Neoliberalism

“In so far as neoliberalism values market exchange as ‘an ethic in itself, capable as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs’, it emphasizes the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace. It holds that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market.”

David Harvey

Neoliberalism broadly describes an epoch in capitalism in which the dominant set of ideas, and political and economic practices are characterised by the emphasis on limited regulation on markets, increasingly financialised set of practices emerging in various institutions, the introduction or expansion of marketisation to services previously held by the public sector, the lowering of barriers to free trade, and the free-flow of capital to anywhere in the world. To put it simply, neoliberalism is “the subordination of the social world to the will of the market”.

Neoliberalism is sometimes believed to be a buzzword in left and progressive circles, but it is a very real political and economic ideology with promoters and practictioners who sought to bring 19th century ideas and practices into the 20th century. It should go without saying that neoliberalism replaces an epoch of Keynesianism which has at times been described as “the golden age of capitalism” due to the rapid economic growth, high social mobility, strong welfare systems and relatively limited unemployment in the advanced capitalist nations. This is not to say that neoliberal programs implemented in various countries (e.g. the so-called “Asian Tigers”) did not lead to economic growth – just that it never did so without undermining nearly all of the features that made Keynesianism seem attractive. Despite this, neoliberalism has endured from the 1970s until today, defining not only modern economic practices, but our political and social life.

It is believed that neoliberalism emerged sometime in the 1970s, and even argued that the basis that its building blocks were set up right after the Second World War. However, its ideological framework was developed in the 1930s by a group of classical liberal economists in a conference held in Paris in 1938 – Among them were Friedrich A. Hayek, Walter Lippmann, Louis Rougier and Ludwig von Mises. The aim of these conferences is to develop a means of combatting what they believed to be the rise of collectivism throughout the world (in the forms of communism, Nazism and social democracy) by introducing a set of laissez-faire capitalist principles fit for a new era. They agreed on the term, neoliberalism to define their ideas described as “the priority of the price mechanism, free enterprise, the system of competition, and a strong and impartial state”.

Many of these economists would set up a think tank known as the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 as a hub for their ideas, and eventually – the locus of a global network of think tanks, with the accompanying deluge of financial backers and a coterie of academics, journalists, corporate leaders and politicians moving within and through the MPS – they existed as a niche movement during the heyday of Keynesian capitalism, and its alternative in communism across the world, with pockets of fascist-inflected corporatism. The influence of the neoliberal ideas emerging within the MPS led to the creation of various institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute, as well of the reconstitution of others such as the University of Chicago via its economics department, even the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – organisations which were the brainchildren of Keynes, came to embody neoliberal programs. The early German neoliberals were able to forge an alliance between the intellectual, business and political forces to build an early iteration of what was to come known as ordoliberalism – a system that eschewed the Keynesian welfarism, and maintained competitive markets in exchange for state interventions in prices. The once marginalised collective of classical liberals became an international movement that was reshaping the Western world.

The crisis of capitalism that emerged in the 1970s had forced the decoupling of the US dollar from the gold standard, leaving it a floating currency. The introduction what would become neoliberalism took place in Chile, which was already a target of covert involvement by the American intelligence services, who sought to overthrow the socialist government of Salvador Allende. In 1973, a coup was launched by several high-ranking members of the armed forces led by General Augusto Pinochet, with the assistance of the CIA. The result was the collapse of the Allende government, and the emergence of a dictatorship led by Pinochet. The Pinochet regime’s economic policies were informed by a team of economists trained in the University of Chicago (nicknamed the “Chicago Boys”) who advocated monetarist policies, resulting in 40% of Chileans thrown into poverty.

As the compromise between capital and labour became unmoored, as the former sought greater profits – the labour unions which maintained the security of social welfarism would be smashed – in many cases literally, and their power would be legally curbed. In the United Kingdom, the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher sought to place Britain at the centre of the increasingly fierce global economy, and decided to do so by bolstering the financial services sector. Commission rates were abolished and trading was was deregulated, while a state-of-the-art digital trading system was introduced. The changes took effect on the 27th October 1986 – the spike in market activity from deregulation of the City of London was dubbed “the Big Bang”. Many old firms were swallowed up by larger banks – both foreign and domestic; it had solidified the British economy’s shift to financial capital over industrial capital, and indeed – it had come to place London among other financial centres as the preeminent hub of global finance. It was part of an overall process called ‘financialization‘, where financial institutions and financial elites become more influential in the economic policy of nations.

With the onset of various global commodity booms experienced during the ‘high’ point of neoliberalism, the socialist world attempted an rapproachement in order to have access to the global market by either opening up its markets through internal restructuring of their economies, or through IMF loans to those seeking to develop their economies after the success of their anticolonial struggle which had achieved the same thing. The most violent result of this has been the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc nations, and the adoption of some form of market socialism to the surviving communist nations. The IMF’s ‘structural adjustment’ packages had also imposed a retardation of the so-called post-imperial nations of the Global South, ensuring their continued dependency to Western economies – making a mockery of their struggles for independence.

In the 1990s, thanks to the IMF and the World Bank, a set of policies promoting low tarriffs on trade, privatisation of key sectors of the economy, and deregulation – spread across the world; the trend had come to popularise the term, “globalization” to reflect its scope. As if to solidify this trend the GATT had reformed into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1994 which promoted anti-protectionist policies. The absence of a rival system counterposing capitalism, and concurrent trends in Western societies (post-Fordism, new managerialism, “knowledge economy”), gave rise to highly optimistic predictions (some of which ironically made during the Keynesian epoch) by a number of academics around a supposed “post-materialism” defining social and political engagement, a supposed “death of class” resulting in the decline of organised labour and decomposition of political bases in favour of a politics by value frameworks.

In political and cultural analyses, globalization was also perceived as potentially leading to a relative peace, and also a synthesis between disparate cultural frameworks across the world – a(nother) ‘benign’ era of capitalist world economy. This conceit only served to obscure the intensification of exploitation in the world outside of the Western Hemisphere. And even then, some of the claims with respect to “the death of class” in advanced capitalist societies were shown to be flat-out wrong, confusing the specialisation of work – especially the rise of immaterial labour (knowledge is a key example), and increasingly fecund expressions of consumption for the disappearance of a unified experience of class (which never existed), to say nothing on the wage/capital relation. The new system ushered in globalization was not a harmonious interconnected world, where all commodities and cultures mix evenly. It was the unfettered expansion of new markets, the free flow of capital, the creation of a new global working class (many of them experiencing the same labour protections resembling that of the 1920s for advanced capitalist societies), and if anything – in a cultural sense, was closer to the “Americanisation” of the world.*

Rather than enact a new kind of freedom and autonomy, neoliberalism had in fact led to the immiseration of large scores of people, the retreat of the social safety net, and the atomisation of the experience of social life. In the Global South, this is felt even sharper – with the presence of transnational corporations (TNCs) exploiting the local labour force in their pursuit of ever-greater profits – with the advantage of weaker labour protections offered by underdeveloped nations**. Neoliberalism has also transformed almost all spaces of social and political life – from education, work, healthcare, to even the conduct of politics. Interestingly, neoliberalism has been a feature of global capitalism for a period even longer than the Keynesian era***, which should give sobering reflection towards the context of the dominance and eventual decline of Keynesianism, and what its purpose actually was, along with that of neoliberal hegemony. But neoliberalism had produced its own set of contradictions, with global consequences.

Chaos in the market New Eden

• The progressive reaction was the anti-globalization (or alter-globalization) movement emerged using the uprising of the Zapatistas against the Mexican government after it accepted the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreements (NAFTA) launched on January 1st, 1994, as a launchpad. The movement demanded greater political transparency, the scaling back of the power of corporations, and the restoration of public institutions. They tried to bring to attention how TNCs were exploiting the Global South, and their facilitation by the WTO and the World Bank; and operated in a decentralised and horizontalist style, drawing inspiration from the Zapatistas. They were said to represent a new kind of anti-capitalism, or resembled one that had not been seen for over two decades. The dynamics of the movement culminated in the protests in Seattle, Washington outside the WTO conference in 1999; the World Trade Center attacks in New York, US in 2001 had shifted their momemtum and they were largely integrated into the anti-war movement in the 2000s – in so far as the Global North is concerned, this movement, while key to the establishment of the World Social Forum, and raising concerns around debt relief on an international scale, its capacity for systemic change had diminished significantly following the War on Terror (see below)

• The reactionary emergence of right-wing “anti-globalism” was also a feature, developing into outright conspiracism around the formation of a global elite establishing a “new world order” (ironically taken from the 1991 speech of George H.W. Bush). Former Nixon consultant Pat Buchanan and Vladimir Zhirinovsky were prominent figures around movements which promoted ultra-nationalism in face of what they believed to be the loss of national sovereignty to financial and political elites. Given that anti-materialism is a consistent feature of this kind of nationalism, all kinds of mystification around globalisation ensued, such as the belief that the UN had the kind of hard power usually assumed from the US, and so hysteria arose around a planned invasion of UN armed forces to signal a “new world order”; and the belief that a globalised world economic system is some kind of Zionist conspiracy. A nationalist worldview reduces everything to national struggle. Figures like Buchanan and Zhirinovsky initially caused concern over their popularity within their respective countries but events overtook them and their chauvinistic causes taken up by their leaders (the 9/11 attacks and the rise of Putin, and the swift conclusion of the Chechen War respectively created a fervently nationalistic sentiment in the US and Russia) leading to their decline. However, the conditions that created them, and what they represented did not disappear….

• The collapse of nationalist movements in an anti-colonial struggle in the Middle East, had led to a movement which synthesized a revivalist Islam with insurrectionist politics known as Islamism. While Islamism was already a political force which had adopted the party form, this new version mostly eschewed the capture of state power, they nonetheless claimed authority within the Islamic world, and some of their most prominent figures adopted special titles to signify their authority. The primary concern of the new Islamists is the presence of the American empire on what they considered to be Muslim lands, and the acquiesence of the leaders (religious and political) of these countries to the West. For them, it solidified that they indeed lived in an “age of jahiliyya” (‘age of ignorance’), in which even established Islamic authorities were corrupt – indeed they were seen as false Muslims. The aims of Islamism are restorationist in their function, in that it seeks to remove all elements of jahiliyya and revive the ‘true’ expression of Islam, and to purge the cultivators of this jahiliyya – which they attribute to Western and Zionist influence. Islamists – particularly Salafist Islamists/jihadists differed on questions around the creation of a caliphate; who represents its foremost leaders; and whether the “near enemy” (the ‘corrupt’ Arab nations) or the “far enemy” (the West, principally the United States) should be the main target. Since the 1990s, the focus of the jihadists was primarily to go after the “far enemy”: in part due to the optimistic enthusiasm in the aftermath of the Soviet-Afghanistan war and the following collapse of the Soviet Union, which had convinced them of their ability to challenge the imperialism of the premier economic superpower and bring it to its heels. The attack on the World Trade Center in September 11th, 2001 was the most notable engagement with Islamism and its adversaries, although cells claiming affiliation to active jihadist organisations are active across the world – in particular, South-West Asia, Africa, and East Asia. The features of Salafist Islamism was the creation of non-state entities which drew the ire and the military might of the United States – along with her allies, the accompanying disdain of the religious establishment and of the majority-Muslim governments, the rejection of a democratic practice, an emphasis on direct engagement with the Qur’an over the long-standing exegetical and legal traditions of Islam as justification for their acts, the decentralised networks that these organisations functioned in, effective usage of new technologies in propaganda, and rearticulations of Islamic concepts like jihad, shari’a and the ummah emphasizing individualistic interpretation. It is for this reason why Suzanne Schneider argues that modern Islamism, contrary to claims that they represent a call to pre-modernism, are in fact hypermodern; in that they represent an expression of the tensions produced by globalisation, the dialectic between individualistic ethos and highly authoritarian practice, and the decentralised nature of the organisations and the claim by Islamic State of a “global caliphate” with authority over all Muslims across the world reflected the neoliberal era it arose from.

• The social dislocation experienced by the working and middle-classes of Latin America as a result of the authoritarian governments between the 1970s-1980s, and the emergence of neoliberal/’Third Way’-type policies meant that the anti-globalization movement in Latin America took a different form. Various social movements around indigenous rights, feminist groups and trade unions mobilise in opposition to Latin American governments (some of them center-left) which had enacted neoliberal policies, and the colonial system which still defines their existence. These groups would become incorporated with left-wing political parties which went from strength to strength, starting with capturing municipal governance to their ascent to forming national governments, often with the alliance – even incorporation of the social movements to their political base. The rise of left, and centre-left governments of the 2000s was dubbed: the ‘pink tide‘. These governments focused on programs emphasizing the nationalisation of companies, massive social welfare programs intended on tackling poverty, and incorporating the participation of various marginalised groups (women, black people, indigenous people, etc.) The combination of these programs came to be dubbed ‘post-neoliberalism’; the rapid economic growth experienced by these countries as a result of the high prices of their main exports (oil. gas, etc.) and the Chinese commodity boom of the 1990s/2000s was what sustained their ‘interventionist’ programs. The ‘pink tide’ had also saw an attempt of economic integration across the South American nations, as Cuba and Venezuela spearheaded the establishment of the Bolivaran Alliance for Peoples of Our America or ALBA – a supranational organisation which had come to incorporate the membership of several countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. ALBA is explicitly stated to be anti-imperialist and anti-neoliberal – in some contexts, even anti-capitalist. It was used as a means for its members to use the oil brought from Venezuela to support various social welfare programs and even set up a virtual currency called the sucre. However, the success of the ‘pink tide’ had apparently relied strongly on the Chinese commodity boom, and the high price of oil on the global market – the resulting slump in the price of oil would lead to a reversal…

And this is describing global trends even before 2008. You know what happens next…

The big crash

In 1999, US President Bill Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. The act was introduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to prevent commercial banks from dealing with non-governmental securities for clients in Wall Street. Clinton argued that the bill was all but dead anyway; he had simply finalized what was the new normal. Banking regulators had since the 1960s interpreted the Act as allowing for commercial banks to engage in some securities activities – a list that had gradually expanded over time. The result was the immediate frenzy of mergers between firms which created huge financial conglomerates hungry to get into securities ventures well outside the scope of their underlying business. The introduction of computer-based mathematical models to financial risk management led to the promotion of increasingly complex financial instruments to buy and sell securities loans. The billions of investment dollars flowed into ‘residential mortgage-backed securities’ with the promise of big payouts from the mortgage securities. This created a massive property bubble which burst around 2007, leading to the devaluation of housing-related securities, hundreds of thousands of foreclosures, and collapse of major financial institutions such as Fannie Mac, Freddie Mac, IndyMac Bank, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch – and many more, had either declared bankruptcy or faced it, leading them in desperate need of salvation.

The Bush, and later – the Obama administrations made it their priority to issue massive bailout packages to save the financial institutions deemed “too big to fail”. The UK and other advanced capitalist nations followed suit. The massive injections of capital to rejuvenate the financial markets came at a price: the US government would own shares in the businesses that were affected. The banks seeking to rebuild their capital base could no longer afford to give massive loans in the way they did before. Due to the global credit freeze, businesses reliant on credit found it harder to obtain, leading to massive layoffs of workers. Unemployment skyrocketed as a result of the slump in industrial output, and the stock markets dropped substantially.

The Group of 20, or G20 – 19 heads of state/government along with the President of the EU, were hastily assembled to discuss solutions to the global financial crisis – the first of the meetings took place in Washington, D.C. on 14-15 November 2008, and the second in London on the 2 April 2009. Their overall goal was to “start the process of reform so as to manage globalisation as a force for good in the medium term”. A $1.1 trillion stimulus package was agreed to several programs in order to improve international finance, credit, and trade, and provide overall economic stability and recovery. Other outcomes were the creation of a Financial Stability Board to work with the IMF, and rising economic powers – China and India, having the ability to determine IMF and World Bank policies.

The global financial crisis had created a profound scepticism on the viability of neoliberalism, and that the outcome of the G20 summits did not conclude with a commitment to establishing greater regulatory oversight on the national and global level had, for many observers marred the entire summit. When arch-libertarian Alan Greenspan, who formerly served as the Federal Reserve Chairman, says that the entire period had shown that neoliberalism no longer worked, then one should take heed. Naturally, the period had for many people in the Global North led to a discontent around globalisation, with one outcome being a more explicitly socialist**** politics reviving, and another being the reemergence of nationalist or nativist ideologies. Some commentators observing these developments described these phenomena with the flattening and unsophisticated term “the rise of populism”; The following ten years through this paradigm saw a kind of chaos engulf the world. A much more materialist analysis would suggest that the contradictions produced in the neoliberal mode of capitalism gave rise to new social, national and global tensions, producing various reactions in response.

When you just keep doing wrong knowing it’s wrong

Whatever sentiments emerged from neoliberalism, its institutional operation was not going to disappear. No international commitment to build an alternative economic system emerged from the Great Reccession. However, what came next was the very opposite of a return to the normality of the period prior to 2008 crisis:

• Fury towards the government bailouts of the major banks, worsening standards of living, the layoffs of workers, and the economic recession, protests across the US built up occpying university buildings, until enough momentum built up to an action to occupy Zuccotti Park on the 17 September 2011. Organised by the anti-consumerist activist group Adbusters, the inciting demonstration was coined #OccupyWallStreet, and was believed to be one of the first large-scale demonstrations organised via social media. The general demands of Occupy Wall Street were for the major banks to be reformed, for the influence of money to be removed from politics, for the forgiveness of student debt, and for a more distributive income. The latter underpinned the OWS slogan: “We are the 99%” (of which late anthropologist David Graeber was credited with coining), in opposition to “the 1%” made of CEOs, hedge funders, industrialists, and other capitalists or “elites”, distorting the ideal of democracy. The protest itself lasted 59 days before the police were ordered to clear Zuccotti Park of the protestors. From there, the targets shifted to banks, corporate headquarters, foreclosed homes, to universities to be occupied by protestors. The spirit of OWS spread internationally, and similar protests were held in the UK, France, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Cyprus, Nigeria, Brazil, Colombia and the Czech Republic. OWS did not necessarily have a firm ideological base beyond its call for a more democratic process, and had everything from anarchist to libertarian tendencies – some of which declaring to represent the ‘real’ character of OWS. However, its general economic concerns, reliance on direct democracy , and overall reformist character has lead some observers to describe it as ‘left-populist’. OWS is said to have overall failed in its goals, however segments of people who engaged in OWS and were politicised by it had gone on either to incorporate their radical democratic politics into the institutional political framework. In turn, the innovations from the Occupy movement – from the “human microphone”, engagements in participatory democracy and general assemblies, and use of the “progressive stack” – giving priority to people from marginalised communities to speak first, had all had significant influence on the expression of the New New Left of the 2010s, especcially those in the Global North. The politics of OWS is also said to have led to the rise of left-wing politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Melenchon, as well as the formation of the Progressive International. Ultimately, Occupy Wall Street at best can be seen as the final form, or logical conclusion to the kind of formation seen in the alter-globalization movement – its commitment to the liberal framework – especially in its understanding of democracy had ultimately limited its ability to create a new kind of politics, and ultimately to address the economic problems that created the movement.
• The Arab world, dominated by autocratic leaders faced their greatest test of legitimacy since the end of the Cold War. The spark was said to be a Tunisian street vendor setting himself alight after police confiscated his material, the outrage from this incident – along with broader issues around economic inequality, and poor living standards – exacerbated by the Great Reccession, government corruption, and political repression, had led to the eruption of protests – largely organised by labour unions. After 28 days, the government of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was toppled. Popular unrest spread across several Arab nations – in particular: Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain; as well as smaller protests in Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan and Sudan. While Tunisia and Egypt were the most successful revolts resulting in a change of government – and even then, the latter resulted in Mohammed Morsi of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood briefly taking charge, before removed in a coup installing military dictator Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi; Libya and Syria descended into civil war. If the entire regional conflagration were not initially great power politics struggling for influence in the Arab world, then this was eventually the character of the ‘revolution’: Libya, abandoned by the Arab League – was subject to a NATO intervention primarily led by the US, UK, and France, to assist the rebels opposing the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi was brutally executed by these rebels in Sirte, and in no time, Libya was turned into a glorified slave market – with its stock primarily being (guess) able-bodied dark-skinned Africans. African refugees seeking to escape the barbarity found themselves blocked from entry into the European Union, and returned to the Libyan Coast Guard. Two civil wars have erupted since the overthrow of Gaddafi; Libya is now under a so-called “unity government” formed of the competing factions. Time will tell how long this will last. As for Syria, The government of Bashar al-Assad at first had to contend with the “Free Syrian Army” formed by defected members of Syrian Armed Forces, and other groups unhappy with his regime, to the emergence of Islamic State. While the US surreptitiously provided aid to the FSA and other anti-Assad forces, and attempted to mobilise a coalition for an outright invasion; The presence of Islamic State had pushed Russia to directly intervene and assist the Assad government in fighting Islamic State along with any anti-governmental forces. Meanwhile, the stateless Kurds in Northern Syria declared the creation of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) – popularly known in the West as Rojava, fighting off the Syrian government forces, along with IS and the FSA. Turkey, threatened by the presence of armed forces controlled by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), invaded Syria once the Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG) went into alliance with the US to fight IS – to prevent the Afrin region from linking with the rest of Rojava. They had in effect created a proto-state in Syria, leading YPG to allow the Syrian government to form a buffer zone between them and Turkish-controlled Syria. In short, the whole situation there is a mess. Yemen likewise descended into civil war following the overthrow of Ali Abdullah Saleh. Saudi Arabia – concerned with the regional stability and its threat to national security from Iran – suspected of backing the Houthi insurrectionists, launched a military incursion pounding Yemen with drone strikes – provided primarily by the UK and US. The humanitarian crisis is dire – indeed it is the worst in the world: UN figures suggest that around 375,000 people were killed as a result of the war – 70% were children. Over 3 million people are dying on their feet due to starvation or disease: The coronavirus outbreak had made things even worse. 6 million people have been displaced as a result of the war; 4.5 million internally. With these into account, there have been accusations that the Arab Spring was not really a popular revolution – with one or more powers – notably the US – accused of weaving it wholesale. That the movement had no intellectual anchors, or even a demand for a new social order (even for Islamism); not to mention that the monarchic regimes in Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia were left virtually unscathed has only fuelled suspicions of foreign interference. The US State Department-supported National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is even alleged to have been involved in the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. Whatever the truth of foreign involvement, the issues around the results of the Arab Spring – which is said to have inspired by OWS above; underscores the abject ineffectuality of horizontalism, and the hollowness that the “NGOfication” of a civil society does to a people in need of tools for revolution. That the ones who gained the most out of this were organisations with a political program or long-term aims (Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian officer class, Gulf state monarchies, ruling elites of regional hegemons), or that the whole thing turned into regional power plays is perhaps fairly unsurprising. At least the AANES has armed militias (oh, and a concrete idea of what they want their society to look like). A case study of “capitalist realism” on an entire region.
• The Great Recession had built up enough economic turmoil that the Eurozone itself came to be under threat in what was known as the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. The crisis had deeply affected one country in particular – Greece. The Greek government was trapped in deficits that it couldn’t meet and its funds were running out. The explanations given to the Greek crisis was generally ‘government corruption’ once the Greek government revealed that it had been underreporting the extent of its debt for years. The reality is much more stark: Greece was allowed into the Eurozone with knowledge (or at least, indifference) of the financial irregularities performed by the Greek government. In fact, Greece was the hub of a financial bonanza in the 1990s, as investors – in anticipation for the euro bought government bonds as if were a fire sale, as interest for them drove the prices for the bonds down – a manner curiously similar to the subprime mortgage crisis – though at the time, it was politically convenient for the Eurozone project to ignore signs of the Greek economy overheating. In 2002, the Greek government struck a deal with Goldman Sachs with the offer to swap government debt with dollars and yen as currencies, in exchange for euros for a brief period of time – to be exchanged back to the original currency at a later date…but the 2008 crash put the kibosh on that. As a result, much of Greece’s expenditure was used to pay off these investors who lost money as a result of their own speculation. The crisis had threatened the stability of the Eurozone, and so the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission – the ‘troika’ – stepped in with the offer to bailout Greece in exchange for harsh austerity measures – Greece agreed and received £275bn as various cuts to public services – especially welfare. As Greece experienced severe economic hardship, its economy shrank, and unemployment rose to 25% – massive anti-austerity protests spread throught the country. The political consequence was that the ruling party, PASOK – a giant of social democratic politics for four decades, collapsing. The decline of PASOK, and of various centre-left parties across Europe gave rise to the term, “Pasokification” by political analysts. As PASOK smouldered, the left-wing Syriza Party superseded them – led by Alexis Tsipras, Syriza secured victory in the 2015 national elections, on the pledges to reverse the austerity measures. However, Syriza’s time in the sun would not last. Multiple times did the troika offer bailout packages which was rejected by the government. Not wishing for Greece to crash out of the EU, yet also trying to make good on his promise, Tsipras decided to put the decision to the Greek people in a plebiscite whether Greece should accept the package deals offered by the troika. The referendum resulted in 61% voting “no” to the deal – an overwhelming rejection. However, pressures from the EU, the Greek Parliament, and fears that Syriza will be held responsible for the economic ruin of Greece, had put Tsipras between a rock and a hard place, and he eventually acquiesced to the demands of the Troika, and accepted the deal. As expected, tax increases were given to Greece’s farmers, and the public pension system received major cuts. The capitulation of Syriza and Tsipras in particular to the EU and IMF, had to many disgruntled citizens and to international observers, signified that they had disregarded the weight of a public vote, which had severely harmed Syriza’s popularity and that of the prime minister. The EU creditors offered further packages to last over three years with austerity demands, to which the Greek government accepted – but with the slow economic growth, a lack of improvement into the lives of the Greek people, and the fact that the money had primarily gone to pay off their creditors – notably major German and French banks, Greece experienced sharp social divisions, and social unrest; the climate was fertile for the spread of nationalism and anti-immigration – seeing the rise of the far-right Golden Dawn. The 2019 general election had led to Syriza was thrown out of power to the right-wing Democracy Party, led by Harvard-educated lawyer Kyriakos Mitotakis. With Mitotakis as prime minister, promises were made to the Greek people that Greece will become economically stronger under his leadership, and the key to Greece’s recovery, according to Mitotakis – is stricter immigration regulations. As it stands, the Greek debt crisis is a prime case study on the effects of financialisation to a middle-tier economy, and had generated profound scepticism on the supposed benefits to globalisation – and more specifically, to the European Union – whose purported aim was to create a federal institution where all members had equality, yet promoted the neoliberal politics that saw Greece as a subordinate member, and then saddled them with debt bondage after a global economic crisis.

‘We hate this ride and want to get off!’

As the ‘New Tens’ set in, across the world, recovery from the Great Recession introduced social dislocation, and a decidedly negative attitude to transnational organisations or institutions said to determine or influence policy of the nations within them. Public figures and politicians associated with globalisation, of technocratic managerialism, who spoke of the inevitability of the market – specifically the global market – were denounced as out-of-touch elites removed from the concerns of the people. Popular appeal for globalisation had evaporated. The only kind of leader that had many sway among their people seemed to be ones who rejected the kind of modernity globalisation represented, but such politicians is as likely to be outside ‘traditional’ or consensus politics as is generally understood. As mentioned before, popular support for a redistributive politics in Europe had resurged leading to the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Melenchon, Podemos, and briefly – the aforementioned Syriza. Their positionings were firmly reformist, yet their prominence had represented a commitment to break with the neoliberal order.

However, they had also come in an age of a particular international crisis: the aforementioned Arab Spring as it had taken place in Syria had led to a massive exodus of Syrian refugees to Europe. It is often suggested that had the European Union not been ‘constrained’ by the capacity of the member states to make policies affecting their respective nations, then the EU would be much closer to realising its universalist ethos, and a much more humanitarian response to the Syrian refugee crisis would have been possible.

This assessment generally ignores that the EU could have easily objected to the border security measures – but is itself committed to hard borders as part of the project of ‘securitization’ it had followed since its creation. The Syrian refugee crisis was a catalyst for the rise of nationalist sentiment across Europe, and the emergence of a new kind of reactionary politics to articulate the festering anxieties. Sentiments around a declinist narrative of the United Kingdom had produced the Brexit referendum in which 52% voted to leave the European Union*****. In the United States, similar anxieties around deindustrialisation and the outsourcing of jobs, unemployment, and declining living standards led to the rise of Donald Trump as he secured the presidency of the US. Viktor Orban of Hungary maintained political legitimacy by appealing to national anxieties around globalisation erasing the domestic culture – and so used convenient scapegoats like immigration, LGBTQ+ communities subverted traditional culture, and multiculturalism. He blamed his one-time ally, the Hungarian-born American billionaire George Soros, for orchestrating Hungary’s problems. In India, the rise of Narendra Modi in 2013, saw the culmination of the project of Hindu nationalism that lay in the shadows of India since independence. Jair Bolsonaro, a retired military officer, soared into office amidst a severe reccession in Brazil, and the collapse of legitimacy of the Workers’ Party through the supposed ‘anti-corruption campaign’/military orchestrated coup plot “Operation Car Wash” – leading to the impeachment of Dilma Rouseff, and the imprisonment of Lula de Silva.

The post-GFC left, or so-called ‘left-populists’ promoted the reassertion of state intervention, and for a reversal of austerity programs ushered in after the Great Reccession. However, lacking institutional influence, inability to meet the challenge of nationalism (either through the effective promotion of a new universalism, or succumbing to its ideology) their social bases composed of disparate ideological tendencies either without undergoing a process of synthesis or even a stable enough coalition, and the very parties they led (or parties embedded in the establishment) reacting to their politics like an organ transplant rejection – and it was eventually defeated, with only authoritarian nationalism, or the so-called ‘right-populisms’, the new normal. These nationalists promised to turn away from globalisation and cater to the national economy, but their purported protectionism did not break from neoliberalism – quite the opposite.

The Trump administration consciously converted the affairs of American politics more overtly into that of a corporation, with Trump himself as the CEO. Trump introduced anti-labour regulations, tax cuts to major corporations, and advanced deregulation as part of a neoliberal logic just like all the presidencies before his up to the time of Nixon. The US trade wars with China had expressed a ‘neoliberal protectionism’ of which the US has yet to deviate from. The Modi government introduced neoliberal reforms opening Indian agriculture to national and foreign companies in the ability to produce, sell and market agricultural products. The fury from Indian farmers was such that it led to the largest recorded strike in history. Bolsonaro likewise opened up the rainforests to domestic and foreign capital – a process that meant the erasure of fauna, wildlife and the indigenous peoples there, as well as evacerbating the climate crisis in the long term, while committing to deforestation and triggering forest fires in the short term – removing the indigenous groups from their home, and exacerbating the climate crisis.

A world in stasis; a runaway planet

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant effect on global economic activity as governments across the world initiated lockdowns to reduce the spread of coronavirus. The global response was far from effectively coordinated, and even today, a “vaccine apartheid” – where an inequitable distribution of vaccines between the Global North and the Global South became apparent, undermining the goodwill and ambitions of organisations like COVAX, was itself catalysed by the patenting of COVID-19 vaccines; Intellectual property rights had hampered aims around the development of a global supply of vaccines ready for distribution; as it stood, access the vaccines couldn’t be paid for by its poorest nations*****. In response, India (a rising economic superpower), and South Africa appealed to the WTO seeking a waiver on vaccine patents, which was granted in mid-2022. The results have been mixed: While the waiver has been beneficial to India, Africa still continues to have low vaccination rates, highlighting the continued dependency of the continent to the Western capitalist powers.

Tensions were still building in Latin America, specifically Chile – over the the expansion of privatisation as the national protests, briefly interrupted by the lockdown, mobilised again to topple the government of Sebastian Pinera. “Pink Tide 2.0” had brought into power left-wing governments in not only Chile, but Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras and Bolivia as well as Venezuela’s PSUV staving off a coup attempt. Brazil’s Worker’s Party and Bolivia’s Movement for Socialism avenged successful coups with their electorical victories – and in both instances, reactionary agitation resulted in violent protests ending in the jailing of many of those involved. Peru is the exception as it was subject to ‘lawfare’ by its National Congress – largely composed of ministers either affiliated with or had their tenures going back to the period of dictator Alberto Fujimori, resulting in the impeachment and imprisonment of the left-wing Pedro Castillo.

In the West, the results of the 2020 presidential election in the US had confirmed that Joe Biden would be the 46th President of the United States, with Donald Trump out of office. Having built his reputation as a force against globalism, Trump and his political allies were able to organise a protest outside of the Capitol, which later turned into a riot and attempted capture of the Capitol. The restoration of order by the security services and the military had suppressed the insurrection, and led to the discrediting of Trump. Even so, Biden was broadly not deviated significantly from the “neoliberal protectionism” characteristic of Trumpism. In the UK, Boris Johnson – who completed the Brexit process – resigned from his positions as leader of the ruling Conservative Party and as Prime Minister. Beneath accusations of his conduct during the pandemic, forces within the Conservatives were unconvinced that he was a suitable neoliberal steward, and so after a party leadership contest, Liz Truss emerged victorious. However, Liz Truss – inspired by the ideas of the neoliberal Institute for Economic Affairs – introduced a wildly unpopular tax bill, which the party elites panicked after seeing the reaction to it. Truss was pressured to resign, and another party election – albeit a carefully managed one, brought in Rishi Sunak as the leader of the Conservative Party and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In France, to see off the far-right in Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour as well as the hard-left Jean-Luc Melenchon, the centrist Emmanuel Macron leaned in to the former’s anti-immigration rhetoric, to considerable success, and retain a second term. Macron has since restructured the political party which brought him into power – including a rename from Republique en March to Renaissance in an effort to insist on neoliberal modernity. In Italy, following the collapse of the unity government (which itself was a non-partisan government brought into being after the collspse of both left and right-based coalitions) in response to domestic challenges of its very own ‘cost-of-living crisis’, in October 2022, the Brothers of Italy – a far-right party drawing its lineage to the post-World War II neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, became the ruling party on September 2022, with its leader Georgio Meloni becoming the Prime Minister of Italy. The result has led observers to claim that there had been no party so far to the right until the current one since the end of World War II. The “post-fascist” Meloni has made an effort to tone down (or conceal) the more radical of her political stances – including the repudiation of some of Mussolini’s policies, and her opposition to the EU. Almost certainly, Meloni is conscious of the suspicion within the European Commission of her – and for good reason, since their fear is of the development of a hard-right bloc from the formation of an alliance between Meloni and Orban. The EC are also fearful of the rise of the far-right Sweden Democrats in Sweden, and of Vox in Spain.

Institutions, along with political and economic figures in support of the continuation of globalisation, have now come to terms that the luster associated with it had long-since disappeared, and are ever reliant on leaders committed to a managerial approach to maintaining neoliberalism. One of the side-effects are political figures coming out of the discontent of globalisation finding expression…and thus far, the institutions that maintain its operation had used its sheer weight to push them into line, at least for the time being. In a sense, neoliberalism today operates as what it always was in clear sight: not as an integrative process melding all societies, and bringing them into prosperity; but the unfettered expansion of markets across the globe, unequal exchange in the periphery, and a vigorous form of capital accumulation concentrated in the core (US, Canada & Western Europe). To put it simply, it is the current form of capitalist-imperialism – only that unlike in the Keynesian era, even who gets to share the world’s wealth is largely denied to the masses of the global North.

So will neoliberalism ever end?

One way or another, neoliberalism will certainly come to an end. What is depends on, is the terms that it does end on. After the financial crisis of 2008, many commentators said that neoliberalism has come to an end. And after the COVID-19 pandemic, a new batch of commentators that neoliberalism has come to an end. Neoliberalism is very much trudging on, although it is long past its sell by date – either already one foot in the grave, or already undead. With that said, studies have shown that even in such volatile conditions such as a global pandemic and a global economic downturn, the largest firms will somehow find a way to make more profits – either because of government patronage, or because of being economically well-suited to profit out of the circumstances. Workers’ wages have not slowed in rising, they stagnated altogether since before the pandemic; and with the rise of the cost of commodities, the conditions for inflation and the ‘cost-of-living crisis’ emerges. But even those on their own are not enough to bring an end to neoliberalism. Time and again, we have seen that the business and political elites are very invested in its continuation – no matter the cost. But in order to properly explore why neoliberalism continues to define our era, we must also understand why it is it became our current reality in the first place.

As mentioned before, the 1960s – 1970s was the period that global capitalism was in crisis, and Keynesianism had reached its limits. The major economies experienced the slowdown in growth, and inflation was high. The intervention of US President Richard Nixon by way of an incomes policy had failed to reduce inflation. Moreover, unemployment was rising in places like Britain, the US – which had created a ‘stagflation’ crisis – and was resistant to Keynesian methods to curb inflation and unemployment, making both worse. Wider context being the fallout of the Vietnam War (The US were printing money like crazy just to fund it, and many countries placed the influx of dollars into their reserves), and the energy crisis caused by OPEC (Saudi Arabia) raising the global price of oil.

When the neoliberals came with their solutions, they saw the pillars of Keynesian capitalism in strong labour securities eg. high wages, interventionist state willing to issue payments to firms and support those who were unemployed; and argued that to restart economic growth that you can have low inflation, or high wages – but you can’t have both: one has to go. The neoliberal epoch exists primarily to resolve the falling rate of profits in global markets. This worked, for about two decades – now economic growth even in the advanced capitalist nations has slowed down, with them increasingly reliant on financialization and the creation of new mechanisms to deal with the flow of financial capital. This led to the buying and selling of securities, which led to an economic bubble, which to led to…you know the rest.

In other words, the very thing that the introduction of neoliberalism was supposed to address: economic stagnation, has itself become a feature of the neoliberal era – the difference is that within the nations that make up the Global North, stagnant and low wages in proportion to profits generated by capital are a common feature – to say nothing of the discrepancy generated in the Global South. With the end of neoliberalism over the horizon, we find ourselves at an impasse. The real question appears to be what comes next?

To its advocates and detractors, neoliberalism gave the appearance of the terminal point of capitalism – its most advanced manifestation to date. And depending on how you look at it either from the left or the right, the acceptance of this reality can either be very distressing or a very positive state of affairs. But what possibilities appear on the routes beyond neoliberalism?

The crisis of neoliberalism has led to calls within the US and Europe for new social welfare proposals such as the introduction of a universal basic income, or setting up an enivronmentally-conscious economic program as the Green New Deal. Other proposals include the creation of a new Bretton Woods system, with added restrictions on transnational companies (TNCs) from interfering with a country’s economic goals. Naturally, all three – especially the first reflect concerns within the Global North. The more pessimistic possibilities include the manifestation of new methods of social control: the first by corporations, specifically the companies in online communications, in the compiling and selling of personal data; with the potential from anything to tailor-made advertising to the management of “digital dossiers” on people as a liaison for the security services. The emergence of an immanent “surveillance capitalism” means the potential of new disciplinary powers at work (such as breaks, attendance, performance, etc.), management of consumer activity, and the profiling of subjects deemed to be potentially threatening.

And the second, a product of domestic and international politics in response to the climate crisis: in the event that measures to halt or reverse the problem become untenable, climate change will almost certainly impact the Global South earlier and significantly harder than anywhere else, with the largest refugee crisis the world will ever see an existential risk. This is likely to be met with a highly securitized border regime maintained in the global core – especially the US*****, and in Europe – with steps to establish these hard borders already in place. “Exterminism” is the appropriate term for a future where most of the planet is doomed to conflicts over resources, starvation, displacement, and in the possibility of entry into the wealthy nations – near-permanent second-class citizenship in a hostile culture. And the rest represent, in effect, a permanent global underclass, with the global elite shielded from the worst effects of climate change.

It is for this reason that within the Global South, the search for an alternative has led towards a restart of dirigismes and “post-neoliberal” programs – except that in doing so, they would be attached to the “Belt-and-Road” initiative launched by China; with favourable loans that they would not receive from the IMF, and the push towards “de-dollarisation”, with the Chinese yuan as the reserve currency over the US dollar, for more amenable conditions for import substitution. Basically, an ‘inverted Keynesianism’ even with the hypothetical anti-Bretton Woods system.

One thing is clear: neoliberalism has proven and made simple that the interests of capital and the interests of labour are diametrically opposed and irreconcilable. With 600 million people in the Global South dragged into the global working class, they have the greatest impetus to put an end to neoliberal capitalism. Any project, organisation, or general demand for the end of neoliberalism has to acknowledge and be in solidarity with the global working class – and overcome any boundaries, whether cultural, social and especially material – to accomplish this, and bring about a more equitable, and freer world.

Components

• Privatization – The transfer of companies from the public space to the private sector.
• Deregulation – The removal of state regulation in the economy, i.e. parts of the industrial sector.
• Liberalization of trade – The removal or reduction of trade barriers between nations.
• Financialization – The increased role of finance via markets and institutions in economic functions.

Ideological inspirations

• Liberalism
  • Libertarianism
    • Austrian school
    • Chicago school
      • laissez-faire capitalism
  • rational choice theory

Organisations & Institutions

• Mont Pelerin Society
• Business Roundtable
• International Monetary Fund
• World Bank
• World Trade Organization
• World Economic Forum
• Organisation of American States
• European Union (you heard me)
• Heritage Foundation
• Institute of Economic Affairs
• Centre for Policy Studies
• Adam Smith Institute
• American Enterprise Institute
• Cato Institute
• Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action
• Institute of Public Affairs
• Hayek Society
• Liberal Institute of Rio de Janeiro
• Institute for Liberty and Democracy

Tools ‘of the trade’ (or weapons)

• Structural adjustment program (generally comes with an IMF loan)
• ‘Shock therapy’
• Austerity
• Neoliberalization
  • Private finance initiative / public-private partnership
  • Academization
  • Workfare
• Free-trade zone

Political projects & iterations

• Pinochetism
• Thatcherism
• Reaganism
• Washington Consensus / Beijing Consensus
• Fujimorism / Lima Consensus
• ‘New Russia’
• Third Way (‘progressive-neoliberalism’) / New Democrats / New Labour (Blairism)
• ‘New Iraq’
• Neoliberal protectionism / Trumpism

Social and cultural developments

• Post-Fordism
  • postmodernism / late modernity
  • New managerialism
  • immaterial labour
    • ‘technoscientific domination’ / ‘cognitive capitalism’ / surveillance capitalism
    • precariat
• Capitalist realism
  • ‘the entrepeneurial self’/’hustle culture’

People associated with neoliberalism

Economists:

• Friedrich A. Hayek
• Milton Friedman
• Gary Becker
• James M. Buchanan
• Lionel Robbins
• ‘Chicago Boys’
  • Sergio de Castro
  • Jose Pinera
  • Hernan Buchi
  • Christian Vignau
  • Fransisco Rosende
  • Joaquin Lavin
  • Ernesto Fontaine
  • Rolf Luders
  • Ricardo Ffrench-Davis
• Jeffrey Sachs******
• Paul Volcker
• Hernando de Soto
• Larry Summers
• Ricardo Hausmann

Politicians:

• Ludwig Earhard (kinda)
• Margaret Thatcher
• Ronald Reagan
• Augusto Pinochet
• Jose Alfredo Martinez de Hoz
• Domingo Cavallo
• Deng Xiaoping*******
• Junichiro Koizumi
• Carlos Salinas de Gortari
• Ernesto Zedillo
• Alberto Fujimori
• Vicente Fox Quesada
• Bill Clinton
• Tony Blair
• Al Gore
• Manmohan Singh
• Bob Hawke
• Paul Keating
• Barack Obama
• Donald Trump
• David Lange
• Hosni Mubarak
• Emmanuel Macron

Other public figures:

• Thomas Friedman
• George Soros
• David Brooks

References:

– Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction – Steger, M.B.; Roy, R.K.

– Neoliberalism: Key Concepts – Cahill, D.; Konings, M.

– A Short History of the Mont Pelerin Society – Butler, E.

– The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective – Mirowski, P.; Plehwe, D.

– The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism – Klein, N.

– The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism – Schneider, S.

– “The death of class”? – Tittenbrun, J.

See also

• end of history
• ‘there is no alternative’
• laissez-faire
• Neoconservatism

How well did “Exiting the Vampire Castle” age?

Exiting the Vampire Castle is a 2013 essay by the late British cultural theorist Mark Fisher. In recent times, the essay is largely remembered for its opposition to the mode of public excoriation known as “callout culture” or “online shaming”, and in part for the responses that it received as a result of its publication. Fisher viewed the left as it was in the 2010s as gripped by a puritanical moralism revolving around identity – specifically atomised identities, which confused priggish chastisement for empowering and unimpeding the agency of marginalised social groups. The piece proved highly controversial and was subject to considerable discussion, and received a number of prominent responses. Its influence is felt on the so-called ‘dirtbag left’ represented by Chapo Trap House, and other sections of the Left hostile to the expressions of the so-called ‘social justice warrior left’ – this concentration is mostly seen among the core writers of Jacobin, the former editor-in-chief of Zer0 Books – Douglas Lain, and the late Michael Brooks as examples. It is interesting to note that so far, the list of names who had claimed influence from the book were from the United States – and that Fisher is, again, British – that said, Fisher’s frustration with callout culture and his belief that it was an impediment to class solidarity, much less the liberatory politics affected by those given to callouts had likely resonated with them precisely because of historic difficulties in mobilising working-class organisations in the United States, in contrast to the perceived (and sometimes real) instances of identity politics used by various social climbers within the media ecosystem, as well as political careerists playing into clientelist politics (usually by the Democratic Party). But did Exiting the Vampire Castle address more than just callout culture? What else did Fisher discuss within it? And how well does it hold up as critique of the left as it exists today?

Background

As mentioned before, Exiting the Vampire Castle was written in 2013. By then, austerity measures implemented by the Conservative government had set in. The Health and Social Care Act had passed the year before – which was a restructuring of the NHS to include further marketisation, which was met with resistance from direct action groups such as UK Uncut and Disabled People Against the Cuts. Students were confronted with the fact that the tuition fees for attendance had tripled, and protested against the rise in costs to their studies. And it was within the umbrage of the Occupy Wall Street protests which had spread internationally. Early discussions around the potential to mobilise mass protests through social media were highly optimistic, and specifically the functionality of Twitter ‘flattened’ and ‘squashed’ the space between influential users of the medium and everyone else in the dynamic of exchanges – the consequence was in some cases, a disruption of the prestige in the public space that these prominent figures acquired ‘offline’ or the support base of these figures en masse targetting a user deemed to have offended or written something offensive about the figure. These interactions both fell under the rubric of ‘dogpiling’ and became but one example of how conversations on Twitter were quickly becoming toxic.

Furthermore, activists on the online space – – particularly from the ‘new social movements’ lionized as alternatives to an ossified Leninism from the 1990s onwards, had a framework which synthesized the various gender, racial and queer struggles into a practice referred to as intersectionality – informing contemporary identity politics, which itself sat alongside the various poststructuralist theories which had become prominent in academia the generation prior. The framework provided a lexicon of terms, as well as interrogated its contemporary culture – and at times, this had led to confrontations with prominent people on Twitter – the accessible packaging of this lexicon led to it being used widespread, representing an early expression of what would become identified with contemporary social justice activism, or alternatively these activists were derisively referred to as “social justice warriors”.

In the climate of austerity, various left-wing writers, broadcasters and activists came into prominence – among them were: Laurie Penny, Dawn Foster, Fransesca Martinez and Owen Jones, in addition to the emergence of the Everyday Sexism Project headed by Laura Bates, and Novara Media. Of particular importance to the social context was the profound epiphany that was to occur to the comedian and broadcaster Russell Brand, who was still affected from the death of his friend, the singer Amy Winehouse from a drug overdose. Initially, Brand wanted to make the case on how to address addiction in British society – particularly from the a public health perspective, which from there became a call for a revolution – one based on love and care as the basis for society, rather than the individualistic atomised existence that characterises it. Brand was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman for the BBC current affairs programme Newsnight, which aired on 23 October 2013, in which he expressed his disinterest in voting and articulated that as person that emerged from a working-class background experiencing severe deprivation, there’s no reason to legitimise the callous and indifferent political system in the ballot box, and denounced the whole thing as a charade. Brand also called for a redistribution of wealth from the most powerful corporations in the country, and praised the Occupy movement for putting in the public lexicon “the 99 percent” contesting the greed of “the 1 percent”. For many observers, even though Russell Brand had not entirely specified the details of the revolution he called for, or alternatively, declared was coming, he did not only hold his own against a presenter infamous for grilling politicians like a George Foreman BBQ, he articulated the frustrations of the underclass seldom recognised and did so with panache.

In online discussions after the interview, including on legacy media, Russell Brand received praise for boldly expressing that a flawed system doesn’t warrant support, as well as scorn for launching into a juvenile tirade with no clear outline on the society that he wants to see and declaring that the most disadvantaged should disenfranchise themselves for some millionaire’s vague, barely detailed revolution. A particular form of criticism from another angle came in questioning why Russell Brand should be the centre of this revolution for social and ethical transformation – when taking into account his history of misogyny: Of particular note was the infamous Andrew Sachs prank phone calls made on his radio show, where he prank called the actor claiming that he had sex with his granddaughter. It was also pointed out that his revolution even as he called for it, did not address the role of feminism in his outlook.

So what does Russell Brand’s political ventures have to do with Exiting the Vampire Castle and its author: Mark Fisher? Quite a lot, actually. Despite his pessimistic analysis of the health of the radical left in Capitalist Realism, Fisher saw “Brandmania” as a cultural and political breakthrough, but more so, he very strongly identified with Brand – to Fisher, Russell Brand was a distorted carnival mirror reflection of himself: someone who came from the same working-class background he did, experienced the same deprivation, maybe even did some of the same drugs – yet Brand became this famous entertainer who in the eve of 2013, is bringing people to the idea of revolution – while the cultural disruption he sought to acheive had up until that point, had only led him to a frustrating job as a Further Education lecturer. More so, Fisher was irritated with the interrogation of Brand’s attitudes towards women – viewing it as myopic, moralistic and irrelevant to the problems faced by people in Austerity Britain – for men and women. All of these issues, from Twitter, austerity, Russell Brand, to third-, well fourth-wave feminism were all things that Fisher felt strongly about and they were the soil that his essay was produced from.

So….what does he say?

I’ll link towards a essay for anyone to read, but the basic summary of the points are as follows:

• There is a very hostile culture in ‘Left Twitter’
• This culture is full of snarky, moralistic jerks delivering regular put downs that he couldn’t refer to any specific examples for fear of being mobbed*
• Solidarity with Owen Jones, who somehow became a target of “everyone’s a lib, but me”-types
• No seriously, why would you fuck with Owen Jones? He’s done the most for class consciousness!
• Such is the self-righteousness of Left Twitter slacktivists that they slag off the Ipswich People’s Assembly rally, while they do nothing**
• Solidarity is beautiful to see, as with was in the People’s Assembly rally. Also, they’re a fine example of the horizontalism we like to see on the left grabbing attention, not by Leninist burn-outs
• Russell Brand is a working-class hero (unlike that ultra-posh nincompoop Michael McIntryre. Yes, Fisher literally says this), and from attending his show, Brand is different from what the ‘poststructualist left’ moralisers paint him as. In fact, Brand’s show is the model for ‘acid communism’ should be***
• Brand pwned the infamous rottweiler presenter Jeremy Paxman, doing what Johnny Rotten couldn’t with Bill Grundy
• Focusing on Brand’s sexism is not important to what he was saying, or calling for, and the “petit-bourgeois narcissistic left” were for some reason under the impression that Brand was himself going to lead the revolution, even though he hasn’t told anyone to do anything****. In fact, bringing to attention sexism from Brand is a thought-terminating cliche
• Class consciousness is weak, and the academic Left is dominated by a petit-bourgeois culture which narrows any discussion of class politics. Indeed, the fragmentation of class has led to the moralism we see in interpersonal exchanges within the Left
• The toxic, moralistic, tribal and self-congratulatory culture on the (Twitter) Left has produced the ‘Vampire’s Castle’, turning the nominally liberatory demands in identity politics into identitarian silos. The Vampire’s Castle reproduces liberal identity politics to take the conversation away from class
• Nietzsche’s portentions of something worse than the slave-morality of Christianity – ‘the priesthood of bad conscience’…is perfectly expressed in Left Twitter
• The Vampire’s Castle produces individualistic actions over the structural critiques that they claim to engage in; has an aura of humorlessness and guilthood, and produces essentialist liberal attitudes.
• The immature, cynical ‘neo-anarchists’ of Left Twitter are subjects produced by the capitalist realism of the New Labour era, have a shallow undertanding of what creates change in society, and misidentify the problems in parliamentary politics without understanding the context – and are just pretentious hipsters giving a pseudo-radical affect
• Faced with this current dilemma, it is imperative that identitarianism is rejected, and that the Left returns to class politics
• Social media is under capitalist control, and that the Left musn’t lose sight of this, despite its faux-egalitarian presentation, the Left needs to recognise that class struggle is the motto, and solidarity the core value. Capitalist social media is enemy territory, and we need to fight to win. The goal is not to be an activist, but for the working class to activate and to acheive victory

It is perhaps a surprise to a small constituency of people that people had stuff to say in response to Exiting the Vampire’s Castle – in particular the tone that permeated throughout the essay. It is, and still remains – a very controversial work, engendering praise for capturing the zeitgeist of the period and making a defiant call for class solidarity, and by (perhaps more than) equal measure derided as a ridiculous tirade from a middle-class white academic upset that his nonproblematic ‘problematic fave’ was getting stick, and trying – as many embarassing socialist groupings and figures have done in the past to dismiss the problems faced on the basis of identity – and apparently those that women face. Before I get into what to make of Exiting The Vampire Castle, I think that it’s worth that we go over more context from the some of the people that knew Fisher personally what they thought of him and his work.

The Passion of Mark Fisher

“Reading Vampire Castle against the grain a bit, how Mark describes [Russell] Brand is how he is describing himself — slightly effeminate and glam, working class, eloquent (although Mark was rather more stocky and wasn’t wearing make-up quite so often by this point) — and yet he’d probably have flunked the interview by telling [Jeremy] Paxman he was being ‘delibidinising’ or insufficiently Spinozist or something. Mark never really did go overground, but he wrote constantly about how important it was that people did. I’ll admit that one of my many reactions to Vampire Castle was wondering why he was wasting his time with this rubbish, wasn’t he meant to be becoming our public intellectual or something by making TV programmes or writing think tank reports rather than arguing with prats on Twitter (although — credit where it’s due — he did do the think tank report for Compass).”

Owen Hatherley

The Sydney Review of Books did a three-part series on Mark Fisher’s influence on the blogosphere, and his body of work ranging from cultural criticism (or to be more specific, his music reviews) to cultural and social theory. It took the form of an interaction between some of his contemporaries (among them were personal friends or at least acquaintances), and those who were influenced by his work. The cultural and social context where Fisher as ‘k-punk‘ posted, the ideological trajectory of Fisher’s outlook, and the kind of personality Mark Fisher had. There was indeed praise for how appropriate k-punk was for the time it existed, and even where it was felt Fisher took overly strident positions was accompanied by attempts to contextualise these actions. When discussing Fisher’s impact in the blogosphere and his work as a music reviewer, the cultural backdrops of both those environments in the late 1990s & early 2000s are presented for the former as a rather subterranean and for the latter as a particularly male-dominated subculture with all the flaws that come with it.

They also discussed Fisher’s own ideological journey from the technolibertarian accelerationism reflective of the thought-mode of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit collective he was a member of, to a somewhat sentimental social-democratic position; and how this shift was mirrored by his own experiences as a philosophy grad student, his time in precarious work, to his eventual literary career. Of additional importance is his formative experiences in northern England as the industrial backdrop was reshaped by the neoliberal turn.

For the interviewees, Fisher’s work during his more overtly leftist positioning was very welcome, even if it didn’t have the flair or aestheticized appeal of his blogosphere years. Though among them, those that recalled the release of Exiting the Vampire’s Castle mostly remember the bemusement that they felt. Owen Hatherley specifically recalls instances in which Fisher during what he calls his most intellectually productive period, dismissed people as a result of various intellectual debates that took place, or at least engaged in practices very similar to the ‘cancelling’ which is now of some cultural concern. For recent fans on Mark Fisher (say post-2017, the year of his death) – the so-called ‘acid communists’ who are unaware of this context, or those who intentionally demphasize focus on this period, it stands as a rather conspicious tenure not to explore – especially considering Fisher’s post-mortem acclaim to apotheotic levels among the New New Left, and the discussions around cancel culture.

Not a lot of focus is made of it because for them it is part of a broader context of where he was moving at the time, as well as the reccuring themes of alienation, depression, and the class-defined social scripts given to people that had been features of his work. Rhian E. Jones, who also grew up in working-class area in Britain where the process of deindustrialisation led to a communal fracturing, rightly pointed out that Fisher’s exhaltation of Brand as the archetypical ‘class warrior’ for our age, did not need to come at the expense of feminism, especially feminists within the working class – or that somehow that objection to sexism was a middle-class malaise, and the intervention in the way that he did undermined the importance of an articulation of class politics. For her, the issues that came about from it were had a tiresome and predictable quality to it (in the sense that they were “points addressed a thousand times”) and had foregrounded the so-called “dirtbag left”, an ostensibly left-wing positioning defined by its hostility to identity politics. She also mused on the irony of Fisher’s arrival at a politics that for her, seemed almost natural and commonsense in her youth – even antiquated by the 1990s, now resdiscovered and championed by a left blogosphere – chalking it up to a deemphasis of praxis and overemphasis on theory the the age demanded; and possibly a lack of engagement with the organised left, and even the parliamentary left. Considering that Nick Land and Nina Power are now fascists, I’m inclined to agree.

Conclusion

So what are my thoughts on Exiting the Vampire Castle? Do I agree with the writers above on their reactions to it, is my position different? And how is it different? Well, unlike the interviewees in that article, I’ve never spoken to him, worked with him, nor was I exposed to his work in the 2000s where his cultural insights apparently looked like the Holy Grail to a certain kind of disaffected grad student a few years away from taking part in those aforementioned tuition-free protests – and even then, I wouldn’t really fuck with post-punk back then, so I wouldn’t have the same emotional connection to Mark Fisher’s works. That it was also a group of professional writers, if only for different genres, could possibly add to the grounded response to it, and in my mind, a necessary contextualisation of this piece among his general body of work.

However, I’m not a professional writer. Or a journalist for that matter. I’m a blogger, and one who had only so much as heard of Mark Fisher a year after his death. Which is why I fully expect readers to not be surprised that given my flippant reaction to various parts of Exiting the Vampire Castle, that I consider this to be probably the funniest piece that Mark Fisher had ever written, and the fact that he was apparently so self-serious about this makes it even better. And by better, I mean by incredulity of the status of the work, not the quality of the work itself. Seriously read it, it’s super-funny. I don’t know if he was intending to call to attention the gradual erasure of working-class culture from television, but going on about how Brand’s so amazing and Michael McIntyre and the army of ‘bland graduate chancers’ doesn’t do much for bringing the issue to attention. In fact, at several points, Fisher undermines the concerns that he is trying to raise with melodramatic diagnoses. I mean, should I really take seriously that Left Twitter is the personification of Nietzsche’s “preisthood of bad conscience”? Should you take that seriously? I know Doug Lain might take that seriously, maybe Ben Burgis and the Jacobin people take it seriously. I sure as fuck don’t.

The decent points that he raises are either underdeveloped, or replaced by an attack on a particular target. And there are even some targets that he won’t get specific about in details (i.e. who did what online?, etc.), for the fear that he himself will be a target! That’s the irony: the essay itself expresses the same kind of moralism that he accuses ‘identitarians’ of doing. This is probably why Owen Hatherley dismissed it as Twitter BS that was a waste of his talents. And more so: it as a consequence barely attempts to get to the structural issues at play here: Twitter as part of an overall process of the commodification of intellectual labour in the backdrop of post-industrialism, the highly addictive qualities built into it (“the scrolling function” being an obvious feature) as context is being churned out, the way that it covertly encourages conflicts between users to generate more content, etc. But instead of daring people to imagine what a communistic approach to online communication might look like (aspects that intitially, were identifiable in the early history of the Internet, as is often the case with these things), we get this individualistic castigation. In fact, he claims the inhabitants of the ‘vampire’s castle’ existed before the Internet – even though social media is such a heavy feature of the piece.

He rightfully identifies a fragmented class consciousness of his era (though I personally believe that in spite of my occassional whinging, class consciousness has slowly consolidated since the time Fisher wrote this) and I agree that identity politics shorn of class struggle is cack – that the problem really is capitalism – not some amorphous, transhistorical power structures (though a lot of the so-called ‘identitarians’ I’ve come across would not really disagree on that point either, but it does need saying), he’s correct in saying that personal virtue and castigation does not lead to the construction of liberatory possibilities and undermines solidarity; Hell, I might even agree on his point on the ‘neo-anarchists’ campaining to protect the NHS.***** But I can’t help but feel that this was an essay written where instead of taking a friend’s advice to sleep on what frustrates him to see whether it still gives him the urge to write on, that he just churned out immediately after a particularly bad exchange – which might be why his points around the preponderance of identity politics over class politics, and personal virtue passed off as “awareness” seem so malformed. I don’t oppose criticism of the prevalence of identity politics at all. I certainly don’t oppose critique of the relegation of class to “another relation” by which those on the lower rung can be oppressed as primarly experiential. I just have read better criticisms. Even from the same author, and where they weren’t even the main focus of the essay. It’s actually strange to me that it this essay, even from critics – which even I’m participating in giving this sort of cultural significance, was granted this kind of importance to his legacy, because it feels so unfinished.

In my attempt to answer the question whether Exiting the Vampire Castle aged well – I can only suggest, that it was likely, well definitely considered ridiculous at the time – at least among some sections of the left, and it time has made it even more absurd. At the same time, I think that it’s OK that it feels absurd. I’m actually glad that it was written, published, and engendered a discussion around it – because many of the concerns that it rose are still very relevant nearly a decade on. I think that as a work, it is probably more optimistic than Capitalist Realism for example, in that Fisher now saw a possibility of an effective working-class mobilisation. Though the idea that two men – particularly two white men – occupied as cultural commentators and producers, could not only articulate the multifaceted social realities of the working-class in Britain in all of its diverse and reproductive adjuncts, but focus them into a coherent aim appropriate for austerity Britain – was always preposterous, whether the year was 2013 or 2022. Since we’re up for another round of austerity, if we’re going to revisit this work and situate it in its context, we have to remember this particular implication in Exiting the Vampire Castle, just doesn’t work.

I think that the Jacobin and 2016-2021 era Zer0 Books guys/ Doug Lain adjacents, who are themselves inhabitants of Left Twitter identify with the critique of identitarian-based moralism, to the point of treating it like some major revelation – primarily and ironically because it’s actually an easy and not especially significant point to make, especially in the context of online behaviour, and questions around the sustainability of online-generated activism (which in the era of Occupy had a much more optimistic outlook towards) and the building of social movements was if not something to avoid, certainly harder to resolve. After all, if you’re already inclined to hate or distrust identity politics, then blaming it for the fracturing of organised labour as a force and an active impediment to rebuilding of socialism as a global force is pretty convenient******. But always, I digress.

So my ultimate conclusion is that it is a rather odd essay that felt unfocused and emotional (which is fine, by the way), that does admittedly have a continued resonance in various cultural concerns. As with all essays, there are going to be parts that aged poorly, especially with the passage of time – and some things will be outright wrong. The thing with Exiting the Vampire Castle is that it has an unusual level of infamy mostly owing to the significance given to the issues raised in it, specifically those around “cancel culture”, movement-building on the left, and the implications of social media. I might think that it’s half-assed, but a number of people smarter than me (all of them dorks, obviously) have praised it, in part because some of the responses to it (admittedly) were of poor quality. I think that a critical, rather than this strange hagiographic engagement with Mark Fisher’s legacy will open the door to a more grounded assessment of this essay.

In short, it ain’t Blood In My Eye, but it sure as hell ain’t “Why I’ve Given Up on the Left” either (Nick Cohen, June Lapine, whoever – all these ‘I left the left’ pieces have always been dribbling dogshit).

Notes

*- This of course doesn’t mean that they didn’t exist, just that he didn’t want to cite anything in relation to this point, apparently.

**- This is perhaps a clear sign as any, that there are times we netizens should find the time to – as the kids now say – touch grass.

***- If that’s the case, then perhaps it’s just as well that “Acid Communism” was never really fleshed out.

****- Brand did tell people to not vote, though. So it’s easy to see why some people mistakenly treated him like he had some kind of alternative program.

*****- Lifestyle anarchists to many will be annoying, no matter what new neologism you give them, especially when they fall back on existing positions, though I strongly suspect that Mark Fisher was telling on himself, with his previous “cyber-Stalinist” edgelord posturing.

******- I do find it curious that none of these folks ever addressed the weird ‘Britishisms’ in the essay, since they’re fairly integral to his championing of Brand and Owen Jones for building up class consciousness. It seems that only the cancel culture and anti-identity politics stuff will do for them. Sad.

Links:

– A video that illustrates the strange acclaim of Exiting the Vampire Castle (done in part, by portraying Fisher’s critics as a formless, hostile mob who only responded to it with aggressive moralism) created none other than the then-editor in chief to Zer0 Books, Douglas Lain. As mentioned before, he as with other fans of the essay, exclusively emphasizes the parts of its content that is hostile to identity politics, and deemphasizes the parts of its content where it appears that Mark Fisher had never been to a demo before.

See also

• Mark Fisher
• Cancel culture
  • TV presenters who wrote or did a documentary on cancel culture
• ‘SJW’
• Brahmin left
• ‘Brocialist’
• ‘Dirtbag left’
• ‘pomo left’
• Class reductionism
• Social media and the online left

Just why should there be a general election? (The search for an independent left and struggle against Black Hole Electoralism)

On October 25th 2022, Rishi Sunak became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Despite losing the first Conservative leadership election in September to Liz Truss, in little more than a month, another one took place sealed off to the party membership to crown him leader. The Labour Party is demanding that a general election take place on the basis that the Conservatives have lost credibility and needs to be put to the test on their legitimacy to govern. Outside of parliament, the national demonstration to address the cost-of-living crisis and a decade of privatisation has now adapted itself into a general demand for a general election – some of the biggest advocates for a GE are the critics of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party – many of whom occupy the far left, who believe Sunak came in without a mandate, and is tantamount to an undemocratic appointment. In this essay, I will attempt to explore why it is, that sections of the British left have pinned their hopes on the possibility of a Labour Government that they know – and aren’t shy of telling anyone – will push anti-immigration policies, will severly punish protestors, will almost certainly encourage stop-and-searches, will be hostile to trade unions, will securitise further an already highly securitised state apparatus, will cater to the whims of the ruling class, will issue in austerity measures and call it “everyone doing their part to spend a little less”, will commit to a neoliberal sensibility long past it’s expiry date, and will not do anything for the working class beyond a few scraps; and why I think that calling this ‘plan’ utterly absurd doesn’t even cover the folly of it.

"We must do something!"
"What should we do?"
"I already told you! We must do something!"

In recent times, it’s not been very easy for the left in the UK: Left-wingers committed to the Labour Party have, and continue to experience repression by the party bureaucracy – if suspensions and expulsions, including retroactive expulsions by association is not the order of the day, then the ‘mild’ withdrawal from a candidacy is also a common enough measure. The anti-war movement had failed to even so much build a presence for its case on the war in Ukraine, easily outflanked by the pro-West chauvinism of the likes of Paul Mason, and slandered in the press, notably by ‘progressive’ commentator George Monbiot characterising critics of Western imperialist involvement in Ukraine as “Putinists”, “tankies”* and “Assadists” and aided in the slander by none other than the leader of the Labour Party itself: Keir Starmer, who after penning an article slamming the anti-war position, made clear of his intent to sanction MPs in the party who took an anti-war stance by threatening to remove the whip. Far more serious, and damning was the failure of the “Kill the Bill” protests which concerned the interests of environmental and racial justice activists, and trade unionists, as well as for migrants and people from GRT communities – as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill passed, and worse, some good and passionate activists were arrested and jailed for participating. It’s not all been bad, but it does present a very sobering situation.

On November 5th 2022 – an auspicious day for resistance to parliament, a demonstration planned and organised by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity took place. The People’s Assembly had a list of demands: an end to the wage restraint imposed on workers and the profiteering from their employers; a wealth tax to fund social care, social security and fuel poverty; a nationalisation of energy, water, rail and mail; a demand to meet the housing crisis by building council homes; an end to the outsourcing of public services and the privatisation of the NHS; and a general election to overturn an undemocratic government imposed by the Tories. The demonstration itself was planned for months, and hoped to synthesize the energy built from the already existing industrial strike actions that had taken place. Indeed, it was discussed in Parliament as an early-day motion and signed by the Labour MPs comprising the Socialist Campaign Group, in addition to a few progressive Scottish MPs on July 5th 2022. The recent addition is the demand for a general election following the collapse of the Johnson and Truss premierships within a 110-day period.

The People’s Assembly, allied with eight trade unions, and over a dozen left-wing organisations, exists as an adjunct for the parliamentary left. And the trade unions themselves which support it, themselves also believe that the best chance that it has for securing a fair pay for its workers exists in a Labour government. With such an ecosystem, it is forgivable or at least understandable that they would commit to a electoral demand and specifically a Labourite demand as the government that exists, a Conservative government, has shown itself to be deeply hostile to worker’s rights. The question, however, is that does it say about the left’s current ability to etch out new political bases, much less push for higher horizons?

‘Nowhere else to go’

In the late 1990s, as the New Labour project went underway, the parliamentary left found it had become a weak and very marginal bloc. This was not due to any active attempt on the part of those New Labour project to suppress their influence, indeed it never needed to – as much of their atrophied state was the result of internal disputes during the so-called modernising process overseen by former Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Thatcherism had already set the terms of how British ‘common sensibility’ were to regard public services – from housing, to transportation, to even healthcare – the public sphere was colonised by marketisation. The Labour Party then, either for electoral calculations or that they were themselves committed to a more marketised society, decided not to challenge this sensibility, because they viewed earlier collectivist expressions of Labourism as outmoded. Whatever the views of the critics of New Labour prior to its electoral breakthrough, they were able to get the unions on side with the promise of reversing the curbs to their rights which Thatcher introduced – only to completely and gleefully renege on that promise once in power. They were also able to convince the activists and supporters of the Labour Party to support it over John Major’s Conservative Party as despite the character of New Labour, “A Labour Party in power is always better than a Conservative one”, and they were desperate to put an end to nearly two decades of Tory domination. Even as it did admittedly commit to social welfare policies, they came tied with the expansion of private finance initiatives (PFIs) to fund them, much to the anger of the unions affiliated to Labour, such as Unison and the GMB.

The unions were antagonised by an incarnation of the Labour Party which seemed willing to break with its connection to the former – the “parliamentary expression of trade unionism” was now considered to be a historical baggage unfit for the modern problems New Labour believed required technocratic solutions. It is to the surprise of both sides, that in spite of the mutual hostility between the unions and New Labour, they both had coinciding interests (the unions sought to have some influence within the increasingly centralised party bureaucracy, and Labour still needed their donations as even the courting the wealthy was not enough to finance the party’s operations), and so that final break did not happen. The parliamentary left, in the form of the Socialist Campaign Group offered its resistance by voting against the party whip in terms of war, social welfare, and for better treatment of asylum seekers. But this resistance only served to demonstrate its overall impotence, for rather than serve as a moral conscience in the body of New Labour, they were regarded as overall irritations.

Strangers in familiar land

As for the revolutionary left, it had also entered a sombering period defined by its decomposition; the last great industrial action – popularly known as the Miners’ Strike had been defeated – and the mobilisation on the basis of class politics seemed to be increasingly untenable following the end of the Cold War, as a result of the fracture of the power of organised labour and the decline of the industrial regions that came with it. The solution they turned was the broad campaigns formed with the wider extraparliamentary left on issues of racial justice, anti-fascism, environmental justice, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ and so on, embedding itself into the milleu of activist groups. Within the revolutionary left in Britain, there had been no greater commitment to this practice than in Trotskyism.

The Trotskyist narrative has it that in vying for inflence in working class organising, they were suppressed by labourism and Stalinism – parallel bureaucratic tendencies respectively each undertaking class collaborationist projects, and stifling working class militancy. Even accounting for the pressures from the Labour and Communist Parties domestically, and anti-communist subversion by the British state, the Trotskyist movement in Britain had been on several fronts of industrial action but as with the wider revolutionary left, they lacked the capacity to turn these struggles to build into a wider revolutionary situation – not least because it was common for Trotskyist organisations to suffer various internal and theoretical disputes, which often precipated their splintering. As with much of the revolutionary left, Trotskyists were faced with the question of how to deal with the Labour Party: Grouplets within the Tortskyist milleu tried various strategies from entryism into the Party and established pressure groups to an active opposition to Labour and its parliamentarianism. The first is most well-known, and a common source of intrigue for observers.

It is through the entryist strategy the Trotskyist movement, or at least organisations committed to Trotskyism had its successes in social movements that it had become involved in: the International Socialists – later the Socialist Workers Party, for example, was influential in the early days of CND, Vietnam Solidarity Movement, the Anti-Poll Tax demonstrations, and anti-fascist organisations such as the Anti-Nazi League. Entering the Labour Party itself had proven to be a riskier gambit, as it had already cultivated a history in its sharp opposition to communism. In spite of the Labour Party’s willingness to expel the organisations, Trotskyist groupings came involved with Labour’s left-wing. While some like Socialist Action preferred discretion in their activities, those like the infamous Militant Tendency were overt in their declarations as a revolutionary socialist party – albeit one embedded in a parliamentarian institution. At least in this respect, they had better headway in incorporating itself in the Labour Party than for example, the Communist Party – which was admittedly a more obvious target, was already a useful scapegoat for the Labour leadership’s frustrations with worker militancy.

All the same, even as these groups told themselves that they would be able to convert members of the Labour Party receptive to revolutionary politics and organise a militant proletarian movement within the Labour Party – a scenario that is by now – the subject of much media hysteria about the Labour Party and its affiliated trade unions succumbing to the influence of revolutionaries, the sobering reality reveals the stupidity and vacuousness of this chavinistic moral panic and common Trotskyist self-deception alike. For it is not the Labour Party – whether under Lansbury, Wilson, Foot or even Corbyn that had seen instances of Trotskyist permeation into Labour’s thought and practice. Rather, it is the Trotskyist groups – believing that they are building a class for itself through the unions, issue groups, and the Labour Party – that had internalised the very labourism they often criticize by incorporating themselves to its various organisational structures, and committing to these organisations – their political programs broadly echoed that of the parliamentary left in its calls for nationalisation of public infrastructure and opposition to wage cuts to the workforce. It could not transcend a social democratic framework, and constructing a route to revolutionary politics was out of reach, even if their sloganeering suggested otherwise.

Entryism in perpetua

The global reccession, which saw a resurgence in enthusiasm for socialist politics, and 2010s-era austerity, which opened the space for left-winger Jeremy Corbyn to become leader of the Labour Party, when various parties on the far left turned to support the Labour Party as it was led by a figure who was a mainstay of various demonstrations and political campaigns. The Trotskyist groups were cautious yet were supportive of the Corbyn project (some even incorporated themselves into it), while amongst themselves having differing set of responses to Brexit, and even opposing stances based on what was prioritised – for example, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) stood in opposition to Brexit – considering it a right-wing project – and demanded that Corbyn’s Labour Party oppose it, while the Socialist Workers’ Party – which stood outside of the Labour Party calling for it to make the final brake with the EU on the basis that it is a neoliberal institution that would oppose a socialist program. The parliamentary left itself was divided on the issue – which led to Labour’s electoral defeat in 2019. Whatever the conclusions around what the correct stance was, and how the fatal error was committed – the result was another failed project around a Labour left leader, just as it was with Tony Benn before. At least for the Labour left, they are – as they will always be, committed to not just a Labour victory even if the party apparatus is adversarial to them, but to one day control the levers of the party, so that the work towards a New Jerusalem can be realised. In other words, it is a setback – but a setback that for them can and must be overcome. For the revolutionary left outside, and especially inside the Labour Party, it represents at best a blocked route to social transformation, and perhaps a feeling even more pronounced than even among those on the Labour left, that invites a reassessment of their strategy – if not their overall politics – and certainly their relations to a Labour Party quickly reorienting itself towards the right (of course, that question has already been answered for some of the parties in question). But if the line about Labour “no longer being a worker’s party” is active again and more so a rallying cry, then it begs the question as to what they stand to gain from hovering close to Labour-adjacent demonstrations.

‘The movement everything, the final goal nothing’

When we take into account the fact that broad left organisations like the People’s Assembly push for a general election, and specifically for a Labour victory – they do so with the belief, to paraphase the American Left, that they can somehow “push Starmer left” or the even less ambitious conclusion, is that the crumbs from the table that you’ll get from Labour will be bigger and more plentiful than with the Tories. The Trotskyist grouplets which occupy these campaign groups generally do not share this illusion, but cynically insist in using demos like the one that took place last week to push for a GE anyway, with some preposterous verbiage about the ‘sancticy of democracy’ or whatnot, knowing full well that British parliamentarianism is a particularly opaque form of government, and therefore lacks any fundamental accessibility to the working class. And when it is pointed out that they are committing to a Labour with an outright anemic social democratic program, the defence is something to the effect of that the contradictions of labourism will expose it for what it really is, and a class-conscious British working class will arise. A suggestion to readers unconvinced by this line would be to press on this point to anyone committed to uttering it, and ask them – how exactly did this work out in 1979 – when Callaghan was resolute on bringing the unions to heel, large sections of its members rather than commit to a revolutionary program, put Margaret Thatcher in power? Or in 2007, when Blair was finished and New Labour had almost completely ran out of steam, on the eve of the Great Reccession – the ‘new workers’ party’ somehow failed to materialise? And if the responses to these questions are less then edifying, suggest that maybe waiting on the failure of Labour governments for class consciousness to spontaneously emerge out of disaffected labourism is really fucking stupid?

That said, it would be remiss to leave out that the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), while not inclined to utter this spiel, also broadly agreed that a GE should be held on the basis of democracy and to support the some of the ‘progressive’ policies Labour still has, such as they are. Any suggestion that stalking labourism and the organisations that it has significant sway in has dulled their radical politics does not invite reflection. This is particularly problematic among Trotskyist groups which, having presented itself possessing a revolutionary edge that the Communists no longer had, replicated many of its flaws in addition to its exhausted strategies in entryism in perpetua to Labour.

What if we said, ‘I’m sick of this shit, here’s what we’re going to do’?

Just Stop Oil, an environmentalist group now known internationally for their public disruptions, may to some engage in a form of protest that seems Dadaist in style. But their brand of direct action makes a clear point: in a world hostage to runaway climate change – there is no time to stop and appreciate public art. Just Stop Oil had since then escalated their protests to defacing car dealerships, and blocking the M25. The British state has responded in kind by arresting several of their activists, and intensifying this process in preparation of the COP27 meetings. At the very least, Just Stop Oil have been clear – they lay the blame on governments unwilling to commit to a transistion away from fossil fuels, and are not swayed by hollow promises from leaders of so-called progressive parties. Likewise, said leaders by dint of electoral calculation and the desire to purify any iteration of Corbynism also are more than happy to denigrate and dismiss Just Stop Oil, and utter a commitment to ecomodernist responses to climate change.

The Sunak government has also retained the anti-immigration policies characteristic of the previous two governments, and is indeed likely to see an intensification from that period. The Home Secretary Suella Braverman pushes the boundaries of parliamentary respectability by using dog-whistle rhetoric describing Britain as victim to a hostile invasion of immigrants, particularly those originating from Albania – using the moral panic of Albanian gangsters. The nationwide Anti-Raids Network is a mobilised couter-power to brutal state racism towards migrants unfettered by labourism and its consistutionalist instincts. The same is also true of renters’ unions which have also been clear that that they will not subordinate their task of defending and organising renters, and taking a militant stance against landlords – private or corporate (local councils), and also likewise recognise that however supportive of their goals that individual councillors may be, the agenda of the councils that they represent are fickle, and willing to enforce evictions in the properties that it has ownership over, or even support the claims of landlords – the most vulnerable of these renters will be immgrants with ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ (NRPF) exculding them from access to various forms of benefits.

The General Election if and when it comes may be won by the Labour Party, but whatever the form of government, we are looking at another decade of austerity at the very least. The sites of resistance demand a space that will not simply be curtailed into a parliamentary agenda, and certainly does not need (grumpy) sheepdogs with a radical veneer doing aiding in parliamentary dilution based on some attachment to a ‘norm’ (really a Thatcherite innovation) of bourgeois democracy. It is not a ‘class war government’ that is creating immersation of the working class, it is class war, period. At the end of the day, when a Labour government engages in the same repressive policies, the same ‘culture war’ obsessions, and a similar acquiescence to business elites, it will be the parliamentary left that apologises on behalf of the Labour Party for not living up to whatever expectations that it believes that its supporters have, will of course engage in resistance to the worst of said government’s measures, but will be constrained by the demand of loyalty to the party. We need not wait for this to happen. What we need is a strong left current independent of parliamentary limitations, and perhaps one that synthesises the aforementioned organisations committed to direct action against an increasingly repressive state, and the complicity of the major parties in Parliament. How this will happen, I have no idea. But it there’s one thing that is clear, that stalking the parliamentary left to build class struggle is not a viable option.

Notes

* The term ‘tankie’, initially used to mock members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who were too uncritical of the Soviet Union – particularly its aggressive enforcing of the Warsaw Pact (Hungary, Czechoslovakia) and came to describe a faction or tendency within the CPGB, is now deployed by Monbiot to mock those who are opposed to the war in Ukraine. If anything can be said about the term – it’s that it lost the power of its original connotation.

See also

• Enough Is Enough
• Parliamentary cretinism
• Extra-parliamentary left
• Politics is not just what happens in Parliament
• Labour left
• Labour Party and the trade unions
• The People’s Assembly Against Austerity
• British Trotskyism
• Entryism
• United front (What Trotskyists who supported this believe that is what they are doing)
• Beyond The Fragments
• “In and against the state”
• Rethinking the Labour Party as a vehicle for change

‘pomo left’

“Pomo left” or the so-called “postmodern left” or “postmodernist left”, is a descriptor used to define an influentual trend in left-wing politics, largely concentrated (or at least said to be) in academia and receptive in student politics. To put it simply, it is a term used to describe the influence of the intellectual movement known as postmodernism on the contemporary left.

As often with the parent term, “postmodernism”, what counts as a supposed “pomo left” to people who use the descriptor is often nebulous, multifaceted and contradictory. But it quite broadly seems to encompass more than the influence of the works of postmodernists and poststructuralists on the Left (eg. Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, etc.) but also various schools of thought that had come into prominence from the 1970s onwards such as French theory, queer theory, postcolonialism, critical race theory, afropessimism, and more. The critique seems to sharply turn towards the influence of critical theory in general, than “merely” postmodernism, and even then, the term has been used to attack contemporary social justice concepts accused of redefining exisiting conceptions of justice and equality.

Criticisms of the “pomo left” have come from both the Left and the Right. On the Left, the charge is that it obsesses too much on language over a materialist epistemology and is a deeply solipsistic and obscurantist project that could never be emancipatory in any form, and that it is fundamentally pessimistic and reactionary. On the Right, it is yet another radical political project that seeks to subvert the existing social order where Marxism supposedly failed*, and its concern lies in the promotion of a set of social and cultural practices antithetical to anything from a liberal to a ‘traditional’ social space. Among these criticisms of postmodernism there seems to be a shared disdain for its purported nihilism and irrationalism.

Background

1968 and the rise of the skepticism of narratives

The ‘quasi-revolutions’ of 1968 provide a common starting point to describe what is the apparent emergence of this trend. Across the industrialised capitalist West, massive protests took place from organised labour, the student movements opposed to the Vietnam War, black, women’s and gay liberation; and these forces converged among each other – the assumption that more than ever – these were these conditions that not only could their respective governments could be overturned, but the spread of this reaction could bring about the end of capitalism itself. What’s more, the protests expanded to the Eastern Bloc in criticism of the bureaucratic features of the communist system. While in many instances, these protests brought about concessions from their respective governments – they ultimately failed in their anti-authoritarian and anti-bureaucratic goals. It is said that after the riots in Paris, the students who rebelled turned towards Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud having seen at home (in the French Communist Party) and abroad (at least towards the USSR and the Eastern Bloc) what the influence of Marx had brought – in bureaucracy and repression. In particular, they felt betrayed by the leaders of the labour unions and especially regarded the PCF as too ‘conservative’ in its response to the situation, preferring instead to focus on electoralism and gaining political concessions from the Gaullist government – Charles de Gaulle had ultimately won the 1968 French general election. The events of the 1968 revolts are also identified as the period in which any existing fetters consumer capitalism had had been cleared.

It was against this backdrop, that the emerging intellectual current known as post-structuralism gained popularity with headed by thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard gaining influence in the following decade. Foucault and Baudrillard in particular had not so pleasant experiences in the PCF, and Kristeva and Derrida were involved in the literary magazine Tel Quel – the latter left as a consequence of the emerging Maoist trappings of the publication.

Let a hundred poststructuralisms bloom

Coinciding with the rise of this intellectual current in Europe, the US saw the emergence of Critical legal studies – a school of thought born out of radical law students from the New Left which investigated the development of law within the United States, and concluded that the basis of the law was to preserve the existing power structures in society, and not any notion of equality among all subjects. Among them differing solutions on how to challenge these power structures became apparent. The co-founder of CLS, Derrick Bell, and representative of the ‘realist’ tendency – was known for his deeply pessimistic conclusions on race relations in American society, and it is even believed among his critics that he felt that America was irredeemably racist, because Bell argued that desegregated schools did not substantially improve education for African-Americans, and that a separate educational system for black children is needed to address ‘the educational gap’. In contrast, Kimberlé Crenshaw – a legal theorist who coined the term “intersectionality” and represented the ‘liberal’ tendency, has asserted a more optimistic assessment of American race relations, and if anything – the moral panic around intersectionality and “critical race theory” by conservatives had emboldened her view that remedies can racial inequality and gender inequality can be addressed.

In South Asia and the Middle East, applications of post-structuralist thought in creating a genealogy of intellectual currents in “the West” as it was counterposed with the domain of “the East” and Africa, shorn off of any history of its cultural development and knowledge of the social and political trends that had occured in the regions. This intellectual trend which came to be known as “postcolonialism” critiqued the universalist assumptions that had emerged from intellectual and sociopolitical trends that emerged from Western societies, believing that at best they contributed to a Eurocentric outlook and any conclusions that could come from it would be reductive and condescending, and at worst, contributed to the project of imperialism and the exploitation of indigineous peoples. Among the most prominent figures of postcolonialism were Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha.

The 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of queer theory which sought to synthesize poststructuralist theory with the activism of the various radical movements from black, Latin & Chicanx, and indigenous peoples, women’s studies, and the historical and comtemporary lesbian and gay struggles. Proponents challenged the prevalence of heteronormativity – the framework placing an implicit heterosexuality as the default in all manners of social life, and critiqued the presence of a dynamic between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sexualities. Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich and Laurent Berlant are enduring influences in this school of thought.

More emergent schools of thought appeared extolling their radical potential and claiming to defy existing power structures on which society rested. While the political Right had charged them with creating conspiratorial programs within universities to brainwash young people and set them against the sarcosanct cultural practices held in “Western society” and “finish what Marxism could not”, critics among the political Left noted that while the scholars and students of these schools often asserted radicalism and an allegiance with the Left, they were at times indifferent to and even in some cases hostile to Marxism, and downplayed or dismissed the importance of class struggle. While largely unknown even now to the Right, the relationship Marxism and postmodernism had been understood as mutually hostile, with attempts to synthesize the two having varying degree of success. With contemporary expressions of identity politics which also had fairly contentious interactions with Marxism, both identity politics and poststructuralism were conflated together under this term. In right-wing politics (and among some liberals), because these were not well understood; and either dismissed as “schools of resentment”, or feared as a new far-left iteration that was potentially totalitarian. Ironically, it was concerns around totalitarianism driving the often dense theoretical work of the early poststructuralists. Indeed, the poststructuralists emphasized anti-totalitarian, anti-authoritarian, heterogenity, and anti-essentialism in their works – and the former two reduced somewhat in its importance following the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, they were castigated for their particularism which itself verged on fetishization and essentialism. Even so, how incisive this critique held was dependent on how broad what was now becoming a pejorative term applied to various thinkers and activists.

A brief list of people and groups accused of being part of the ‘pomo left’

• The Frankfurt School (Even Jurgen Habermas, who is a critic of postmodernism**)
• Michel Foucault***
• Jacques Derrida
• Gilles Deleuze
• Judith Butler
• Wendy Brown
• Louis Althusser
• Slavoj Zizek (Who is also critical of postmodernism)
• Fredric Jameson (Another critic of postmodernism)
• Edward Said
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• Stuart Hall (This is projected onto everyone else involved in the ‘New Times’ project from the Marxism Today publications in the 1980s, but Hall had also received particular ire for his forays into postcolonial theory)
• Ernesto Laclau
• Chantal Mouffe
• Homi K. Bhabha
• Mark Fisher (Was, yet again, another critic of postmodernism)
• Antonio Negri (yep, you guessed it, hates pomo)
• Pretty much all of the critical race theorists, but particularly Kimberle Crenshaw

A brief list of critics of the ‘pomo left’, from the Left

• Noam Chomsky
• Naomi Klein
• Murray Bookchin (wrote a whole book excorciating what he considered to be ridiculous nonsense harming the anarchist movement he supposedly broke from)
• Vivek Chibber
• Adolph Reed, Jr.
• Jacobin magazine is editorially opposed to the ‘pomo left’
• The THIS IS REVOLUTION podcasters (Pascal Robert and Jason Myles had voiced their disdain many times on various forms of ‘racial grievance politics’, and Afropessimism particularly attracted Robert’s ire)
• Alex Callinicos
• Pretty much anyone still involved in an org of the Fourth and Fifth International. Trotskyists are particularly hostile towards postmodernism
• Mark Fisher (Went further than “merely” critiquing postmodernism, by taking aim at what he called the ‘poststructuralist left’ in his essay, “Exiting The Vampire Castle”)
• Slavoj Zizek (Like Fisher, criticized “left-postmodernism”, while himself accused of being representative of it; in his infamous debate with Jordan Peterson, he indicated that he might agree with Peterson on his sharp opposition to “postmodern neo-Marxists”…if he could clearly identify who is or was representative of this trend)
• Douglas Lain
• Nancy Fraser

Views of the critics of ‘pomo left’ on critical theory

While the Right is near-universal in their contempt for critical theory**** – indeed, as mentioned before, their assessment of it has been largely conspiratorial; the left-wing critics of postmodernism have diverse responses to the utility of critical theory as a method of investigation and to map out political goals. Douglas Lain and Nancy Fraser, for example, are themselves critical theorists who view the influence of postmodernism on the left as pernicious and essentially reactionary. For Lain, there is something of a lamentation that the original intent for critical theory which had served a political purpose and had a clear Marxist orientation, had become mostly reducible to the domain of literary studies. He, as well as Fraser firmly object to the anti-foundationalist framework advanced by postmodernists.

Vivek Chibber and the writers orbited around the Jacobin publication issued their criticisms of the ‘cultural turn’ that for them indicated pessimism towards the potential of class politics to radically transform for the better, and charge that it encouraged an extreme subjectivism that had been in the long run, deleterious.

The critiques employed by Gabriel Rockhill are interesting in the sense that he came up through critical theory, and that he studied under Derrida and Badiou, but now charges that much of the work undertaken under the rubric made these scholars the clearest examples of “instrumentalised intellectuals” – a group inculcated with the practice and logic of an institution in the service of the current economic system i.e. capitalism, and further, that their work was of interest to Western intelligence services as tools to demobilize revolutionary potential, and that the association of these academics with the coterie of think tanks and publications linked to the security apparatus put their valorization as radical thinkers into question. (I think this particular example requires further commentary, that can’t be done in this post)

Noam Chomsky is even more dismissive of critical theory, deriding the work produced by them as intellectually bankrupt, reeks of inaccessible jargon, and even says that its influence on the Third World has been awful. He ties its origins to “[coffee-shop frequenting] Parisian intellectuals” drawn to Stalinist and Maoist movements who suddenly switched to become the firmest of “anti-totalitarians”. He also espouses a “physics envy” narrative: That the academics in literature departments felt the need to make complicated models that mirrored what was found in the hard sciences – yet unlike the latter, you could neither make predictions or reproduce the phenomena observed in controlled experiements. Chomsky’s hostility stems from his rationalist framework, and is reflective of the “analytical vs continental” philosophy arguments. Unfortunately, the stridency of Chomsky’s arguments, in particular, have been appropriated by certain kinds of political reactionaries with bugbears around contemporary feminism and “cultural Marxism”: this out-of-context clip of his Q&A interview with Michael Albert, served as a common go-to for this ilk.

There have been objections from political liberals for largely unsurprising reasons, given that they uphold the modus vivendi of the current social order; Nick Cohen in 2007 work “What’s Left?” makes an unusual connection between the cultural (and moral) relativism that he identifies in the contemporary Left, charging Chomskyan critique of American imperialism as responsible – all the more strange given Chomsky’s known hostility towards postmodernism for its relativistic assertions. He also attacks Judith Butler for her lack of clarity in her theoretical works – taking the excerpt from the paragraph included in the 1999 “Bad Writing Contest” to lay the case that Butler and Chomsky are complicit in the cultural malaise of the Left, rather than reactive of this condition.

The “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW) collective, themselves a heterogenous group of ‘thinkers’ who see themselves as the line of defense of “Western values” against “oppositional schools of thought” that seek to undermine it, charge critical theory for its hostile reaction to the Enlightenment which they believe had led to the improvement of the standard of living from its beginnings to today, undermines the free exchange of ideas, is responsible for everything from identity politics, political correctness, to ‘cancel culture’ and regards critical theory as potentially totalitarian. The formation of the IDW runs the gamut from ‘STEMlords’ like Bret Weinstein and Steven Pinker to the more ‘esoteric’ interests of thinking represented by Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. What they share is the (supposed) need to defend and uphold the “Western canon”, and as the late Michael Brooks noted, they all share an uncritical and devotion to affirming capitalism.

A left (un)worthy of the name?

There is, to be sure, a sociological link— though its magnitude is often exaggerated— between the “postmodernist” intellectual currents we are criticizing, and some sectors of the American academic left.

Fashionable Nonsense pg. xxii, Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont

There is a overarching assumption in all of this that the “academic left” is largely unmoored and isolated from social events as we understand them, even as they come to hear about it. The panic around postmodernist academics functions as the logical conclusion of a stereotypical “ivory tower” scholar forever pontificating over problems that have no relevance to the external world. The lack of specificity or even coherence around the term “pomo left” betrays an intellectual hostility towards unfamiliar knowledge practices.

All that said, as shown in the previous two sections, in the middle of all the hysterics it does describe something that is real, and was and still is of great concern to many academics even and especially of the political Left. The compound term, “postmodernist left”, implies a tendency that already undermines the common allegation that postmodernism is unrelentingly pessimistic and nihilistic, and indeed: there are many postmodernists (though not all) who identify in some form with left-wing or progressive politics. On this question, what is being evaluated is the question of what the legacy of this intellectual current has had to the Left, in light of the provocative declaration of skepticism towards all grand narratives?

Actual postmodern theorists who identify with left-wing politics have by and large engaged in its more moderate expressions, or at least engaged in a “micro-politics” concerned with difference and supporting the power of socially marginalised groups. This, in many ways, makes a lot of sense given their concerns around subjectivity and the historical context which the current emerged from engendering their suspicion towards totalizing and universalist frameworks.

However, the engagements with politics have not led to a unified or sustained, let alone emancipatory political project. The heterogenity of thought among postmodernist theorists is probably why a political project on a set of agreed principles does not and likely, cannot exist. Even so, the political interventions made affected a reserved, cautious and even at times mercurial range of stances on various issues involving imperialism, war, inequalities, freedoms and so on. Because many of the stances adopted by left-wing postmodernists were and very much are moderate and qualified in their support for various sites of struggle, many of them had come under the accusation that they were merely posturing as radicals, and promoted a politics that offered no breach or answer to overcoming capitalist relations, and serves to narrow possibilities and demobilise the momentum of movements.

To give an example, let’s return again to Noam Chomsky and explore why he has such vociferous reactions to postmodernism. In his 1967 essay, The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Chomsky expressed the view that public intellectuals should be accountable to the people, be committed to truth, and resolutely expose the machinations of the powerful. He picked as an example – the esteemed historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. – as an intellectual utterly and shamelessly in the service of U.S. political elites, in that he admitted to lying to the press about the details that he gave about the invasion of the Bay of Pigs plot to depose Castro was American-backed, lied about the number of the anti-Castro forces, and even praised New York Times for suppressing information on the planned invasion in accordance to “the national interest”. What alarmed him even more was that the American intelligentsia didn’t seem to care that Schlesinger did this, in spite of his own principles, and for his loyalty to the Kennedy administration, he was offered a prestigious position as the professor of humanities the City University of New York. What was an individual decision to lie on behalf of JFK, had now made them complicit – because they were also in the service of power as well.

However, one of his most infamous intellectual opponents Michel Foucault, the issue for him would not simply lie with the intellectuals in service to state power. For him, power is diffused everywhere: hospitals, schools, even in communities and at home – because knowledge is bound up with power, ‘truths’ are as well, and a ‘legitimized’ truth are in contest with another set of discourses opposing the hegemonic, political, social, cultural practices reinforcing this ‘legitimized’ truth. Foucault also questioned the privileged role of intellectuals in offering truth, even truth to liberate people. According to him, intellectuals function as agents of the “regimes of truth” that provide legitimacy of the current social order. A ‘radical’ intellectual to Foucault, would therefore not make any set of recommendations for political struggle; Referring to himself, he said that his role was not so much to tell people what he thought the best course of action was, but to allow for the possibility of a different framework which could be useful in struggle. For Foucault, the role or ‘responsibility’ of the radical intellectual was to ignore “the call to prophetism” and respond with silence.

A Chomskyan interpretation faced with Foucault’s description of power would conclude that it is far too removed from any structure or sense of agency by which to frame any grounding to challenge institutional power or indeed, any impetus to do so, even if Foucault allows for that possibility; and would also conclude that Foucault’s ideal intellectual is simply one that refuses to take any sense of responsibility for their actions or held to their statements. Even putting aside how Chomsky or anyone professing to follow in his thinking, it’s hard not to as a leftist, to look at this and not see it as either kind of a call to inaction, or to be not bothered with questions around resistance. Maybe a “i’m just throwing it out there” kind of affect – which would be fine, but seems like an inordinate amount of effort was spent writing books to display that mood. Again, this only complicates – not simplifies how resistance is built, and ignores that asking for guidance is not the same thing as looking for orders.

Another example to consider is that while the postmodernists may be skeptical of grand narratives and proclaim their exhaustion, it is quite clear that not only are these ‘metanarratives’ still relevant to our age, but recent ‘totalizing’ narratives masking a certain globalised political project have received no postmodernist ‘counter-narrative’ that had been successful in interrupting, much less subverting or destabilising. At the end of the Cold War, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared “The End of History”: What he meant was following the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, liberal democracy had defeated all ideological opponents and had proven itself to be the ultimate form of human government. Fukuyama asserted that regardless of the makeup of the society, it will eventually come to be understood that a society with strong institutions, liberal freedoms, representative democracy and that allowed free-market capitalism to flourish, will be the ones that can best overcome its internal contradictions and resolve questions of human need better than any other.

In 1993, Jacques Derrida addressed Fukuyama’s assertions in a conference in the University of California, titling his speech, “Spectres of Marx: The State of the Mourning, and the Spirit of the New International”. For Derrida, Fukuyama’s proclamation was yet another as a “grand narrative”, but also said that as a man of a certain age, “endism” is not a novel notion that he’s come across nor had Fukuyama really said anything that was persuasive of liberalism’s ability to resolve human need effectively. Indeed, rather than the triumphalism that Fukuyama and his allies thought the end of the Cold War heralded, Derrida believed that this was an even more sobering period to look on:

“For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the Earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the “end of ideologies” and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the Earth.”

The main crux of Derrida’s talk was a call for a revival of the spirit of Marxism, in the revolutionary impulse it had; a “Marxism without Marxism” or even a “Marx without Marxism”. The ‘spectre’ of Marx should continue to haunt the hegemony entailed in Western liberal democracy. A ‘new international’ should push back against the capitalist global order. As far as general statements to political commitments go, Derrida was surprisingly clear and frank about what he believed that the situation demanded. It also marked for the first time, a definitive statement from on how “deconstruction” can be used for political purposes. That said, what was largely unattended to was that the “end of history” thesis was an ideological cover for an ascending political project known as neoconservatism.

Neoconservatism declared that the world can be made over to “expand” liberal democracies, permitted so-called “humanitarian interventions” to countries deemed hostile or even “unfree”, and were almost completely transparent in explaining that the purpose was to secure American global hegemony. And what did Derrida’s “New Internationalism”: an unusually universalist conception by the standards of his generation of poststructuralist thinkers, which nevertheless demanded a transnational alliance or ‘friendship’ without any form of institutional framework binding it – do in response to this neoconservative march to the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, with hard power backing their ideological weight? The answer is nothing, and it could not do more than nothing. And this embarassing fact is only made less bruising when you consider that Derrida had at most a few years of thinking about it, when faced with a new formulation of American imperialism which had twenty years to develop. At least Derrida had made a declaration that he held responsibility for. The point is not that Fukuyama was right, and Derrida wrong. The point is, Fukuyama was an ideologue for an existing political project that stood to violently reshape the world in its image – even if his thesis wasn’t anything more apparent than a jiggle and dance over a crumbled Lenin statue, it was faced with what was – at best – an emphemeral concept based on cosmopolitan principles that were never actualised by any organisation or even action.

Conclusion – events but not as they choose

The central problem animating discussions, whether overblown or not, around a ‘pomo left’ is about the role of academia as a public space. Throughout history, participation in academic life – or indeed, even getting a formal education, was part of the privileges offered to the elite in society, and so the knowledge production in academic practices legitimised the political system in which they existed in. Scholars who became social critics of a particular system, or even just criticising a leader, were often subject to political persecution, or at least loss of favour, with efforts made that that they and their works were subject to proscription.

Shifts in knowledge production came as a consequence of wars, revolutions or even simply contact with other civilisations and their practices were adopted and incorporated to the academic institutions. The expansion of access to higher education came as a result of the expansion of political rights; the emergence of liberal democracy supplanted monarchical absolutism and introduced new conceptions and practices of citizenship. In addition, internal academic debates and discussions came to encompass the critique of the political system itself and its representatives, and focus on the ability of society to realise existing principles as universal notions that bind the society. E.g. justice, freedom, liberty, fraternity, etc. These events came to to codify the purpose and role of critique both within the academy, and also within civil society, and indeed – the political sphere as well. Academia was still intimately tied to power, and academic institutions functioned as nodes of power and legitimacy as sites of accumlated knowledge to provide justification for the human exploitation seen in colonialism and in slavery for example.

Coming to terms with the way knowledge is constructed and produced meant acknowledging that it is never value-neutral, that it never came at the benefit for humanity as a whole and that knowledge production always comes to serve wider social and political projects, even ones that come with the potential to oppress other people, and even lead to wide-scale destruction. The members of the Frankfurt School were among the foremost critiques of the positivist trend pervading in natural and social sciences; Adorno and Horkheimer took the concept “instrumental rationality”, a concept developed by Max Weber, and used it to critique the Enlightment for encouraging an ethos which applied rationality to see things around it as a means to an end, rather than as the end in of itself, and it was used to dominate and consume the natural world and other human beings, in accordance to the imperatives dictated by capitalist society. For the Frankfurt School, instrumental rationality was totalizing, affected every aspect of social life, and did not liberate people, but surbordinated them.

The events of 1968, at least in Paris, was this instrumental rationality applied to the function of universities coming to a head with the interests of the radical students who participated in the protests. While the number of students attending universities rapidly expanded from 60,000 before World War II to 500,000 in 1968, the students had several concerns such as their post-university prospects in the job market; the hierarchical, regimented form of education that minimized essential interaction between students and professors; edicts from visiting opposite-sex dorms after hours; and the harshness of university exams. Their interests converged with the train and factory workers also subject to instrumental rationality, experiencing wage restraint as France’s economy grew. The protests which ballooned into general strikes brought with it the possibility of creating a definitive rupture with the capitalist order, and opening up new ways of organising various aspects of social life. But the uprisings failed, and consumer capitalism not only continued unabetted, but subsumed various aspects of social life.

The rise of postmodernism reflected the beginnings of a turn towards financialisation and unfettered marketisation practices known as neoliberalism. The political right interpreted the events and the subsequent activities of the disillusioned French radical intelligentsia as part of the consequences of the seduction of revolutionary politics towards a class whose primary purpose was simply to interpret the world and reproduce subjects in the service of society. The irony is, is that while something of their former revolutionary spirit remained, revolutionary politics was treated with the same contempt as bourgeois politics, and the poststructuralists endeavored to complete what the academy was stated to perform in spite of its actual function: to rigorously interpret the world and produce knowledge for the sake of it, not (supposedly) for any political program.

It is interesting though, in that in spite of the often provocative assessments around History not having any driving force, and statements around Christianity, science, and Marxism (different practices primarily addressing different concerns in the observable world) all being similar in their absolutist yet unsustainable frameworks, various poststructuralists / postmodernists did and do identify with some form of leftism, if cautiously. This adherence to progressive politics challenges any supposed notion of nihilism, although there persists criticism on its limited ability to challenge the existing bourgeois order in any serious capacity. What was (and arguably still is) important about the intervention of postmodern thought is in its pursuit of problematising the formation of identity (useful in historicising minoritarian identities and disrupting the essentialist character imbued upon them), which in turn was extended to the revolutionary subject in the proletariat in Marxism – and questioned the character of class as an essential formation. The emphasis on differential practices and knowledge systems presented further challenge to an ‘Enlightenment project’ claimeing to guarantee a maturation to the human condition – leading to the study of how this system of knowledge and methodology deployed were in the service of imperialism and contributed to the erasure of the colonised people’s own cultural and scientific legacy, encouraging the importance of rediscovering, reclaiming and reintroducing the important forms of knowledge production in the Global South.

But in terms of practical action against their concerns around globalisation, ‘techno-scientific domination’ and the dominance of referential sign-systems over our social world – overreaching, even totalising as they might say – has led to ineffectual political resistance tackling these problems so far, and perhaps even indefinitely, and are perhaps indicative of the unmooring of academics – particularly atomised academics in neoliberalism from active political engagement – particularly in the class struggle they denounced as passe. Conservative assaults on the “pomo left” could mostly do so in the terrain of the university, and to be perfectly frank – there’s not other terrain in which this conflict could look like or take the form of but an academic culture war. In turn, a new generation of theorists, familiar with poststructuralist thought yet critical of postmodernism – representing a kind of post-postmodernist/metamodernist thought such Slavoj Zizek, Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown and even Cornel West for the political impotence it represented.

After the Great Reccession of 2007-9, amidst austerity measures held in place across the globe, the people of that generation once more turned towards the class struggle – identifying their opponent clearly as capital itself. The so-called “pomo left” as it exists today in spite of their various attempts to problematise the certainty in the centrality of this struggle, have never opposed, dismissed, or declared the efforts of the anti-austerity protesters to be foolish or misguided – though it is in part due to the latter being constituent of the new social movements they placed their faith in. Perhaps, on some level this is what Foucault was insistent on in declaring ‘silence’ in sites of struggle. Nevertheless, we must remind ourselves that in times of capitalist crisis, people will turn to socialism for the solution, and the demand for socialism will continue to weigh on capitalism until it finally ceases to exist.

The postmodern theorists may on some level continue the goal set out for critical theory to resolve, and as the shift from pessimistic to optimistic conclusions in its intellectual trajectory reflect a greater self-confidence in working-class organisation and mobilisation, we must remind ourselves that while for some of those theorists, communism plays the role of an ideal we may never meet, yet struggle towards, that it is under these conditions that the movement to abolish the present state of things springs forth.

Notes

*- This ‘failure’ is mostly predicated on the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, the communist systems in China, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea are at best, regarded as outposts in this view. For some, China is viewed as on the cusp of “growing out” of communism due to the way it implemented its market reforms, and its prominent position in the global market; leading to an almost enthusiastic support/grudging praise of its ‘neoconservative’ elements.

**- The first generation of the Frankfurt School had mostly died before postmodernism became influential, and indeed Habermas is the only surviving member. In fact, Habermas became critical of much of the work of the first Frankfurt School for its Nietzschean influence on their thought and their pessimistic assessment of the Enlightenment. The first generation of the Frankfurt School did problematise various assumptions in bourgeois society regarding freedom, desire, autonomy, reason and so-on; as well as various tenets of Orthodox Marxist thought, and stood opposed particularly to Marxism-Leninism, questioning the validity of historical materialism, to even challenging the notion of a revolutionary subject – with some concluding that the alienation experienced by man is too great to truly overcome. It is for these reasons that they are considered foundational to “post-Marxist” thought, and are influential in the thought of many postmodern theorists.

***- Michel Foucault’s position on the Left is contested and highly controversial, as he constantly denied political affiliation to any party or tendency for the most part. On one hand, he was associated with various Maoist groupings (even as he dissed some of its members in anecdotes) and he was involved in the Prison Information Group (PIG) with Gilles Deleuze, Jean Genet, Pierre-Vidal Naquet et al. producing essential work for the prison abolitionist movement, and in his infamous debate with Noam Chomsky, he placed his rejection of the concept of a human essence in terms of class struggle. On the other, in the 1960s before his reputation as a radical, he was believed to be a Gaullist technocrat, and sat on the very education body that produced conditions for university students that led to the May 1968 student protests in the first place (although he was not in France during the uprising), he also offered support to the Shia Islamist clerics seizing power in the Iranian Revolution in 1979 – claiming that the Islamists’ victory represented a revival of spirituality unseen in the West for centuries and appeared to admire it for lacking precisely the “rationalism” involved in liberal or Marxist politics that made it special, and then there was his approval of neoliberal economics and friendship with Austrian school economist Friedrich Hayek – now described in terms of him being “seduced” by its potential as an apparently autonomous system which didn’t exhibit the bureaucratic statism represented by (post-war) social democracy or communism. For myself, i’d put him as some sort of weird “meta-libertarian”, but for some left-wing critics of postmodernists, Foucault is emblematic of the dangerous naivete (at best) or an obnoxious and narcissistic sophism displayed by these theorists in their political analyses.

**** As far as the Right goes, the NRx (Neoreactionary)/Dark Enlightenment movement are probably the closest thing to their own set of critical theorists, complete with accusations of political impotence in comparison to the radicals in the promixity of their political position – in this case: the alt-right.

Good stuff to go over

• This interview with Michel Foucault in which he explains structuralism, and goes over his academic career, and activism
• Jonas Ceika (formerly known as “Cuck Philosophy”) provides an alternative assessment of the infamous 1996 “Sokal hoax” academic controversy
• Judith Butler’s response to the “Bad Writing Award” she received (which Nick Cohen neglected to take up in his book “What’s Left?”)
• Cornel West’s “The Dillemma of the Black Intellectual” (pdf)
• The political import of deconstruction: Derrida’s limits? a forum on Derrida’s specters of Marx after 25 years (pdf link)

See also

• Critical theory
• ‘Cultural Marxism’
• Cultural turn
• Poststructuralism
• Postmodernism
• Fredric Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism‘
• Ernst Mandel’s ‘Late Capitalism‘
• Jacques Derrida’s ‘Spectres of Marx‘
• Nice Work
• ‘post-Marxism’
• ‘New Times’
• Queer theory
• Postcolonialism
• Critical legal studies
• anti-essentialism
• Jacobin‘s war on all things ‘anti-class politics’
• Did postmodernism really create identity politics?
• The leftists who really like Nietzsche for some reason
• ‘anti-totalitarianism’

The foils of the ‘pomo left’:

• ‘nouveaux philosophes‘ (their evil twin)
• Dark Enlightenment (even worse than the above if that were possible)
• Risk society (more of a ‘pomo centre’)
• Intellectual Dark Web
• Postmodern conservatism

Global developments in the background:

• Neoliberalism
• Post-industrial society
• Post-Fordism
• end of history
• ‘techno-scientific domination’
• Late capitalism

Misogynoir

That’s some rough girls from Rutgers, man, they got tattoos…some hardcore hos, that’s some nappy headed hos there!

Don Imus

Image from imperial.ac.uk

Misogynoir is the dual discriminatory practices, behaviours and attitudes directed towards black women for their race and their gender. The term was coined by queer black feminist and poet Moya Bailey and is a portamenau of the words “misogyny” and “noir” – the latter being the French word for “black”. Bailey explained that she came up with the word to describe the unique ways in which Black women are presented by the media, and the deleterious effects it has on public perceptions of Black women:

“I say all this to say that it is important to me and to at least one other non Black person of color that the term is used to describe the unique ways in which Black women are pathologized in popular culture. What happens to Black women in public space isn’t about them being any woman of color. It is particular and has to do with the ways that anti-Blackness and misogyny combine to malign Black women in our world.”

Moya Bailey

Bailey credits the blogger Gradient Lair for popularisation of the term in current parlance. The basis of its usage is grounded within the framework of intersectionality and a womanist lens.

While existing stereotypes of black women such as the “angry black woman” or the “sassy black woman” alongside a long history that excluded and delegitimised black women from presentations of culturally acceptable femininity (at least, in proximity to whiteness) – early discussions and conceptions of misogynoir focused on the presentation of black women within hip-hop culture, suggesting that internalised oppression within the black community proliferated within popular culture. That said, Bailey and other observers were insistent on the social phenomena that is specific to the experience black women as a whole as a result of the prevailing cultures of sexism and antiblackness intersecting:

“Back in spring 2008, (I love the Gmail archive) I was talking to one of my best friends, Mia Mingus, about the ways that Black women are depicted in the media. She, a self described “queer physically disabled Korean woman transracial and transnational adoptee,” suggested that there could be a term to describe just that, because she too noticed that the way Black women were treated was different from other women of color. I played around with words and ultimately settled on misogynoir… I had other Black women, Whitney Peoples, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, among others, vet the term and we talked about its potential utility, its pros and cons. I started to use it on the Crunk Feminist Collective and members of the CFC started to use it too…It took on a life of its own on tumblr and it is amazing that so many folks I don’t know have taken it up and use it far more frequently than I have… I don’t know that lumping all other WOC into one category is useful, especially when the differences between us could help us root out our own internalized oppression.”

“I was looking for precise language to describe why Renisha McBride would be shot in the face, or why the Onion would think it’s okay to talk about Quvenzhané the way they did, or the hypervisibilty of Black women on reality TV, the arrest of Shanesha Taylor, the incarceration of CeCe, Laverne and Lupita being left off the TIME list, the continued legal actions against Marissa Alexander, the twitter dragging of black women with hateful hashtags and supposedly funny instagram images as well as how Black women are talked about in music. All these things bring to mind misogynoir and not general misogyny directed at women of color more broadly…”

Moya Bailey

Examples of instances commonly cited as misogynoir:

• The forced sterilisations conducted on working-class black women by doctors in the United States – of which civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was the most prominent victim.
• British Member of Parliament Diane Abbott being the recipient got the greatest incidents of online abuse out of any other female MP, most of which target her for her gender and her race. Amnesty International reported that nearly half of all recorded abusive tweets sent to female MPs in the six weeks before the 2017 general election were directed towards Abbott alone.
• The allegations Meghan Markle made of the British Royal Family regarding a failure from them to protect her from being targeted by the British tabloid press, racialised comments made about her then-unborn son from members of Royal Family, and denying her access to mental health treatment as she suffered from depression.
• The derogatory comments made of Serena Williams’ physique and behaviour, notably the cartoon produced by Australian artist Mark Knight presenting Williams’ outburst towards an umpire during her match with Naomi Osaka in the 2018 Grand Slam final (Osaka herself is coded as white in the cartoon, despite being of dual Haitian and Japanese heritage).
• The aforementioned incident in 2007, with shock-jock Don Imus mocking the appearances of the mostly-black Rutgers University female basketball team.
• The lack of response from the Metropolitan Police to the disappearance of sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman; their bodies only discovered by their family and friends, and even photos of their bodies shared by police officers on WhatsApp.

There are many, many examples to describe misogynoir and are often summed up in two words, “black bitch” (or some other derivative). However, prior to 2010 there was never a word to describe the phenomenon. Gradient Lair also coined the term transmisogynoir to describe the discriminatory practices, behaviour and attitudes directed towards black trans women who face particularly disproportionate violence.

See also:

• Triple oppression
• Intersectionality
• Antiblackness
• Womanism
• Gradient Lair
• Hip-hop and women

The state of unemployment

Unemployment is when someone is not in work. The status of unemployment is when someone is neither in work, education or some form of training. There are technicalities to unemployment in that you can volunteer and in still not be in work; even though you are giving your labour, you are not given a wage for it.

There are many reasons why people are unemployed. Some are laid off as part of staff cutbacks. Some come down with severe health issues which force them from work. Others do not have a skill set that draws them to employers. Poor behaviour can be a reason to be unemployed. Ultimately, all these reasons come down to is that the businesses are concerned with cost-efficiency. There are plenty of economic theories drawn as to why unemployment exists – many based on supply and demand. Often it is taken for granted, or even outright ignored that unemployent is a necessary feature of capitalism.

Unemployment exists because of the neverending drive to increase profits – expressed in competition within industries and as a break in the demand for rising wages. The unemployed in Marxist terminology constitute the “reserve army of labour”; a contingent which can easily be drawn from to replace other workers if they resist.

The unemployed themselves have their subsistence payments in the form of welfare support by the state constrained as not to ‘encourage’ those in work. Fearmongering and anti-poor propaganda in slogans such as “welfare cheats” on government billboards and daytime TV, encourages hostility towards the unemployed. They are further stigmatised with assumptions that their status as unemployed because of their own personal flaws, or that they are not good enough. Being unemployed cuts you off from most social life, it comes with many stresses and can lead to poor mental and physical health, and to cope – many people turn to substances to cope with their situation. The stresses of unemployment can also lead to housing insecurity, and eventually homelessness.

The unemployed are not incentivised to organise based on their circumstances, and their circumstances are a barrier from doing so. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t and hasn’t happened. 100 years ago in this country existed the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. Their strategies of direct action did not endear them to the Labour Party or to the Trades Union Congress, and so they received support from neither. They were communists with the goal of abolishing the wage system, but later focused on demanding work pay at trade union wages. A breakaway group called the Unemployed Workers’ Organisation was formed in response to the perceived mollification, and broke away during the first ever Labour Government. We have not seen organised unemployed workers take action on that scale since. What the labour movement now has is Unemployed Workers Centres by the TU, and “Unite Community” by Unite the Union. The organised unemployed are only represented through their trade unions and make demands for ‘benefits’ based on the strategy of those unions. Before while they were managed by the CP they used to demand work.

The unemployed need to find the strength to mobilise on their terms, for the state and the capitalist class fear the most is the unemployed outside of their control. They have the least to lose.

See also:

• Homelessness