{"id":27922,"date":"2023-08-15T22:00:26","date_gmt":"2023-08-16T05:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=27922"},"modified":"2023-08-15T22:02:14","modified_gmt":"2023-08-16T05:02:14","slug":"the-cosmopolitan-socialism-of-michael-brooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/08\/15\/the-cosmopolitan-socialism-of-michael-brooks\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cosmopolitan Socialism of Michael Brooks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

BY BEN BURGIS<\/a> (jacobin.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michael Brooks, who would have turned 37 years old today, wanted the Left to do better. In the last year of his life, he\u2019d started to write a book about what that might look like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
Michael Brooks (1983\u20132020) was absolutely committed to bringing about a society where no one was hungry or homeless or unable to live their lives the way they wanted to because of their economic circumstances.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I thought about calling Michael Brooks the night before he died. It had been almost a week and half since he\u2019d reminded me that we were going to co-write an article about his vision of \u201ccosmopolitan socialism.\u201d I felt bad about not following up on that sooner, and I wanted to nail down a time for a writing session. I didn\u2019t end up calling because it was getting late and I didn\u2019t think there was any rush.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not that article for the simple reason that Michael isn\u2019t here to do all the things he did when we co-wrote articles for Jacobin<\/em>. He can\u2019t dictate sentences to me over Skype, quibble with formulations I used in sentences I wrote, and say things like, \u201cI don\u2019t know, brother, let\u2019s not go in that direction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also don\u2019t want to claim that anything I present here represents the final evolution of Michael\u2019s thinking or conclusions he would have stuck to for the rest of his life. Michael had a restless mind. He was always reading new books, interviewing new thinkers, and synthesizing new perspectives in new ways. It would be foolish to predict where else all of that would have taken him if his life hadn\u2019t been cut short this summer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I can do is present my understanding of the socialist politics Michael had arrived at in the last two years of his life. I want to do that for two reasons. The first is that he cared deeply about these ideas, and laying them out here feels like a small but meaningful way to honor his memory. The second is that, while it\u2019s impossible to know how his thinking might have evolved in the future, my belief is that he was right about almost all of this stuff and that his insights are important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Experiments in Living<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Last year, when I\u2019d been editing drafts of his book Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right<\/a><\/em>, Michael repeatedly made it clear to me that this was the part of the project that most excited him. The book was originally intended as a response<\/a> to a group of reactionary intellectuals so lacking in humor and self-awareness that they called themselves \u201cthe Intellectual Dark Web,\u201d but by the time he was writing Against the Web<\/em>, that particular branding exercise was mostly over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michael wanted the book to be about something much bigger. He used the IDW as a case study in how non-Trumpist versions of the Right brand themselves in the current landscape. This gave him a chance to take a hard look at how and why the Left so often fails to effectively counter the Sam Harrises and Jordan Petersons of the world, and how we might do better by steering between the rock of the IDW\u2019s Western chauvinism and the hard place of \u201cradical\u201d identitarianism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, in the final chapter (\u201cBeyond the IDW\u201d), he approvingly quotes M. N. Roy\u2019s comment on the Second Congress of the Communist International. \u201cFor the first time,\u201d Roy said, \u201cbrown and yellow men met with white men who were not overbearing imperialists but friends and comrades.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michael goes on to contrast this inspiring vision of global solidarity with the sort of thing we often see in contemporary \u201cwoke\u201d discourse. For example, he warns that \u201cremaining forever fearful of cultural appropriation\u201d will \u201csmother the international socialist project I envision by contributing to what Adolph Reed has disparagingly termed \u2018essentialism,\u2019 the almost metaphysical belief that culture stands apart from politics and economics.\u201d Michael argued that \u201cthere is no magical or particular essence that gives people born into a culture the right to deny those who are not from that culture access to art, ideas, music, and the like.\u201d In fact, we should \u201cbe open to all cultures and should in fact embrace and encourage cultural exchange and syncretism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than choosing between the woke and bigoted versions of cultural essentialism, or simply dismissing culture on the grounds that no one should care about anything but economics, Michael wanted to take what was best in the tradition of liberal cosmopolitanism and combine it with his core commitment to a more humane and democratic economic order. When no cultural group is stigmatized by being permanently relegated to the status of an impoverished underclass, we can all freely intermingle and freely sample whatever is good (and freely discard whatever is bad) in all<\/em> of our cultural traditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When classical liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill talked about \u201cexperiments in living,\u201d the ideal was a good one. But Michael understood that most people\u2019s ability to experiment is severely constrained by the economic conditions in which they live. It\u2019s all well to tell people, as a libertarian might, that they\u2019re \u201cfree\u201d to live in a devout Christian nuclear family or a polyamorous Wiccan compound, but the reality is that, under the current system, many people can\u2019t hold any relationship together because of financial stress \u2014 or they\u2019re stuck in bad marriages because they can\u2019t afford to lose their spousal health insurance. Real cultural freedom requires a far more economically equal society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Michael\u2019s refutation of Jordan Peterson in the next-to-last chapter, he praised the example of Spain\u2019s worker-owned Mondragon Corporation, which he saw as a preview of what a realistic version of socialism might look like. He didn\u2019t want to portray democratizing the economy as a utopian cure-all. He emphasized that Mondragon \u201cis a work in progress with limitations and internal contradictions to overcome.\u201d Even so, the example of Mondragon and other successful worker co-ops demonstrates that, contra Peterson, \u201cthe rigid economic hierarchies that emerge from the separation of labor and ownership can be transcended without this leading to economic collapse or famine or the dragon of chaos terrorizing the countryside.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Perils of Moralism<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Michael was deeply disturbed by what\u2019s sometimes called \u201ccancel culture.\u201d For one thing, he saw it as a gift to the Right. In Against the Web<\/em>, he talks about the Right \u201cdining out on endlessly clippable examples of collective performative browbeating.\u201d For another, he saw it as a disturbing sign of a \u201cdeficit in empathy\u201d among far too many of his comrades. Here\u2019s how he put it in the part of the book where he discusses Mark Fisher\u2019s classic essay \u201cExiting the Vampire Castle<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

I am not arguing that no one on the left has ever said or done anything racist or sexist or transphobic, or that we shouldn\u2019t care if they do. I\u2019m also not claiming that we should disavow the historical importance of identity in favor of a simplistic economic reductionism that tells people not to worry about \u201cmerely cultural\u201d issues. That\u2019s exactly the wrong way to fight the Vampires\u2019 Castle. What I am saying, however, is that . . . we will continue to devour each other \u2014 and thus fail to win power in society \u2014 if we don\u2019t reject the confused moralism that permeates so much left-wing discourse.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

He hit similar notes in his February 27 Mill Series lecture<\/a> at Lafayette College. After discussing the dangers of essentialism and urging the Lafayette students to read Adolph Reed, he says that \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of conflict between people who are more socialistic and people who are more \u2018woke.\u2019\u201d It is, he reiterated, obviously true that \u201cAmerica is a racist society.\u201d Left identitarians aren\u2019t wrong to insist on acknowledging that reality. But the IDW was \u201cexploiting a lot of weaknesses.\u201d When the left side of the culture war spends its time yelling at people about how \u201cSeinfeld<\/em> is problematic,\u201d it\u2019s not hard to see how that could create an opening for reactionaries to appeal to the \u201calienated young men\u201d in their target demographic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His concerns about counterproductive left moralism were at their strongest at the very end of his life. I\u2019ve been lucky enough to read what may have been the last piece of writing he ever did \u2014 about a page of notes for a book project that he was just starting to conceptualize. Just before he died, he sent them to his friend Daniel Bessner for comments. I don\u2019t know much about what he had in mind. Neither does Daniel. Neither does David Griscom, who was another of Michael\u2019s frequent collaborators. But whatever he had in mind, those notes are a fascinating window into what he was thinking the weekend before he passed away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the last paragraphs, he transitions to a discussion of his spiritual interests, and at the very end, he suggests that the whole thing might have something to do with a discussion of China. But the part that\u2019s most relevant here is his reflections in the first couple paragraphs on recent events in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Current Moment<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

He bemoans that \u201cthe 2012 to 2019 resurgence of the social democratic left\u201d has, with \u201chonorable exceptions at the non-national level\u201d been defeated. After the murder of George Floyd, \u201cthe uprisings on the street against the vicious and racist realities of American policing\u201d could and should have led to a renewal of substantive action on the issues of \u201ceconomic justice,\u201d \u201creinventing policing,\u201d and \u201cexpanding the 60s rights revolution.\u201d Instead, we\u2019ve seen an extreme \u201cnew round of woke identitarian politics and a new grift opportunity for the diversity industry.\u201d (I suspect that this last might have been meant as a pointed reference to the recent popularity of Robin DiAngelo\u2019s book White Fragility.<\/em>) A \u201cculture of snitching, witch hunts and cruelty\u201d that \u201csubstitutes for genuine social change.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Referring back to his refutation of the IDW in Against the Web<\/em>, he clarified that he was \u201cnot here to backtrack.\u201d The IDW types may have been \u201cmore right\u201d than he \u201cwanted to acknowledge\u201d about \u201ca cruel and totalitarian drift on the left,\u201d but \u201cthe IDW toolkit is not at all up for that challenge.\u201d The IDW-ites want to naturalize persistent inequalities instead of \u201chistoricizing\u201d them \u2014 i.e., analyzing the contingent historical circumstances in which these features of our society came about so we can understand better how we might move beyond them. He affirms that he still wants to create \u201ca truly democratic and compassion-driven society.\u201d The IDW might be reacting to real things, but they suffer from \u201cone-sidedness, lack of historical knowledge, and unwillingness to engage with the substantive left.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Confidently asserting that \u201cAdolph Reed could have set all these guys straight in a day,\u201d Michael says that the \u201canti-essentialist\u201d Marxism he learned from Reed was \u201cthe opposite of reductionist.\u201d Instead, it \u201cprovides depth.\u201d In a culture \u201csubsumed on all sides by lazy and moralistic essentialism,\u201d this vision of socialist politics \u201cdemands historical grounding and a serious commitment to a countervailing source of power to capital.\u201d He understood this political project as being at its core about \u201cexpanding freedom to all domains\u201d and \u201cdelivering real foundational needs to all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would have loved to read that book. I can\u2019t hope to know everything he would have said in it, and I\u2019m guessing that there would have been things in there about the importance of spirituality and \u201cintegral theory\u201d with which I didn\u2019t entirely agree. But I know it would have been sharp and insightful and that I would have learned a lot from engaging with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can\u2019t know how Michael might have continued to evolve in the future. I feel confident, though, that \u201cexpanding freedom to all domains\u201d and \u201cdelivering real foundational needs to all\u201d would have always been the telos of his politics. Michael was an intellectual, but there was nothing abstract, nothing intellectual, about his core commitments. He was absolutely committed to bringing about a society where no one was hungry or homeless or unable to live their lives the way they wanted to because of their economic circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he criticized the Left, he did it because of how badly he wanted us to win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHARE THIS ARTICLE<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

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CONTRIBUTORS<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Ben Burgis is a philosophy professor and the author of Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left. He does a segment called “The Debunk” every week on The Michael Brooks Show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY BEN BURGIS (jacobin.com) Michael Brooks, who would have turned 37 years old today, wanted the Left to do better. In the last year of his life, he\u2019d started to write a book about what that might look like. I thought about calling Michael Brooks the night before he died…. Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[946],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27922"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27922"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27924,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27922\/revisions\/27924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}