Not so much pro-Twinkies as anti-anti-Twinkies

There seems to be a growing confusion in certain quarters that those of us who argue against the back-to-the-land types, 'simple living', localism, or related forms of contemporary anti-modern nostalgia, think that there is nothing progressive in the pre-modern past that can be recovered and used.

But no one says this at all. I’ll happily conceded that there are lots of examples of cooperative behaviour from the past — indeed, cooperation and altruism existed prior to the existence of homo sapiens — that can be admired and act to some extent as sources of inspiration.

Rather, the argument is simply against those who argue against modernity and what they vilify as 'productivism', against those who mistakenly believe that a retreat from industry, progress, science, technology, consumption, growth and anything large-scale is a path toward social justice and optimal maintenance of ecological services useful to humans. The modernist position also argues that such a retreat would actually result in enormous human suffering and do nothing to arrest climate change or biodiversity loss anyway.

Similarly, the modernist argument is also not against artisanal anything; rather the argument is against those who think that artisanal products are inherently more humane than industrial products.

Another way of putting this — if we try to understand all this with respect to a certain industrially baked sponge-cake product with a cream-like filling — is that the modernist argument is not so much pro-Twinkie as anti-anti-Twinkie.

As an example of this sort of confusion, let’s look at this interview at People and Nature with French literature scholar Kristin Ross about her new book on the Paris Commune, Communal Luxury, which in many respects looks to be a fascinating work about a pivotal moment in left history, albeit with some erroneous conclusions if this and other interviews are a fair indication of the key arguments of the book.

I'm alighting on Ross largely because one anti-modernist cretin this afternoon [not linkable, malheureusement] took to celebrating her book in this way: “If Kristen Ross's book on the Commune rekindles interest in the later Marx and his exchange with Vera Zasulich on the Russian peasant commune-against productivist fanboys' breathless citations of the same few passages of the [Communist] Manifesto* in defence of fully automated luxury butt plugs and the Starship Enterprise-she will have earned her place in the red pantheon of the future.” [links added to speculate on what my excitable little Tasmanian Devil of an interlocutor is likely referring to here]

But I bear no particular animus to Ross; indeed I'm very keen to read the book. Nonetheless, she says: “One of the things I find so exciting about these thinkers [who celebrated the communards such as William Morris, Peter Kropotkin, Elisée Reclus, Nikolai Chernyshevsky and the late Marx] is their ability to work with, and treasure, forms of uneven temporality,” and to embrace the rural Russian peasant commune as a form of social organisation “anchored in the past and yet as possible prefigurations of another route.”

To the extent that we can at any point look to the past and note some partially beneficial structure, there is nothing at all wrong with this — so long as we do not romanticize these pre-capitalist structures, or worse still, call for a return to them. Ross recognizes the potential pitfall here: “The Russian rural communes were not models for the future in some simplistic way. They were, for example, patriarchal, and oppressive in other ways.”

But then she makes precisely the error that she warns against by implicitly counterposing the artisanal forms that she says are at the heart of the Commune project to industry proper:

“It’s significant that a large percentage of the Communards were art workers – they worked in the arts and crafts industries, they were artisans, they had an artisanal formation. There is a primacy of arts-and-crafts labour at the centre of the Commune; that model of a useful production is at the centre of their culture. … [19th Century socialist writer] William Morris posed the problem by considering the impossibility under capitalism of that kind of solidarity that existed among crafts workers engaged in useful production.”

The argument here that artisanal or craft labour permits a “kind of solidarity” not available under industrial production is not unrelated to our current popular emphasis on the local small business, farmers’ market or artisanal craftsperson as performing the Lord’s own work against the faceless mega-corporations. But this argument — the sort of argument that used to be disdained on the left as ‘petty bourgeois’— is ignorant of the causes of exploitation and oppression, which have nothing to do with size, but the need of capital to self-valorize, an imperative that exists under capitalism at all scales, big and small. If that imperative can be done away with, then it does not matter at which scale production is mounted. 

Again, to be clear, the critique of this small-is-beautiful argument is not an argument against craft beer or local bakeries; if the aesthetic of these operations is what people want, bully for them. The critique is an argument against those who posit small as an inherently more egalitarian and environmentally friendly mode of production than large. There is no evidence that this is true; indeed there is growing evidence to the contrary (small-scale localist agriculture for example is more carbon-intensive that intensive agriculture).

Capitalism unleashed heretofore untold productive forces, simultaneously enchaining billions and transforming billions of lives for the better. But the full potential is never realized, as the set of things that are profitable is smaller and not completely overlapping with the set of things that are useful to humanity. This is the ‘productivist’ argument: In order to develop an ebola vaccine, for example, we have had to step outside the market, and depend upon the public sector and medical charities. Imagine what forces could be unleashed, how much better the human condition could be, if production were completely unfettered from the shackles of capitalism. But make no mistake: this is more stuff, more production, more consumption, more growth.

Call this traditional left argument against such petty bourgeois distraction and in favour of modernity and the Radical Enlightenment 'futurism' or 'Jetsonism' if that floats your reactionary boat, but it's tilting at windmills that aren't there. 

We’ve always celebrated our past accomplishments, but have done this alongside the knowledge that modernity was progressive, decisive break with all previous ways of living and thinking. It is conservatives that have always emphasized the past as superior, while progressives are confident that the best that our species has accomplished lies ahead of us.

To my mind, the contemporary, pervading emphasis on the past is itself a product of the neoliberal cancelation of the future, of the Thatcherite command that There Is No Alternative. With an egalitarian future foreclosed now for three or four decades, people begin to look to the past for their utopias. In this way, even as they believe themselves to be raging against neoliberalism, their ideas are actually a product of the very neoliberal delimiting of the horizon of our imagination they want to overcome.

--

* Sadly for the cretin's attempt at an appeal to authority, Marx's 'productivism' can be found not just in runs the Manifesto, but consistently through his oeuvre, including such minor works as the German Ideology, the Grundrisse and Capital. If anything, the formulation of how capital fetters production in the Manifesto is naïve compared to the concept's further development in Marx's thought, and how the realm of freedom is expanded as the realm of necessity (human labour) is diminished by expanding productive forces. Not that it should matter what Marx actually said anyway. If something is correct or incorrect, it is because it is correct or incorrect, not because of who said it.

Bunfight over Jacobin’s ‘culinary luddites’ article

Jacobin magazine this morning published a trenchant polemic, ‘A Plea for Culinary Modernism’, by historian and philosopher of science and technology Rachel Lauden, against the current trend toward foodie politics (local, organic, paleo, anti-GMO, gluten-free, CSA, food sovereignty, etc.) and in favour of industrial food production. It’s also quite a long read and an extensive history of our relationship to food since our emergence as a species.

I found Lauden’s piece to be a superb corrective to the foodie parts of a broader category of anti-modernist politics that I strongly disagree with. Evidently many other progressives are feeling the same way, as the piece (actually a reprint from Gastronomica magazine) has been exceptionally widely shared. However, the Facebook comments underneath the post on Jacobin’s page suggest that many, many people also hated the essay: “Epic Jacobin fail.” “Absolute bullshit article.” “One of the stupidest articles you've ever published. Hipster contrarianism in its purest form.” “I'm not going to read this article.”

One of the people who really, really disliked it was Anthony Galluzzo, a Facebook friend of mine (but whom I’ve never actually met in the flesh) who, like me, is a regular Jacobin contributor, and also, like me, has written what I suppose could be called ‘pro-modernity’ pieces. He was one of the last people whom I thought would disagree with Lauden.

I’m publishing here our friendly argument from the aforementioned thread on Jacobin’s FB page because such threads are ephemeral and I thought this one was worth preserving.

As you’ll see, I disagree with a lot of what Anthony says, but far from everything, and all of it in any case is much more considered and subtle than the usual kneejerk anti-modernist reaction to anti-anti-modernist critiques.

Anthony starts off, and then our mutual friend Will Hough invites me to respond. There have been no edits to the original conversation with the exception of the addition of a few paragraph breaks to make for easier reading. 

--

Anthony Galluzzo Historical accuracy isn't really my criterion for whether food is good or not. "Artisanal"-another flavor of gourmet-is better aesthetically. And as noted below, too many straw men or rather straw hippies here.

Yes, we need a better, more sustainable, large scale industrial agriculture, of which small scale organic farming will form a tiny part. Why always these antinomies? So our only choice is between McDonalds ("edible" garbage) and "Luddism"? This is a C student-level example of the false dichotomy. And why are the masses consigned to Big Macs again? Note the subtle hints of reactionary cultural populism-fancy food is only for fancy people, after all!

And as for celebrating bad mass produced food as a "modernist" gesture...this increasingly predictable kitsch Jetsonism is veering into self-parody at this point. I will take farm-to-table over Soylent any day.

Will Hough I agree re the straw men. As for the rest, I'm hoping Leigh Phillips will help me sort it out.

Anthony Galluzzo The problem isn't the technical point (s) per se-there is a campy aesthetic here-a callow 1950s era futurism (the wonders of Jell-O and canned foods) used as a fuck you to some hypothetical Park Slope neo-hippie. Tiresome.

A sensuously aesthetic life for all-which will include "reconfigured* traditions, many of which were once the province of elites-should be one primary goal of socialism.

And do Michael Pollan or Anthony Bourdain really offer their recipes as historical claims? Please. Sophisticated geek trolling-the future as endless McRibs at the Jetsons' place. Kill me now.

Will Hough This'll do for sorting things out, thanks.

"A sensuously aesthetic life for all-which will include 'reconfigured' traditions, many of which were once the province of elites-should be one primary goal of socialism."

Miguel Antonio Gomez A tiny part? You might want to check your facts, buddy. Small farmers produce most of the world's foodand they are doing this with less than a quarter of the world's farmland.http://www.grain.org/.../4929-hungry-for-land-small...

Anthony Galluzzo I am critiquing the article, if you didn't notice, buddy. My point being that a sustainable future will depend on a better, large scale industrial agriculture and small organic farming. These false dichotomies make for stupid-ideologically coded-debates.

Connor Kilpatrick Anthony Galluzzo, now is the perfect time to confess to you how much I love the Olive Garden's Zuppa Toscana soup.

Anthony Galluzzo Cheer whiz and Spielberg movies-a Marxist vision that even Fox News can get behind, Seriously, I generally love Jacobin, but this article is embarrassing and the constant trolls will only undermine the magazine. Also, some more nuanced takes on environmentalism would be nice. It's not always an either/or.

Anthony Galluzzo Make sure to snap a pic of every McDonalds you visit in Europe, Connor -no "feudal" food for you: #accelerate

Miguel Antonio Gomez Oh but there is a dichotomy, Anthony Galluzzo! There is indeed a big contradiction between the two 'modes of production'! The most obvious one is that they compete for resources: space, land, water, financing, etc...

Anthony Galluzzo So what's your take on the essay, Miguel Antonio Gomez? We need to go all organic and local? Neo-agrarianism? Elaborate.

Anthony Galluzzo What's the Eco-socialist perspective, John Gulick?

Leigh Phillips I'm surprised at your antagonism to the article, Anthony, after the other day, you were quite rightly fulminating against Carol Lipton for her salmagundi of anti-vaxx, primitivist, pseudoscientific, Malthusian, ‘other ways of knowing’, noble-savage brain rot. This essay is countering many of the same tendencies with respect to food. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to all the evidence-phobic, faddish waffle everywhere you go about gluten-free, chemical-free (impossible unless what is on offer is a perfect vacuum, as everything is made of chemicals), paleo, local, all-natural, organic, anti-GMO, etc., etc. It’s not trolling to contest the problems of what the author calls ‘culinary luddism’. It’s not the term I would have chosen, as the Luddites of the 19th Century were a lot more complicated than the term luddism would suggest, but otherwise, the essay is a brilliant, provocative piece of popular history.

More broadly, we are living at a moment when a rainbow of anti-modern ideologies dress themselves up as anti-capitalist, or at least anti-corporate. Yet for all their claim of opposition to capitalism, when you scratch the surface, they very frequently turn out to be quite neoliberal and market-friendly while unconsciously drawing on 19th Century counter-Enlightenment thinking or early 20th Century Blood and Soil reaction, and usually come marinated in postmodernist anti-rationalism and relativism.

We find these counter-Enlightenment ideologies within a great deal of environmentalist thought in particular; within the technophobic opposition to nanotechnology, space exploration, cloning, genetic modification, neuroscience, human enhancement, etc., etc.; within the essentialism of identity politics; within the mysticism of alternative medicine; within the scepticism of civil liberties mounted by safe space, trigger warning, ‘no-platform’ forms of campus censorship; but also within foodie culture. To contest the Malthusianism within environmentalist ideas is not to deny climate change, or stop worrying about overfishing or pollution, say, but to propose real solutions to these problems. To contest technophobia is not to embrace the ‘gadgets + capitalism = awesome’ naïveté of a Wired or Popular Mechanics magazine, but to offer future-oriented egalitarianism. To argue against the magical thinking of alternative medicine is not to abandon our challenge to Big Pharma. To contest the censoriousness, viciousness and victimology of SJW berserkers is not to abandon the fight against racism, misogyny and homophobia, but to argue for a better, universalist mode of campaigning against these phenomena. Similarly with this critique of the ahistoricism of contemporary foodie culture, the argument is not to damn aesthetic pleasure in artisanal food, craft beer, etc., but to remind of their fundamental dependence on industry that has brought so much benefit and how industry is not to be done away with, but captured by us and planned in the interest of all.

A growing number of Marxist writers—myself included and I think a lot of folks in ‘the Jacobin ecosystem’, if you’ll permit me to project a little here—are growing increasingly frustrated with the hegemony of such counter-Enlightenment ideas on the left and are groping towards a way of critiquing them without alienating those who unfortunately but with the best of intentions embrace these ideas. The Accelerationists likewise are largely on the right track, albeit steeped in a philosophical register impenetrable to most. Elsewhere, the self-styled Eco-modernists are interesting and definitely coming up with very good solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss but insufficiently confronting the contradictions of the market system.

Do we always get it right? No. Are we sometimes inelegant, ham-fisted or even sneering in this regard? I’m the first to admit that my curmudgeon performance around these sort of issues is a little clumsy at times. But this isn’t the same as trolling. And for all the fumbles, I remain convinced that our best hope for breaking out of the neoliberal impasse lies in a universalist, global, future-oriented, labour-centric revival of the modernist project, not a small-is-beautiful retreat to some Golden Era that never existed. And so this critique must continue to happen, however maladroit it may be sometimes. (That said, I don’t think this essay is maladroit in any way. It’s a superb piece of writing)

Anthony GalluzzoThe fact that you're surprised illustrates my point, Leigh Phillips-apparently there are only two caricatural positions on this (and other issues) where one is either Carol Lipton-a "hippie" devotee of counterenlightenment-OR an unequivocal advocate of McDonalds.

Some general points: there was no one enlightenment, and romanticism is also a development within the aufklarung-imminent critique-which both Hegel and Marx understood. The problem of alienation and its overcoming was central to Marx's project. I am just as disturbed by scientism and recent attempts to posit some reductionist folk enlightenment-reinventing Marx as a technocrat, for example-as I am opposed to the the obscurantism I critiqued on Ms. Lipton's thread. Both positions are equally false antinomies, as is the opposition between a reified technophilia and a reified technophobia. Human techne must be a conscious, collective, and rational praxis conceived with both material limits and human ends in mind (which include a non-alienated mode of human living, plus the aesthetic, affective, and imaginative dimensions of human self-making).

As for the specific issue addressed in this article, who is advocating the complete abolition of industrial agriculture here? One of the writer's many straw men in what is a very poor article. Certainly not me-look at my comment above. I wrote that we need an industrial agriculture that is better-more sustainable, healthier...and yes, more conducive to aesthetically preferable foods. Such a development does not necessitate the complete abolition of organic farming, which will play one-probably small-role in food production.

As for the article, it is a beastiary of fallacies: for example, modern organic farming is just that: modern. It is dependent on modern agricultural techniques-adapted to a different scale-and does not imply a return to the medieval period or feudal relations of production-a conclusion either dishonest or moronic on the writer's part. You notice the author's historically illiterate use of Luddism-one of many such flaws here. I don't think Michael Pollan, Anthony Bourdain, or other artisinal locavore types-gourmets and gourmands-would claim they are making historical statements about actual peasant diets, nor are they offering a blueprint for revolution; it's better, more aesthetically pleasing-pethaps healthier-food that they advocate in the end. McDonalds is shit. The poor should not have to eat McDonalds, Everyone should be able to eat farm to table luxuries, although it can't make up all of our diet....

Will Hough I'm just going to peek in again to say that I feel like a prize fight promoter.

Anthony Galluzzo...and I am sorry, but it is hard not to see in this essay a certain, deliberately provocative, cultural politics, camouflaged as no bullshit empiricism. It's bash the straw hippie married to a reactionatey populism-McDonalds FUCK YEAH!-that I can also detect in other forms (celebratory paeans to the blockbuster mode of culture industry). Sophisticated trolling, which sometimes mars a magazine with which I am in broad agreement.

Also, I see no value in equating eco-radicalism, SJWs, and trigger warnings under the broad, and largely meaningless, category of irrationalism; while I might be opposed to these phenomena individually, they are distinct things and must be criticized on their own terms.

The team sport mentality-with its cartoonish misrepresentations (primitivist! futurist! You either accept the entirety of a position or you are the enemy or an SJW or a witch) is as far from dialectical as you can get, while intellectual progress won't happen when our only two argumentative modes-and this isn't directed at you in particular-are snark or cheerleading.

Anthony Galluzzo I am done. This consumed my whole day. My two cents.

Will Hough ...and that I do agree with Anthony that the article situates the debate in a false either/or way.

Leigh Phillips Because I’m running late with some other things, bullet points will have to suffice, Anthony. I appreciate the thought that has gone into your reply, and from your status updates, I really think you’re a mensch and would very much like to meet you in the flesh one day. But nonetheless:

- Who is promoting this scientism and technophilia? Where exactly on the left does this dominate? Really where? This is the real straw man.

- Rather, it is po-mo anti-realism, anti-positivism, relativism, scepticism of science, small-is-beautiful gemeinschaft and identity politics that is hegemonic.

- If there’s anywhere that can be said to remain home to technophilia and scientism, it’s Silicon Valley/TED talks neoliberalism. Again, find me a defender of this on the left.

- Who is cheerleading, being snarky? Laudan’s piece is really thoughtful, very well written, and empirically backed. This is the farthest thing from trolling.

- People like Michael Pollen, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein do *indeed* advocate a retreat to the local and small and away from ‘industrialised agriculture’, ‘mega-projects’, ‘extractivism’ (whatever that means), etc, but of course this is a hypocritical muddle, as they consistently are using the products of industry, the large-scale, and mining. These aren’t straw men; they’re bestselling authors.

- Very influential figures on the green left such as Derrick Jensen and Paul Kingsnorth go still further and advocate primitivism. You can buy Jensen’s books at Walmart for a discount. Kingsnorth writes for the LRB. These are not marginal figures.

- Of course there was more than one Enlightenment. The Moderate Enlightenment of Voltaire, Hume, Newton, et al, who made their peace with monarchy, slavery, empire, the Church and capital, and the Radical Enlightenment of Spinoza, D’Holbach, Condorcet, Diderot and Paine, defended and extended by Marx. (This is an oversimplification, to be sure, but, you know, bullet points, as I said. cf. Jonathan Israel’s scholarship in this regard)

- This turn away from the future, from modernity, from Enlightenment, by the left is itself a product of the world-historic defeat of the working class in the 70s/80s and the foreclosure of possibility presented by the collapse of the Soviet Union (a welcome development for freedom-lovers everywhere, but simultaneously the handmaiden of End-of-History capitalist realism). When the future has been cancelled, resistance—such as it exists—degrades into a kind of nostalgia. (Here Mark Fisher’s writing has been absolutely vital) In other words, socialism may no longer be possible, but locally-sourced hand-woven granola underwear is.

- Thus reviving the modernist project and overcoming the neoliberal impasse are one and the same goal.

- Bourdain is no locavore.

- Organic is a complete swindle. (My piece here on that:http://bit.ly/1EorCzf )

- Once you actually consider the evidence for localism, you find it’s counterproductive with respect to GHG emissions (cf. Greg Sharzer’s ‘No Local’; my upcoming ‘Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts’; or Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu’s ‘The Locavore’s Dilemma’)

- There are no hard-and-fast material limits to what humans can do, with the sole exceptions of logic and the laws of physics. The history of our species is a history of overcoming material (natural) limits. Long may our breach of natural limits continue, delivering ever greater degrees of freedom to humanity.

Will Hough Best of the bullets, though maybe the least pertinent to the subject (because the one who arranges the prize fight gets to referee too):

"Of course there was more than one Enlightenment. The Moderate Enlightenment of Voltaire, Hume, Newton, et al, who made their peace with monarchy, slavery, empire, the Church and capital, and the Radical Enlightenment of Spinoza, D’Holbach, Condorcet, Diderot and Paine, defended and extended by Marx. (This is an oversimplification, to be sure, but, you know, bullet points, as I said. cf. Jonathan Israel’s scholarship in this regard)"

Leigh Phillips I’d rather it not be a prize fight at all, Will. Anthony’s point about avoiding snark, cheerleading, and team-sport mentality is really well taken. He is absolutely correct here. It is vital that we not be sectarian. I don’t know if I always get that right. (As I said earlier: I reckon I play the role of curmudgeon in a ham-fisted clumsy way far too often and I always feel gross inside afterward when I do. I became a socialist not because I wanted to jeer at people, but because I love them) …I just don’t think that this applies to Lauden’s very thoughtful piece.

Will Hough I didn't mean it quite in that sense at all, Leigh Phillips, but rather as an aspiring fighter enjoying the opportunity to witness a formidable exchange between allies that is remarkably instructive for a leftist novice like me.

Anthony Galluzzo Leigh-the left is miniscule, but you ask where do we find technophilia/scientism on the left to match the anti-modern strain? We have already discussed accelerationism-the hot new thing-about which I have mixed feelings. I would also call attention to the prominence of new atheism, and Dawkinsite social Darwinism, in certain left liberal circles.

That said, my comments above were directed specifically at Jacobin-there is, I think, a better way to make some of these points without the constant resort to a simplistic contrarian kitsch futurism. This framework doesn't allow for other possibilities-for example, consider a technolocalist scenario in which the majority of the population is concentrated in a mega city surrounded by a massive greenbelt that would provide our urban dwellers with most of their food-a scenario that would involve high tech agricultural methods, transportation, and infrastructure. Whether this arrangement is feasible or not, it's unthinkable within the current terms of the debate (primitivist vs futurist).

I have entertained a Promethean vision as well, but my doubts increase with time-even in such a scenario, technology must serve expansively conceived human ends (including those old humanist Marxist issues, like alienation and species being).

And, I would add to the moderate and radical Enlightenment of Israel, the early romantic or idealist trajectory stretching from Kant through Schiller and Hegel; these were all thinkers for whom imagination, affective life, and the aesthetic state were crucial elements of any substantive rationalism. Fredrick Beiser's work is great on this tradition. This enlightenment shaped Marx.

Another way of putting it is that the 1790s antinomy of proto-futurist rationalism (Paine) and traditionalist historicism (Burke) is synthesized, resolved in Marx. But I have wandered too far afield. We should meet sometime, and I look forward to your book. I still don't like the Jacobin piece: no Big Macs!

Anthony Galluzzo One final point-what distinguishes Marxism from earlier radicalisms is its emphasis on historical conditions, our historicity, as opposed to the rational futurism of a Paine (how Marx combined Paine with Burke in a way). The utopian future isn't a year zero; the new society emerges from the old. Walter Benjamin develops this model in the most compelling way, for me, in depicting the revolution not as an absolute break but a reconfiguration of the past, under which even its victims are redeemed.

This vision informed my comment to Will Hough above about the socialist transformation of historically elite traditions. It is a perspective totally lacking in the Jacobin article, in which the writer would have us reject modern peasant bread because the original was full of sawdust. She can't imagine the ways modernity-which she claims to love-preserves, transforms, and even redeems the past, its traditions and detritus.

Anyway, Corey Robin has recently written thiughtfully on the left and its complex relationship to history, which has disappeared in our current cartoon showdown pitting primitivist ancestor worship against museum burning future fetishism.

Will Hough Benjamin's "Illuminations" is next up in my crowded queue, so I hope he speaks to the dialectical process you talk about here. I'm finally into "Witness Against the Beast" and it seems to me that Thompson's analysis owes a good deal to the same idea re reconfigurations.

Leigh Phillips Hmmm. I have my misgivings about accelerationism as well, but they come more from how writers like Alberto Toscano, Ray Brassier, Benedict Singleton and so on write in the impenetrable register of Continental philosophy (although the Accelerationist Manifesto itself and the writing of Nick Srnicek is much more approachable), and, more importantly, how it sits in the realm of the abstract and seems, as you say, a ‘hot new thing’ that could evanesce tomorrow morning the minute the next philosophical fashion comes along. (Whatever happened to Speculative Realism, for example?).

Meanwhile, there are very real, tangible, contemporary and near-future issues that Accelerationists could apply themselves to, such as the anti-modernist tendencies on the green left (which is far from miniscule; it is the house ideology of the Guardian and most of the multinational multi-million-dollar green NGOs) that is one of many blocks on successfully navigating climate change (which is actually eminently soluble, but, yes, does require large-scale public-sector infrastructure, most notably nuclear power); and the innovation desert of the last four decades that even the EU and World Bank fret about (and, in the case of the absence of new families of antibiotic, the single greatest global public health risk); the effective abandonment of space exploration; the incapacity of neoliberalism to tackle the threat from near-Earth asteroids; how do we navigate the radical open-endedness to further experiment with our nature (species being) that human genetic enhancement may be offering in the next few years; what is the progressive take on strong AI, its risks and benefits; what is to be done about the coming decades of vast unemployment produced by a heretofore undreamt of scale of automation; etc., etc. The Accelerationists intrigue me, but these concrete subjects intrigue me more. I’m curious as to your own misgivings. Nonetheless, I don’t really see any scientism amongst these humanities folks, still less any technophilia. Anti-anti-modernism isn’t isomorphic with technoboosterism.

And I don’t know if I recognise this contrarian kitsch futurism at all. I’d have to be shown examples of that. Your own piece, ‘Soviet Space Opera’, which I much admired (not just for favourably quoting me), could easily be denigrated as such: http://bit.ly/1HA8AuA Or perhaps that’s what you mean when you say you have over time drifted from this prometheanism. But that would sadden me if you’ve abandoned your earlier position. There are so few of us promethean pinkos around.

As for Dawkins and the New Atheists, every leftist and even most liberal lefts I know have very little time for them, correctly identifying the bullying elitism, imperialism and Islamophobia that undergirds their ideas. But even here, these Iraq-war-cheerleading fedora-wearers aren’t quite the same thing as scientism.

What you describe as technolocalism I think fits very much with my own hopes: vast, richly cosmopolitan megalopolises producing their own food within urban limits, dismantling hydroelectric dams that are no longer needed thanks to advanced nuclear fission and fusion, amid a planet of vast tracts of wilderness that are nevertheless human-superintended (return of the woolly mammoth perhaps? Elimination of the mosquito?) for maximum human flourishing and aesthetics is pretty much in keeping with my own hopes, so I think we’re on the same page here. But speak to any typical localist green and they would be horrified at such a vision, even though this returns so much more land back to wilderness than any organic, low-tech agrarian or primitivist society could achieve.

I genuinely care about climate change because of how it threatens human flourishing. But I find that the biggest barrier to enacting the infrastructure changes we need to correct the problem—after the barriers posed by the fossil fuels industry and public-sector-phobic neoliberalism—is the anti-modernism science-scepticism and small-is-beautiful ideology of the green left.

I’m comfortable at recognising the vital, emotion-oriented, affective role played by romanticism/idealism (Jeez, I’m no emotionless, hyper-rationalist robot. I’ve got stirring, rousing Spanish Civil War posters on my wall), so long as we recognise its dangerous seductions as well. I’m more enamoured with Jacob Bronowski—mathematician, biologist, defender of the Enlightenment tradition in ‘The Ascent of Man’, but also poet, playright and biographer of William Blake, and the efforts of CP Snow to overcome the Two Cultures of science and the humanities.

I’ve not read Fredrick Beiser, but I’ll seek him out, and that Thompson book on Blake looks useful too.

Anthony GalluzzoI  haven't abandoned it, Leigh. I think that the absence of a viable left over the last few decades has led the utopian impulse to some strange places. I harp on romanticism because it seems like we are closer to the 1810s and 20s than the era of the communist party-utopian socialists of the primitivist and Promethean variety (Wordsworth vs Godwin, Shelley)... A peculiar landscape. But I like your work, Leigh. I am growing tired of a certain, repetitive Jacobin fixation on SJWs and hippies. Like hipster-bashing, hippie hating can be a reactionary fixation on a symptom that obscures cause.

Will HoughI too think that the fixation on SJWs sometimes gets in the way of working towards viable radical solutions even more than the SJWs complained of get in the way of working toward such solutions. Sometimes, maybe the thing to do is to ignore the sideshow rather than gawk and point at it, since those under the SJW tent thrive on attention. There's no reason that I can see to keep giving it to them, especially if you are sure that they are a distraction and have nothing to offer when it comes to solutions.

Leigh PhillipsYou’re right that we need to be on our guard against a smug hippie hating. There’s certainly a nasty, nerd-elitist strain of ‘we’re smarter than the mouth-breathers’ amongst the liberals in the Skeptic Movement in the US and UK.

The recent mean-spirited cheering of the Australian government’s denial of government services to parents who refuse to vaccinate their children is a concrete example of how anti-hippie triumphalism can quickly run into an inegalitarian ditch. http://bit.ly/1HnJQmH

And the Spiked folks are very good in their defence of modernity, civil liberties and criticism of identity politics, but holy shit the sectarianism of that website! (“Everyone sucks but us.”) And some really bad, hyper-contrarian positions from time to time too: (“Gay marriage is an abandonment of gay liberation. Therefore we’ll back religious anti-gay-marriage conservatives.” WTF?) And above all, they really hide their Marxism under a bushel.

The CPGB in the UK is writing some good things on a number of these points, but, god, ditch the word ‘communism’. It is never going to fly in eastern Europe, or indeed anywhere else, and with good reason.

Platypus are interesting and robustly intellectual amidst a wider, ‘activism-ist’ left that frequently spurns intellectualism, but secretive and hyper-sectarian and have a fetish for the Frankfurt School that I don’t share (not least due to the central role played by Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment in reviving anti-modernism on the left). So I don’t know if anybody has it exactly right yet.

Yet anti-modernism is very real and hegemonic on the left at the moment, and we *have* to figure out how best to challenge this and revive the modernist project.

I actually think that Jacobin is one of the few places where they’re more or less getting it right on how to challenge anti-modernism in a non-sectarian fashion. I feel the same about their tentative criticism of identity politics, especially the writing (in Jacobin and elsewhere) ofAmber A'Lee Frost and Connor Kilpatrick and a few others I can't remember right now (on the latter subject, I think the ISO is also putting out some great things these days). Identity politics is also hegemonic and it too needs to be challenged.

Amber A'Lee Feminists for Big Macs.