Review: Coming Clean

Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left #

By Eric Heinze The MIT Press, 2025

Heinze, Eric. 2025. Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-04958-0.

Books that scold the left about its own history usually come from the right, and they usually are not worth the shelf space. Eric Heinze wants you to know from the first pages that his is a different animal. "I am not antiwoke," he writes in the introduction. "I am pro-woke, but pro a very different kind of woke." Coming Clean argues from inside critical theory's own premises, credits the tradition's achievements before pressing its failures, and closes by calling for more critical theory rather than less. Whether the book earns that self-description is the interesting question. While Heinze delivers the rare intervention in the woke wars that produces transferable concepts rather than heat, I will argue that his central charge is constructed so that almost nothing could disconfirm it, by showing 1) how the two-step machine works; 2) where the scholarship makes real contributions; and 3) where the standard of proof floats free of any possible evidence.

The two-step machine #

Heinze's contribution is a single, crisp distinction he calls memory politics, which "unfold in two steps." Step 1 is memory: recording and preserving knowledge of past injustice. Step 2 is politics: carrying that knowledge "out of seminar rooms and meeting halls and into public consciousness," through museums, curricula, films, and commemorations. There is no opting out, since "state-orchestrated amnesia itself is a form of memory politics — indeed, the most sinister kind." Chapter 3 shows step 2 working at full power: the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Liverpool's International Slavery Museum, Queer Britain, the German vocabulary of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Resnais and Lanzmann on film. Heinze counts all of this among the left's real victories. Its "single greatest achievement," he argues, is having "defined the very terms we use to discuss justice."

The charge follows from the distinction. On its own history, the left takes step 1 and stops. Leftists concede the crimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot in private and in print, "but they never take step 2. They never carry knowledge of leftist atrocities out of the seminar room and onto the streets." In my estimation this accusation cuts smarter than whataboutism, and Heinze explicitly refuses the cheap version. The claim is not that the left is hypocritical; it is a claim about the sociology of public education, namely who builds museums, who writes school curricula, and which atrocities get a commemorative infrastructure.

The best expression of the argument is the "Braynington University" allegory in chapter 5, the book's most effective invention. A hypothetical university happily runs Black History and Women's History Weekends (step 2 about its own racist and sexist past) but denies recognition when students propose a Socialist History Weekend named for Memorial, the Russian human-rights NGO that Putin dissolved in 2021 and that won the Nobel Peace Prize a year later. The device pre-empts the standard rebuttal ("we already teach about Stalin in seminars") by showing exactly where the asymmetry lives. But note what the allegory is doing: a hypothetical carries weight that documented cases should carry. If real universities are suppressing socialist history programming, Heinze does not show us one.

Where the scholarship is real #

The strongest chapters are the least polemical. Chapters 9 and 10 identify a real lacuna in hate-speech scholarship. Building on Words That Wound, Heinze coins "disloyalty propaganda" for the universalist lexicon of socialist persecution (traitors, parasites, enemies of the people) running from Lenin's Cheka to Castro's campaign against the Ladies in White. His point is that human-rights professionals have never classified this vilification as hate speech, because the postwar legal instruments defined hatred around national, ethnic, racial, and religious identity, and socialist persecution framed its targets in universalist terms instead. That observation about the architecture of international law is original, and it deserves uptake regardless of what you make of the book's politics.

Chapter 6 does something similar with critical race theory. Heinze extends Derrick Bell's interest-convergence thesis (that Brown v. Board served Cold War image-management) and argues Bell was "too right by half." If self-scrutiny is always bounded by self-interest, the question is whether leftist self-scrutiny obeys the same law. Chapter 7's Burger King analogy handles the "lesser power" defense cleanly: a $7 billion firm is still responsible for poisoning its customers even when McDonald's dominates the market. And chapter 8's recovery of paradiastole, the rhetorical figure of dressing up tragedy as trivia, gives a proper name to the move AfD leader Gauland made when he called the Nazi years "bird shit" in a thousand years of German history, and to its mirror on the left. Naming the figure matters; the humbuggery of minimization has a rhetoric, and Heinze catalogues it.

The falsifiability problem #

Now the reservation. The empirical spine of the book runs thin, and it repeats. Chomsky's 2022 remark that Ukrainians should treat Russia's invasion like a "hurricane" appears in the introduction, anchors chapter 4, and returns in chapter 7. The recurring cast (Chomsky, Lindsey German, Mélenchon, Corbyn, Owen Jones) is small for a claim about "the left" as such. The Jones case study in chapters 11 and 12 is the most careful: Jones's This Land does name distinctively left-wing antisemitism, citing the conspiracist slide in Marx, Bakunin, and Proudhon, but "the problem was that he drew no visible links to the present." Step 1 without step 2, exactly as the theory predicts.

Therein lies the problem. The theory predicts it whatever Jones does. Any leftist acknowledgment of socialist atrocity can be reclassified as mere step 1, and Heinze never specifies what public gesture would count as step 2 being taken. A museum? A curriculum unit? A BBC series? The conclusion's formula, "Don't tell us. Show us," works rhetorically and evades analytically, because the standard of proof floats. A book this insistent on the left's duty of self-examination should have stress-tested its own central claim, and it does not. Heinze also openly declines to balance his rebukes of socialism with comparisons to capitalism. That scope decision is defensible, and he states it up front. But it leaves the book producing precisely the kind of one-sided public history it criticizes, with the right's own step-2 failures waved at only in passing; the critic and his target become, on this one point, flip sides of the same coin.

How it reads #

The prose is brisk trade nonfiction wearing a university-press jacket. Chapters open on vivid scenes (the 2023 beating of Brigitte Macron's grandnephew outside the family chocolate shop; a Virginia school-board fight) before extracting the concept. Heinze addresses the reader directly and defines every term on arrival, which makes the book teachable at the undergraduate level in a way most critical theory is not. The gerund chapter titles ("Hurricanes Raging," "Dots Connecting") are a conceit that obscures more than it charms. The tone throughout is the sympathetic insider scolding his own side, earnest and occasionally sermonic, ending on "a left worth joining."

Verdict #

Coming Clean is the rare intervention in the woke wars that produces transferable concepts rather than heat. The step 1/step 2 distinction, disloyalty propaganda, and the identitarian gap in hate-speech law are all tools other scholars can pick up and use, and chapters 9 and 10 make a real contribution to the legal literature. The immanent framing is honest: this book is pitched to the left about its own future, not another entry in the anti-woke catalogue. But the central charge is built so that almost nothing could disconfirm it, and the evidence base is a handful of figures asked to stand for a whole tradition. Read it for the machinery, argue with the verdict, and notice that Heinze has at least done the left the courtesy of an accusation precise enough to be worth refuting.