Helsing posted:

Given how quickly this article has been spread around the web I think it is clear that it addresses something important. Obviously part of the appeal here is that it may tell certain people what they want to hear, but I also think it's pretty clear that people really do feel, wrongly or rightly, that this article is relevant to their lived experiences. As such I think it's important for serious leftists to read this article in a thoughtful and careful manner.

I have to say that from my own experiences I think that while there are some pretty serious issues with the author's argument, she does have a point. Anti-intellectualism and groupthink are serious problems amongst the contemporary left.

Now I hasten to add that I don't think they are problems unique to the left. They are common symptoms of any political movements. However, I think they are a problem for the left because the left is much weaker than the right. A right wing organization can sustain a lot more groupthink because they have access to corporate largesses and are typically welcomed into their respective movement. The right is articulating ideas that are helpful to the people in power so the right gets a level of institutional and monetary support that radical leftists are simply never going to receive. By contrast, the left has very little institutional support and very little money (which is necessary to do most things, like rent an office, print flyers, publish journals, pay people to do full time organizing, provide food and drink at gatherings, attract speakers, etc.).

So while the left and the right (and liberals for that matter) all indulge in dogmatism and groupthink, those practices are going to be a lot more damaging to a leftwing organization for the simple reason that the left is weaker and just cannot afford to waste resources or energy.

I also think the author does a better job than they intended of illustrating why rigorous theory is so important for the left. Here's what I considered the most interesting passage in the article:


The problem is that when you're low on theory and high on moral outrage you produce exactly the sort of activist that the author turned out to be. Just look at how the author was superficially attracted to anarchism, tumblr-feminism and generic anti-capitalism. She developed these beliefs more out of passion than out of any kind of theoretical understanding of why, say, contemporary capitalism and patriarchy might have a strong and substantive link.

So once the author's passions waned it was very easy for her to abandon these beliefs since their actual intellectual roots were very shallow. She may have been genuinely outraged at one point but she never seems to have developed much of an understanding of the theoretical left. She just had this powerful but vague sense that capitalism and oppression were linked. That clearly isn't a sufficient position from which to launch a sustained critique of capitalism.

If the left can't provide convincing theoretical explanations for why it can solve the problems of capitalism then it's never going to migrate far off of university campuses, and it's going to constantly lose recruits once people graduate and are forced to deal with the pressures of getting a job, paying off their loans, and generally starting their adult life.

So in conclusion I'd say that the biographical details given by the author actually support her thesis: her leftism was based more on emotion than reason, and as such once she left campus she quickly abandoned her commitment to any kind of radicalism.

But while the author doesn't display much theoretical understanding of the left, her comments on the attitude of many young activists rings true for me. More humility and less dogmatism are in order, and there are too many leftists who are basically unwilling to acknowledge any viewpoint except their own as legitimate. Unfortunately I think certain theoretical tendencies currently in vogue on the left exacerbate this problem.