Being a literary critic in America’s desert of fictioneering is lonely business–and sometimes, I have to go slumming in search of something to review. Much like Diogenes, I have to go begging for books, and when no one offers me anything, I have to dig through the garbage. And what I find is usually just that–garbage. I get a book pretending to be about Christopher Hitchens (‘Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters’ by Ben Burgis), or yet another book about Nietzsche (‘How To Read Like a Parasite’ by Daniel Tutt) or a Substack redux (reduction? remix?) of Olufemi O. Taiwo’s book on elite capture (‘How Elites Ate The Social Justice Movement’ by Freddie DeBoer–not reviewed, read half of it, promptly tossed it against the wall), or…well, I will save you the tedium. Suffice to say, when one travels the American desert of fictioneering, one will have to drink their own piss a few times just to make it out alive.

The first issue one might raise, after raising their voice in support of whichever one of their favorites I have kicked in the nads (or ignored), is that the books I have mentioned are not fiction. I disagree. What they are not is literature, as literature, like the literary critic in America, is a near-extinct species. And in a nation so dull that it has not produced literature in several decades (while producing a forest destroying amount of kiddult nonsense), the literary critic must move on to other fictions to feed on–or fictions to make. Some go for religion, some go for politics, some go for movies. I like to have variety–a little cinema here, a little religion there, some politics as a treat. In recent years, politics, and the theorizing that goes with it, has been the funniest of the worst, sitting above televangelist books and Veggie Tales but below the kitsch of our film ‘auteurs’ in nutrients. Politics and the theories it engenders is the sitcom of its form; proclaiming to mirror reality but instead giving us something plastered, cut up, and staged for our viewing pleasure. Or dismay.

Thus, I find myself here, reviewing Carlos L. Garrido’s ‘Why We Need American Marxism’. I appreciate that Verdigris is saving me a trip to the bin to search for something to review–after all, when it was sent my way, I was caught off guard. When I saw the red cover, the white lettering, the American flag, I thought there had to be some mistake. I rushed to my computer, and prepared the following message for its editor Dwayne Monroe:

‘You have sent me a book from a Fox News personality. You have made a mistake; I am not Matt McManus. This is not my bag.’
Before I hit send, I decided to take another look–after all, I was certain that Mr. Monroe would not make such a mistake, whether it is sending me the newest sludge from Fox News, or mistaking me, a hick with delusions of culture, for that academe altar boy of Toronto. Upon review (ha!), I saw the hammer and sickle. I sighed with some relief; Fox News would never put such a logo on their books.

Right?

While I was mistaken about whether Garrido’s book was an actual Murdoch product, having now read it I think its style captures the Murdoch essence: the boxy letters and the gleaming style reminds one of the greasy sleaze of such right wing pulp. This is a pulp that, I am sad to say, I have had a lot of traffic with. I was confronted with the sludge early on; as a son-of-a-cop, I was age 15 (or there about) when my father handed me Bill O’Reilly’s ‘Who Is Looking Out For You?’  (2003). From then until I reached the age of 19, I was inundated with various Fox News paraphernalia. I became a fan of Newt Gingrich, reading books of his like ‘Real Change’ (2008), ‘A Nation Like No Other’ (2011) and ‘To Save America’ (2011)–the last of which states, in excited font over a urine-yellow sticker, that it is ‘Completely revised and updated with a Battle Plan for the New Republican Majority in the House.’ Well! That is sure to excite the loins–or are those the bowels? I–what is that, Father? I need to leave the confessional? If I must…

Why do I mention this? Obviously, there is a connection; the same way my adolescent brain excitedly turned each of these pages with naive anticipation, so my world weary, adult brain scoffed, groaned, and sometimes snored through ‘Why We Need Marxism’. You see, the greatest irony of Marxism in America is that, like everything from cinema to religion to the novel itself, it has become an industry. You have Verso Books, Repeater Books, the shiny new Revol Press, Zero Books and, in this case, a self-publishing moron. They all turn out books much like this one: a book that proclaims, by sublation, sublimation, or subjugation, to have a cure for you. Nevermind that it tastes like snake oil–or is that a Tide Pod?–they assure you that it has the solution to, if not all of your problems, then the ones that you complain about the most on Twitter (I refuse to call it X). What’s the trouble with the Left today? Why, Nietzsche, says Mr. Tutt. No, it is because of the elites co-opting social justice, says Freddie DeBoer. No no, cries Burgis, it is because we have not given the Right a good argument! But what about…

Incidentally, in 1980, during an interview on the Paul Ryan Show (no no, not that Paul Ryan), American scourge Gore Vidal once said the following:

“There is nothing you cannot get people to believe. And I think this comes from [the fact that] the United States never developed a civilization, or anything like one. There are no agreed upon set of values and this is why everyone is so crooked. It is why, if you’ll forgive me, we are a nation of shoplifters.”

Of course, Mr. Vidal, you can be forgiven–this is a Christian nation, or so they say. Forgiveness is to be expected, but in this case it is not necessary. There is no reason to forgive someone when they are right, and Vidal is just as right, from beyond the grave, as he was then, while he was alive but beyond the pale. In this nation of shoplifters, being our very own Melvillian ship of fools, everything that is done is crooked, bent towards the latest grift. Such is the nature of crooked-ness; it cries out for those who want to offer us a cure, and therefore every grift begins as a cure. From our religion to our kitsch to our politics to, finally, our economics (both heterodox and radical), everything is delivered to us by street preachers with a cure. God, AI, nostalgia consumer goods or the newest movies. 

And, at last, ‘American Marxism’

I

When one begins reading ‘Why We Need American Marxism’, one is beset by a format of word processing (it is not writing) that will plague the reader for the rest of the book. Carlos Garrido writes the way they teach adolescents in American debating clubs to write: assert a point, reference a source, and essay a conclusion. He begins his book in this way:

‘In 1928 the great Peruvian communist José Carlos Mariátegui would write that “socialism in America is a carbon copy. It must be a heroic creation. We have to give life, with our own reality, in our own language, to Indo-American socialism. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation.” Mariátegui was, of course, referring to the same America as the apostle of the Cuban revolution, José Martí, in his classic Nuestra América. The America of la patria grande.

Mariátegui, nonetheless, expresses in this statement a general truth about socialism. This is a truth rooted in the dialectical materialist framework through which the crème de le crème of the communist tradition has approached the questions of the world, where that which is universal is understood as such not because it exists the same irrespective of context (i.e., space and time), but, in contrast to most of the Western philosophical cannon (except Heraclitus and Hegel), precisely because it can take on diverse particular forms in accordance with its historical-spatial context. This dialectical framework, which sustains concrete, not abstract, universals, allows us to see how, in the actual world, there can be no abstract socialism in general.’ (p. 1, his italics)

Here the cycle is a little different only because this is where he must begin: the quotation comes first (Jose Carlos Mariategui said…), assertion of a point (general truth about socialism, dialectical materialist framework) and then a conclusion (there can be no abstract socialism in general). Incidentally, I chuckled as I read this. You read that solecism right: the Western philosophical cannon. I am surprised that the Second Amendment extends to dead philosophers (except, apparently, Hegel and Heraclitus. Are they woke?). Chuckle as I might, this merry-go-round makes one dizzy. The statement of Mariategui expresses a ‘general truth about socialism’ whose conclusion is that there is ‘no abstract socialism in general’. The truth is general, but socialism is not abstract. If the truth can be general, but socialism cannot, then how does the general truth apply to a specific kind of…why yes, teacher, I am having trouble. This square block just won’t go in this round hole.

And once the reader feels they have gained their footing, the cycle begins again, bouncing the reader around like a guest at a P. Diddy party. Here is what comes next:

‘Socialism can only exist through incorporating the particular traditions and characteristics of the civilizations and peoples who won the struggle for political power. As Lenin would write: “All nations will move towards socialism; it is inevitable. But the process will not be exactly the same for all nations … each nation will have its own characteristics.” Or, as Gramsci would notice, in contrast to rootless cosmopolitanism, real internationalism is “profoundly national.” This sentiment is echoed by Mao, who would write that “Can a Communist, who is an internationalist, at the same time be a patriot? We hold that he not only can be but also must be…[we] must therefore combine patriotism with internationalism [and be] at once internationalists and patriots.”’ (p.2)

Socialism can only exist through incorporating particular traditions and characteristics of the people who won the class struggle. Don’t believe me? Let’s turn it over to Vladimir Lenin with more…I was only on the first page, and I already wanted off this ride. But bravely, and against my better judgment, I continued, barf bag in hand.

In this cycle of palaver, I had to focus on something to keep me from losing my lunch. As I continued, I noticed that every reference presented was a quotation. There is nothing wrong with a quotation, especially in a book meant to focus on the historical in some way. In many ways, one needs these quotes to either frame a point one is trying to make or, stylistically, to offer a segue to one’s argument. One can leave an exception, here and there, for the review which is focused on a specific book. But as I got to the middle of Garrido’s–mercifully short–book, I began to realize that the only kind of reference in this book is quotations. When he, say, quotes Herbert Aptheker writing that the American revolution was ‘the first anti-colonial revolution in history’ (p.11), he does not follow this up with any attempt to provide evidence for what was written. He follows it up with, you guessed it, a quote from someone else–in this case, Vladimir Lenin. He does not attempt to relate, in any particular way, the veracity of that particular quote, or to give it context showing why Aptheker believed this, or why the reader should believe him. He constantly argues via a genetic fallacy, resorting to the authority he presumes his quoted individual has.

This might seem ridiculous, but I can assure you it gets worse. You see, Garrido’s book largely rests on his mentioning of, and his dedication of chapter 4 to, W.E.B DuBois. W.E.B. DuBois is perhaps one of the greatest thinkers in the entire American pantheon–and Garrido agrees! And yet, in his chapter on W.E.B. DuBois, we get a total of 54 quotations that are cited from a diversity of books. In all 27 pages of the chapter, where W.E.B. DuBois and his book ‘Black Reconstruction’ are mentioned (asserted) as ‘the foundation of American Marxism’, DuBois himself is quoted only 13 times, with 8 of those quotations coming from the book noted as his ‘magnum opus’, of which 3 of these quotes regarding ‘Black Reconstruction’ are in the footnotes. For those of my readers who do not wish to do the math, have no fear: in a chapter meant to shed light on DuBois and his book ‘Black Reconstruction’, we hear from DuBois himself less than a quarter of the time, while his book features four-twenty sevenths (14 percent) of the time, with five percent of that time being stuffed away in his sprawling footnotes. They serve less as a way to reference what Garrido is talking about, but to supplement his very loose, unfocused writing with more long winded tendentiousness, where he explains that what he was explaining was actually explaining that–sigh. Ça suffit. This chapter would have been a wonderful place for the direct quotation of DuBois’ ‘Black Reconstruction’ with a larger supplement of quotations from DuBois himself and his other works. One might have examined DuBois’ writings and perspective in relation to both Marxism and the United States itself, perhaps considering a variety of his changes from when he rose as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance to his later works with the United Nations, Pan-African activism, and perhaps had tied this altogether to consider…well, I won’t give the game away. The match is already set. 

I might seem to be nitpicking here. I can hear scores of the Twitterati and the Midwestern bumpkins who have siloed (soiled?) themselves with Carlos Garrido, Noah Khrachvik and the cult known as the ‘Midwestern Marx Institute’–an institution for, I can only assume, the insane. Their rejections will take the form of shrugging between shrieks: who cares! Quotations or no, Garrido has made some good points! He tells us that…well? What does he tell us? You see, the reason I pick at these un-literary knots as I look over this ungainly pabulum is because above all else, the point of writing is expression. In literature proper, writing expresses narrative, characterization, leitmotif, suspense, and a host of other techniques and effects. In non-fiction, as this book purports to be, writing expresses ideas, particularly that of the author. While words do not need a grammarian-like precision, with every punctuation where it ought to be, it does need to use the right words, in the right form, to express the right (if not correct, which in this case it isn’t) ideas. Examining this book for what it tells us is so exhausting because of just how silly its formatting is, and just how many solecisms there are. 

For example, I have already referenced the spelling of ‘canon’ in ‘Western philosophical canon’ as ‘cannon’. One can see it in his reference to his article where ‘combating’ is spelled ‘combatting’, which is then spelled that very same way in the title of the appendix–incidentally, appendix is not understood either, as it is not meant to function as a place to write more as one does in an epilogue or afterword, but as an organizational section for a bibliography, subject references, and relate the reader to original material. This function, meant for an appendix, is attempted in the footnotes, which make the numbering of pages at 114 pages dubious, since most of the pages of this book have large footnotes that take up most of the page. On top of this, there is the sprinkling of philosophic jargon, which reads that way it might taste if someone seasoned their pork chops with a whole bag of citric acid. One runs into phrases like ‘concrete concretely’ or the constant use of terms like ‘dialectical materialist framework’ or ‘dialectical materialist worldview’ or ‘sublated’, which seem to have no actual bearing on what is being discussed but are thrown in as mere signifiers to assure the reader that, yes, you are reading a Marxist. Don’t you see? I have Marx right here…

It is an Olympian effort to sort through the silliness of this all. Are there ideas in this book? That depends, and I will get to that. Are they expressed by what is written? Not really. One has to search for the ideas, which are, usually, not stuck between philosophic jargon, endless quotations, and bad epigrams (‘Dogmatism is as incompatible with Marxism as oil is with water.’), but are stuffed away in the footnotes.

And, as Noel Coward once said:

‘Having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.’

II

Here I am, having gone down stairs, looking at the ideas of Garrido’s book. As I stand here, exposed, I should be honest: I am not a Marxist. To many, this statement will now disqualify me from writing about a Marxist text–or a text that references Marx and the vocabulary various academics have tagged him with. I do not think, however, this should disqualify me. 

To those who wonder about the benefit of listening to me, I turn you to a story in Diogenes Laertius’s ‘Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers’ about the Ancient cynic philosopher Diogenes. In this story, Diogenes watched as the secretaries of a great religious temple led away one of their own stewards who stole a goblet. In response, Diogenes uttered:

‘The great thieves are carrying off the little thief.’

Since I am not a Marxist, I am in a better position to be honest, mainly because I have no great stake in its reputation. I am not for nor against Marxism: after all, being against Marxism is as futile as being for it. While Marx was a genius who was often right, his current followers are, with very few exceptions, merely Sunday school adherents of a secular religion that has, as all religions do, abandoned its savior for the image of him. These Marxists, current author included, are not concerned with being right, but with performing the right rituals and finding a place in the Church bureaucracy–or among its priests. When these people schism with each other over this or that doctrinal dispute, I look at everyone, and I see every great thief–and all the little thieves too.

The ideas of Carlos Garrido’s book belong to a little thief, because they are not ideas–they are merely assertions. For all the richness of the Marxist theology Garrido claims to have reverence towards, he seems to have only stolen minor trinkets. These assertions, trinkets they are, are never made to relate to absolutely anything else, either outside the text nor within it. When Garrido tells us about ‘national nihilism’, to pick one of his assertions at random, he gives us a quick definition on page three, saying it is ‘the totalizing rejection of one’s national past because of its impurities’. National nihilism is mentioned, leaving out its parroting in his ‘Endorsements’, eighteen times: it is in two titles, one for the book and one for one of the self-references in Garrido’s book–both titles telling us Garrido is ‘combatting’ nihilism Yes, you read that right. No, I am not having a stroke. But if the solecisms keep up… It is also in two of the quotes Garrido notes, one from a speech from Georgi Dimitrov and one of the scattered quotes from ‘JV Stalin’ (why? Just say Joseph…or uncle Joe?). Finally, it is asserted in the text twelve times, and of those twelve times, it is only given an explanation three times. This all seems like a numbers game, but pay attention: of the three definitions, two of them are exactly the same: the one noted above, on page three, is reiterated on page eighty-three, only adding it is a ‘form’ of ‘purity fetish’. It is mentioned, again, on page eighty five. On this page, Garrido gives the following context:

‘Their national nihilism, contrary to their intentions, leads them into a liberal tinted American exceptionalism, which holds that while all countries have had to give their socialist content a national form, the U.S., in its supposedly uniquely evil history, is the exception. Like German guilt pride (based in the so-called Erinnerungskultur, the ‘culture of remembrance’) it is a way of expressing supremacism through guilt.’ (p. 85)

This is the only context we are given, built on nebulose nonsense and ended on a sneer of Erinnerungskultur (oh Goebbels!). National nihilism leads to a form of American…exceptionalism? Yes, that American exceptionalism. As you see, to bring the definition together with the context, if you ‘reject’ your ‘national past because of impurities’, it opens you up to having a feeling of exceptionalism about your nation’s history. I had to take off my glasses, wipe them down with Windex, and put them back on. Is this the famed dialectical materialist framework, where contradiction is a sign of…well, I must pass on. What we are seeing, here, is a thief who does not understand what he has stolen. Garrido’s book is strewn with such contradictions, like when he quotes Vladimir Lenin’s comment to the Young Communist League that ‘you can become a Communist only when  you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.’ I chuckled reading this: mankind, yes, that definite nationality which Lenin was telling us that the worker’s struggle must take. Well, if you can’t beat them, misquote them.

There are several such assertions that are like this, too many to cite without causing me to wish heartily to hang myself. I will focus on his only other major assertion that he gives any context to: his assertion of the ‘purity fetish’, defined as ‘a worldview that makes them relate to the world on the basis of purity as a condition for support’. This is a definition that we only get on page eighty two, after it is snuck into the footnotes and asserted once on page seventy eight. Incidentally, the footnotes act something like an apology. I am very sorry, reader, that I am putting this word in here randomly–if you go read my other book, you will learn what it means. Norman Mailer lives–these footnotes are an advertisement for oneself! Nevertheless, Garrido’s definition of purity fetish apparently comes in three flavors.

The first of these is a condemnation of ‘a bloc of conservative workers’, meaning that the American Left is ‘effectively removing about 30-40% of American workers from the possibility of being organized’. In a work so doused in footnote after banal footnote to this or that book, consider the surprise I felt when this exact statistic had no footnote. In the margins, I scrawled ‘proof?’, just as I did when he claims on page two ‘The necessity of socialist construction adapting to the national peculiarities of the peoples constructing socialism is not simply a hypothesis  – it is a historical fact!’ No footnote? What a surprise. If you live by the footnote, you will die by it. And so his claim about the first of these ‘central forms’ dies on its footnotes. His claim, here, is that even if there are workers of a conservative persuasion, or even a fascist one, we must absorb their ideas into what we consider socialism. Nevermind anything that Marx said, if the Freedom Convoy of COVID denial fame claims the Jews have space lasers and Anthony Fauci is making the vaccine to kill our children, then we must accept it. They are, as he says, ‘working in the pressure points of capitalism’. Their wisdom is–must–be all knowing. Vox populi, vox dei. DEI? Someone call Carlson Tucker, God has a problem…

The second form of this fetish is ‘a continuation of the way it is generally present in the tradition of Western Marxism, which has always rejected actually existing socialism because it does not live up to the ideal of socialism in their heads.’ One might have a few questions when reading this abominable sentence: a continuation coming from where? Where is this in Western Marxism? And whose ‘heads’ have the ideals that reject existing socialism? These are never answered, only pushed along as we get more assertions: this leads to leftists ‘parroting empire’, failing to recognize that ‘socialism is to be built’, which occurs under ‘extreme pressures of imperialist hybrid warfare’, leading to the left accepting the ‘McCarthyite lies with which the ruling class has fed the people’. Wait, didn’t Garrido just say that we need to accept and absorb, rather than refuse, the conservative and right wing blocs of the working class? What makes them right wing? Is it the acceptance of these McCarthyite–no. At this point, the contradictions and blatant knavishness of this book are no longer cute. I can only make this joke so many times, because this seems like a contradiction but it isn’t, nor is it a mistake. It is an attempt to evade the truth of Garrido’s book: that it advocates for national socialism. He does not want a Marxism with nationalistic characteristics, but national socialism with vulgar Marxist signifiers.

The third and final form of this fetish is national nihilism–and now we have come full circle. An assertion made up of ideas that are not understood but only thieved from the temple of Marxism, all set out in the form of two boxy S’s juxtaposed diagonally on top of each other. One gets distracted with the mis-labeling of the relics stolen from this temple: ‘petty-bourgeois’ instead of petit-bourgeois, ‘Sinified Marxism’ instead of Chinese Marxism, the way Garrido calls us to action by writing, ‘We, communists in the U.S., need to develop and American Marxism.’, the absolute naivete of Garrido’s excited quoting of politicians without a hint of concern that, by and large, politicians of Communist countries (assuming such nations existed at all), including their leaders, are just as corrupt and lie just as freely as capitalist politicians, and so much more mentioned here–or left out for the sake of my sanity.

As I stumble about, searching for the door handle so I can finally let myself out of this little thief’s funhouse farmers market, I can say this:

What can one say about Carlos Garrido’s ‘Why We Need American Marxism’? Many things, but most importantly we can say this: that we do not need it at all.