Finally, a book on and from the left that constitutes, as a certain sort of Englishman might say, a “proper” bit of thinking! Or, as a certain sort of lawyer might say, an “actionable” analysis and argument, that is, a book which can serve as a basis for action—and thinking politically again. In addition to making the case for a re-politicized cultural studies that does a lot more than endlessly produce ludic commentaries on banal cultural phenomena, Michael Bérubé’s The Left as War gives us the opportunity to seriously reflect on our world. Though Bérubé claims the mantle of a democratic socialist, I want to argue that his analysis and argument are more properly Marxist, in contrast to those who more ostentatiously inhabit that category, like Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, whose non-political and actually non-Marxist thought I will briefly consider below. Bérubé’s work is political, and Marxist, because it seeks to engender a better world on the basis of what is immanent in this one, and not on the basis of its infantile rejection. His book is political in daring us to give up the certainty that so many of us on the left feel that we have it all figured out, if not the details, then the broad outlines. To wit, most of us, though fully linked in to all the benefits derived from the horrible past—air travel, telecommunications, computer technologies—nonetheless purport to be the arch enemy of the present, the capitalist, neoimperialist, patriarchal, heteronormative, liberal democratic present. What enables our certainty is our conviction that we know who the bad guys are—and they are, when all is said and done, us—and so by a simple if not very rigorous logic we know who the good guys are—anyone who is against us.
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