Catherine Liu

We’re hoping to encourage research in ideology critique and historical materialism that really isn’t taking place in the university. I always joke that we’re a Frankfurt School tribute band, but we’re girls and gays.

The Frankfurt School has been in the news a lot since Jürgen Habermas died, and Gabriel Rockhill published his book about how it was all a big CIA cutout.

Catherine Liu

Both Right and Left seem to be in various phases of rejection of the Frankfurt school, which to me is only testimony to its power. What they really tried to do was integrate psychoanalysis with Marxism to create a method of historical and cultural analysis that I do think has lasting power.

One of the things that they did was work on reviewing films and culture in the Berlin of the Weimar period, analyzing culture industry products and integrating that with historical materialism. I think that’s very unique.

Catherine Liu

I believe that the Marxists make the best economists, but I’m not an economist. That’s not where my contributions are going to come in. And I think the larger intellectual project has to marry economic history, historical materialism, with the Frankfurt School cultural analysis. And what it allows us to do is to look at transitions between different forms of production in a unique way.

Walter Benjamin, for example, wrote a book about the German mourning play. And it’s really about court society and feudalism, and the emergence of a secular clerical class. You can analyze the epic form of commodity fetishism that emerges in the nineteenth century as capitalism is coming into its own. That’s certainly something the Frankfurt School is interested in. Or you can look at the relationship between the emergence of liberal pluralism in America and the kind of economic structure of agricultural autonomy that came out of it.

It’s not just a matter of watching movies and having thoughts about them. They were looking at how psychic structures, cultural structures, changed from feudalism to mercantile society to industrial capitalism.

Catherine Liu

Two of the big focuses are on zombie liberalism and gangster capitalism.

Catherine Liu

Kamala Harris and the DNC could not connect at all to the sense of betrayal that Americans felt about this kind of liberalism. And one thing we wanted to look at was the destruction of all these liberal institutions that were supposed to be these nonmarket, independent spaces of free exploration. These institutions that cannot die, like the New York Times, like Harvard, like Yale, like Princeton, have been hollowed out. Liberalism as a set of first principles has been completely betrayed by liberals themselves.

An institution like Yale tried to stay out of it with Trump, but they don’t really believe in academic freedom. They capitulated so quickly to the will of the donors and the administration. And it shouldn’t be surprising.

I was saying to a graduate student today that the corruption of the liberal elites really began in 1947, when Harry Truman declared the Cold War and American liberals just fell in line. And those dynamics never entirely ended. Even after the defeat of the Vietnam War, we kept looking for more enemies to exterminate. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we never got the peace dividend. We got the forever wars of the global war on terrorism.

Catherine Liu

The best of liberalism was the idea that we need to be able to debate ideas freely, to have the kinds of disagreement that help us build a democratic culture through dissent and through coming together through reason. You’re a philosopher, you know this better than I do.

I was always skeptical of this picture, but I believed we needed something like it for a functioning democracy.

Catherine Liu

The liberal establishment just demonized anyone who disagreed with them! Cancellation, exclusion, and calling anyone who didn’t agree with them a fascist became an easy shortcut to creating a false sense of consensus from the top down.

It’s the politics of NGO leaders and wealthy people who wanted to fund performative “anti-racism” and oppose socialist candidates. Bernie Sanders might have really changed things economically and politically, but the liberal establishment defeated that challenge.

Catherine Liu

Especially given the close relationship between the United States and Israel. Everything that’s been done to Palestine really showed how farcical it was for Democrats to talk about a noble mission to impose liberal human rights on other countries. That might seem like the death of this kind of liberalism. But, you know, they also say that that which is dead cannot die.

So all these institutions have been zombified and hollowed out from within, but their shells remain, and they keep sucking up resources and attention. And they pursue increasingly strange forms of identity politics.

I mean, the New York Times just published a whole thing about it’s OK to be heterosexual!

Catherine Liu

It’s baffling. In the meantime, you have people on the right, the far right, pursuing some post-human technological singularity.

Catherine Liu

The Frankfurt School is trying to put to death a bourgeois humanism from the nineteenth century: the idea that the surplus value produced by the working class would be expended on cultivating the total and whole self of a small elite. But in Marxism, in Karl Marx’s own work, the fragmentation of the worker is one of the most intense forms of exploitation. Marx describes how a worker is reduced to an arm, and how thinking is outsourced to the foreman, the supervisor, the engineer.

The way out of that was supposed to be a restoration of wholeness based on allowing the worker to own the means of production so that he or she can determine the form of work that’s taking place, right? But the wholeness is still a part of this idea, this very German romantic ideal about the whole person.

Catherine Liu

They don’t have the ideals of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie. They don’t believe in wholeness. All these fantasies of an AI-driven singularity, they’re not based on any notion of wholeness at all. They’re based on the pure coordination of the means of production — the ownership of production and control of consumption.

The consumer is part of the machine. I can’t tell you how many people who respond to my work have been disillusioned first-generation white-collar workers who have worked their way into jobs as coders, software engineers, civil engineers, logistics people, or academics. Eventually, they come to understand that this system is not working for them, that it is attacking every kind of value or knowledge or skill that they have.

So I feel like the zombie is a perfect example of what optimization capitalism wants — an everlasting, hungry, addicted, de-skilled, nonverbal husk of a person who only moves with the masses; who is dangerous, not in the singular but because there are so many of them; and who can’t produce anything but instead lives off the ruins of what was once a productive economy.

Catherine Liu

Agents! Subjects! Yeah, exactly. Agents who would read and think.

Catherine Liu

The chancellor of my university has been going around to all the schools telling people that we should be making chatbots for our classes so our students can ask questions at 2 a.m. So I should be feeding all my course material into Claude and then have this chatbot answer questions. I don’t think he’s been in a classroom for ages, but this was his response when I asked him what he would do if he were a humanities professor.

Catherine Liu

It’s outrageous. Massachusetts Institute of Technology research has shown that cognitive abilities in people who use chatbots decline over time. Especially with young brains.

Catherine Liu

Gangster capitalism is my way of narrativizing a critique of private equity that doesn’t make me fall into total despair. I go back to the eleventh through thirteenth centuries to think about how systems of domination have worked in the modes of either coercion or exploitation. And then I relate that to what’s going on with private equity today.

Private equity reshapes industries completely. It hollows them out, strips them out for parts, then resells everything from nursing homes to vet care to hospitals — institutions that produce and provide real services for people. They take over, knowing they have a captive audience. Then they strip the company or enterprise of all of its valuable assets and resell it to another private equity firm.

Catherine Liu

There’s obvious gangsterishness about Trump. He was a protégé of Roy Cohn. And I also argue, dialectically, that the gangster is an American folk hero. One thing Democrats have trouble understanding is that there is actually something very compelling about this gangsterish figure, this cultural symbol that really comes out of 1920s and ’30s, during Prohibition.

Little Caesar and the first Scarface — they’re immigrants, they’re outsiders, they’re outside WASP-y American cultural puritanism. Their striving and their greed are all about trying to acquire the trappings of success. Like Trump and his love of gold. There’s something compelling about him in his idiot babyishness.

Robert Warshow was a left-wing film critic for Partisan Review. He wrote this incredible little essay that basically nobody in academia reads anymore called “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” He says the gangster is the American tragic hero. His story is rags to riches to rags again, because every gangster falls in a spectacular way. They climb the ladder of success and then fall right back into the abyss. They’re the perfect destructive, nonproductive characters to represent a purely coercive economic and political environment. And that’s exactly what Trump is.

Catherine Liu

Yes. It’s going to be taking place in Frankfurt on June 12 and 13. Our major speakers are Lee Jones from Queen Mary University, London, Vivek Chibber of NYU Sociology, and Roger Lancaster from George Washington University in Washington, DC. We are really wanting to ask a very back-to-basics question. What is the social of socialism?

I’m trying to put a little historical materialist frame around the social. In the Middle Ages, there was the court, and there was the world, but there was no conception of society as its own thing. The social only emerges with this idea of bourgeois participation.

Catherine Liu

Exactly. We’re talking about what that means for us — how we can build socialism if the social has actually been destroyed by the forces of capitalism over the past fifty to sixty years.