Hayes—formerly a prominent host on MSNBC and a widely read
public intellectual—has for years occupied a political position that
illustrates the contradictions and dangers of the media “left.” His arguments,
style and role function not as an organ of working-class struggle but as a
channel by which layers of the petty-bourgeoisie and professional-class
radicals are integrated into the interests and strategies of the capitalist
state.
Readers familiar with Hayes's other books and media work
will know that he operates within a media and institutional milieu whose social
base is the upper strata of the middle class—journalists, academics, think-tank
professionals, and professional managers. As far as I can tell, Hayes is not linked to or is a
member of any radical party, but for the sake of clarity, it would be safe to
say that he is from the same social layer as other “pseudo-lefts”:
Hayes' early career was spent within a network whose
executives, shareholders, and advertising base are embedded in the capitalist
class. As a recent article on the WSWS leading broadcasters and columnists
“operate in effect as the public faces of their respective firms” and must
conform to corporate priorities to keep their platforms and fortunes” Hayes’s
career has largely been spent making criticisms acceptable only up to the point
where they do not threaten corporate clients, advertisers, financial interests
or imperialist foreign policy He is a prime example of how individual dissent
is tolerated so long as it stabilises, rather than challenges, the system. I
doubt we will see Hayes on the barricades anytime soon.
During Hayes’s former program, he often performed the ritual
of exposing outrages (inequality, racism, corruption), but the structural
constraints of corporate ownership limited the reach of those critiques. The
result is a media ecology where “critical” voices reinforce, rather than rupture,
the legitimacy of capitalist institutions by confining debate within narrow
parameters. Hayes’s style—moral passion, policy technocracy, and denunciations
of right-wing reaction—fits this social function. He channels legitimate anger
at inequality into policy reforms, electoralism, and crusades within the bounds
of bourgeois democracy. This can radicalise public sentiment, but
simultaneously diverts class anger into institutional remedies that leave
capitalist property relations intact.
The political consciousness of media commentators like Hayes
does not develop in a political vacuum. Their professional positions are
secured by corporate media conglomerates, venture capital, and advertising
markets embedded in global capitalism. The need to retain access to funding
sources, advertising revenue, and elite networks naturally inclines such
figures toward compromises with state and corporate power. The result: a
politics of “reform” that is simultaneously anti‑Trump, pro‑liberal
intervention, and protective of the neoliberal order’s basic rules.
The same political outlook that guides Hayes’s media work is
carried into his books. No more so than in The Siren's Call. Hayes knows his
audience. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, he knows his song before he starts singing. The
Siren’s Call, like much of the punditry produced within the corporate media,
performs an important political function: it channels popular anger and
democratic anxieties into narratives that stop short of challenging the
economic and class foundations of society. His audience is politically conscious
but still embedded within the institutions of the bourgeois state and corporate
media. This book is written to diagnose social problems accurately enough to
win credibility—unequal power, corrupt elites, erosion of democratic norms—but
then it prescribes solutions that leave capitalism fundamentally untouched.
To sum up, the siren call that Hayes and his Pseudo-Left
friends offer—reform, managerial solutions, moralism—must be answered by a
socialist perspective capable of ending capitalist rule.
