Leftwing academic (2023)

Book Review from the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

A How To Guide to Cosmopolitan Socialism. A Tribute to Michael Brooks. By Matthew McManus. Zero Books. 2023. 135pp.

Michael Brooks was an American talk show personality, political commentator and comedian, who died in 2020 at the age of 36. Little known in the UK and Europe, Brooks identified himself as a socialist, a Marxist humanist and an anti-capitalist and was well known for mixing political analysis with comedy and, as George Carlin before him, putting across ‘controversial’ social ideas with brio and verve.

This volume by left-wing academic Matthew McManus presents itself as a tribute to Brooks and to the ideas he was known for in his writing and public and media appearances. However, most of it contains little reference to the man or his ideas but rather puts forward McManus’s own take on history and politics. What we have in the first half of the book is a brief, and not uncompelling, history of political thought from the earliest times to the present day, taking in the Greeks and Romans, St Augustine, the early ‘liberals’ (eg, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke), Kant’s ‘pure reason’ theories, 19th century socialist ‘internationalism’, and then different kinds of modern capitalist ideology. At the same time the author discusses the relationship of that theory to social developments and events including war, slavery, religion, class division, and much else. He then presents his own theories on recent developments in capitalism, especially in the US, dividing these up into neoliberalism (seen as beginning with the free-market ideas of such figures as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell), neoconservatism (described as ‘the ideological supplement to neoliberalism’), and then his own additional category, ‘post-modern conservatism’, ie, capitalism with an ultra-nationalist twist as under leaders like Trump and Bolsanaro.

Following this, in the final 35-page chapter of the book, entitled ‘What Would a Cosmopolitan Socialism Look Like?’, the author does place some focus on Brooks himself, in particular in a 7-page section sub-titled ‘Michael Brooks’ Cosmopolitan Socialism’. He explains that Brooks’ vision of socialism was of a world that would end ‘the division of society into contending social classes’ and in which ‘all beings should be entitled to the freedom and well-being necessary to lead a life of flourishing’. At the same time, the point is made that Brooks favoured what the author here calls ‘militant particularism’, meaning that ‘progressives’ should not hesitate to involve themselves in reformist activity, since, as he puts it, ‘it was Michael’s insistence that an injustice anywhere in the world was very much our business’. In this connection the author too advocates ‘socialist reforms’ such as ‘shortening the working week’ and calls for ‘limiting the influence of money’. Here of course we would part company both with Brooks and with the author of this book, on the grounds that involvement in reformism inevitably means putting the vision of a real socialist world, a democratic moneyless, wageless one of free access to all goods and services, on the back burner and eventually, as unfailingly happens with reformist groups and parties, losing sight of it altogether.

Here too this is precisely what seems to have happened with Brooks, for, despite the occasional references to the need for everyone to have a life of flourishing and to do away with contending social classes, there is no clear view of the democratic majority action that needs to be taken to establish such a society and indeed to the idea that it is even a feasible proposition. Instead we learn, for example, that Brooks was an admirer of Castro’s Cuba and, indeed that this tribute to Brooks ‘is intended as a quick primer on how the left can begin to think globally, even if we must continue to act locally’.

The other observation to be made about this book is that, while some of the time it uses clear, easily comprehensible language, too often it lapses into academic jargon which obscures rather than elucidates, seeming to go out of its way to make simple ideas over-complicated. To give just one example among many, to write that ‘neoconservatism is consonant with the paradigm of liberal imperialist adventurism, which includes a long genealogy of Conradian harlequins from Disraeli through Kipling and Bush’ is clearly no way to facilitate the understanding of readers. More generally, too, its theorising on the different incarnations or variations of capitalism (neoliberalism, neoconservatism, post-modern capitalism, etc) seems manifestly out of proportion to any practical differences these make to the lives of those who live under the capitalist system and to be irrelevant to the truly important question of how to replace the global system that capitalism is with a new global socialist system. Perhaps it is not surprising then that it fails to establish a clear meaning at all for ‘socialism’, with shifting notions ranging from ‘welfarism’ within capitalism, elements of social organisation within the Soviet Union, and Chile under Allende (one of various ‘socialist regimes’ mentioned).

So while there can be no argument with observations such as ‘the logic of the market precludes the socialization of resources’ and the book’s concluding call to ‘construct a shared world together as equals’, this is not matched by the author’s take on how that world is to be conceived and on the action necessary to bring it into being.

Howard Moss