Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left - but which left?

Irish Times

20 hours ago

Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left
Author
:
Eric Heinze
ISBN-13
:
978-0262049580
Publisher
:
MIT Press
Guideline Price
:
£26
Only a few months ago, the idea of Conor McGregor lecturing the world about immigration from the White House on St Patrick's Day would have seemed like a poor Saturday Night Live sketch. But in 2025, all bets are off.
The richest man in the world was appointed to a central position in the US cabinet. His online platform has with his approval become a fascist cesspit. There is global revulsion at the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but protest about it seems completely impotent. Donald Trump's plan for 'peace' in Ukraine involves forcing that country to settle on the invader's terms. It is a grim time.
During the 1990s one Irish far-left party's recruitment schtick was to claim that 'there has never been a better time to be a socialist'. Only the completely delusional would suggest this now. So what has gone wrong?
Eric Heinze, a professor of law at London's Queen Mary University, gets off to a promising start, noting how the US right has adeptly used 'culture war' issues around race and gender to gain support. Indeed, as far back as 2020, Steve Bannon confidently predicted, 'this is how we are going to win'. The contrived nature of much of these controversies is illustrated by the fact that before January 2020, Fox News had mentioned
critical race theory
a total of three times; during June 2021 alone, it was referenced 900 times.
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But these issues are not the focus of Heinze's book. He is, he claims, 'not anti-woke. I am pro-woke but pro a very different kind of woke'. Instead, Heinze suggests that the left will not prosper until it faces up to its past. He claims that the left 'rightly demand we must come clean about western violence at home and abroad'. But, he asserts, 'the left pushes the widest possible public education about western wrongdoing, yet engages in no public education about leftist wrongdoing.'
He suggests that if 'the left is to maintain any integrity in our public conversations, it must start to do what it has taught the rest of us to do … when leftists fail to take charge of their own histories, the right inevitably sweeps in to do it for them, often in mischievous ways.'
The problem is that Heinze appears unclear as to what 'left' he is addressing. Most of his arguments are about critical theory and those who adhere to it, whom he terms 'crits'. But his primary examples range from Noam Chomsky on Ukraine, the oppression of LGBTQ+ people in Castro's Cuba, the controversies about anti-Semitism in Corbyn's Labour Party and the rhetoric of French left-wing leader Jean Luc Mélenchon.
It is not that Heinze doesn't make salient points sometimes, but that he appears unaware that others have said it all before and often more convincingly than he does. Heinze, for instance, doesn't mention Kenan Malik's study of the limitations of identity politics and their impact on the left, nor important work on anti-Semitism by Rachel Shabi and David Renton.
And while Heinze lists 'classism' as one of the oppressions opposed by the left, he appears to have little understanding of class. Historically, socialists put the working class at the centre of their politics, not because it always contained the most oppressed, but because they possessed the ability as a class to emancipate themselves. Heinze doesn't believe that, obviously, which is not a problem, but neither does he address class in any real way. If he did so, he would find that the absence of class analysis explains many of what he identifies as the left's hypocrisies and blind spots.
The majority of the left no longer believe in the centrality of class either, which in part explains why some of them end up in thrall to despots and others follow the latest academic fashion in search of a quick-fix route to success. And, indeed, the left often says or does stupid things. (A good rule of thumb here is that if you don't want to be criticised for doing these things, then don't do them.)
But ultimately, we are very often talking about people with relatively little power. Corbynism was a failure, but Keir Starmer's administration delights in policies which inflict pain on those least able to cope while reacting to suggestions about taxing the super-rich with horror.
Heinze is right to ask questions about the left's future. It may not have one. The global right has built a movement on what Keith Kahn-Harris describes as 'self-interest, cynicism, delusion, lies and hate'.' The left can't, for a variety of reasons, emulate that. It needs an honest discussion about what it can do, but this book will only be of limited use to that process.
Brian Hanley is Assistant Professor in the History of Northern Ireland at Trinity College Dublin