there, you know, you're, you're not just alienated from your work. You're alienated from yourself, right? You're made into this sort of shambling figure that's just going through the motions of what your boss has told you to do. But increasingly, you know, companies actually want, they want what's inside you as well as your external labor.

So I think if we understand it in horror terms, it suddenly is brought home to people. Yeah. And at my job, part of it is taking calls and we have a script that we have to follow very much. And part of that script includes saying the person's name back to them. So, but like it's scripted. So you're trying to produce a sense of authenticity. like I'm using your name like we're connected but it just it just kind of reinforces the alienation and the fact that I have no idea who I'm talking into and more than that both of us are talking

to each other through the prism of our of our roles within the hierarchical workplace and so there's no real authentic human connection there and that can be extremely alienated and that's why I've said many times like you can go to work you can interact with dozens if not hundreds of people and you can still come home feeling lonely and alienated and you know empty because because of that sort of alienation between people in the workplace? Absolutely. I mean, there is no better figure for the kind of era of the post-recession mode of capitalist living than the zombie. The zombie is desubjectivized kind of just, you know, we work because we have to, right? We have those basic material needs that we have to meet,

you know? And so the zombie is this sort of seamless, de-individual. figure that, you know, can become a horde and is shuttled and spreads across the globe. It's, for kind of globalized capital, in many ways, the figure of the zombie is what they want the ideal worker to be. So in what ways are the horrors of capitalism dressed up, disguised, and obscured in popular culture, media, and politics? I know you talk about this, and I think it's really interesting. So can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Yeah, totally. I mean, I think one of the striking moments was the election here in the UK. There was a big debate, a huge amount of criticism focused towards Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, who is this lifelong socialist who is extremely suspicious of nuclear weapons. And so Corvin was criticized relentlessly for his refusal to use them. he wouldn't use them in a first strike situation and so the political establishment and the media establishment

would say oh he's naive he doesn't understand the reality of politics how he's going to let he's going to let Britain be destroyed by whoever the kind of monster figure of the moment was Iran or North Korea

but really what he was doing was refusing to commit to the brutal murder of hundreds upon thousands of people right he was he was making a very simple straightforward point that maybe britain should not spend its time incinerating hundreds of thousands of people um you know that that to me seems very straightforward and so there was this weird moment of kind of uh things didn't join up things didn't make sense because he was being criticized for being uh for for being unwilling to commit mass murder on the world stage.

So one of the ways in which the kind of horrors of capitalism are disguised is that they are made to be natural. They're made to be naturalized laws. You know, you hear politicians say things like, oh, it's not ideal, but this is the world we live in. You know, this is just the way things are. These are the practical truths of the world. And really, what it is is a way of ensuring that we. don't question too much the huge amounts of injustice, violence, and death that capitalism manages to inflict upon the world.

Yeah, I mean, it's precisely the world we live in because people like them make the world that we live in. Yeah, absolutely, right? Absolutely. It's really interesting when you talk about this sort of like, you know, Jeremy Corbyn talking about nuclear weapons and people being like this really uncontroversial point, like, hey, let's not slaughter innocent people for no reason, becomes a weird thing where that's his weakness. Yeah, his weakness was that he wasn't willing to turn himself into this sign of

blood-soaked murderer. Right. And here in the U.S., when, you know, we have the Republican presidential elections, especially in the primaries, it's the opposite, it's a race to the opposite end. It's this machismo, it's this machismo posturing. Like, I'll bomb the hell out of them, you know, I'll kill them all. And like, whoever can be the most verbose and machismo about how many innocent people Del Slaughter, that plays better and better with the base, and that's just sort of a macabre reality, yeah. I mean, I think one of the great

horror figures of U.S. politics is Wayne LaPierre, you know, the head of the NRA, who is this, if you think about him for more than 30 seconds, is this blood-soaked monster that you would tell stories about to children

to scare them before they went to sleep. This person who had spent their entire life politically organizing to allow the senseless murder of American people by distributing gut. Like, you know, if you strip away his suit and his banal platitudinous rhetoric, Wayne LaPierre is this just drenched in innocent people's blood. And, you know, should absolutely be feared and reviled as the monster that he truly is. but simply by putting on a suit being well connected having that capital wealth that enables you to buy access you can turn the most grotesque atrocities into these kind of oh well that's just the way the world is don't politicize things that's just the way things are right yeah and i think um you know as we as we talk about this that that's one of the strong points of a gothic marxist approach is that we can rip off we can rip off the suit and

and knock the briefcase out of their hand and reveal them for what they are to not cut corners or talk about these people as if they're just these reasonable centrist politicians but they're actually these, in a lot of ways, these sociopathic monsters that they need to be stripped down to what they really are and exposed for what they really are.

And that's something I think Gothic Marxism can do. One of the big points, one of the things that Gothic Marxism is really good for is there is, again, just to mention Mark Fisher once more, wrote a brilliant book called Capitalist Realism where he said that the subtitled was the question, is there no alternative?

And one of the kind of main features of these people is that they say no, there is no alternative. And one of the kind of interesting and fascinating things about Gothic Marxist approach is that you can go, you can expose them as the monsters they are and you can possibly articulate that there can be an alternative. that, you know, we don't have to live with these monstrous figures presiding over us.

And that's actually a good segue into this next question, which is about an article you wrote, the name of the article is On Centrism and Horror, the Politics of Nothing, and in it you examine neoliberalism as a mode and style of politics, and you talk about how vacuous and unimaginative and limiting it is. Can you summarize the argument of that article for our listeners and highlight the ways in which neoliberalism negates political imagination? Yeah, absolutely. So my kind of principal point was that within the realm of politics, there has to be some sort of degree to which you can imagine the world is different to the way that it is, right?

Every political leader has said, this is what we're going to do, this is what we're going to change, this is what we're going to fix, right? And on the left, in particularly, the impulse has always to be, has always been to say that we can make the world better. you know all of this we could make ourselves a better world and that requires a degree of imagination so even if we're not utopian Marxists

I know maybe some people are even if you're not that you still have to have the kind of imaginative capacity to say that the world could be different in some way right increasingly what we see though especially in neoliberal centristism is this

this space within politics where you imagine a different world slowly gets closed down and we stop imagining a different world and we actually lose things that we used to have right and they become these impossible utopian visions where it was like you know

an example in the US would be that kind of centrist cry of like single payer is not going to happen why because this is the way the world is and you have to deal with it you know gun control is a utopian impossibility

forgetting the fact that gun control legislation has been introduced and passed in America and all around the world before. And suddenly it's not even that we are asking for the impossible, we're just asking for the stuff that we had that has kind of vanished. You know, it's like university education is the price is only ever going to go up. Why? Because that's the way things are, forgetting, you know, seemingly forgetting or erasing the fact that for a long time university education was something that we saw as a public good, not as a commodity. So I describe it as the politics of nothing.

So it isn't even that they put forward a vision of the world as better or different. All they say is that the world will continue. And it will probably be, their politics is the, that kind of politics is the politics of a managed decline. You know, it isn't that they're going to make things better for you. it's just stuff will continue right stuff will just carry on and all of these problems we will try and find patchwork solutions and we can maybe ameliorate the worst effects but really this is the best it's it comes from a sort of warmed over uh interpretation of francis fukyama's famous thesis on the end of history where he said that kind of western liberal

capitalism had won and that was the best form of government and there are people who desperately clinging to that when you know we're in the middle we're still we're like a decade out from the worst economic crisis since the great recession there are huge um structural problems in capitalism which are beginning to make appearances politics has never been more volatile in lots of places um and there are still people going well nothing could change nothing you know it's impossible that things could get better yeah and there's a um a certain sort of smugness with which they say it when you know when Hillary Clinton is going against Bernie Sanders on the universal health care debate she has this smug little smirk on her face

when she's talking like what what a fool what what an idealist utopian to think that like every other developed country in the world that we could the richest country on the planet that we could that we could afford this of course we can we spent two trillion dollars on illegal wars you know we're doing a 1.5 trillion dollar wealth transfer to the ultra rich but we can't afford to provide basic health care services to our citizens. And that's the sort of like lowering the bar, the lowering of expectations that the centrist and the liberals are pros at. So there is this kind of, as I say, there's this slow contraction, this drawing in of the space within which you can actually do politics. I mean, the huge kind of policy proposals are policy proposals from people who are ostensibly on the left,

what we'd probably call like centrist's now are just they're just kind of banal and you know it's oh well maybe this section of people could get tax credits maybe this section could get you know we could means test this benefit we could you know and we could introduce a market here to you know increase competition and it's and it's like this is this is nothing this is just an excel you know this is not even an acceleration of our present politics it's just maintaining it and ensuring that it will only slowly get worse rather than catastrophically get worse. Yeah. Would you mind if I read a paragraph from your article on centrism and horror? Because I think it's so good and it speaks exactly to this. No, not at all. Okay. So

in it you say, capitalism is nothing if not adaptable and the monsters of old left their castles and changed their form. Capital got rid of the blood in the dirt and exchange it for a suit in a briefcase, good makeup and a media delivery system. The blood is still there, but is disguised now, under the tailoring. They never seem quite real, do they? The smooth face centrist on television? There's something about them. Their suits are less clothing and more skin. The smile slightly too slick and oily, and the words are all a kind of banal, audio, white noise. Professional sound bites that can emissurate millions of people, and after you hear them talk, you struggle to remember what it was, they said. The faces all look similar and the names are all interchangeable.

You might have seen that one on TV once or a thousand times. It's hard to tell, isn't it? There's something almost hypnotic about them. The constant reassuring drone that nothing really needs to change, that we should accept that things are better than ever for so many people, that all we need are good, centrist politicians with all the right facts and the world will continue on as it ever had and ever will. I love that, and it speaks directly to what we're talking about.

Very well written. I mean, I just think you listen to, I think, often sort of, of moderate Republicans are very good at this, you know, or sort of right-leaning Democrats are very good at this. And you listen to them and you struggle to kind of concentrate on what they're saying. And then when you stop and think about it for just a moment, what they're saying is this horrifying rhetoric that is, you know, the wealth transfer that is going to, their GOP tax bill that, as you call it, that kind of wealth transfer to the ultra-rich was couched in these series of banal platitudes about getting Main Street back to work

and helping working families when you stop and look at what you're doing and what they're doing and you go, no, this is some sort of corporate oligarchical nightmare that we've stumbled into but they cover it up with with a quick smile, a good suit and pleasant lighting and I think we absolutely have to strip that away from them. think they're calling the bill now like the the tax reform and jobs act bill like like the the the implication is that giving a bunch of money to rich people will be a job creator like it's just it's the same old trickle-down theory that's been debunked a million times repackaged and handed back to us oh yeah absolutely i mean the ideas are not new right uh Marx describes

capital as dead labor you know it is it's it's the dead who have come back to haunt us and so they they don't have new ideas or innovative approaches to policy questions, all they can do is rebrand and repackage themselves, and they're very good at that. And there's, you know, that leads next in this next question, which I think kind of speaks to parts of that hollowness and the vacuity is, is nihilism. In what ways, in your opinion, does nihilism enter into and permeate neoliberalism? And how does this nihilism manifest itself? I think one of the things that is really striking is this, there's a very famous quote in kind of leftist theory circles that's attributed either to Slavoghijek or Frederick

Jameson where he says it's where the quote is it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism so it's not even is the question is not you know what would a socialist organization of the economy look like the question is can we imagine that anymore and increasingly for many people the answer is no and what this kind of get to do as a sort of yeah a blank passivity as sort of

there are two kind of main drivers to it there's a kind of generalized anxiety you know I teach in the university I come across a lot of students who are desperately anxious about their future and the reason that they're anxious is because they've taken on huge amounts of debt coming to university

and they're aware that there is a huge expectation and pressure on them to get what they need out of this environment and then get out into the world of work. So there is this and a lot of them have a hard time articulating it. They have a hard time going pinpointing where this anxiety comes from. But a lot of it is bound up with their sense of kind of economic, they're economically predestined, you know. They were told for five years when they were in secondary education that going to university was just what you had to do. And then you go to university because that's what you have to do and then you take on all this debt because

that's what you have to do and then you go and get a job that you don't really care for and doesn't fulfill you in any way because that's what you have to do because you have to pay back the debt and so they they sense that and the other thing is there's this sense that there's a kind of I remember I saw I can't remember at which kind of huge protest march it was I saw that over in the states there was this sign that said if Hillary had won we'd be at brunch right now and I was like okay it's a funny joke but it does kind of pinpoint

one of the other problems right that politics is essentially a matter of appearances you know if a Democrat had won rather than Donald Trump for a lot of people that would have been fine

because the problem that lots of people seem to help with Donald Trump isn't the fact that he is a fascist-leaning egoist who is desperately asset stripping the American people the problem is that he's rude and vulgar

and so there is this there is this sense that politics has to happen within a kind of a discourse of politeness and if you're in that place if you're in that sort of polite and presentable rhetoric

your politics are sort of immaterial you know you could you could have your extrajudicial killings, your drone strikes, your deportations of immigrants, you could have your criminalization of black people, you could have your increasing opioid addiction, but as long as everyone is polite, you know, that's not a problem. So there is this, there is the, I think, I think nihilism is one of the kind of big dangers of neoliberal politics, because we become, and I think one of the reasons

that Gothic Marxism is so appealing is that it cuts through that very clear. Lee. And Obama was so loved because he was the perfect face for the capitalist imperialist machine. He was polite. He was progressive. And so many people in the center and on the liberal left, they loved it. And that's what a big fear of mine, especially in the U.S. and more broadly the world over, is that a return to the status quo post-Trump will satisfy a lot of people. And that's what really scares me. The bar has been so lowered that even raising it just a little bit, just back to the horrible status quo, we'll satiate too many, you know, too many people, and that's a fear I have. Yeah, and we think that that's necessary because we can't conceive of anything else. Right. You know, you know, if, this is why it's very often very difficult for people on the left who are socialist, who are communists, to talk about communist approaches to contemporary problems, because for a lot of the people that they're talking to, suddenly you'll find yourself arguing about Stalinism again.

Right? It's because we end up trapped in this sense that there is no alternative. There is no possibly different future. But as Marxists, we know that the future is determined by the class struggle. You know, we know that that's how change is one. And there is a long, long record of working people managing to change what seemed like the immovable systems of politics that they were trapped within through that. But so many people. that we you can you can try and talk to you about communist politics suddenly you end up talking about Stalinism you end up talking about oh well communism has killed however hundreds of millions of people that they've been told it killed and you're not no longer talking about the contemporary issues you're suddenly refighting an old past you're rehashing an old historical issue so I think that's one of the reasons you know it's because this sense of possibly different future has been closed down and that's what we absolutely have to kind of fight to reopen yeah well said and i really hope anybody listening to this kind of internalizes that point like let's spend a lot

less time rehashing the issues of 1917 and a lot more time thinking about how we can relate to the non-politicized working class and present a vision that speaks to people's real problems and real interests in the here and now that's what our that's what our focus and energy should be that's the main reason i hate sectarianism and i hate rehashing issues that are century old. We're playing right into the hands of the centrist that wish to preserve the status quo and keep the present, you know,

indefinitely into the future. Yeah, because every time we get drawn into rehashing one of those arguments, you suddenly you go, oh well, you're suddenly on their turf. And that sense of that there is no alternative, that there is no possibly different future, that door is slammed shut once again.

Exactly. All right, well, let's move on to the second half of the show. which we're going to talk about, we're going to talk about culture, postmodernism, etc. So in a previous episode on this podcast, we analyzed the Texas Chainsaw Massacre from a Marxist perspective. And one of my guests, Taylor, he talked about films as cultural dreams. So in what ways can film illuminate deeper issues in our society and our collective subconscious and what makes them worth studying by leftists and liberationists? Well, I think this is something I mentioned a little bit earlier.

It's very easy to dismiss, especially horror film, right? It's kind of a low genre. It's very populist. You know, loads of people love horror movies. So it's very easy for kind of cultural critics to just dismiss it as trash, you know, as rubbish, as not aesthetically or morally good. But really, what scares us is an incredibly powerful motivating force, right? what we are afraid of and another way of looking at

is what we're made to be afraid of those things are all historically and materially situated because the question that sort of always rolls around my head is like who are we asked to be who are we sort of asked to be afraid of

now and why them why is it that figure who's been made into the monster for us to fear so one of the ways in which kind of our cultural anxieties find expression is through horror movies, right? If you look at the 1980s, you saw a real growth in slasher films, right? You had Friday the 13th, you had Nightmare on Elm Street, you have those two big franchises were really key. But there was this sense of a kind of, it was also the era of kind of greater cultural conservatism in lots of respects.

So the 80s saw these, saw all of these teenagers doing licit, illicit things going off to drink and do drugs and have sex, and they were punished for it. You know, they, you, you, you, those films function as warning texts. Oh, I see. So, you know, you go, oh, well, this is what happens to you if you listen to those crazy counterculturalists. You have a lot of, a lot of horror films in the 70s with dealing with the American South and expressing some pretty classist assumption. about what working people in the deep south especially were like you know they were hillbillies and cannibals and they were dangerous and so the the good north uh americans shouldn't be

wandering through the forest or going off the trail because you may end up and suddenly you're no longer in in a recognizable America you're in a dangerous environment so culture uh is a great way of expressing these kind of sublimated horrors uh of our of the contemporary moment right um it's why we have a vampire film comes around. A big vampire movie probably comes around about once a decade and has done pretty reliably since the 1920s. It's because in every iteration they're expressing a different aspect of the anxieties and fears and horrors generated by that iteration of capitalism. That's extremely interesting. So catching up to today, you know, after the 2008 recession and the subprime mortgage crisis, you've talked about the home as a quote, reinvented

sight of cultural anxiety. So can you elaborate on that idea and point out how those anxieties manifest themselves in more contemporary horror films like paranormal activity and insidious? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the biggest successes in terms of, just in terms of money that it generates in American culture has been the movie industry, especially post-2008. And one of the areas that has been most successful has been horror film, horror film is pretty cheap to make. You can distribute it pretty widely, and it's generally very profitable. So I'm working on a paper, which hopefully will be out fairly soon, talking about Blumhouse productions, and they're behind things like insidious and paranormal activity, and they specialize

in micro-budget horror. So they make huge amounts of money. Paranormal activity was 2007. So this is just as the subprime mortgage crisis is coming to its head, really, and it deals with a young couple who've moved into their first, into their kind of starter home, and it's suddenly invaded by this demonic presence that feeds off negative energy. And if you think about home as an asset, right, a house is not just a utility. It's not just something that has a use value for us. It's somewhere that we need, you know, we all need and deserve a place to lay our head. But if you have a mortgage, your home is possessed, right? It can be possessed. You know, there are these spectral forces of

digitized, globalized capitalism that can take you from your home, you know, the amount of money that was poured into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when they were taken under the control of the US Treasury,

you know, it just goes to show that the home is not secure, right? If you're mortgage broker, if you're, the people who hold your mortgage need the infusion billions of dollars just to stay in existence suddenly your home can become a very precarious place right yeah and there's you talk about it reflecting a certain sort of middle class anxiety you know so much of what we're told growing up is is you know you have this like nice little you go to school you go to college you get a nice job you get married you get a home and the home is a sort of symbol of

growing up and progress and something to aspire to um and and you talk about how that that that anxiety manifests itself in films like this. I mean, yeah, both Thatcher and Reagan emphasized home ownership, right? Reagan said that owning a home encourages you to save, build up wealth, pass it on. And he also said something really interesting. He said that it expressed American values. You know, being a homeowner was what made you an American. You know, Thatcher said that, or the Thatch government said that they wanted people to feel like they had a stake in society.

So unless you were a homeowner, they deliberately dismantled Britain's social housing stock and sold it off as a way of raising revenue. But they also said, well, this is how you accumulate wealth. This is how you take your place in society. We don't want people to be dependent upon the state because the state is evil, of course. And so this has been a kind of dominant message tacitly accepted by a lot of the politicians and political figures who have come in the wake of. Thatcher and Reagan, right? We're told that owning a home is something that we should absolutely be doing. Otherwise, we've sort of failed in some way, right? So, given that, you know, as I say, we're about a decade away, a generation away from this colossal crisis in global capitalism,

there are huge numbers of people who are realizing that maybe they never will own a home. Maybe they never will be one of those people who are building up that kind of wealth. So we have to rethink what does it mean to have a home? What does it mean to live in a way that is fulfilling and secure rather than paying the mortgages and lining the bank accounts of landlords and the new re-emergent Rontiate class, the renters, the people who control housing? So it isn't really a surprise that the house that we were all told to aspire to. You know, we've made it to the front door and we look inside. it's full of ghosts and demons and it's falling to

falling to pieces in front of our eyes beautifully said yeah exactly so so moving on because this covers another part of of our modern society and you and china me how do you say his last name uh meaevil yeah you guys have both echoed the need to you know avoid falling into nostalgia for a lost past and i i've talked about this before i got some pushback actually

when i talked about stranger things and kind of critiqued it from this angle But there's also all these modern remakes of 80s and 90s classics popping up lately, like It, Ghostbusters, Beauty and the Beast, Jurassic Park, et cetera. They're all like odd manifestations of some neoliberal attempt to draw our attention to the past as well as commodify our nostalgia. But I'm not exactly sure. I've struggled with this, but I can't really flesh this out in my own head. So in your opinion, what role does nostalgia play in our neoliberal era and why is it important

to be suspicious of it? Well, one of the things that immediately jumps to mind is there's a, A great phrase by a British writer and philosopher Tom Wyman who used the phrase cupcake fascism. So in the wake of the conservative government's austerity program here in the UK, what we started seeing everywhere were rebranded and reimagined posters and media that drew from old wartime imagery and propaganda. The famous one is the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. which people are probably familiar with and there was a resurgence in things like

bunting and cupcakes harking back to this era of an imagined British past where we had a crisis but we solved it with our stoicism and our stiff upper lip and our growing vegetables in the back garden and that was what we our response

to this to the economic crash was supposed to be right we was supposed to buy into both economically and ideologically this vision of the imagined past but the thing is nostalgia is not history right nostalgia is an imagined past

and as such it's extremely ideologically loaded and it's something that we should approach with a good deal of caution there's nothing wrong with it I mean some of these you we can absolutely enjoy these things but we should also be aware that

they are primarily functioning as commodities they are trying to sell us on something rather than just be things that we can enjoy without being unaware of the wider political implications. Yeah, and I also think there's a connection to the negated political imagination point you were making earlier. To draw our attention away from the future and into the past, it serves all the functions you've talked about, but I think it also serves the function of precisely keeping

our eyes off the future, of kind of low-key slipping in that negation of political imagination. And I love shows like Stranger Things. I mean, I'm not dissing those shows at all, but they certainly play that role. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I feel like I should emphasize is that the Gothic is not politically unambiguous. It's politically ambiguous, rather. I come at it from a Marxist point of view, but it is also, historically speaking, one of the kind of first Gothic novels was written by the son of the British Prime Minister. So it is also connected with things which are very conservative, quite reactionary,

quite concerned with hostility towards others, towards what's strange. So, I mean, yeah, I don't think we should be quick to jump upon the Gothic as a kind of unquestioned or unmediated space of kind of political imagination. Monsters are really interesting because if you look at the root of the word monster, it comes from a Latin word, which you can translate as meaning both a warning and revealing something.

So monsters warn us about something, warn us to stay away from something, but they also show us the truth of something as well. Interesting. Yeah, and moving on, but kind of bouncing off this notion of nostalgia and how it manifests in the neoliberal context, we talk a lot about post-modernism. I think it's a really ill-defined term, and it's hard to pin down because it spans so many different subjects,

philosophy, architecture, literature, etc. But I think it's important to talk about it. So in what ways is postmodernism and neoliberalism related and how does postmodernism manifest itself in the neoliberal era? I think that's a really interesting question. I mean, I'm not usually sure that I have a good answer to it because one of the things, as you say, about postmodernism is that it is this enormously kind of fungible

and malleable term. So I think neoliberalism and post-modernity are probably not as opposed as they initially appear, because neoliberalism, this kind of settled state of politics, this end of history,

this sense that there is no alternative, does initially seem like it might conflict with a more postmodernist approach of kind of plurality and difference of multiplicity and of possibility. but I think often post-modernity, post-modernists, the politics and kind of class analysis is very obviously lacking.

I mean, Derrida is often held up as the kind of figured de jure that the right kind of views with suspicion as being a kind of relativist and a nihilist. But that's not true at all. He was actually a deeply ethically engaged writer. But politically, he often sort of, opts for the status quo rather than the potential of a kind of revolutionary moment. What would you say are the main conflicts between Marxism and postmodernism? Because, you know, the term postmodernism has been weaponized a lot lately by like weird right-wing people like Jordan Peterson, who calls everything he doesn't like post-modern and cultural Marxist. And so there's sort of, on the reactionary right, there's this conflation between Marxism and post-modernism. But in reality, they also conflict in a lot of ways. So what are some, those main conflicts and what, if anything, can leftists learn from postmodernism?

Okay, well, I mean, Marx himself was not a relativist. You know, he was a universalist. He believed in what he called a Gondomsvesen, which is translated as kind of human species essence, you know, that we have a kind of shared ground. And so I think this conflation of cultural Marxism and postmodernism just shows a complete lack of understanding of anything that Marxists have written about this. I mean, people like Jordan Peterson hold up the Frankfurt School as the kind of bogey man of the West, as it were, but the Frankfurt School also wrote about the importance of great arts and culture.

They actually wrote on issues such as defending the idea of a family as a site of resistance against commodification of capitalism. um so there's this idea that you can conflate postmodernism and which i take that they mean a kind of relativist uh moral thoughts and a kind of end of grand meta narratives uh with marxist thought it it's it's utterly incompatible to my mind utterly incompatible um and it just shows that they haven't really read any of this they've only read what they've been you know they've read the people who have read it and have come up with these kind of strange conspiracy theories. That said, I do also think that the postmodernism debate, kind of in academia, especially in the kind of circles of academia that I work in, was sort of, to me, it seems

very odd that we're talking about this again, because back in academia, this was a big topic of conversation during the 80s and 90s. So we've said, we, you know, lots of academia who has suddenly gone, oh, really? You're just catching up to this. We were talking about this quite a while ago. But I do think that this, the idea of, one of the good things about postmodernism has been the idea of plurality. And the sense that, you know, the working class is not a homogenous block, right? The working class is not a single or static subject. Rather, the kind of challenge of Marxist politics is to respond to this in a way that builds the broadest possible coalition. So we're not just trying to, one of the kind of buzzwords of a lot of

the British right in politics is the white working class. But any good Marxist analysis will tell you that the working class isn't all that white and isn't all that male. You know, it's often made up of women of color. It's made up of people who are not. that kind of stereotyped image. So I think one of the things that we shouldn't be too quick to dismiss is this notion of plurality and difference and the importance of building coalitions which are genuinely inclusive, which are genuinely liberatory for all, because if it is not liberatory for all, then what are we actually doing?

And we shouldn't be too quick to dismiss, yeah, to dismiss that aspect of it. Yeah, and when you're talking about the multiplicity of narratives, it draws my mind. to the internet and the democratization of voices for the first time in history marginalized voices are finally coming to the four and they're talking about their experiences and their narratives people of color, trans people, queer people for the first time ever, finally get a platform

where they are on equal footing with, you know, conservative white males, Twitter, Facebook, all over online. You can make a blog. You can make videos. And so the challenge is to the left of how can we respect, understand, learn from this multiplicity of narratives, but at the same time create a way to unite all these narratives and all these different people with all these different experiences into a unified coalition to push forward for liberation. And so there's almost a dialectical relationship between the multiplicity of narratives

and the Marxist view of history and kind of producing this new synthesis of, let's combine these things and move forward in a diverse and in um sort of unified way i mean one of the things that um has been kind of uh really uh interesting and important in my own kind of political organizing and work with uh sort of unions and with uh political parties here in the UK has been this idea that we don't build solid you know solidarity is not built in spite of our differences with other people but because of our differences you know there are so many uh people people who are affected by capitalism and that impact is revealed in different ways. But solidarity is not done.

In spite of the fact that I have different experiences to some of my colleagues and comrades, we have a sense of solidarity precisely because capitalism is this multifaceted, hybridized, multi-line of attack force that can individuate and pinpoint people so precisely. We can build solidarity because of those differences. because that's where coalition building can really begin. Well said, well said. And, you know, John, thank you so much for coming on. I want to have you back at some point in the future

because there's so much more that you write about that we can talk about. And, you know, we have a lot of interesting things going to unfold in this next year or so. So let's keep in touch. But before we leave, what are some recommendations that you would give to anyone who wants to learn more about what we've talked about tonight? And where can listeners find your work? Yeah, you can find me on Twitter at The Liquit Guy. I also have a website, The Liquit Guy.com. If you're interested in finding out more about this,

one of the places that I actually started was I was on YouTube and I found a talk by the British fiction writer and socialist China Meaville entitled Socialism and Halloween. where he talks about a socialist response to Halloween. And that's one of the things that really sparked my interest in researching Gothic Marxism. I also really recommend a great book by David McNally called Monsters of the Market, which is a really detailed look at some of the Gothic metaphors within Marx's own writing. Yeah, I encourage all my listeners to go check those out, follow the Lit Crit guy on any social media platform.