Here's
a rant from a leftist that covers many of my points. He talks about his adventures trying to climb the pecking order of the "
Theory Cluster" - the NERDs - but dropped out because he's just not that studious of a student:
I was in a number of reading groups from 2000ish-2004ish, studying the sacred texts - Marx and Engels and Lenin and Trotsky and Gramsci and Althusser and Kropotkin and David Harvey and on and on. Eventually I gave up, for a few reasons. The first was that I just wasn’t a good enough student. I looked around me and saw all these guys who could quote chapter and verse of Proudhon or whatever, and though I was diligent and passionate I could never get to that level. Try as I might I could never keep my Grundrisse straight from my “Critique of the Gotha Programme.” And for everything I learned there was another something that, I would be made to understand, I didn’t know. I wanted to be serious, and I knew that to be serious was to be studious. But it wasn’t a race I wanted to run.
I didn’t think much of the finish line, by that point. I knew people (I know people) who just studied Marx like the Yeshivot studying the Talmud, study on top of study and seemingly for no other reason. They were dismissive of all actually-existing left movements and too pure to live. You couldn’t judge them on their actions because they had no action, only theory. When my time in the anti-Iraq war movement was over and I emerged from it, exhausted and spent, it was time to leave the temple for me too. I had had enough of the high priests.
That's all the left is: some people are just born students, and are good at being students. They thrive in their natural habitat: rooms filled with desks covered with useless busywork. They are good at being teachers pets, but like all pets, they cannot survive for long outside.
So what do they do? They form a gang. They conquer and weaponize all desk-jobs, starting with education and all information dissemination. Those who won the genetic lottery, natural-born-students are assumed to be some kind of master race. They send missionaries to colonize the world and crush those who fail to assimilate. And just what is this
überlegene Kultur which has a manifest destiny to rule the world? The details change over the ages, but one thing is always consistent: the endless multiplying of desk jobs and useless busywork.
"
The left" did not start with Rousseau or the French Revolution. "
The left" is
the same social phenomenon that gave us the medieval Catholic clergy. "
The left" is an unreconstructed continuation of inquisitors discussing page 1000 of some tome of irrelevant dogma, finding a slight difference of interpretation, and them burning someone at the stake to save their soul.
But of course there are limits: For a start, most people would rather feel than think, and prefer shouting to reading. Also, there's the issue of "
elite overproduction", which happens because a pecking-order of parasites finds it easier to produce desk-workers than invent new desk-jobs, so you end up with more leeches than veins.
This explains the "
Moralist Cluster", which has now taken over:
I see ostensible socialists who think of it as this empty vessel of not-liberalism, whose socialism just is shitty Twitter jokes and broad assumptions about a postcapitalist world where they can just make webcomics or play Minecraft...
...socialism is some embittered grad school dropout doing irony at you, ladling out performative disaffection, making sure you all know that everything is expected by them, nothing exciting or surprising or scary...insults for days but no plan......a social culture of frustrated post-college urbanites who know little about left theory or practice and who use left politics as just another way to wage petty little wars of social status with their peers, and b) a set of ambitious entrepreneurs who milk that community for all its worth...
...army of frustrated would-be filmmakers/musicians/social media stars, doesn’t demand constructive insight but rather anger, formless and pointless and directionless...