Ep 126 - Lasch Back w/ Douglas Lain

Christopher Lasch was one of the first serious thinkers I read when I was sixteen. I went back a couple years ago to read his essays in NYRB and The True and Only Heaven. I think it is fair but also very misleading to call him a social conservative. He was supportive of civil rights, feminism, and the early gay rights movement while being critical of the forms they took–and to a certain degree must take–under the ascendency of neoliberalism. Which, by the way, is exactly what we should do as Marxists. So, to think of him as anti-civil rights or whatever would be the same as saying Marx was anti-worker for criticizing Blanqui, Proudhon, or Owen. His turn in the 80s wasn't toward conservativism, but more like a kind of humanistic nihilism. Understandably, he had a hard time seeing a future for truly anti-capitalist politics after the breakdown of workers struggles between the 60s and 90s and the movement of many workers toward Reagan. I don't think we can fault him for that. He is limited by his historical milieu but is also an extremely helpful thinker around the problems of spectacle, atomization, and the breakdown of non-capitalist forms of community. As an example of what someone might take as right wing: Lasch was very critical of many forms of black activism that arose in northern cities because he felt that they lacked the coherence and vision that the southern black religious experience had afforded the early civil rights movement. It wasn't that he merely wanted people in Harlem to pull up their pants. It's that the material experience of the northern ghetto was atomization which could only express itself through spectacle but not communities of solidarity. Now, I might not agree with this, but to read this in a right-wing way–as Bari Weiss or Steve Bannon might–requires a good deal of bad faith.

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