"Obituary": Zak Cope

At the end of 2011 I copy-edited the manuscript of Divided World Divided Class (DWDC) by the then upcoming scholar Zak Cope. Although I ultimately disagreed with the conclusion of the manuscript (a rehash of the Third Worldist argument that there was no proletariat in the imperialist metropoles) I appreciated the expansiveness of the empirical data that at least proved the existence of a labour aristocracy. And in any case, it was not my business to agree or disagree––my job was merely to copy-edit. Then, in the fall of 2012, right after my daughter was born, I had the misfortune of having to lug 50 newly published copies of this book in a suitcase across the world, throughout the Netherlands on a train, and over kilometres of the cobblestone streets of Maastricht to the Jan Van Eyck Centre where they were being launched as part of a conference I was co-presenting at. I still remember the echoes of my clunking suitcase as I crossed the town early Saturday morning, causing the inhabitants to look out their windows in alarm. If I had known then that Cope would denounce this book, along with his Marxism, and become a raving Thatcherite reactionary I would not have bothered to transport these books across the world, let alone edit the manuscript. But nobody possesses prophetic foresight, as much as many of us would like to imagine––in hindsight––that we might have been able to see the errors of defection from the very beginning.

After the release of DWDC, Cope became a vaunted scholar within the so-called "Third Worldist" milieu. The now defunct Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement (RAIM)––an offshoot of the Leading Light Communist Organization (LLCO), itself an offshoot of the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM)––saw Cope and DWDC as the scholarly text needed to justify their existence. On the other extreme, post-Trotskyists whose entire theory was based on the jettisoning of Lenin's theory of the labour aristocracy saw DWDC as anathema. Cope thus received a small spotlight as a Marxist scholar. Lionized by groups such as RAIM and villainized by groups such as Solidarity, he could enjoy becoming a spokesperson for the theory of the labour aristocracy by collaborating with RAIM on certain projects and by debating about the efficacy of the theory with Charles Post. Although the RAIM collaborations were boring (as were the essays written by RAIM's Nik Brown, now another former Marxist, that used Cope's work to push RAIM's microsect line), at least the debates with Post were exciting.

Again, while I did not agree with Cope's ultimate conclusions––which I found insightful but lacking nuance and ultimately empiricist and determined by positivism (particularly in the way he conflated exploitation with super-exploitation)––I thought that he was a meaningful Marxist scholar. After all, I don't fully agree with every scholar whose work I have appreciated, just as my colleagues and comrades don't fully agree with me, and I think it is important to maintain a distinction between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions. In the case of Cope's early Marxist scholarship, I found the points of disagreement to be non-antagonistic. The differences between this perspective and the tendency I defend I've outlined in Critique of Maoist Reason, Politics In Command, and a review on this very blog where I write: "in [his] effort to prove the existence and persistence of a labour aristocracy, Cope lapses into an undialectical and unnuanced understanding of qualitative phenomena. Absorbed in the positivism of political economy, he overlooks the necessity to grasp the theory of the labour aristocracy according to the scientific method of historical materialism––that is, like so many political economists, he is not a very good dialectical materialist."

But now that Cope has denounced his Marxism, and all his work he wrote when he was a Marxist, it doesn't matter if he was a good dialectical materialist––he doesn't care about that anymore. Instead, Cope has joined the odious population of Marxist (or anarchist or any kind of anti-capitalist) defectors: like Bernard Henri-Lévy and others, Cope has become another leftist-turned-reactionary. The bourgeois ideological story of "I was a communist but then I grew up and all these other communists who still talk about Marxism and the evils of capitalism are little children." Such a cliché, ho-hum, and in some ways we should dismiss him as a cliché… But at the same time we should ask why this cliché persists, why do these defections happen, why does, as William Burroughs puts it in Naked Lunch (or was it Cronenberg's Naked Lunch adaptation, I can't remember), "every agent sells out."

There is a tendency amongst committed anti-capitalists to treat every defection from our camp as a sign of original sin. That is, we like to search for something in the work of people who defect––who become liberals or reactionaries––that generated this defection and thus denounce their work as being flawed from the beginning. Maybe the lack of dialectical thinking, along with other psychological factors, led to Cope's defection, but it is also the case that a lot of Marxists whose work is not very dialectical, and is filled with errors, remain opposed to capitalism for their entire lives in a curmudgeonly kind of way. So I don't think this "original sin" kind of thinking is productive. For one thing, I find it to be a replication of religious thinking: I grew up around Christians who treated Christians who "lost their faith" as having never really been "truly Christian" to begin with. This kind of religious thinking was based on the notion that if you truly believed you would have never lost your way because "true belief" would mean eternal commitment. Such a viewpoint is based on the notion that there is some unique soul, some untainted personhood, and a personal subject that doesn't change overtime: you either have revelation or you do not; if you abandon your faith then you never had revelation to begin with.

But as a (historical) materialist I tend to believe that there is no such thing as a "true self". Indeed, my upcoming book about the concept of the subject upholds the notion that there is no such thing as a fixed person but instead multiple subject positions within which we participate overtime, processes of selfhood that are determined by social relations and ideology. As even analytic philosophy has obsessed over, personal identity is a construction: every individual can be a completely different person at different points in their life, hence the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Ideology and social relations explain this thought experiment more thoroughly than analytic philosophy (with its positivist over-determination) can explain: as collective beings, our social being determines our subjectivity, and thus we occupy personhoods influenced by the ideology of the social relations that are predominant in our lives. With the dominant class ideologies being the most compelling, especially if we lack participation in a collective life challenging these ideologies. This problematic is precisely one of the themes I investigate in my upcoming book: subjects are processes.

I cannot say for sure what kind of collective life Zak Cope was part of, let alone what revolutionary practice he pursued, but I suspect it wasn't significant. I think an inference from the best explanation would be that he did very little organizational work––his entire Third Worldist notion of practice, after all, argued that there was no proletarian life in which he could participate so why bother?––and there is zero evidence he did much anti-imperialist internationalist work either. I cannot say what ideologies he would have found the most compelling (although Zionism was maybe one of them considering his reaction to October 7 2023 that precipitated his reactionary gestalt shift), because I did not know him. (Others I have spoken to did know him, and there were signs of his shift that occurred over time, but again all that signifies is that people become other people over time because subjectivity is not stable.) But I can say that Cope's defection is not bizarre, nor is it necessarily some result of an original sin on his part beyond being an undialectical thinker––but even dialectical thinkers, with much better revolutionary practice, can defect when isolated from collective life. Kobad Ghandy turned into a magical post-Marxist thinker after being isolated from the living movement; Hisila Yami (Pavarti), despite the strength of her work on people's war and women's liberation, ended up joining the revisionist camp. Individual agents, either shorn from collective life (Ghandy was in prison for years) or experiencing the fragmentation of this life (Yami was subjected to the violent vicissitudes of line struggle in a peace process that neutralized a People's War), sell out as their consciousness changes. Cope is not on par with Ghandy and Yami––he was not a revolutionary, it seems unlikely he lived any kind of meaningful collective life with a parallel revolutionary practice, and far less pressure seems to be exerted on his life to push his shift in personhood––but that is why it is so easy for individuals like him to sell out. Indeed, parts of his own work can account for his betrayal: he is living in the privileged imperialist metropoles and is thus bought out as an ideologue like his worker counterparts are bought out by super-profits. He's the ideologue-"worker" proof of his theory of the labour aristocracy. He has become a first world ideologue who can now benefit from the profits that imperialism generates and lauds on the university system where his kind of intellectual can flourish.

Moreover, it is telling that part of Cope's defection is his denunciation of his early work. Whatever errors were in this work, it was still work that was in direct opposition to the ideological position he has adopted. Indeed, DWDC's strongest passages were the analysis of fascism which is diametrically opposed to his current understanding of fascism––an understanding that claims that Nazism was literally socialism, following the liberal nominalism that dishonestly claims that the equal Hitlerite dishonesty of the name "national socialism" actually meant "socialism". The contemporary version of Cope is either being disingenuous or has become a complete moron to make such an argument, but it is a disavowal of his previous work. As is his current embrace of colonialism and imperialism. He knows what he is denouncing; he conceptualizes his new "scholarship" as a thorough break and rejection of his past scholarship.

Which is why I don't find it useful to denounce the work of defectors such as Cope when they themselves denounce such work. They are not the same subjects responsible for that earlier work; they have separated themselves from it, they denounce it, they do not want to be associated with it––and for good reason! Usually aspects of their work, if these defectors have produced meaningful work of any kind, would hold them to account. Their denunciation must be thorough: their past work needs to be rendered worthless (Cope referred to his entire Marxist approach in disparaging terms, denouncing it entirely) if they are to survive as scholars. This gambit is not necessarily disingenuous because it also works the opposite way: when I look at essays I wrote in my undergrad, or the dumb shit I wrote in zines in high school, I denounce that entirely as work written by a different person with different ideological apprehensions of the world! But for the same reason I don't care about upholding the early work of thinkers who were radicalized, I do care about upholding the early work of thinkers who were deradicalized. This is not simply about DWDC, but about the work produced by other and more important thinkers who were actually revolutionary and whose subjectivities were compromised. Hisila Yami is no longer a revolutionary, but the work she produced at the height of the people's war regarding proletarian feminism is still brilliant––and I doubt she cares about it anymore, and would probably denounce it if asked.

Nor do I find it useful to presume that Cope defected because he was bought out, as I've heard some claim. While it is clear that people in the revolutionary camp have been bought out and turned into state collaborators, it is usually more common that paid state agents are sent into revolutionary movements. As for scholars such as Cope who possess no revolutionary life or organizational experience, it seems unlikely that the state would care about him––he was a minor thinker. Maybe he did do the math to decide it was more lucrative to become a counter-revolutionary scholar, but that would also coincide with a subject-process that transformed his politics. And that is also a gamble: having been in academia for years, I know there are a lot of right wing academics who have no jobs as well… They are in my contract faculty union and keep trying to demolish the union but without the University ever wanting to give most of them jobs because they do the union smashing work for free! Maybe if Cope was on the scholarly level of a Badiou he would take a bribe, if he was a just looking for a patron, to become a reactionary, but he was always a scholar appreciated by a minor audience. Yes it is more lucrative to become an establishment scholar, but even still there aren't a lot of tenure jobs out there for even establishment scholars these days.

And it is at this point that I wonder about my own scholarship, and whether or not I will become another person––an agent who defects––at some unknown future point. If that is the case, if there are ideological events that transform me into a completely other subject, I want to be clear that the person I am right now will hate and despise that possible future person. I want to proclaim that my work now is anathema to the possible defecting agent I could become, and the subject I am now will hate forever that possible version of myself. As much as I want to ensure I won't defect, won't become a shitty liberal version of my current self (let alone an outright reactionary), I cannot predict the circumstances and ideological pressures that I will encounter in the future. So if I ever defect, I want to note that my work now is completely opposed to that possible future person who I hope will never come into existence.