What are they? The sociologist Dylan Riley poses this question at the very outset of Microverses, referring to the 110 — originally handwritten — ‘notes’ out of which this, his latest book, is made. Their writing was prompted by a confluence of personal, political and social crises: his wife Emmanuela’s illness, the final months of the Trump presidency, and the Covid pandemic. Most are short discursive essays of varying length and on various political, sociological and cultural themes; the rest are more brief, personal reflections. Some of the notes first appeared in New Left Review, and these are written in the dense, combative idiom for which that particular venue — on whose editorial board he sits — is renowned.

In his preface, Riley outlines a number of critical and intellectual concerns, foremost of which is the status of social theory. As he points out, theoretical analysis ‘is now held to be abstract, falsely universal, and above all opposed to a pre-theoretical “experience”’, which is roundly ‘honored’. Against this aversion to theory, and following a sociological lineage which includes such figures as Theodor Adorno and W. E. B. Du Bois, he maintains that experience is in fact ‘realized’ through critique. Microverses is his contribution to this tradition, which conceived of sociology itself ‘as a creative linking of lived experience and theory’. For Riley, this, and not bland empiricism or simple biography — think of the lazier iterations of what today gets called ‘standpoint epistemology’ or ‘positionality’ — constitutes sociology’s true ‘point of view’. Whether inadvertent or not, Microverses’ very structure — how it interleaves the personal with the theoretical — seems to reflect this, implying: even immense personal duress, a confrontation with illness, say, or the brute fact of social marginalisation, doesn’t obviate the problem of how experience is ‘mediated’, not ‘given’, as Adorno might say. Social theory allows us to at least identify these mediations: the discourses and ‘styles of reasoning’ through which we make sense of our individual experiences.

This might be dismissed as a rather tortuous way of saying something quite banal: that nothing happens in a vacuum. Moreover, it risks making Riley’s book sound like an altogether more turgid affair than it actually is. While its preface is littered with the technical vocabulary of his academic field, at its best Microverses is a withering demolition of a political culture that, when examined closely enough, everywhere betrays its shallowness and dysfunction. Trump, of course, was one of the primary manifestations of this — a ‘morbid symptom’, as legion armchair Gramscians would come to call him. But Riley’s concerns lie for the most part elsewhere, in particular, with America’s liberal establishment and its supposedly blossoming left.

Why and on what basis? To anyone familiar with New Left Review’s editorial style, Riley’s critical focus on ostensible political allies won’t surprise. From the journal’s perspective, the monstrous nature of entities like Trump and the Republican Party is basically self-evident; to spill much ink spelling this out further is to engage in a redundant pursuit best left to the liberal commentariat, or to what Nikhil Pal Singh, in a recent New Statesman essay, called America’s ‘crisis-industrial complex’. Riley singles out the widely acclaimed historian Timothy Snyder as emblematic of this discourse, identifying his growing presence on platforms like MSNBC and CNN as ‘one of the clearest symptoms of the putrescence of the liberal intelligentsia in the age of Trump’. On his reading, Snyder’s message, distilled to its core, amounts to the following shibboleth: ‘shared “truths” are the foundation of democracy, and that what undermines democracy is to lie’. The implication is that, pre-Trump, the United States boasted a political culture somehow free of mendacity. This is itself bullshit: ‘lies, euphemisms and hypocrisy’, he reminds us, have long been ‘the lifeblood of US politics’. Riley’s more — dare I say — dialectical reading of Trump is that what distinguished him as a political phenomenon was less his compulsive lying, and more his tendency to sometimes (inadvertently) blurt out the truth. He writes:

One of his truest speeches came immediately after the 2020 election when he accused Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi of being creatures of high finance and Wall Street. Or recall when he skewered Jeb Bush in a debate before the South Carolina primary by reminding the audience of the Iraq debacle. Perhaps what Snyder meant to say is that the basis of democracy is the elite’s shared commitment to patriotic hypocrisy, a commitment that Trump did not share because his only value appeared to be self-enrichment.

What of Riley’s comrades? Surely the emergence of what looks like a newly invigorated left in the United States, spearheaded by the likes of Bernie Sanders and the so-called ‘squad’, heralds better days? In his hard-nosed realism, Riley is unbowed. For him, the policy platform of even the most radical wing of the Democratic Party is marked by an ideological modesty that — when situated in the longue durée — bespeaks historical weakness, not strength.

Socialism? What self-declared socialists like Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have in mind is far from a transcendence of the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, as Riley points out, even the Sanders faction of the Democratic Party is limited to a neo-Keynesian discourse of progressive taxation and deficit spending, because the polity in which they act lacks even the skeleton of a social-democratic state. This school of thought understands politics as ‘a matter of redistributing surplus produced in the private economy so as to make society fairer’. The production side of the ledger, where worker exploitation actually occurs, remains untouched. As another Marxist theorist, Martin Hägglund, has argued, this emphasis on redistribution is liable to prove, in the long run, a snag to any would-be socialist left, for ‘as long as the means of production are privately owned, the growth of capital — rather than the creation of meaningful forms of labour — will be the aim of the system as a whole, regardless of what our individual intentions may be’.

This question of intentions is key, because to a disempowered American left faced with awesome obstacles to structural change, it can seem the only thin gruel on offer. The hope, one imagines, is that an evangelism of benign intentions might lead to more equitable distributive outcomes — ‘social justice’, in other words — by bending the capitalist system towards ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’.

For Riley, this is little more than bien-pensant piety, a howl of ‘would that things were better!’ As a discourse, it’s also, he suggests, analytically deficient. For one thing, it hamstrings any rigorous appraisal of the structures that produce the very inequalities it then passionately decries, by reducing the problem to a matter of individual conscience. For another, it encourages a reliance on legalistic concepts that are ultimately retributive. The potentially deleterious consequences of this scarcely need elaboration; a quick glance at Twitter and its absurd rituals of punishment and acclaim is probably enough. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the concept of ‘social justice’ as espoused by many on the American left remains ‘perfectly compatible with the private ownership of society’s main productive assets’. As such, its bona fides as a truly emancipatory — or even ‘just’ — project rest on a shaky foundation.

Virtually every page of the book has Riley landing blows on both a vapid mainstream liberalism and a moralising, slogan-based leftism. In many ways, it’s a battering that feels both warranted and necessary. By tethering, albeit loosely, his reflections to an identifiable political context and chronology, a damning overall impression emerges from these notes: that of a range of political forces and actors, some malign and others less so, reliably missing the point or failing to act, no matter how disastrous the consequences. One might wish to gainsay his relentless pessimism, but as the Biden administration continues to be lashed by the gales of inflation, and as a Trumpified Republican Party stands ready to capitalise on the current President’s resulting unpopularity, optimism looks increasingly like delusion.

Luke Warde is a writer and researcher based in London. He completed a doctorate in French at the University of Cambridge, and his writing has appeared in the Irish Times, the Sunday Independent, the Dublin Review of Books and Eurozine.

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