There's something wrong with the Western academic left.

from Jason Hickel:

Universities are full of professors and students who claim to be "anti-capitalist". One may be forgiven for assuming that there is a robust socialist movement thriving on Western campuses, perhaps with an organic connection to real-world working-class movements and liberation struggles.

But there's not. When you scratch beneath the surface it becomes clear that this "anti-capitalism" is mostly (with important exceptions) just abstruse, discursive critical theory. People's politics often boil down to a vague, liberal counter-hegemony, with the only real commitment to something like a post-structuralist "critique of power".

In fact in most cases these "anti-capitalists" do not even describe themselves as socialists, and often actively distance themselves from socialism. They have no concept of how a socialist economy can work, no practical plan for how to achieve socialism, and no connection to real-world socialist and anti-imperialist struggles, or socialist parties, or working-class liberation movements of any kind.

Worse, they often refuse to support liberation movements when they actually arise, particularly in the global South, or even actively attack them for failing to conform to the ideological purity of the Western ivory tower, with no acknowledgement of the real material conditions that these struggles have to engage with.

This is not a new tendency. It has been going on since the Cold War, when many Western left academics played an active role in discrediting anti-colonial and socialist movements in the periphery that arose in the 20th century.

The result is that the "anti-capitalism" of this intellectual class is toothless and makes little positive difference to real-world material conditions . In fact it actively disables the left, and funnels hundreds of thousands of students who have real revolutionary potential into believing that being radical means spinning complicated theory, using language that is aesthetically pleasing to an intellectual elite but totally incomprehensible and alienating to most people.

We urgently need to overcome this tendency. And people can take inspiration from the powerful exceptions that are out there: academics and student movements who are connected to and actively contributing to socialist formations and liberation struggles, often with extraordinary courage.

Source: https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/1887437578896359890