Dilettantes for the Dialectic Unite!

Arturo Desimone

August 9, 2026

I’ve always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo...But my

background is a bourgeois background, or an upper-working-class background... it’s a

dialectical thing, you know?

— John Lennon, 1971 interview

The first time I came across Negative Dialectics by Adorno, was not in a university

library, nor in any expensive communist bookstore in Europe—those were the places

that seem natural habitats for such encounters. The title in giant letters was emblazoned

on a painted cardboard book bigger than a coffin. The coordinators of the demo had

assigned me the job to drag that book-coffin down a road in the city center of The

Hague, amid other protesters who carried various similar props—gigantic book covers

with cerebral-sounding titles. I questioned my own presence in this protest as bizarre,

because I am a high school drop out who boasts a GED and am inclined to criticize the

fetishization of the university degree. My reason for joining the movement was to

lambast the Dutch student protesters for not having set up an antiwar movement

instead, thereby I tested the limits of the much-marketed Dutch tolerance. The big

books were ploys in a protest, against the scheduled dissolution of higher ed in the

name of innovation and other euphemisms for austerity. It would have worked better if

one of the coffins could open revealing a doll with the likeness of one of the politicoes

driving austerity. But then again, that tactic is straight out of Gene Sharpe, who

everybody knows was a CIA stuntman.

The books, as ornate and out of place as African masks, were futile shields against

watercannons. The non-lethal weapons made a sound like a very powerful royal toilet

flushing, wielded by the relatively polite but irritated Hague cops, seemingly disgruntled

at how regulations forced them to haul in all these soft-power contraptions when it

would be much simpler to just loose some attack dogs and bash in some heads.

I scoffed at the title. What the fuck was negative dialectics supposed to mean? It sounded

like more of the poststructural crossword gobbledygook which had helped the politicians

to justify their closing coffers in the first place, by arguing that they really were dialing

back on years of decadence and overspending.

The light on the road to Frankfurt

Years later I cultivated a dilettante’s understanding of some icons of the Frankfurt

School, other than the only one who I could respect at the time—Walter Benjamin, still

the most admirable of the club. Obviously, the entire hysterical scene in the Hague was a fated and immaculate irony, since the acolytes of Adorno have a reputation for a

dispirited form of resignation, a distance they take from intervening in political reality,

much like the crew on a starship in a science fiction novel, who wrestle with the ethics of

meddling in the affairs of aliens.

Adorno’s Negative Dialectics refutes certain rigid formulations of the old Enlightenment

dialectic. But he also attempted to problematize the method of “dialectics” often parroted

in Marxist-Leninist milieus. [1] This was during the Cold War, at a historical crossroads

when roughly one third of the world population was still living under self-declared

socialist regimes. Innumerable schoolchildren had to memorize the terminology of

“dialectics” and “dialectical materialism” behind the rusty iron curtain.

Shortly after Adorno’s death, the quintessentially American mass entertainer Shirley

Maclaine made a film in which she toured China. In “The Other Half of the Sky,”

Maclaine frequently invokes a “process” of solving “historical contradictions.” We cannot

pretend this was wholly innocent: Maclaine put Lady Mao on a pedestal.

In the capitalist West, Sartre was still in vogue, polyamorous, his pipe still chugging

away like the train to Stalingrad, and “dialectical materialism” had become popular

among students who were tuned in and turned on to various strands of Leninism,

Trotskyism, or (the oxymoron of Western-) Maoism. This young population, by no

means insignificant, drew inspiration from the heroics of third-worldist fighters like

Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. A new romanticism fed them with an eagerness to

participate bravely in the world. Such fiery predispositions, when not purely cathartic or

reduced to a radical chic invocation of centrist liberal pieties, are frequently discouraged

or scoffed at by people employed in higher education, including those who today read

and teach Adorno—which is not to say that he lacks great merit, as a thinker who strove

to cast a shadow over what threatened to become a cultic, metaphysicalized, and yet

oversimplified form of Marxism.

Adorno, here reduced to my admittedly dilettantish understanding, represents the noble

effort to prevent both modernity and Marxism from becoming rehearsed doctrinaire

theologies, in which dialectical materialism is applied by sheepish young intellectuals as

if it were catechism—as if Fichte’s and Schelling’s thesis antithesis synthesis (borrowed,

copped by Hegel who renamed synthesis “sublation”) were the holy trinity invoked

before transubstantiation. Such efforts at immunizing the young against a hypnotic

dogmatism were sane in their context. The context was the Cold War and the Western

universities where German Jewish exiles addressed their admiring juvenile audiences.

But those were the 1950s and ‘60s.

Today, almost no student knows what “dialectic” means. (Or “sublation,” for that

matter.) Such is the phase of intellectual history we find ourselves stranded in.

Our context is a grotesquely inappropriate one for applying Adorno’s critique. It

becomes yet another anachronistic revolt, bereft of any kind of practical usefulness. But

Adornoites are famous for proudly eschewing praxis anyway.

A young socialist activist from a Caucasus Republic neighboring Iran, once told me of

his movement’s struggle to foment what he modestly called popular “enlightenment.” He

and his friends faced brutal persecution from the regime, so they earned their right to

grandiloquence. He told me of an experiment he ran. At the free university where he

tried to educate and organize people from the exploited sectors, he had his adult

students read the eponymous text by Kant, and then read Foucault’s disdainful

commentary on said enlightenment. The people engaged enthusiastically with both, but

somehow could not process Foucault. Their society, he said, had not yet undergone the

enlightenment, and were therefore incapable of unpacking the critique of the

untraversed phase.

Jaded Western societies, by contrast, have become rehearsed in the critique of books

they have not read, of ideas they never bothered to understand even after downloading

the PDFs.

Now is not the time for “negative dialectics,” or for “problematizing” the dialectic.

“To ensure a long existence to religious sects or republics, it is necessary frequently to

bring them back to their original principles.” — Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy

The epochal crisis warrants a popular education which will turn electricians and

truckdrivers and teenagers into pedants, who passionately discuss and apply this thing

they heard of called the “dialectic.” That is at least the “utopian” situation we should now

be pursuing: by fomenting people’s book clubs and free courses, on a federated

national and international level, in a hybrid format (in physical gatherings and live online

transmissions). We need open institutions of the kind my friend and comrade in

Azerbaijan had built before the razzia raided his school. Such courses will provide the

oppressed more spaces of reflection and discussion and hermeneutical tools for

debating opposing views, and for analyzing the sinister realities of exploitation without

resort to the genre of conspiracy theory that often entices workers.

This runs against what much of the podcast and YouTube lefty community is currently

advocating: on one end, there are the podcasters and academic interviewees

discussing Adorno; at the other, the host of 1Dime Radio denounces such

“condescension” and “pedantry,” calling for an interpretation of Marx that aims to teach

the workers nothing and assumes the workers always know instinctively what is good

for them.

But to recognize that working people will often understand their immediate interests,

does not automatically mean that there is no need for educating and organizing. The

problem is that, at present, secondary and higher education in the West is adulterated

with a secular version of the moralism that infused Christian State education in the past.

Today’s progressive moralism is the poisoning chemical analog of the past’s reactionary

Christian Victorian indoctrination, and threatens to undermine any pedagogy of the oppressed by way of the former’s coercive messaging. But I am not here to advocate

ideas of Freire’s, nor to rail against Adorno. I argue for re-popularizing the dialectic,

making it a fad, the new game in town. It is one way to end the oxymoronic “culture

war,” which is the struggle for symbolic capital between competitive elites, even as

these partisan pundits support and advocate for the exportation of real war overseas.

Reignition vs. Resignation

“The much invoked unity of theory and praxis has the tendency of slipping into the

domination of praxis.” — Adorno, Resignation

Academic Marxists have earned a certain degree of infamy for claiming that the

behavior of the true Marxist is one of harnessing and subjugating the vita activa, the

active life, to the vita contemplativa, rather than the other way around. The Stalinist

drudgery of degrading the contemplative to work, most succinctly expressed in Brecht’s

“first grub, then ethics,” was what Hannah Arendt critiqued [2] when she drew upon these

monastic-sounding terms of the medieval itinerant philosophers, to advocate for a

balance between work/activism and reflexion/thought. Adorno, a Jewish exile like

Arendt and Marcuse, came from the trauma of Nazi Germany, the ultimate actionist

dystopia.

That is a background not shared with contemporary academic marxist professors. When

push comes to shove, these do not stand up to the college administrators who act as

overlords, gutting the funds for serious research. In this way, the academic marxist

breeds anomie and disenchantment among the young, while seeking more opportune

and immaterial scapegoats than their direct oppressors. The Platypus academics, for

example, have become obsessed of late with blaming the follies of “the anti-imperialists”

for all the woes of the left, rather than tackle the preferred ideologies of the HR

departments, who hold real sway over their professorial destinies.

These pedagogues under inverted totalitarianism [3] are often the extreme inverse of the

Stalinist overseer on the collectivized farm. They are to the vita activa what the Maoist

slave driver is to the vita contemplativa.

They will not drive to a working-class neighborhood or prison to teach simplified courses

in philosophy or in other fields for free, to help the oppressed gain a better grasp of

conceptual tools that could be used towards self-organizing.

Why work for free, if they already describe the plight of the “adjunct” as that of the

oppressed proletarian subject? They have replaced the cause of what once called

proletariat with that of the precariat—an unstable caste, defined by its volatility and

anxiety about sudden downward mobility, by its hysteria about abrupt upward mobility. I

am partial to Orwell’s advice for socialists in The Road to Wigan Pier, though he would

caution against using words like “precariat” and would likely condemn my idea of a need

for a campaign to popularize “dialectics.” But Orwell lived before the death of society

and the death of politics in the West. The counterfeit substitute for societal discussion and debate in the West is our so-called “culture war,” in which partisan spokespersons

of different moral symbol-systems competing for hegemony in the middle classes,

openly declare that they boycott inter-ideological dialogue. Thusly they kill off any seeds

of intellectual evolution. Those seeds could germinate in the public, by popularizing the

system of thought in which two opposite paradigms synthesize, in fecund, rather than

sterile confrontation, and give birth to new insights, enriching all parties. That tripartite

route along which knowledge travels and develops is modeled on nature, ever since

Heraclitus in the 5th century BCE, one century before Socrates, wrote his observations

about the flickering motion of fire.

This is, of course, a dilettantish understanding of the dialectic, laughable for the

aficionados of both Platypus and the NLR. This is also what I am advocating for.

How would this reignition look?

Today most podcasters in left video culture say they “don’t do debates.” They eschew

debate. Their avoidance of even playful conflict, despite upholding a revolutionary anti-

bourgeois tradition, is intimately related to the inability of these interlocutors to escape a

strictly virtual realm. Only consignment to screen time, the postmodern lifestyle, can

insulate a person against having core beliefs and preferences come under attack. The

extreme opposite, like Piers Morgan’s refereed screaming matches, affirm this

impossibility of debate by reaching back to the anti-dialectical stance which Aristotle first

denounced as “eristics,” or those who debate for the sake of winning verbal wrestling

matches. This was the preferred liberal format of “free debate” up until the “radical”

2010s.

The left needs a series of entertaining and popular debates which fight out internal

disagreements. Lenin’s furious debates with Bogdanov were duel-like, and a source of

spectacular entertainment that attracted ordinary and uneducated people. A faint

glimmer of this was reproduced in the debate between Slavoj Zizek and Jordan

Peterson, which filled a Toronto auditorium with 3000 sold out, overpriced seats. On

Peterson’s YouTube page alone, the debate garnered 7 million views.

Nowadays, a cycle of sectarian partisan feuds occurs behind closed doors, like all

private petit bourgeois drama. They are about what defines the amorphous and neurotic

community that claims the mantle of the Reds.

There is no debate, and therefore no dialectic, on the following concrete points between

opposed factions, for example:

1. between leftists who support renewable energy and those who see nuclear as

   the only alternative for the fossil fuel crisis.

2. between “abolitionists” and prostitutes’ right-to-work advocates, about whether

   prostitution and porn should be regulated or abolished. The disgruntled former

   marxist-feminists-turned-puritans who write for Unherd, for example, confer only

   amongst themselves, intra species, never confronted with facts by an actual prostitute-activist-intellectual (of whom there are at least several) in what would be a lively event.

3. on what position the European left should take on Ukraine and Russia.

4. on what position the Western left should have on Iran, and on numerous

   Middle Eastern causes not strictly limited to Palestine.

5. on what the actual resolution is to the Israel-Palestine impasse: is it one state,

   two states, or beyond states?

6. The debate between a left that campaigns for the interests of the family farm, vis

   a vis vegan brahmins or those who believe that the postindustrial neoliberal

   society has moved on from the concerns of agriculture—meaning food.

7. between leftists who have taken recourse in revived nation-state discourse, like

   Angela Nagle, and those more eager to fight for the rights of migrant workers.

Right now, there are only encampments who dialogue with themselves, choirs

without counterpoint, descending into noise.

These are all incredibly mundane and tendentious topics, which could draw massive

popular audiences, online and in physical spaces. Public space would be generated

against the privatized tyranny. People of all backgrounds would tune in, just as they did

for the Peterson-Zizek extravaganza. It would also be educational and would destroy

the image and associations that global working classes have developed since the mid

2010s, a burlesque in which “the left” amounts to little more than the censorious

shock troops of the anti-labor radical center.

What do these topical issues have to do with “the dialectic”? Simply, the model of

thesis-antithesis-synthesis, can be presented as a panacea for the bane of the

censorious anti-culture of progressive jingoism which stained the 2010s, preventing any

repeat of that decade of ignominy. “Dialectics” offers the prospect that is possible to

weld and alloy new things from old metals in the fire. Or less metaphorically put, it

opens the possibility of engaging with antagonizing views on issues that the people care

about or can take interest in. The death of politics has meant the death of “agon,” the

playfulness of antagonizing interplay. Exported beyond the fortress of the left, a

glamorized dialectics can remind people that they are welcome: that the socialist can

engage with every person and tackle every worldview, making sure to distinguish

Fascist from Fascism, Zionist from Zionism, Evangelical believer from the Prosperity

gospel. That all are welcome to curiously enter the spaces of the left, to state their

beliefs and expose these to a reasoning process, an adventure in which the

propaganda of divide et impera can be exposed and withered away.

The anti-actionist efforts of sectarian Critical Theory communities are anachronistic for

those who wish to erect the building blocks of a movement that can face the criminal

enterprises of agricultural and digital capitalism and war. The death of politics can be

reversed by fomenting a dilettantist revival of the popularization of “the dialectic,” offered

as a much-desired antidote for the paralyzing “culture wars,” in which alienated and

disempowered individuals liquidate one other in virtual reality, punishing the existence of contrarian views rather than contesting them. The result has been a de-erotocized

society that only reproduces its own death.

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[1] “Sub rosa, he polemicizes also against the twentieth-century Marxist establishment—which brings us to the second of the three keys” p. xi E.B. Ashton, translator’s note prefacing Negative Dialectics.

[2] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

[3] Henry Wolin, Democracy Inc