Serious question. I’m vaguely familiar with him as a political commentator on the left, but the more I see of the guy, the more I think he’s just a liberal.
Serious question. I’m vaguely familiar with him as a political commentator on the left, but the more I see of the guy, the more I think he’s just a liberal.
He’s got some good takes and some wacky ones. He also talks in a way that would suggest he’s very radical, like he calls people brother and sister, and he’s got a very powerful speaking voice. He’s got a good sense of oration and he’s not afraid to throw around words like imperialism, structural racism, stuff like that. I think if you wanna look into West’s ideology, I think he’s caught up in too much religious symbols and metaphysical stuff to ever reach what we’d call coherent leftism. He’s a 1990s style leftist, when the smell of Marxism had drifted away, when any radicalism had been defeated, when everyone was a kind of utopian.
But you’re right. He’s another ivy league professor. They’re always going to betray you, because they’re at their core just some academics who write papers. It’s the same with how people will occasionally get whiplash from something Zizek says.
So far the only ivy league professors who have never betrayed me have been Michael Parenti, Richard Wolff, Paul Buhle, and Jodi Dean. They’re very cool and know what they’re talking about. There’s also Vijay Prashad who is possibly one of the best Marxist academics right now, at least among English speaking academia. China probably has some kickass scholars I’ve never heard of. I have a gut feeling there are some good academics who write in Spanish too.
The way to tell if an intellectual is going to knife you is simple. What do they do outside of the university? Do they organise at grass roots level? Are they cadre in a political org? Or do they just posture at every election and protest to sell books?
There are some exceptions like how Chomsky had bad takes while being legitimately involved in material work, but Chomsky is at least consistent in his bad takes, he doesn’t betray his own stated values at a moments notice. (He’s always walked an inconsistent line of electorialism vs anarchism, for instance)
Yeah this is a good metric. Cornel West has mainly just done speeches his whole life. He’s been involved with DSA too, but mainly as a distant advisor role. He was famously at the Charlottesville thing as a counter-protestor and there was some kind of violent confrontation where some antifa defended him, which is pretty cool honestly.
I don’t know what to make of West honestly. I’ve read his books and from those alone you’d think he’s got it figured out. Clear and concise condemnations of structural racism in the US and where it comes from. But from his interviews and speeches he sounds more vague, more fuzzy, less capable of presenting a coherent plan or message.
I still want to like him because he was instrumental in my own development. I read his books as a teenager and they stuck with me, but he’s frankly a relic of a bygone age. He’s stuck 30 years ago when the moment’s long since passed him.