It is painful to watch what Brad Lander is going through on the streets of New York. Painful, but also important.
On Saturday evening, outside Madison Square Garden, Lander — the former city comptroller, now the Democratic candidate for Congress in New York's Tenth District — came to a demonstration against the RSS, the Hindu nationalist movement whose leader was speaking inside. He introduced himself to the crowd and said he had come to join them, to say no to the RSS along with everyone else. Some of the protesters tried to shield him and reminded the others that he was there for the same cause. Others screamed at him to get out. He was called a Zionist, a paid Zionist, and a good deal worse than that. Lander did not leave. He turned to the man shouting at him and said, "Bring it on."
Here is a man who was one of the architects of Zohran Mamdani — the cross-endorsement that turned an insurgent assemblyman into the mayor of New York — walking out of a demonstration cursed, humiliated in the street, branded with the word Zionist. And what makes the scene worth watching is that unlike Bernie Sanders, the godfather of the camp, Lander is not surrounded by a security detail and a staff, and he does not enjoy the odd charismatic halo of the man behind the counter at a kosher deli. By any reasonable logic he should have fled. Instead he explained to the ones cursing and screaming at him that this is his place and here he intends to stay.
The problem with Lander, as with every left-wing mind, is fundamentally a romantic problem. It is the failure to recognize that rejection means rejection. That compromise is the product of the other party's will and not of your own exertion. The political mentality of the left, romantic at its root, keeps projecting out of the personal field into the political one exactly this sort of conciliatory behavior, in the faith that you can turn the other's world around and produce a gain for everyone. And unlike the private romantic vision, this one, being political — especially in its less moderate versions — also requires a gnostic enemy.
Here we ought to be honest about the romantic himself. Even the greatest romantic has jealousy in him, and possessiveness, a certain insecurity, and of course a fear of losing control. So does the genuine leftist. Among leftists there are more romantic types and less romantic ones, and jealous lovers, obsessives and purists among them, and they are entirely capable of driving the affair to the point where it is no longer clear what is right and what is left — as happened, famously, in National Socialism.
Lander stayed. Just as he has not given up on the immigrants, the Muslims, the activists he has spent a career defending, some of whom would be glad to be rid of him and are kept from doing more than shouting by the laws of New York and the officers standing a few feet away — he genuinely believes that they will not give up on him either. He believes that together, in the manner of the eighties ballad, the two of them can stand there and let the world around them come apart.
What he has not understood is that here, exactly as in romance itself, when you throw your lot in with the proletariat as a bourgeois calling it toward consciousness, what you are actually doing is releasing your own slave class to see you as nothing more than one more man holding their chains. It is the lover who sets out to save his woman from herself, only to discover that the rescue attempt has itself become, at a certain point, an unbearable form of oppression.
That belief, like the belief of every romantic in his private life and of every left-wing mind in his political one, rests on an assumption of reciprocity that does not exist. The reciprocity does not exist because even at the radical, avant-garde foundation of left philosophy there is an internal division of labor, and that division of labor generates the openings for rupture and for the collapse of mutuality. It is the source of the enormous enthusiasm for Lenin and Stalin among Western thinkers, who sincerely believed that the divisions inside the camp of progress — divisions Marx himself had foreseen — could be abolished and led. That we really are capable, again in the romantic idiom, of living the dream despite the splits and despite the daily grind.
Where does the hallucination come from, in those who saw the world that way, and in Lander, who keeps assembling with a political camp that hates him? It comes from a refusal to relinquish reciprocity despite the blazing signals of an other who is not interested in reciprocity or is not capable of it. But it is also a functional weakness of socialism, which is vulnerable to culture itself and to culture's representations. Culture and its representations can turn the intellectual into a worker and the worker into an intellectual. Which is to say: changes of form compel changes of category regarding who and what is to be redeemed, and as a result, changes of role. The proof is that until 1967 the Jews were part of the camp of progress, and after it they were not. And so on.
The structural condition of inequality that Marx built on the Hegelian master–slave relation produced a built-in paradox in which at no stage can the camp of equality be said to be absolutely stable. It is not for nothing that Marx is said to have distorted Hegel, who held in the *Philosophy of Right* that nothing is more absurd than the demand for abstract equality — that the very attempt to impose it is a misunderstanding of what a person is and what he holds.
Return, then, to the romantic lover, or the romantic politician. A man of ostensibly good intentions. For Lander to stop standing in front of that crowd, what would be required of him is a painful recognition: that giving up on reciprocity means the great vision of equality — in the world, or even inside the camp — is not achievable. And the same, naturally, goes for the romantic vision.
As in romance, so in leftism: what leads is the will to be subsumed, *hitkalelut*, the will to lose yourself in the other in order to find yourself larger. This is the production of categories as a wall in consciousness, followed by war against the categories that have just been produced — and the most vital and most modern of them all is of course property and ownership, alongside other forms of organization that can be laid out phenomenologically and analyzed.
The will to bring down the partitions, to reach what Deleuze and Guattari call the connective synthesis of desire, is what leads in the stream running from Marx through Marcuse to Butler. In the stream of Foucault, Derrida and Heidegger, one can say there is a will or a faith in the dismantling of categories and partitions out of the belief that only through them can one reach the authentic. Marx, Marcuse and Butler are more social thinkers in this respect; Foucault, Derrida and Heidegger less so — they too have some relation to the social, but they do not hang the human condition on it. Their romanticism remains, to a degree, internal. Butler sits somewhere on the axis between them.
This is why Marx is returning today more than Marcuse, and why Butler is limited. In an age of digital and proprietary alienation, Marx still contains that elementary human expectation that everyone, whatever their condition, deserves to be seen beyond categories and catalogues — an expectation tied at the navel to living conditions and material capacity. That is not the case with Marcuse, and certainly not with Butler. And the tragic paradox of the left, and of Marx's own thought, is that it sincerely believes the abolition of categories and barriers can be reached by shrinking the world into them.
So when they scream "Zionist" at Lander, "liberal Zionist," what they are saying is that there is no inclusion for a category of that kind inside our categories. Which is precisely what Lander says about Netanyahu's government: that there is no inclusion with it.
Lander and the people who hate him, unlike the sincere romantic lover, are both trying to manufacture categories through which, and through whose abolition, the world can be brought together into some higher condition — a little like Heidegger's faith that by way of a handful of concepts and our relation to them, man can be brought into a more authentic state. The trouble is that whereas existentialism can play with categories as a philosophical exercise, provided it does not harden into a political rubric, in Marx the production of categories is itself a political-religious labor, and there is a war on right now between the political priests over it. A war that is not existential but romantic. And when I say romantic, I mean uncompromising. The romantic, at most, builds an idealization and hopes his beloved will fall inside his dream; at most he will be disappointed, and one hopes he can manage his disappointment without declaring the source of it an enemy of humanity, or his own personal enemy.
Among Jews, the sublimation of the romantic into the political left runs deepest and most extreme. Lacking any individual experience of modernity that does not arise out of a relation of tension with the general society, Jews on the left always hope that by mapping categories onto social existence they will at last be accepted. The problem is that a new axis always appears, and it turns the fire back onto them. Because social redemption is always the annulment of a prior phenomenon according to a prescription, and the prescription generates an almost Darwinian experience inside Marx — whose own historical schema, for all his contempt for the cruder social Darwinists, runs on a developmental and selective logic.
What Jews are looking for in non-Zionist socialism is a moment of classless revelation. Not a constant dialectical revelation, because the dialectic motion goes on prosecuting a journey through and out of slavery that their Jewishness, exiting itself, was supposed to have brought to a halt via classical humanistic equality. A redemption that advances by way of struggle in which groups reach self-knowledge is historicist dialectic, and historicist dialectic and Judaism have nothing whatsoever in common.
The Jew enters socialism to forget himself, the non-Jew to elevate and discover himself. The Jews want to arrive at the millenarian end, and to arrive there by way of one struggle they have identified to blend and be blended. They are not interested, as a rule, in an infinite continuation of struggles towards self-realization — in that sense they are still middle-class — and they are not interested either in the victory of one identity over another, because one identity over another is precisely the Jewish particularism they ran away from in the first place.
So they go looking for the most universal thing on offer. And then one of two things happens, or both of them at once. Either they are the ones who end up identified as the particular lodged inside the universal, or else the historical struggle generates new particulars of its own within that same universal idea — to these particulars, even if they exist outside classical nationalism, the Jews have no answer, and they may become their undoing.
Which is why, in every socialist revolution, in the first stage, while there is still faith in a universal revelation of the revolution, within the idea and within the initial organization, the Jews always stand out.
What happens afterward is that, in the language of the Bible, the hour arrives to divide the land and to settle it in earnest, exactly as in the period of the Judges, when the unifying project comes apart into tribes and their own local business. At that stage universality contracts into the selfhood of particulars, into people and their actual needs. And then the split occurs, between the leadership and the people.
At the moment of that split the collective imagination migrates toward some intermediary standing between the two, and it can be an external enemy or an internal one. Whichever it turns out to be, the mere existence of that gnostic force — and it is present in every social revolution out of Marx's house — places the Jews at risk, and at the very minimum strips them, within a generation or two, of their standing among the radical left and the reformist left alike. In America, in Germany, in Russia, in Britain: it has happened in every one of them.
The search of the Jewish revolutionaries for a universal revelation is in truth a search for a desperate quiet. It is a quiet that the creatures the revolution carries into power have trouble making peace with, both because of their functionary temperament and because no revolution is ever going to grant it. Which means that the differences run not only along the axis of function against idea, but along the axis of what the revolution is even for. And the Jews who wanted to assimilate and to keep the quiet failed to understand that by the very act of the revolution they had sentenced themselves to another wandering in the desert — only this time not even as Jews.
The pattern holds for every large socialist movement in history without exception, except in the countries where there were no Jews to turn on: Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, Angola. The Jews are perceived not only as the engine of the bourgeoisie — Marx is explicit about this — but as those who, by refusing to strip themselves of the Jewish structure, inflict damage on equality, on the revolution, on consciousness, and of course on the historical process itself. That is the source of Israel's marking in the global left. It has a religious and gnostic genealogy too, which is not for here.
In every left-wing movement there are romantics, and alongside them there are cynics. This much is well known. What has somehow never been clarified is that the division between the two is a function of movement — movement between categories, and between the points at which the ideal arrives at its own realization. There is a phase of creation and then there is a phase of construction, and the romantic and the cynic are less two kinds of person than two positions along that passage. Only that now, in the world of representation, whoever is capable of controlling representation becomes the ruler. He becomes the function that is required. He becomes, in the end, the ideal itself. That is what the fight is actually over.
And the Jews will never be able to be an ideal of that kind. They will never be able to redeem the world, because whether they arrive as romantics, in the manner of Rosa Luxemburg, or as functionaries who are romantics as well, in the manner of Trotsky, what happens in practice is that in the world of representation the power is in the hands of the mass, and the Jews will always be without mass. No idea built on rigid categories drawn from a phenomenological analysis of reality — which is to say, Marx's idea — is capable of producing a condition in which so small a quantity attains quality without producing oppression along the way. And that oppression, in which Jews took their own part in the past, is what will finally turn them into the enemy of the very system they blessed.
This is why the romantic left-wing project is baseless: the samsara of categories will more than once run against the very people who created them in the first place, which is to say against Jews. The mechanism of annulment is built around the idea that whoever produced categories inside socialism, or communism, or postcolonialism, is himself oppressing the text of the revolution no less than the capitalist. He distances it from authenticity. He produces the structure of power. He multiplies the alienation. And how could he not be suspect of oppression, this man who insists on remaining un-annulled and un-included, always asking for his pound of flesh?
A Jew who enters a romance with the left is a Jew who enters a relationship in which the goal is to be the perfect victim. Relationships of that kind, even when they are conducted on the basis of authentic romantic longing, end in heartbreak. All the more so political systems on which millions of people depend. Six million Jews were already offered up on the altar of that hybrid where it stopped being clear what was right and what was left, and several million more were tortured by socialism in its own name.
Brad Lander is a Jew. He is supposed to be smarter than this, and to notice it. If not in his private life, then at the very least in his public one. Because this Jewish romanticism of death-as-a-solution looks to me like a man trying to crucify himself all over again. Fine. But why your brother too?
