Jacobin is a Marxist Rag for Our Postliterate Age

A Response to Their Jonathan Bowden Hit Piece

The image of this awkward, hand-wringing, nerdy guy with serious demons putting on his poorly fitting suit in his biohazard of a caravan to get ready to go on stage and come alive, fiery with passion for his fringe and sometimes incoherent worldview is deeply compelling to me.

-Zetag @zetag006

Jonathan Bowden wasn’t a politician, he was an artist

He didn’t live in a trailer. Like all maverick intellectuals, he lived in the clouds

His life was only a tragedy because he lacked a noble patron

Every radical artist will succumb to economic terrorism without the backing of a billionaire

Materialistic merchants like James Dyson betrayed Britain by buying super yachts & running away instead of funding talented revolutionaries like Jonathan

As a result, he fought the good fight alone

May he rest in peace

-The Greatest British Bloke @BangersOnToast

The owner of the Jonathan Bowden Quotes X page asked me just a few days ago if I had plans to write any more pieces on Bowden. At the time, I didn’t, but I told him I was open to it in the future. How serendipitous that the very next day, something would happen that would explode Bowden into greater prominence and give me a reason to write about the man again.

It started with a biography written by Edward Dutton and published by Imperium Press.

This book was recently used as the main source for a hit piece on Bowden by the left wing anarcho-socialist-Marxist-whateverist online magazine Jacobin.

Dutton’s book has been controversially received thus far by the dissident right. Some have gone so far as to claim the book itself is a hit piece, while others say that it’s meant to be sympathetic but Dutton just doesn’t ‘get’ Bowden and thus has trouble conveying his appeal. For his part, Dutton has insisted he did mean the biography to be laudatory, not derogatory, but also thought it was important to give an honest and candid account of Bowden’s life.

Personally, after listening to some of the interviews that fueled the creation of the book, I suspect a lot of the acquaintances of Bowden whom Dutton interviewed had a bone to pick with the man, due to clashing personality types or bruised egos and jealousy over Bowden’s rising posthumous fame, and this comes out in the biography, through no ill intent of Dutton’s own.

But that’s just a guess, because I haven’t actually read it yet. I do intend to read it, and probably write about it at some point in the future to give it a more fair assessment, especially because I’m referenced by name in it.

I’ve made it! In a very small way.

But what I wanted to focus on today is the Jacobin hit piece, Johnathan Bowden is a Fascist for Our Postliterate Age by John Merrick. It’s not a long piece, but manages to be a hilarious, self-defeating mess in many ways in its short length.

A central theme of the piece is that Bowden isn’t credible and his work should be dismissed because he lied about his personal life. Bowden claimed that he was a self-made millionaire when he actually lived in poverty, that he had a wife and children when he died a bachelor, and that he graduated from Cambridge when he actually only attended briefly before dropping out.

This avenue of attack will fall flat with most Bowden fans because he was never presented to us as a Cambridge graduate millionaire family man to begin with, so tearing down that image of him really doesn’t have much impact. Likewise, if you don’t put much faith in credentialism (and hardly any of Bowden’s fans do), learning that nearly all his knowledge was self-taught at the public library because he had no wi-fi, rather than being spoonfed to him at an elite university, just makes his body of work all the more impressive.

But what about the moral issues with lying? Well, it’s hard to argue that Bowden did any real harm to anyone with his fabrications about his personal life. Furthermore, you’ll be shocked to learn that on this front, John Merrick is a major hypocrite. I know, I can’t imagine a far leftist being a hypocrite about anything, especially morals, but there it is (that’s sarcasm, just in case Merrick himself is reading this).

In the very first sentence of the article, Merrick compares Bowden to “a figure from a Roberto Bolaño novel.” I’m sure he did this to establish his literacy bonafides, since he takes snipes at the literacy of Bowdenists in the title and closing. “I am a very sophisticated, well-read man who is intimately acquainted with the stylings of Latin American Trotskyist authors you’ve probably never heard of,” is the subtext here. It’s also obvious from the context that he considers Bolaño a respectable author. An author worth reading. There’s just one teeny, tiny problem.

Bolaño almost certainly lied about his own past. The Chilean born author, who spent much of his life either in Mexico or galavanting around South and Central America, claimed that he’d returned to Chile during the Pinochet regime and was imprisoned for his activism before being broken out by two detectives who worked for the regime but were moved to help him due to being former school acquaintances. He wrote not one, but two short stories about this, one from his view and one from the detectives. Except there’s no evidence any of it happened, and his Mexican friends have stated that he didn’t go to Chile at all during the time he claimed he was imprisoned.

Left: graffiti art of Bolaño, Right: a sketch of Bowden

So if lying about your past disqualifies your work and ideas from being taken seriously, Bolaño’s larping as a heroic activist, braving prison under a notoriously brutal dictatorship before making a daring, unlikely escape, should certainly disqualify him at least as much as Bowden larping as a self-made millionaire with a wife and kids at home he kept out of the limelight. More-so, if anything, because Bowden’s lies aren’t incorporated into his work the way Bolaño’s are into his. Yet Merrick considers Bolaño to still be an author worth reading.

With this simple rhetorical gesture, Merrick has shot down the main substance of his argument against Bowden. Bowden’s lies aren’t the real issue for Merrick. His politics is. Yet he focuses on the lies in hopes this will dissuade people who might otherwise be receptive to Bowden’s message. It’s disingenuous.

As for why Bowden lied, while I don’t generally approve of pushing falsehoods, after listening to one of the cohosts of The Monday Club express his incredibly stereotypical posh, snooty, British disdain for Bowden looking like a hippie… I kinda get it. If these were the sorts of people Bowden was relying on for a platform at the time, the tall tales might actually have served a practical purpose of getting them to let him in the door at all.

Beard-era Bowden

Beyond this, Merrick only has the usual collection of left wing labels (unconvincing to anyone who isn’t already indoctrinated*), a vague insinuation about Bowden being forced to leave the library once (an accusation made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, and he didn’t even have the balls to actually make the accusation), and most amusingly, an appeal to class snobbery. A left wing socialist leveraging his opponent’s poverty to invalidate him is a bold strategy, to be sure. While this could be chalked up to more hypocrisy (modern leftists love touting the awards, grants, and patronage they give each other for being leftists as proof of their superiority), I think it might show that this piece’s target audience isn’t really Jacobin’s normal left wing readership. Merrick is trying to hurt Bowden’s reputation on the right: to reach young people flirting with Nietzscheanism and otherwise non-mainstream avenues of thought who might become interested in Bowden’s work, and convince them that he isn’t worthwhile.

Well, when it comes to authors, artists, and philosophers who didn’t achieve material success in life but became influential and celebrated after their deaths, Bowden is in very good company: HP Lovecraft, John Kennedy Toole, Vincent Van Gogh, Nietzsche himself, and even that destroyer-of-worlds Karl Marx (left wing hypocrisy rears up once again), to name just a few. Posthumous success can reveal a greatness that gets overlooked in life due a myriad of factors, such as living at the wrong time, lacking talent in business or self-promotion despite talents in other areas, or plain bad luck.

Bowden spent his energies obsessively pursuing activities that had extremely limited potential for profit, so it’s not particularly surprising to me that he struggled financially. The Neocon “get a real job” attitude has been thoroughly discredited by their own increasing cultural irrelevance and political impotence. Once again, this is an avenue of attack that falls completely flat for younger audiences

Other highlights (or lowlights, if you prefer) of Merrick’s hit piece are:

-Calling Edward Dutton a “disgraced anthropologist” before using the man as his main source

-Informing readers that he was too lazy to listen to any of Bowden’s speeches, despite admitting Bowden is most known and lauded for his speeches, but that he read “a great deal” of Bowden’s writing, followed by quoting and paraphrasing… parts of Bowden’s speeches, not his writing

-Complaining that Dutton goes on tangents from writing about Bowden to write about other things, in a section that is itself a tangent (Merrick can’t seem to decide if the article is about Bowden the man or Dutton’s biography, with 2/3rds of the article being ranting about the man and 1/3rd being ranting about the biography, in a way that isn’t particularly cohesive)

-Comparing the expository parts of Bowden’s speeches to clicking through Wikipedia pages, because both explain things, and writers and public speakers shouldn’t explain aspects of topics their audience might be unfamiliar with, I guess (Why did Marx do so much “clicking through Wikipedia pages” to his readers about the Paris Commune, Merrick? Or Carlin on network censorship? Or Bolaño on Pinochet’s dictatorship? Or you on Bowden himself? Idiotic criticism)

-Fuming briefly that Bowden’s content is edgy because he references people like Julius Evola and Savitri Devi (I detect a hint of envy here, Merrick can tout his love of Trotskyists for days and it will never be anything but safe-edgy larp, on some level he knows this)

-Merrick, per his article’s title, questions the literacy of Bowden fans, despite admitting that Bowden was intellectually precocious and did an awful lot of reading and research (clearly he means “literacy” in the same way social media users mean “media literacy,” aka, “what agrees with me is literate and what doesn’t is illiterate”)

That about sums it up. TL;DR: Bowden pretended to be rich when he was actually poor. As far as smoking guns go, it’s incredibly weak stuff.

Merrick also summarizes the pivotal incident when Bowden had a mental breakdown and ran through the streets wielding a katana and a machete.

I’d probably go crazy living in a place like the modern UK too.

That he thought this would make for a good a dunk, that Bowden fans would think it was anything but a colorful and compelling story (although sadly one with a tragic end, as this was the episode that led to Bowden being put on the antipsychotic medication that killed him), shows the gulf between those who appreciate Bowden and those who don’t. Bowden wasn’t a prim and proper success story. He was a flawed, troubled genius. An absolute mad lad. In fact, he’s the exact sort of character Count Dankula might make an Absolute Mad Lads video about, if Bowden’s popularity grows enough and Dank is still around doing his thing when it does.

By the way, this mental health collapse is another commonality that links Bowden to both Nietzsche and Lovecraft.

Supposedly there are more left wing hit-pieces on Bowden planned, and if they’re of this caliber, they’re not only going to flop, but only increase the man’s exposure and appeal.

You can pick up a copy of Shaman of the Radical Right: The Life and Mind of Jonathan Bowden by Edward Dutton to read for yourself at this link.

No, I’m not sponsored by Imperium Press, although if they wanted to offer me a little something-something to stock my own filthy caravan, I certainly wouldn’t say no.

*Merrick calls Imperium Press a “white nationalist publisher,” which isn’t really accurate. IP is more of a neoreactionary/counter-enlightment publisher, for lack of a better term.