I was excited to see my longstanding friend and comrade Adam Turl’s new book, Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven & Earth (Revol Press) reviewed in the socialist online journal Cosmonaut. Having worked with Adam for years as a Red Wedge editor, it is exciting to see their work, some of the most sophisticated cultural theory to be produced in the last decade, collected in a single slim volume. Alas, Cosmonaut reviewer and art historian Patricia Moras doesn’t like the book. It seems that she was looking for something else. While I will engage further with Moras’s broader frame of reference, the key point here, perhaps reflective of an instrumentalist and reductive view of cultural production tout-court, is that she is disappointed Turl has not written the “secrets of a highly successful cultural organizer.” She also seems miffed Turl doesn't hold the reader’s hands when referring to 20th century aesthetic debates that persist into the present.
In a sense, like others in and around our loose collective of theorists in the mid to late teens — those of us Red Wedge and other small publications — I see the review as not merely a critique of Turl’s book but of our overall cultural/political project. Intervening in aesthetic and cultural-theoretical debates at the time, like other work rooted in that era, Moras makes reference to Red Wedge without engaging with what we published over the years, the constitutive relationship between our work and the “normie socialism debates,” part of which was a deliberate but non-didactic attempt, both in theory and in aesthetic production, to offer an expansive vision of the working class. “The Working Class is Weird,” to paraphrase one of Adam’s drawings/collages. As against a resurgent left social conservatism, we spent a special issue of Red Wedge engaging “a defense of transgression.” It’s odd that Moras, who complains about a lack of historical context, does not engage the constellation of thinkers and artists that Adam has been associated with or the debates within the left at the time. So my response here, as a co-thinker from that time, is both a corrective and a statement of disagreement. I contend that Moras, while complaining about the lack of politics in Turl’s work, has written a very apolitical review, predicated upon an intellectual campism rooted in what China Miéville calls “folk Marxism,” received beliefs, rather than dialectical reason. Moras’s view of the politics of art seems entirely functionalist.
Adam Turl drawing/collage from Red Wedge Magazine (2019)
“Turl tries to do too many things, go too many places, in too little time, and the clarity of their thesis suffers for it,” complains Moras. Yet this is to miss the forest for the trees. What Moras refers to as Adam’s thesis, one developed by theorists and artists over a long period of time, is not a “thesis.” Turl assumes a certain sensibility and doesn’t need to hone in on why, for example, as Leon Trotsky wrote nearly one hundred years ago, cultural producers need not focus only on didactic art. This likely stretches back farther, perhaps to Freidrich Engels who preferred Honoré de Balzac to proletarian novels, if not to the much-maligned ancient sophists who preferred allegory and humor to dictums and dogma, to the chagrin of elite rivals like Plato. That this debate criss-crossed the borders of the “Cultural Cold War” seems more important to Moras than the content of the debate itself. She complains about a lack of historical context, perhaps in a disciplinary tic, misconstruing the purpose of theory qua theory. Moras throws down the gauntlet for a left cultural conservatism in the guise of a book review. Like other interventions didactically defending socialist realism, Moras gives up the game from the title onward, a silly pun on a Trotskyist concept. From castigating and flattening Turl’s engagement with Soviet aesthetics to her decontextualized quotation of Trotskyist-turned-Americanist Clement Greenberg, this is a polemical Trot-baiting work, a work of intellectual campism.
“Campism” has classically been a term used by anti-Stalinist Marxists and other anti-capitalists to describe support, “critical” or otherwise, of one imperial or national camp over another in the geopolitical realm. It is similar, but I’d argue distinct, from the more pejorative “tankie.” Today’s campists may not be fans of “the Chinese model” as it were, but they see the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the “Belt-and-Road” project, and other Chinese “soft-power” initiatives as indicative of a China-led progressive camp. To many, this ‘stance’ seems compelling when contrasting the no-doubt impressive Chinese leaps in aspects of human development and scientific endeavour with US political and social decay in the last decade. That decade has seen a resurgence of campism. A generation was politicized in the United States around the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) grew, as well as groups farther left, as did a vast ecosystem of left publications in the mid-to-late ‘teens, including Cosmonaut. Yet this effervescence was stymied coming into the pandemic and the repression of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, as well as the failures and sabotage of a “soft-salvation from above” in the form of Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, et al. In place of this soft salvation, but keeping the sort of institutionalist or “hot-house” logic underlying the 2010s regrowth of social democracy, various forces sought out a “hard salvation from above,” a return of a reductive “scientific socialism,” a concept championed by Cosmonaut. To be clear, Cosmonaut does not seem to hold campist geopolitics. But the inner logic of their position, as exemplified in Moras’s review, is indicative of the growth of a sort of campist “common sense.”
Red Wedge editors at the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago: Adam Turl, Crystal Stella Becerril, Alexander Billet, J. Matthew Camp, Nikeeta Slade and Brit Schulte.
One could read, for example, David Camfield’s recent book Red Flags (2025) to learn precisely what was, and is, wrong with campism. Whatever can be said about “actually existing socialist” societies, whether one s conceives them as state-capitalist, ‘degenerated worker’s states,’ or non-capitalist class societies, these are not and were not ultimately aspirational models for the emancipation of the working classes and the oppressed. But when one switches one’s historical agency from classes to states, campism is an inevitable result.
Intellectual campism, or in particular cultural campism, is a suspicion towards art or theory that deviates from the official (including the official avant garde). Of course, the compromise entailed in living as an artist “on the make” on either side of the Cold War often meant subtle or arcane compromise with this or that officialdom. To some artists the classic question “who’s using who?” came up. Do we blame either the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky or the musician Louis Armstrong for being put to geopolitical use in spite of their respective oppositions to Soviet or US society? In any case, the “Cultural Cold War,” in its narrow sense refers, in the work of Frances Stonor Saunders and David Caute in particular, to the instrumentalization of civil society and of “high culture” by both sides in the Cold War. Such programs (on the US side) were famously exposed in Ramparts magazine in 1967. For the Soviets, the Cultural Cold War’s tentacles came out of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). None of us would be so foolish as to condemn the many great cultural producers who aligned with Communist parties. If I think the Popular Front, for example, was politically unwise, this is not to say that, as Michael Dening put it, the “labouring of culture” was not something very real. And we would be very foolish to think even a majority of Popular Front cultural producers believed themselves mere instruments of Soviet cultural policy.
In NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) countries, a series of cultural producers and publications were funded by the CIA and its affiliates, filtered through what was called the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF). In Saunders and Caute’s accounts, whatever sympathies they may have (which seem to decidedly differ), this is not a black hat/white hat situation. There were actual radical leftists, notably Dwight MacDonald, involved in the CCF. After the Communist Party’s virtual liquidation into electoralism —“the graveyard of social movements”— and other “lib/lab” coalitions, after its support of the Smith Act used against Trotskyists, its prestige in the late forties and early fifties was not what it was at the height of the Popular Front. The “non-communist left,” so to speak, including Trotskyists and anarchists, had far more credibility.
Red Wedge at Historical Materialism Montreal/The Great Transition at L'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) (2018). From left to right: Adam Turl, Alexander Billet, Neil Davidson, and Jordy Cummings. Photographs by Tish Turl.
In the historical episode labeled the “Cultural Cold War,” we see tragic compromise, whether with US imperialism or high Stalinism, but we also see the development of art and cultural production that transcended and transgressed the arbitrary Cold War binary. Far more often, in particular on the “western” side, radical artists, from Jackson Pollack to the Beat generation, from Phillip Larkin to the Beach Boys, had no clue that they were being used. Arguably their art outlasts how it was used for American “soft power” at least as much as the composer Dimitri Shoshtakovich’s art outlasts how it was used for “the other side.” This is perhaps best shown in a series published in Red Wedge by the late historian Neil Davidson, engaging among many others, Trotsky, György Lukács, and the aforementioned Clement Greenberg with regards to not merely the cultural form, but the generative quality of the modernism debate itself. Realism and modernism, in a formal sense, criss-crossed the so-called Cultural Cold War. Yet it is clear Moras is looking through the lens of the Cultural Cold War — a received wisdom not thought through or unpacked. The Cultural Cold War becomes an historical blip through which Moras conceives the entire project of cultural production.
This intellectual campism entails a suspicion of cultural analysis itself. Left suspicions of the Frankfurt School (which is certainly worthy of critique) are often comparable with the “cultural Marxist” conspiracy theories of the far-right, as well as the 2010s normie socialist or “dirtbag left” crowd with whom Red Wedge polemicized. The campist philosopher Gabriel Rockhill, in a comical move, actually seems to believe that Herbert Marcuse, who mentored CPUSA member Angela Davis, pulled the strings of an elaborate CIA counterinsurgency campaign against real Marxism within the academy. This is akin to Moras, as we see, having an inborn suspicion of Adam’s project, and implicitly attempting to place it in the American imperialist camp in Cultural Cold War terms, simply by virtue of an adopted frame of reference and its theoretical blinkers.
Tom Wolfe, author of the The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, was a writer and “journalist” known for trolling the New Left, intellectuals, and various art and cultural worlds. His work conflated class and other frustrations with cultural prejudices in the interests of a reactionary “common sense.”
Notwithstanding lacking a frame of reference for the quotidian act of an artist publishing their writings, Moras sees the project as “publish or perish,” when this is far from an “academic” text. This is also indicated in her misreading Adam’s critique of didacticism and championing of cultural interventionism as categorical opposition to propaganda. She gives up the game when stating, in the type of declarative tone that is almost humorous, that “the functional relationship between aesthetic and political radicalism is tenuous if the cultural producers in question are not explicitly creating art for political movements.” It is the height of campist Babbitry to assert such a utilitarian correspondence.
Babbitry is named for the titular character, Babbit, in Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 satire of emergent petit bourgeois conformism and cultural conservatism. George Babbit is deeply unhappy with his midwestern life.. His attempts to escape the monotony of that life, whether through dalliances with left politics or bohemianism, leave him full of regret. He just ends up even more reactionary. Tom Wolfe’s work, as Fredric Jameson points out, is a classic example of Babbitry, a cultural philistinism that tries to, in more modern parlance, “own the libs” or “shitlibs.” In a passage on Wolfe (on whose grave I once shat), Jameson captures precisely what is wrong with this approach, “the absence of any utopian celebration of the postmodern and, far more striking, the passionate hatred of the modern that breathes through the otherwise obligatory camp sarcasm of the rhetoric.”
Moras is missing, to refer back to the conspiratorial understanding of the Frankfurt School, how Adam, like myself, is squarely situating themselves in the tradition of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was not a member of the Frankfurt School proper, he was too independent. What is important here is his concept of aura, that which remains after commodification. The entire theme of this work is how maintenance of aura, of affective contagion, is far more of a clear cultural focus than simply “having the right politics.” That special quality embedded in the best cultural production that we cannot simply say has been subsumed, and in a sense, is unsubsumable, inalienable. Human beings come to know ourselves by how we create, and how we recreate our worlds. Our consciousnesses are circumscribed by the logic of uneven and combined development. Instead of griping about “art for art’s sake” as humans will always be creating art, I’ve argued that we need to talk about what the word “sake” means in that formulation. If “art’s sake” is the cultivation of sensibilities that can develop revolutionary capacities, as Adam’s work implies, it is far more of an effective intervention in socialist politics than histories already better portrayed by Carol Reed in the 1949 film The Third Man.
The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene, and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, and Orson Welles, set in post-war Vienna, is seen as one of the first Cold War thrillers, albeit critical of imperialism. It is considered one of the best British films of the post-war period.
Jordy Cummings is a cultural critic, academic worker and socialist residing in Toronto. From 2016 to 2020, he was an editor at Red Wedge. He has written for Spectre, Counterpunch, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other outlets. He still thinks we need to keep socialism weird.
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