The Zombie Left and the Cult of Personality: Marxist Name Layer Cake Redux

There is a trait among Marxists that some anarchists flippantly remark on Anarchists are known by their positions, but Marxists are known by the names of their patron “saints.” This is, of course, a distortion as many anarchists have also taken to branding themselves with names, but they have abandoned the practice while “Marxists” more or less have not.

David Graeber went so far as to notice that Marxists tend to be defined first by revolutionaries, then by heads of states, and lastly be academic philosophers.  Again, there is truth to this and not just in the US.  Now I could point to the normal use of the warning of the Marx’s admission against personality cults, but I will say this: This is a sign that Marxist politics as it actually exists only as a shadow of itself, interested in names and glorious dead to which new people can identify or synthesis their spin in the Marxist layer cake, to steal a phrase from Mike Ely at Kasama.

Now all positions have their dead and might-as-well-be-dead-philosophers–American liberals  have J.S. Mill or John Rawls or Lord Keynes, conservatives have Russel Kirk and Edmunde Burke, Fascists have De Maistre, Masse, Strasser, and Mussolini, and anarchists have too many to name.  Yet a living political movement is not defined by -isms of its dead.  Notice how “creationists” try to discredit Darwin that way.  Marxists need to stop being “Marxists-Leninists-Maoists-Avakianist-Zizekian” and start being something different: in the past, this was socialist or communists within the International, but the 20th century may deny those words to us without the taint of failure.  Regardless, the zombie left needs to stop celebrating it necrophile character, and start trying to live again.