Political Theory is for the Masses
The logo for Spectre
This interview is part of a series highlighting new publications. Past installments have included Southern magazine Scalawag and feminist magazine Lux.
Spectre, which launched last spring, is a journal by and for people who are organizing. It’s one of a handful of new publications that have sprung up alongside a growing, more active political culture on the left.
The journal takes its name from the famous Marx quote: “A spectre is haunting Europe,” and in its pages you’ll find essays that engage the debates consuming 21st century politics, such as what do gender, race and class have to do with each other? What does “racial capitalism” really mean? What might revive the labor movement? On its website, the editors have published first-hand accounts from essential workers throughout the pandemic.
I interviewed co-editor Tithi Bhattacharya about Spectre the morning after the coup-that-wasn’t. “We’re not yet scary enough to haunt capitalism,” she said, “but we hope we can train many people to do that job.”
Before we talk about Spectre, I have to ask, what did you make of the storming of the Capitol?
I watched in horror! And the really astonishing thing for me was the aftermath and the outright racist liberal response to a violently fascist event. You kept hearing, “This is a banana republic. This is like the Third World.” Coming from the Third World I don't remember these sorts of things … not to mention, the U.S. itself created the banana republics of the world, which they seemed to have forgotten.
Jake Tapper randomly comparing the scene to Bogota was quite something. What’s your analysis of the riot itself?
We might see this as a trial run, but not because the fascist movement is capable of mounting a real resistance to liberal democracy right now. We should see it as a trial run for another reason: the appalling state of the economy and the Biden administration only offering more austerity solutions. That’s extremely fertile ground for a fascist element to grow, mostly in the middle classes. And let’s not start again with the liberal bogeyman of the white working class! The strength of fascism is always the petite bourgeoisie. The headline of our editorial response should be a twist on Marx’s phrase, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” We cannot let yesterday’s farce become tomorrow’s tragedy.
The riot did reveal an interesting division on the right. Trump incited the riot. Then an almost coordinated response came from the capitalist class: the Chamber of Commerce, heads of major corporations, social media companies that cut Trump off, the leadership of both parties, and even the leaders of the military and mainstream media. Where the right-wing rioters found support was seemingly in the Washington DC police department. We have to remember how our protests are greeted and how the fascists were greeted.
OK, turning away from fascist riots and toward Spectre. Why this journal and why now?
Spectre started among a group of friends and collaborators who did not necessarily come from the same political groups or organizations, but [who] shared … certain broad political understandings of capitalism. It was obvious to us that capitalism was reaching a point of crisis and was utterly incapable of meeting people’s needs. On the other hand, it was clearly true that capitalism had changed in ways that meant socialists had to find new answers to old questions and ask questions differently. For example, the climate crisis was not the same emergency in the 1970s.
Some of us had been thinking about feminism and the crisis of social reproduction, some of us were focused on race and what we mean by racial capitalism, or on sexuality and queer politics. We decided to get together because the journals we saw around us did not adequately address these aspects of anticapitalism. Class has to first be a social relationship, and how people are tethered to class is often through race and gender.
The real meat of Spectre is how to develop an activist strategy for social transformation that begins to reconstruct social relations in the here and now, while at the same time building the power to dismantle capitalism. This is why during the pandemic I started a series on the website, trying to get essential workers to write for Spectre about their struggles.
How do you ensure that the journal is legible to people who may not come from an intellectual background or higher education?
Working-class people have always read Marx. The example I always like to give is around 1890, Vladimir Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya (a fellow revolutionary and Lenin’s wife) used to run capital reading classes with Petrograd workers. We’re talking about workers in the industrial areas of Russia who could barely read and write. So don’t give me all this nonsense about finding this stuff elitist. Theory is for the masses!
I personally think that one of the vital tasks that we need to accomplish now is political education – neoliberalism especially in America has, for the last 40 years, cut working-class and young people off from the history of the left. School curricula have been sanitized and institutions like unions that used to educate members are depleted. It took a mass movement – the movement for Black lives – to say, hello, the Confederate flag is wrong.
Not knowing your own history atomizes the left. I’m in Indiana, which is supposed to be really conservative – and it is! – but Eugene Debs is from here, and the heartland of the labor movement was here. That sort of history has been suppressed, and our job is to help expose that.
What’s one article in the most recent issue that really captures the Spectre ethos?
Robin D.G. Kelley on defunding the police!
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