On Theoretical Degeneration

By 1900 the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the strongest socialist party in the world and its Erfurt Program the model for almost all others. In 1912, the SPD was able to win 4.25 million votes in legislative elections. As Pierre Broué shows in The German Revolution, 1917-1923, by 1914, the party had 1,085,905 members, ninety daily newspapers, 110 deputies in the Reichstag, 220 deputies in the state parliaments, and 2,886 elected politicians at the municipal level. And nearly all the leaderships of the trade-union federations were explicitly tied to it. Despite these incomparable heights it was all about to come crashing down.

What followed was a bloody First World War, the rise of fascism, and an even bloodier Second World War, the ‘vast cemetery’ that theorist of the left wing of the SPD Rosa Luxemburg warned of in The Junius Pamphlet before being murdered by the Freikorps on the orders of the SPD leadership. But on the eve of the left’s destruction, socialism appeared to be an inevitable fact of history to most revolutionaries.

Centrist figures in the socialist movement at the time, such as the ‘high priest’ of social democracy Karl Kautsky, understood class struggle as the necessary product of capitalist development. According to his view, the developmental logic of capitalism, which transforms old classes into workers and draws those workers together onto the factory floor, generates both the objective grounds for socialism – a class with an interest in capitalism’s overthrow – and a working class subjectively aware of that interest. In this view, struggles are not made by conscious people so much as they are produced by capital’s laws of motion. When some in the SPD offered up a peasant-based strategy to build support in the countryside, the center of the party rejected it outright in 1895. Supporting peasants, in historian Geoff Eley’s retelling in Forging Democracy, ‘merely salvaged an archaic form of agriculture, doomed to vanish with capitalist production.’ This approach has come to be known as orthodox Marxism.

In The Road to Power, Kautsky wrote that, ‘The Socialist party is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making party. We know that our goal can be attained only through a revolution. We also know that it is just as little in our power to create this revolution as it is in the power of our opponents to prevent it.’ This justified his position that socialists had to simply wait out the First World War. In his account, the capitalist class structure automatically generates class politics, once the ‘material conditions’ are at the correct stage and confidence in the ruling class has sufficiently broken down. As Schorske notes in German Social Democracy, 1905-1917, the party ‘would stand as an island of morality in a turbulent sea of iniquity; when the storm had exhausted itself, its surviving victims would take refuge on the island’. Luxemburg saw things differently. In her view there was no waiting: it was socialism or barbarism.

Kautsky’s prediction that the working class would take power at a certain stage rested on an assumption: the working class is largely homogenous and its members’ interests interchangeable and clearly recognizable in class terms. Kautsky saw himself as a populariser of Marx’s scientific ideas, and many of his works were meant as a catechism. He was a simplifier. But as the German council communist Paul Mattick wrote the year after Kautsky’s death in 1939, ‘his simplifications turned out to be new mystifications.’ When the reality of the working class’s diverse interests are abstracted away from in theory, in practice a chain of solidarity made of the class’s distinct segments is made more difficult to link together. For class struggle to ratchet up into a political movement with increasingly widespread support from the working class as such, programmatic attention to the conditions of its distinct segments is necessary.

Marxism faces a prediction problem; as a static theory it appears disproven by its own subject. Following the long depression of the late 1800s, orthodox Marxists thought capitalism was on the verge of permanent collapse, but capitalism adapted, then nationalism won out over international class consciousness at the ballot box in the lead up to the first world war. Contrary to the developmentalist-productive-forces theory, revolutions predominantly occurred in agrarian societies rather than advanced capitalist ones. The really-existing socialism these revolutions produced led to authoritarian political structures rather than emancipatory ones. In the advanced capitalist countries the class structure has not become increasingly polarised but fragmented. And perhaps most important of all is the haunting spectre of John Maynard Keynes: the state has proven its ability to stabilise capitalism through increased interventions.

Its critics use these anomalies to discredit Marxism. But as the late sociologist Michael Burawoy showed, Marxism is a dynamic Lakatosian research program that thrives only by incorporating the uneasy facts time forces upon it into the questions it asks and politics it offers. Marxism is in dialogue with the past in a tireless search for emancipatory paths to the future in the contradictions of the present. To thrive, Marxism must reconstruct itself. But we live in a world in which this theoretical task is not inevitably undertaken. There are forks in the road, life’s crooked timber, where we sometimes take the wrong path, and only later come to see our mistakes. The late-nineteenth-century belief in the inevitability of socialism, what Stuart Hall referred to in ‘For a Marxism Without Guarantees,’ as ‘a single homogenous and predictable process’, was a form of theoretical degeneration that ‘did serious damage to Marxism’ for decades.

By theoretical degeneration, I do not mean merely a shrinking of the number of intellectuals or a lessening of the significance of social theory and theorists: as in the early twentieth century, both are arguably more popular than ever before. Rather, I mean the erosion of coherent emancipatory frameworks that incorporate the contradictions of the present. In their stead has grown up a reactive and accommodationist theory that (perhaps unintentionally) accepts some of the right’s own viewpoints.

We can see plainly that when it comes to theory the right is in a moment of reconstruction. Its ideas are bubbling and frothing, becoming increasingly unbound to liberal notions of individual freedom and liberty that anchored it in the commonsense of the past. Theorists, politicians, and many leading CEOs today publicly embrace openly anti-democratic and hierarchical visions of the future where domination is celebrated as a good. And they increasingly have a shared understanding of the principal causes of our crises: the woke riff raff becoming too emboldened in our institutions and streets. In our hearts, we know that the Left, by contrast, has become theoretically defensive, ceding terrain on these points. But theorists are not floating brains. Our theoretical degeneration is a symptom of defeat – of the demobilisation of the emancipatory movements that followed the 2008 downturn. From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter to the Women’s March, the long 2010s were dominated not only by the right’s reaction but also by popular revolt and protest. Once this protest wave was exhausted, redirected, and captured by elites themselves, the right was unleashed to advance anti-democratic plans and fantasies openly.

On the contemporary Right, gonzo theorists like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land offer visions of corporate-monarchism and techno-determinism that defend social hierarchy and domination, between people, and people and machines. A decade ago, both were at the cultural margins, far outside ‘the cathedral’. Today both right-wing and left podcasters and YouTubers dissect their (often internally incoherent) ideas like texts that can decode the truths of our times. We can historicise these strange intellectual stars though, and find similar figures sprouting up, in another period: interwar Europe, when the continent stood between workers’ revolution and the installation of fascism. In that crucial moment between the German Revolution of 1918 and the blood and soil that was consecrated in the state after the Reichstag fire in 1933, many of Europe’s leading thinkers turned sharply against the democratic and egalitarian ideals at the heart of the Marxist political project.

Yarvin’s concept of the CEO-monarch in his proposals for neocameralism echoes proto-fascist Oswald Spengler’s vision of the Caesars in The Decline of the West, dictators who impose social order by force when democracy exhausts itself and proves itself unworkable. While Spengler’s Caesars subdue money interests and democracy in favor of Western culture, Yarvin’s monarchs subdue culture and democracy in favor of money interests. Yet at their core, both think democracy has become ineffectual, corrupting effective governance, and that centralised personal rule is the only solution.

Nick Land’s accelerationism celebrates capitalist technology as self-propelling, a rapid force humans can’t and shouldn’t try to resist. We must embrace the ‘dark enlightenment,’ where autocratic techno-elites steer the state like algorithmic monarchs, allowing self-propelled AI to determine human life, if such a thing even still exists in the future. Land certainly doesn’t seem to want human life to persist and flourish. Our history, for Land, must be destroyed entirely. This imaginary has echoes of a Futurist past. Interwar Italian Futurists, such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, similarly glorified the machine over man. They embraced the speed of modern technology and economic organisation, which they celebrated as violently sweeping away a stagnant past. Both hold contempt for democracy and humanism. Whereas the Futurists wanted to liberate machine aesthetics from human culture, Land wants to liberate machine intelligence, as such, from human constraints.

Read Alexander Dugin’s so-called ‘fourth political theory’, which claims to transcend liberalism, communism, and fascism and you will similarly find booming echoes of Julius Evola, the Italian fascist philosopher whose Revolt Against the Modern World has become a favorite of the bookshelf Right. Evola’s esoteric traditionalism, which celebrates aristocratic virtue and pre-republican Roman hierarchies and scorns egalitarian modernity and the popular rabble, has become the new Right’s conceptual vocabulary.

Here we face something of a paradox: the Right is in a period of profound ideological reorganisation and empowerment, while the capitalist class itself is increasingly disorganised. Gone are the days when business associations like the Chamber of Commerce or the Business Roundtable spoke on behalf of a class unified on a coherent program, despite its internal divisions and competitive squabbles. And where global capital does gather, at places like the World Economic Forum in Davos, whether evidenced in self-serving forms of ‘sustainable development’ just a few years ago or Mark Carney’s ‘middle powers’ survival plan for a ruptured great powers world, the global capitalist class seems wholly incapable of articulating a shared agenda. They are disorganised but nonetheless dominant. Now, firms and CEOs use political favors and groveling, bending the knee as it were, to extract exceptions and gifts from the state. When it comes to the capitalist state, it would at least appear that momentarily it has taken a Bonapartist form.

But class disorganisation is only part of the story. What happens in its absence, aside from the groveling and favor-begging? The ruling class today is in a period of high epochal decadence and therefore visible decay. By this I do not mean it is in decline or weakening: it is more exploitative, extractive, imperialist and powerful than ever before. But in this cultural context, where the symbols and positions of the ruling class are so unsettled and their worldview disrupted, the would-be philosopher CEO has emerged. The well-heeled bureaucratic experts of the Fordist and neoliberal era have been traded in for philosophical dabblers disconnected from democratic accountability and the constraints of popular culture. They openly fantasise about colonising Mars and turning every worker into a robot, like Elon Musk, or cryogenic freezing and the coming of the Antichrist, like Peter Thiel. That conspiracy theories and apocalyptic thinking run through the Right and the highest echelons of the corporate class today is evidence of their decay.

History never repeats itself; historical analogies are therefore never exact. But there are echoes from the past in the present, that capture our thoughts and frame our options. To answer the question ‘is it fascism or isn’t it?’ fundamentally depends on the characteristics you ascribe to fascism and at what stage we are in our fascist, not-yet-fascist or other-than-fascist turn. How concrete or abstract one’s definition of a thing is goes a long way in determining what that definition can describe in the present. But the thinkers of the Right, marginal as some may appear to be to people looking the other way, reflect an emergent right-wing commonsense that coheres in the ruling class and that similarly took hold in Europe’s interwar period: democracy is exhausted, the vox populi can’t be trusted, and the nativist fragments of the working class must be incorporated into a state-led nationalist project. In the Right’s current vision, the future belongs to authoritarian forms of governance that embrace human (and non-human) hierarchy. Horrific as it is, the Right is achieving real theoretical reconstruction.

What has been the response of left theory? Segments of the academic and writerly Left have accommodated these right-wing reactions into their own work, similarly criticising the very movements of the long 2010s that put liberals and the Right on the defensive for the first time in decades. These are the movements that forced the elite to capture the polysemic field of ‘identity politics’ in the first place. In the US, Black Lives Matter protests, climate activists, the student-based campus occupations against the genocide in Gaza, the women’s movement, the Democratic Socialists of America itself, and even labour movements when they emerge in the context of the university, are all cast as insufficiently class-based. In each of these arenas, we are led to believe that a professional managerial class of elites has dominated them, using them to both project their own guilt and create pathways to upward mobility.

A recent book that has had a warm reception among so-called ‘class-first’ Marxists advances a Bourdieusian account of this recent history. Communications professor Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke places particular causal weight for our contemporary crises on the power of a group he calls ‘symbolic capitalists’. Symbolic capitalists, according to al-Gharbi, do mental labor, relying on symbols, images, data, analysis and abstractions, making their living doing non-manual work, or at least aspiring to do so. If we are to believe the argument, they are the elite and ‘wokeness’ their cultural capital; in Marxist terms it is the ruling ideology. And on this cultural terrain, liberals and the Left have sharply converged. The American Left’s fiercest champion of normalcy, Dustin Guastella, calls the book a ‘necessary intervention.’

The basic argument of the book is that wokeness is a means of elite legitimation and a means of professional advancement in particular kinds of intra-elite competitions. Borrowing a phrase from the blogger Matt Yglesias, it argues that we have just gone through a ‘Great Awokening.’ The story goes like this: new educational opportunities generated elite overproduction (too many elites); this has limited opportunities for advancement for elites (more elites relative to elite occupational positions), which created the incentive to ‘go woke’ (presumably mainly for women and elites of colour) to edge out others in elite professional fields. Is this wokeness stuff all merely liberal virtue-hoarding and PMC politics as art professor Catherine Liu or geographer Matt Huber would also lead us to believe? Adopting this view misses fundamental bottom-up dynamics in the class struggles of the last two decades, simplifying that history far beyond caricature.

Many of these political positions rest on incoherent and chaotic theoretical concepts. The first such concept is ‘symbolic capitalists’ itself, whose incoherence extends to certain uses of the so-called ‘professional middle class’ in political discourse. In al-Gharbi’s account those that fall into this category vary widely. They include artists, teachers, adjuncts, professors, journalists, lawyers, psychologists, medical professionals, people in advertising, entertainers, consultants, architects and designers, IT specialists, nonprofit workers, bankers, accountants, financial advisers, brokers, traders, corporation chairpersons, entrepreneurs, and corporate executives, to provide a large, but not exhaustive list. These, we are led to believe, advance in their professions with the symbolic capital of wokeness, using their claims of identity and victimhood, as ‘totemic capital’ like skills on a resume. Of course, there are also anti-woke individuals in these professional spaces, but that is merely a flex, according to this argument, intended to undermine the dominant woke ideology and open opportunities for new advancement in crowded fields.

That both adjuncts, scrambling for courses to eke out money to pay rent, and Wall Street CEOs, extracting more than ever, are cast as elites should make us pause. Are adjuncts and lecturers really the primary winners in the prevailing social order when the academy as a whole moves increasingly to make their labour more precarious and underpaid? The analysis becomes further confused when we are led to believe that these symbolic capitalists are the primary ‘drivers’ of inequality, by purchasing goods and services from corporations like DoorDash, GrubHub, Amazon, Lyft/Uber where workers are highly exploited. Note that the exploitative flows here are to the consumers of these goods, not the firms making the profits. As an alternative, might not the broader issue be that even in Bourdieusian terms, the discourse of wokeness and anti–wokeness are themselves specific to a particular professional field, and ultimately not of much relevance one way or the other to working-class people, some of whom are themselves in those fields? And beyond Bourdieu, might not the broader transformation here be that capitalism unbound has led to an increased proletarianisation of large sections of mental labour?

Perhaps strangest of all, the theoretical degeneration I am identifying is particularly acute in precisely these symbolic professions, the ivory tower and certain publishing corners, where tenured academics at elite institutions and highly educated journalists increasingly adopt a posture of systematic self-criticism, treating their own milieu as part and parcel of the identity politics that liberal politicians use as a smoke screen to advance their own extractive ruling-class projects. When the former Compact magazine editor Sohrab Ahmari uses anti-wokeness to launch a public smear campaign of Zohran Mamdani’s new Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, Cea Weaver, it’s clear that anti-wokeness is serving the landlords. While all things associated with wokeness are dismissed as an elitist project – presumably also most of the bottom-up politics of the long 2010s that lacked explicit class rhetoric or occurred outside the workplace – even in our anti-woke moment elites seem to nonetheless come out ahead.

Something doesn’t smell right about the new Marxist common sense. How could the largest protest wave in America, often sparked by young people of colour in the poorest neighborhoods, merely be the effect of professionals looking to advance their own careers? Were the protest waves of the long 2010s all just an elite-driven ‘awokening’ to be retrospectively dismissed, and Left politics framed against?

The explanation of this new catechism is perhaps simpler than it seems. Both the HR-mandated wokeness that inconvenienced America’s elite institutions (universities, the media, the state, etcetera) and the anti-wokeness that now snaps back in the opposite direction in those same places, are part of a single professional field that was quite disconnected from those neighborhoods where working-class protests erupted in the first place. As those protests spread, they nonetheless increasingly implicated these professional spaces through different forms of student activism. In successive waves, students protested right-wing speakers; they led campus-based Black Lives Matter protests to pressure universities to redirect resources into student initiatives; they combined with graduate students and university lecturers to lead union campaigns and in some cases wildcat strikes; and they occupied zones of the university to pressure administrations to divest endowments from companies profiting from the genocide in Gaza. While woke/ anti-woke discourse is mainly a story of professionals; and their conversations and debates with each other, its origin in the university is a clear backlash against student-worker activism.

The more important question for Marxism is, how were the demands of the oppressed, which were simultaneously both redistributive demands and demands for dignity, articulated on the ground in working-class communities and workplaces before they were absorbed by liberal elites, and what does that tell us about the possibility of coalition formation between the segments of the working class? It was only after they were absorbed and captured that they became ‘wokeness’ to use professionally, and transformed into virtues to hoard. But again, what of those original demands, those which were undeniably bottom-up and firmly rooted in working-class life? When Occupy Wall Street was launched in New York City in 2011, its principal demands were not only about banking regulation but also about systemic political corruption and the need for economic redistribution. The demands that emerged from the protest wave were: overturning Citizens United vs the FEC; breaking up banks ‘too-big-to-fail’; raising minimum wages; and creating a single-payer healthcare system. When protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 after the officer shooting of Michael Brown, was this merely wokeness? The protests emerged from a suburb that was nearly 70 per cent Black and had seen its poverty rate double since the early 2000s. The demands were not only related to the charging of Darren Wilson and police accountability, but also for better municipal services and more political representation.

Ignoring this entire first phase of the long 2010s, ranging from the Occupy encampments to the Black insurgencies that made Black Lives Matter namable, entirely displaces the agency of the working-class in shaping our recent history. We are led to believe workers are only passive and, to the extent that they are able to exert force on politics, it is only via a self-harming ressentiment when they are incorporated into Trumpian and other right-populists coalitions, which offers no real material rewards.

For anyone who cares about the agency of the working class, it’s this first phase in the cycle that holds promise for emancipatory politics. And yet, nearly all the Marxists critics of woke politics on the Left today omit this fundamental question. This has created a left intelligentsia increasingly afraid of its own positions: ‘we support gay rights, we just don’t foreground them.’ Rather than defending expansive visions of justice and materialism – i.e. the visions that might be the basis of coalition formation – these left theorists claim legitimacy by appealing to ‘popular things’.

This pitting of identity politics against economic populism is a false one, based on a deep misunderstanding of both capitalism and class itself. It is the result of the theoretical impasse of class abstractionism, which under the guise of materialism in fact sinks the Left into the Right’s discourse. The basic point is this: without the direct threat of popular unrest, right-wing elites have been emboldened to reframe the debates about redistribution into culture wars over language and symbols. Democratic demands, equality, and diversity, have increasingly become subjects of elite skepticism rather than elite capture. And significant portions of the Left have accepted the Right’s reframing as simple political realism.

For the Left, the interwar period again offers uneasy comparisons. In 1930s France, Marcel Déat and a faction of the Socialist Party (SFIO) adopted fascist slogans and rhetoric to appeal to the middle classes. They believed that by accommodating nationalist and hierarchical sentiments, they could maintain political relevance. The outcome was catastrophic: they became Nazi collaborators. In Belgium, Henri de Man, a leader of the Belgian Labour Party, articulated ‘plannism,’ a vision which replaced the goal of socialism with the idea of a national plan managed by technical experts. Crucially, de Man celebrated authoritarianism as a potential solution to democratic deadlock. When Belgium was occupied by Germany, de Man’s intellectual work had already prepared the ground for collaboration.

These cases are examples of how theoretical degeneration creates the conditions for political catastrophe. When the Left accepts the Right’s premises about democracy’s perversity, dangers, and futility, they are not better positioning themselves to win in a culture war; they are giving up in a war of position. In our context, where working-class communities are under attack by agencies such as ICE, this is precisely the risk associated with left calls to support anti-immigrant sentiments, by politicians like Germany’s Sahra Wagenknecht or Nebraska’s Dan Osborn and publications like Compact magazine, who see multiculturalism as failed policy.

Yet not all degeneration follows the same trajectory; it too follows down many possible roads. Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, sociologists and leading Swedish social democrats (hardly fascists), reveal a more complex pattern. Their 1934 book, Crisis in the Population Question, is considered a founding blueprint for Swedish social democracy. It offered a defense of pronatalist welfare policies (free day care, after school programs, summer camps, lower taxes on workers, more expansive public housing, as well as other policies to increase worker capacity for consumption and therefore family expansion) but it also explicitly advocated eugenic policies such as forced sterilisation of those deemed ‘unfit’ to ensure a ‘quality’ population. The Social Democratic Party adopted this recommendation in their sterilisation laws the same year and subsequently forced about 63,000 ‘unfit’ women to forgo childbearing until the law was abolished in 1975.

This was not conversion to fascism. But it was an accommodation to right-wing views at the time. It was, as historian Nils Gilman notes, a matter of ‘political expediency.’ Just as ‘anti–wokeness’ has emerged as a consensus view among elites after Trump’s second election, so in the early twentieth century eugenics was common sense and the common ground between many progressive and conservative causes. Sterilisation programs were not simply adopted in Nazi Germany; they found their origins in United States social progressivism and became policy in social-democratic countries like Denmark, Finland, and Norway. Though both Alva and Gunnar supported the 1941 expansion of the program, by 1938 Gunnar himself was expressing private reservations that it had ‘a smell of Nazism.’ After 1941, the Myrdals would no longer publicly comment on sterilisation.

This distinction, between outright ideological conversion and the acceptance of anti-democratic logics within left frameworks, is crucial. Periods of theoretical degeneration like ours are typically interpreted as examples of clear-cut left-to-right conversion. Sometimes, in fact, they are – as in the cases of Déat and de Man. But more often, they are characterised as the acceptance of the Right’s framing of the issues that most define the problems of the conjuncture as the baseline terms of our cultural discourse. Theoretical degeneration, therefore, is often theory in the service of political tactics rather than rigorous theory building. It therefore offers something in between conversion and fidelity to the course. But those that let themselves slip into it nonetheless allow their own theoretical problematics to be driven by the Right’s discourse. In the interwar period, it was deep hostility to democratic institutions, a rejection of the labour movement, and the embrace of hierarchy and eugenics. Today, it is hostility to ‘woke’ cultural and political institutions and popular movements and the embrace of nationalistic identity.

If not tailism, what might be an actual attempt to reconstruct left theory today? Articulation. Stuart Hall usefully defined articulation as, ‘a structure in which things are related, as much through their differences as through their similarities’. When it comes to class struggle, the crucial problem of our time isn’t merely that liberals absorbed woke politics. ‘Woke’ liberalism had exhausted its possibilities even before the cottage industry of anti–woke books and magazine articles erupted. Indeed, the existence of the industry and the high demand for its authors itself is possible largely because their subject was already a historical one rather than a contemporary one. The crucial problem today is the segmentation of the working class and the demobilisation of movements. Drawing on Hall’s analysis of the articulation of differences allows us to move toward the politics of solidarity as something we actively construct through negotiating and mediating these differences, as against an ‘orthodox’ Marxism in which differences are deliquesced in favor of some abstract and homogenous class that only exists in podcasts and lectures.

The difficult task of left thought is not how to accommodate to the shift of the right and their electoral victories – that can only be politically disastrous – but rather the reconstruction of emancipatory frameworks adequate to our historical moment. This is far harder to accomplish than simply being blown one way or another by the vicissitudes of ‘popular’ discourse. Nor can the renewal we so desperately need reject political realism in favor of romantic ideals. Instead, it requires the recovery of theoretical rigour that cuts through the cultural bog to recover the real movement of democratic and egalitarian ideals in contemporary life. We must not let the Right’s terms define our analysis, or our praxis.

Michael McCarthy is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal and The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (and a Radical Plan to Rebuild It). In addition to scholarly writing, his work has been featured in Boston Review, The Guardian, Hammer & Hope, Jacobin, The New York Times and The Washington Post. He is currently writing about class, democracy and political identity.

This essay appears in Salvage #16: The Construction Site of Hell (Autumn/Winter 2025).