This might be old news but it’s kinda wild to me.
You might remember Doug Lain from being the publishing manager when Zero Books rose to prominence, back when Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher made a big splash way back when. He moved on to Sublation Media and seems to be doing roughly the same schtick after Zero got taken over by a different parent publisher. (History seems to rhyme for Doug, getting put into his position at Zero Books with the ouster of the old crew when John Hunt took over only for Watkins Media to take over John Hunt, ingloriously booting Lain out in the process.)
Doug has always been a part of the sorta eclectic post-New Left cultural critique, in that milquetoast style of BreadTube broad left “YouTube Killed The TV Star: Adorno, Benjamin, and the desolate media landscape of late capitalism” or “One-Dimensional Marvel: Marcuse and the MCU” style of slop. Y’know, the stuff where it’s super pretentious and yet deeply tailist of pop culture trends with a smattering of a couple of the quotes from the key text referenced in the title, the same one that every textbook and every first-year student quotes, in order to give the impression that it’s super serious marxist critique when it’s actually just 20-60 minutes of anti-capitalist bellyaching combined with the latest fad.
Yeah, that sort of stuff. He’s good buddies with Ben Burgis who is a hack that has been trying to position himself as the patron philosopher-saint of the progressive-to-socialish left for years now, to little avail.
Welp, turns out that Doug had Peter Coffin on for an interview a month ago here, where he’s uncritically buying into the whole “woke ideology” narrative and all buddy-buddy with Coffin, who is Caleb Maupin’s #1 fan (turns out that Peter Coffin isn’t handling the divorce well). And apparently Doug has been doing some livestreams on Midwestern Marx and MAGA communism (I thought they abandoned that name, but Doug doesn’t really have his finger on the pulse tbh) and he has an upcoming stream on Maupin and Coffin. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to stomach multiple hours of livestreams from Doug Lain about PatSocs and Midwestern Marx to get a read on what his position is.
In one respect this development is totally on-brand for Lain, to be chasing whatever audience and principles be damned (the Angela Nagle bullshit didn’t faze him - doesn’t matter; sold copies, he was quite comfortable hanging out with the stupidpol crowd on Reddit too) but in another respect, his frequent collaborator Ben Burgis has always played at sheepdog to the left by policing the limits to radical left discourse and positioning himself as anti-authoritarian and buying into that anti-communist paradigm so it’s kind of a weird pivot.
I think Peter Coffin’s angle is pretty apparent - he’s just courting a legitimate publisher so that a ghostwriter can do some turd-polishing for whatever he manages to draft, sparing him the indignities of having to self-publish next time around.
But it’s still weird to me. Maybe they’re proving horseshoe theory true and making a connection between the libertarian faux left of people like Lance from The Serfs, Beau of The Fifth Column, and Ben Burgis with the authoritarian faux left like MWM, Maupin, and Coffin where Doug Lain is the connecting point between those two trends. I guess if they’re all on different grifts, and they are, then this would explain how it all fits together neatly.
But on the other hand idk. It feels like the online discourse on the left is reaching a weird inflection point. You have Gabriel Rockhill and his Critical Theory Workshop, Rockhill being closely associated with PSL and someone who should know better, courting the MWM audience. Then you have Doug Lain, who should also know better although I’m not surprised if he doesn’t give a damn, doing a similar thing and he’s broadening out to openly PatSoc audience and not just confining himself to the crypto-PatSoc MWM audience. It’s giving Strasserist vibes tbh.
Luckily it’s online and not the real world, I guess?
It’s gonna be a really awkward moment when Hinkle, Haz, Maupin, Coffin, and MWM drop the pretense and finally jump the shark to become openly fascist, perhaps taking some of these courtiers with them. Imagine having the tankies screaming for years on end about these clowns being fascist in all but name and orbiting Larouchite cutouts with nobody listening because “tankie redfash”, only for this position to be vindicated eventually. Though if history is any guide, those SocDems are gonna find themselves chanting PatSoc slogans side-by-side with the likes of Hinkle, Haz, Eddie and Peter to own the tankies:
We live in interesting times.
Lmao
I’ve been doing some more digging and the COO of Lain’s new publishing group, Ashley Frawley is deep into the anti-woke stuff. Like really deep into it.
I haven’t been able to get a good read on her but she has said some odd things. Not entirely wrong but just that the framing doesn’t sit right with me - she said that Marx didn’t argue for people looking inwards to find their own happiness internally, which is true, but that The Communist Manifesto was written like an ode to capitalism and it extolled the virtues of capitalism, that Marx argued that capitalism has liberated us but in an incomplete fashion (which is true, technically, but it doesn’t come off as a genuine reading of Marx in totality but more as a cherry-picked one and it’s not a very historical reading for someone whose whole thing is historical materialism - if capitalism has liberated us, what has it liberated us from and where have we been delivered to?) and she says that Marx advocated for an expansion of production and consumption beyond what capitalism has been able to provide us. Which, again, is not untrue but it’s a very lopsided interpretation.
I wish I could find the whole interview where this was clipped from because if she’s responding to a question or it’s part of a broader point then I can see how she might find herself saying this but if she’s just saying this absent of any particular context then either she’s intentionally misrepresenting Marx to court an audience or she genuinely believes it then that’s no good.
She was also a bit disingenuous, I think, by saying that Marx was advocating for the expansion of production and consumption. Sure, he was doing that in the mid-to-late 1800s, as was everyone else at that time except for Malthusians and those who wanted to see a restoration of the feudal order, maybe. But just because Marx wanted to see the expansion of production and consumption back then doesn’t mean that he was talking about the economic conditions nearly two centuries later. Marx wasn’t one for making sweeping predictions about the future to the point where he would dictate economic policy for us today and it’s a fool’s game to play at what he would or wouldn’t have predicted. As for what Marx would say about the current state of the world if he were alive today, I think his first urge would be to identify that capitalism has reached a situation where it has externalised its contradictions to the environment and now it has reached a point where those externalities are threatening the existence of capitalism itself but, being what it is, it is fundamentally incapable of resolving this contradiction and thus the masses are faced with an urgent choice between socialism or (climate) barbarism. Not to play the “My dad could beat up your dad” card, but it’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t take climate science seriously and that he wouldn’t see it as capitalism running up against a force capable of permanently hemming in the ever-expanding forces of production.
The way she talked lacked any acknowledgement of the antagonism inherent to class society. I wasn’t getting any dialectical analysis from what she was saying and whenever someone talks about Marx’s ideas without driving home the dialectical nature of his thought and how central this is, I find myself asking if they’re just simplifying it and if so, are they simplifying it to the point where they’re gutting the Marxism from Marx himself.
I wouldn’t want to call it with just the little bit that I’ve managed to find with her takes on Marx but it is enough that it makes me feel suspicious.