Blackshirts & Reds

Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, or simply Blackshirts & Reds, is a 1997 book written by the American political scientist Michael Parenti. The book is notable among the political Left for laying the case at a time in which it was not popular to argue – this time being the 1990s i.e. after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that socialism is not only not discredited, but that the works produced in its name validates the continued struggle for its final victory. Parenti argues that the greatest weapon ever rose against communism – was fascism, that it was the continuation of global capitalism in crisis, and that it was used as a bulwark against the advance of communism. Parenti also takes his aim towards anti-communist narratives – including those produced on the Left.

This book has something of a reputation among those on the far-left, especially those who were drawn to communism (that is to say, Marxism-Leninism*) in contemporary times mostly due to its clear prose and rather forceful argumentation against the prevailing (even triumphant) notion that the collapse of communism was good, and for making the case on how it had actually improved the lives to those who lived under it. Indeed, it is often part of the foundational reading lists of socialist and communist groups – some even going as far as to say that Blackshirts & Reds “changed their life”. Such reactions are mostly found in the Anglosphere, or people originating from there, especially among those from the United States, and given the incredibly aggressive anti-communist political culture of the US, it’s not hard to see why people who’ve come to see the various contradictions in American society and reject (aspects of) its national narrative really like this book. However, this reaction also obscures what Parenti actually says about communism in the book in which we will get into. I also intend to make a somewhat controversial statement (well, controversial to Parenti fans) regarding the ‘reading’ of Blackshirts & Reds.

So, what does Parenti say?

The following is a (relatively) brief summary of the contents of Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts & Reds compiled in bullet points to help readers of this post curious about the book to get an idea of what it says, and allow them the relative space to decide whether they should read it or not. It is also an illustration of which parts I’m interested in highlighting, so keep that in mind if you’ve not read it.

• Parenti expresses bemusement that in the working-class Italian-American neighbourhood that he grew up in the Bronx, the visage of Benito Mussolini still graces T-shirts in novelty stores. When Parenti questions the clerk about it, the latter shrugs and says that some people like them, and maybe a Mussolini-type leader is what is needed in America. Parenti concludes from this exchanges that fascism still exists in forms more than curiousity. Contemporary anti-fascists would agree all too well.**
• Once the working class, specifically militant organised labour started making gains in Europe – specifically in Italy and Germany, the industrialists and financiers of both started funding the “national socialists”, and especially took a shine to the leadership in Mussolini and Hitler respectively. The class composition of the fascists were from the petty-bourgois and the lumpenproletriat, and they got very good at strike-breaking and smashing unions by the 1920s. In Germany, the Communist Party sought an alliance with the Social Democrats against the threat of Nazis, but they were refused, just as various right-wing parties formed around the Nazis to win enough support to make Adolf Hitler the chancellor of Germany in 1933. Parenti observes that this is a common tale in countries past and present on the short-sightedness and duplicity of social democrats***, in that they would “sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with Reds” (pg. 5). **** Parenti also challenges the notion that fascism was a deformed version of socialism, citing Hitler’s statements about “saving industrialists and bankers from Bolshevism”, and the fact that he assembled a massive personal fortune – even charging a small fee for postage stamps with his face on it (pg. 9).
• The bourgeois press, or as Parenti calls it, “major publications” such as Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Saturday Evening Post, New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and others were very enthusiastic about the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, praising them for saving their countries from collapse and from extremism. The Blackshirts of Italy received particular praise for protecting a “new democracy”. Industrialists like Henry Ford were not only fans but travelled to Rome and Berlin, received medals, and cut deals with their regimes (pg. 10). The critiques offered by various leftists and progressives of fascism did not receive much exposure in the media.
• Parenti insists that to focus on the “irrational” features of fascism is to miss the point of what it functioned as. He sees features such as the cult of personality, retreat into mysticism – particularly nationalist mysticism, and reliance on a monistic slogans e.g. Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer (one people, one rule, one leader), as a deliberate attempt to bind citizens into a nationalist politic eschewing emphasis on class divisions, and in fact reinforcing them, preserving them as a natural order. He contrasts this with the Left which expresses popular demands with an acute awareness of social injustice and class struggle (p. 12). Parenti also sees a parallel in fascist presentations of natural hierachies of class, race and gender; with the then contemporary “race scientists” who argue for the inferiority of black people via arguments against multiculturalism, using their presentation of IQ tests, demographics of academic achievements e.g. The Bell Curve, and crime statistics.
• Parenti chastises those writers who see communism and fascism as totalitarian twins, accusing them of not understanding that fascism had consciously apprpriated the language and even some of the organising from the Left, while doing nothing to resolve class contradictions once their drive to control was fully realised in the conquest of the state. The Nazis used antisemitic and racist propaganda to misdirect grievances rising within German society to convenient scapegoats, and bolstering ideology of the absolutist state which has the Germans interests at heart; this propaganda was carefully disseminated to demographics based on their class position to create the same result: To see ‘the Jew’ as an alien element to society. Parenti also claims that the view of Nazism as parallel to communism was not even the view of European leaders and elites, they in fact saw Nazism as useful as a bulwark against communism.
• Attention is called to the aftermath of World War II, and fascism’s defeat; Parenti charges the Western powers with a lax attitude to eradicating fascism, save for the prosecution of its leadership. Parenti states that under the aegis of the US occupation authorities, many of the Holocaust perpetrators and collaborators were reestablished within the now ‘democratic’ societies acting as police, lawyers and judges, federal agents, and businessmen; while the partisans fighting fascism were persecuted because they were communists and syndicalists. Western complicity in the rehabilitation of Nazis, even if only in reputation, has a continued relevance to this day in light of recent events.
• The American people were subject to relentless propaganda distorting the agenda of communists and that of their own leaders. American people were repeatedly lied to about the reasons for suppressing revolutions across the world, citing the supposedly duplicitous and power-hungry nature of communists, and their responsibility to guide smaller and weaker nations into democracy. Parenti argues that the “global counterrevolutionary war” had led to the mass extermination of various peoples across the world who only sought a different way of living than previously and that the “corporate class”, particularly that of the US, found that unacceptable.
• Parenti defends the concept of ‘revolutionary violence’, though argues that it is falsely cast, as violence is disproportionately deployed by reactionaries seeking to prevent reform, regardless of whether the social movements are peaceful or not. To this end, revolutionary governments in which Parenti cites Cuba, Libya, Vietnam and North Korea as examples should be lauded for not only representing an actualisation of popular struggle, but also surviving the Cold War.*****
• The US during the Cold War, and after were less concerned with resolving inequality and a spirit of altruism than ensuing its continuation, and then cynically claiming that it is spreading/preserving democracy. Parenti cites George Kennan quoting him as saying the US could not afford “the luxury of altruism and world benefaction” in a world where the majority of its people faced abject poverty and exploitation, and that discussions around “vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization…” should cease: “The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better” (p. 32).****** Parenti goes on to deride political scientists such Samuel P. Huntington (he of the “clash of civilizations” fame) and the Reagan-era US Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick for outright defending authoritarian governments in Latin America, Asia, and Africa (which the latter called “benign”), just so long as they weren’t Red. The common equation to all of this is what these governments served: either capital interests, or that of the proletariat. It is in this context that we see Parenti critical of China and its flirtation with global capitalism, along with with the gross attention the country is receiving from these Beltway jerkoffs*******.
• Parenti has a whole chapter devoted to what most would call a “with friends like these…” moment, as he takes aim at a tendency on the Left which propogated anti-communism, and unintentionally or willingly encouraged bourgeois dominance. He diagnoses them as the type to call themselves “anti-totalitarians” with a willingness to fight dogmatism “of both the Right and the Left” – but are in actuality just other kinds of Red-baiters. George Orwell, Murray Bookchin, Noam Chomsky and Ronald Radosh are to Parenti, symptomatic of this problem. Regarding the former, Parenti appears to view Orwell as a proto-Cold War liberal and the blueprint for “left anti-communism” rather than the prophet of creeping absolutism that he’s commonly presented as. The targeting of Bookchin and Chomsky has a personal element to it as well, as Parenti had public and professional disputes with both.
• The centralization of power and authoritarian features typically displayed in socialist states, especially during the Cold War – absolutely has to be contextualized in a scenario where non-stop attempts to subvert, disrupt and destroy the revolutionary governments had taken place throughout the 20th century. These environments are not brought into place by a Lenin, a Stalin, a Mao, or a Castro – but by the conditions the revolution takes place in, which then determines the society.******** Parenti even posits that had any of them not being confronted with struggles for survival for the entirety of their existence, these socialist states would have easily transformed into “worker-consumer societies” (and to an extent, many of them did).
• There were serious issues with socialism as it existed, and that we should not try to sugarcoat that. All of them had rigid command systems – while central planning was useful in ‘siege socialism’ to help them (and ‘them’ usually means either a crumbling semi-feudal empire or a periphery of of an imperialist territory) rapidly industrialise to defend it against enemies like Nazi Germany, they did not have the required flexibility to produce a wide enough********* range of consumer goods and services. Additionally, there was no computerised system large enough to address such a large and highly intricate economy by responding to the aggregate demands of the populace (pg. 59). Innovations in scientific and technological development was stifled by top-down planning – in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s, it was the failure to address this, that led to their infamous ‘stagnation period’. A managerialism persisted which meant that there was a lack of incentive to pursue or allow innovations that could make a manager’s job obsolete; that there was little material incentive to take those risks worsened the problem. They were inefficiencies developing at the point of production, in part because when firms paid for raw materials, fuel, etc., they did not do so at real-value-prices; lack of replacement parts for industrial production and consumer goods; improvement in production only led to the raising of production quotas bringing things back to the trap of incentivised labour (pg. 61). A self-justifying bureaucracy became a fact of life – and not even an efficient or even clever one: in contrast to common reports of ‘totalitarian control overlooking every aspect of life’, incompetence, laxness, and corruption (of the huckster variety) were common features – and this deeply affected work discipline. Go figure: the problems over there – were very similar to the problems here!
• The experience of communism frustrated the common people living it, especially during the period where there was no expectation that the goods and services they wanted would even arrive at all, much less on time. The basic social welfare which was the envy of much of the world, and the guaranteed jobs were all taken for granted – and with the more professionalised strata of people under communism, they became increasingly envious of life in the West, which offered better pay, a wider range of consumer goods – including better clothes, and more exciting lifestyles. This had and has affected interest in Marxism and appreciation of the revolution (in a negative sense) which under their own admission – often provided liveable, even near-“first-world” standard conditions. This created a deeply distorted lens of the West as a cornucopian utopia – with the cognitive dissonance around the existence of deep poverty in these societies brushed aside with the rationalising narratives of “working hard to get rich”. As Parenti put it, “people cannot live on the social wage alone”.
• Many of the dissident intellectuals and activists from the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc like Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa are either delusional rubes with a case of “Western envy”, or cynical turncoats afflicted with the same condition. Parenti notes that the “freedom fighter” Sakharov was not only a propagandist for capitalism, but cheered on America during the Vietnam War, and for all his talk about freedom and state tyranny, had fuck all to say about Pinochet’s Chile and other right-wing authoritarian regimes – least of all, South Vietnam.
• Anti-communism, especially in academia has led to unserious, much less an inconsistent presentation of Joseph Stalin’s leadership of the Soviet Union – one that is cultivated to make him a Genghis Khan-like figure, and to lay the case for the “twin totalitarianism” model. Thus, the number of deaths under his regime is inflated over time to a preposterous degree, resembling ‘atrocity porn’. Parenti points out that if Stalin was really as dedicated to killing people as much as is often claimed by Cold War academics, the Soviet population would have decreased significantly, and the gulag would be its single largest enterprise. Parenti also bring up an anecdote when Churchill asked him many died under him, Stalin put up both his hands, thus giving the number of 10 million by Stalin’s own account, according to Churchill, who conveniently didn’t ask Stalin for clarification*********. Parenti however makes clear in this work that he regards the Soviet Union under Stalin as a “dictatorship”, and that Stalin committed many crimes against the Soviet people.
• Decommunization for Eastern Europe brought anything but freedom and democracy; Boris Yeltsin, hailed as a hero in the West was emblematic of the autocratic rule for the sake of market expansion into Russia. Yeltsin was the blueprint for presidents in former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe, who now sought to rule by decree, and bypass parliamentary consensus. Parenti muses on the irony that introduction to the free market which was said by reformers “to be the foundation of political democracy, could not be introduced by democratic means”. Support of Yeltsin even during the bombing of the Russian Parliament building in 1993, and the presidential election of 1996 came from the United States, which in the case of the latter – even gave Yeltsin’s campaign team a $10bn aid package to support him, literally buying off democracy. With Yeltsin’s control of media, and iron grip over Russia’s political branches, Yelstin was reelected. Parenti also posits that the repressive and authoritarian features in the process of decommunization and so-called “democratization” began during the tenure of Mikhail Gorbachev, citing suppression of workplace organising, control of the flow of information towards pro-capitalist media, and even suppression of debate in the political organs of the Soviet Union.
• With capitalist restoration, not only was their widespread political repression of the Left and trade unions through banning their activities and seizing their property, the nationalism that emerged in many parts of the former Soviet Union led to persecution of ethnic minorities. There was also a “bonfire sale” of state property that the “new capitalists” made a tidy profit out of, stocks in public firms were sold to the global market – from there emerged a class in post-Soviet society which we only call ‘the oligarchy’. The working class, however suffered immensely as the welfare system was ripped to shreds: hospitals were privatised, or were closed down. Cooperative farms were broken up. With the privatisation of agriculture, former ‘breadbaskets’ of Eastern Europe themselves experienced bread stortages. Infant mortality rose dramatically, while the life expectancy reduced sharply during the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The multinationals came in buying up land and property, while pumping out pop culture that mimicked the West – Parenti describes this process as effectively colonisation. Crime and corruption was widespread as “beggars, pimps, dope pushers…” came with “unemployment, homelessness, air and water pollution, prostitution, spousal abuse, child abuse, and just about every other social ill”. Suicide rate increased to nearly 50% in Russia and Hungary. Russia itself turned into a ‘mafia state’ where ‘gangsterism’ rules the country. Eastern Europe is open to all kinds of evangelism. ‘Red nostalgia’ sets in, as capitalism no longer receives its romanticised image after a few years experiencing its sharp edges, leading to a common refrain: “We never knew what we had”.
• Parenti spends the final chapter defending Marxism as a science, and for its continued relevance in explaning social, economic, and political phenomena throughout the world. He insists that it is able to do so because Marxism deals with the imperatives of class power and political economy; treating them as the motor forces of society and history. Parenti points out that people have been declaring ‘the end of Marxism’ even during Lenin’s time, which the latter commented on in just two years before the Russian Revolution. He says that many of Marx’s predictions and theories have proven not only to be right, but still very relevant; pointing out that the ‘tendency for the rate of profit to fall’, while not appreciated in Marx’s time, at the very least in modern times – it is widely accepted that boom-and-bust business cycles are a common and necessary feature of capitalism; that wealth in a society, and indeed around the world, has a tendency to centralise and concentrate through its accumulation – and the capitalist class that own it, rather than encourage or create wealth to spread towards the lower classes via jobs, instead seeks to find means to extract more wealth – not out of a lack of ethics, but necessity; and that labour is the source of all value remains true. He concedes that Marx was wrong about the proletarian revolution starting in Europe, but that was in part because he was a man situated in 19th century Europe when political development of the working masses was unprecedented for its time, and this was what his investigations led him to to make those conclusions. Moreover, “trickle-down” economics is horseshit, and for all the praise capitalism gets from conservatives around the preservation of culture, traditions, family values, and so on – they don’t appear to recognize that it is capitalism that is dissolving these social bonds and their meaning in the first place.
• Defines Marxism as a holistic science which studies the nature and functionality of capitalism; As capitalism is not just an economic system, but an entire social order, this demands investigations into how capitalism shapes politics, law, culture – even communities, families, medicine and science itself. Marxism has to be systemic, and therefore has to advance a universalism. Parenti believes that social phenomena like racism isn’t a mere social ill that requires interpersonal correction, but an expression of systemic power mediated through institutional apparatuses. For Parenti, racism is another form of class warfare – not as blunt as other weapons, but certainly a subtle tool in confounding class consciousness.
• Parenti takes his ire towards “Anything-but-class” (ABC) theorists. By that, he means postmodernists and poststructuralists. He charges that for all their blase and dismissive attitude towards class analysis and Marxism in particular, their radicalism is impotent and is really just a form of liberalism anyway. He mocks Ronald Aronson for his naive politics, and notes his involvement in the Sokal affair…in the notes. He also charges that the ‘separation’ of Marx’s political development to ‘early Marx’ and ‘late Marx’ that was prevalent in cultural studies at this time, is bollocks. He’s also none too happy about what academia has done to Gramsci, identifying him as a Marxist-Leninist, and not the ‘neutered’ radical to mine for explorations on ‘discourse’.
• The most pressing global situation of our time is the ecological crisis – with the substantial damage to the ozone layer, rise in pollution, disappearing freshwater supplies, mass species extinction, destruction of the ocean’s protoplankton and a rise in skin cancer among people, the ecological crisis is an existential one – and the continued existence of capitalism is the culprit, with the driving motor is the transformation of everything, even nature itself, into commodities. The ruling class is well aware of the problem, yet it attacks the environmentalists who seek to combat it – first with the press, and in less developed countries, like Nigeria, with bullets e,g, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Capitalists will be as ruthless to the Greens as they are to Reds. Ergo, the “green movement” would be better served with a commitment to class politics, as the struggle against the eco-apocalypse is another front of the global class struggle (p. 160). And that’s the end of the book.

The Hammer and Sickle at the End of History: Blackshirts & Reds as post-Communist Literature

• See also: ‘actually-existing socialism’

“The only countervailing force that might eventually turn things in a better direction is an informed and mobilized citizenry. Whatever their shortcomings, the people are our best hope. Indeed, we are they. Whether or not the ruling circles still wear blackshirts, and whether or not their opponents are Reds, la lutta continua, the struggle continues, today, tomorrow, and through all history.”

Michael Parenti, Blackshirts & Reds – pg. 160, the last paragraph of the book

Despite its reputation as a “tankie book”, Blackshirts & Reds as we’ve seen thus far takes a rather critical stance on the countries under communism, and especially the ones that survived the end of the Cold War. He was none too pleased with China and even Vietnam in their forays into the global world market and the accompanying introduction of privatisation of state assets; Judging by the tone of the book, Parenti likely expected them to go through the same capitalist restoration that the other countries endured. The only ones that seemed to have escaped his sharp pen are probably Cuba, North Korea, and Laos – the latter owing to its relative obscurity.

Nevertheless, the fans who claim to have become communist in part due to the book were exposed to the musings of a man who even at the crumbling of a seven-decade experiment in socialism continued to defend the legacy of that project, all that was built as part of it, unfailingly denounced the United States for its part in smashing it, as well as the naive and deluded leaders who allowed it to get smashed out of some imagined promise of a new alliance – not once cracking so much as a smirk (or even a tear for that matter) over its dissolution, unlike Chomsky who declared its breakdown “a positive for humanity”, or the various academics who outright abandoned socialism for all sorts of various ‘micro-politics’ over ‘grand projects’, came to make up another ‘grand project’ while claiming that that’s not what they’re doing, or become outright turncoats and get involved in some think-tank and advise capitalist-imperialist leaders. Parenti for these people is example is an example of a principled scholar-activist who at a period of a revolutionary ebb, continued to insist on the continued importance of the class struggle, and expressed this in passionate and readable prose without exposing his readers to dense Marxist terminology, even as he describes the processes of capitalism, or rather “corporate power”.

However, the presence of these critiques to communism to large sections of its contemporary advocates who “uphold” states like China, Cuba, Vietnam and other existing Marxist-Leninist nations, these critiques can be slightly disquieting to those who’ve examined fairly closely what was written in it. I’ve seen (anecdote alert!) fans of Parenti and this book in particular, rationalize this by saying that this was an “early” Parenti who had ‘social-democratic’ tendencies, and he became more ‘tankie’ over time – a claim which doesn’t hold much water when you consider that by the time Blackshirts & Reds was published, Parenti had been writing books for nearly three decades, he critiques social democracy in the book (as noted in the bullet points), and Blackshirts & Reds is largely a compilation of essays and lectures synthesized into slim pages.

While Parenti describes himself as a Marxist, and indeed – takes aim at the various competing left-wing modes of thought flourishing in the 1980s and 1990s in academia, as some of its own fans have likely noticed, it is entirely possible that Blackshirts & Reds can be read as ‘post-communist‘. The reason for this doesn’t lie in his critiques of socialist states as they exist, or even with historical leaders in those states, but the context of the period the book is written in, and his stated solution for overcoming it. The year Blackshirts & Reds was published is 1997, which as much as it was a reaction to the mood after the end of the Cold War, it is also a work soaked with the three decades worth of extensive debates on how Marxism is to be approached, conducted and practiced – a “crisis of Marxism”, were beside the ideological and geopolitical tensions between the Soviet model and the Chinese – were arguments over who was the revolutionary subject, whether or not Marxism should be more ‘open’, whether there needs to be a return to Marx (and often with the implication that Engels should be ignored), and did Althusserianism “break” Marxism?

For Parenti, these debates were solipsistic, and did not engage with the very real struggles presented by liberation movements over the course of the Cold War – and the relentless opposition that they were faced with. By that some token, Parenti does not engage with the internal tensions in world communism in his text at all. With several of his works and lectures coming into prominence at what was a clear revolutionary ebb in communism, when existing socialist states had consolidated and appeared to approach the world through national interests, and the climate of disillusionment of the results of various national liberation struggles, Parenti had taken a ‘realist’ approach to their actions. From what point on, he made it a point to discuss colonialism as well as the situation faced by socialist societies at the time.

Parenti’s diagnoses of these societies was pessimistic – especially that of the Soviet Union, however even if Parenti believed that the game was up, he still believed that it along with other countries built or reforged with the red flag flying was more than a failed dream, that it transformed lives for the better, allowed people who would have remained in a state of serfdom had conditions remained what they were in the beginning of the century to not only have more control in their lives**********, but by their own hands recreated their countries into something that they had actual participation in. They were societies built by the masses, and for the masses, and that much deserved to be acknowledged. That the efforts of millions of working-class people to build a society free from poverty, ignorance and conflict collapsing on itself deserved so much more than the mocking eulogies produced in the media, among politicians, and through academia – from a civilisation whose splendor is still effectively maintained by the exploitation of half a billion souls in the planet. And worse, the segments of the Left committed incredible perfidy by joining in the chorus celebrating communism’s demise.

However, Parenti is not – or was not neccessarily saying that communism is not dead, and continued to speak of it as if was a noble, but ultimately flawed project – at the very least in its 20th century manifestations. His final chapter, and especially the last paragraph seems to suggest that what is needed is the ‘spirit of communism’ in order to tackle the pressing global problems of the era. Parenti understandably did not know what was on the horizon in terms of what could emerge out of the social movements that the Left produced at the time, but what he was concerned with was that the collapse of communism, or at least the shock of the fall of the Soviet Union, would not lead to anything good – the possibilities being the resurrection of fascism, even if only in a diminished and fragmented form, or much worse – the unfettered exploitation of the rest of the world. What is not often appreciated is that Parenti himself was born of the New Left – and so is inclined to be supportive, if tentatively, of the new social movements, especially the ‘red-green alliance’ and the anti-globalisation movement. With all that said, if we accept the conclusions made by Parenti in this book, then we also have to consider that while he has a clear and obvious disdain for post-Marxists for their rejection of class as a social relation of continued epistemological significance – Parenti, much like the Western Marxists and the postmodernists had approached a crossroad where solutions lied ahead of the practice of 20th-century communism, which they had all concluded had lost steam.

From this angle, we can see how Blackshirts & Reds can have a post-communist reading. Is what is said by Parenti here really all that different from Jacques Derrida’s declaration that the “spectre of Marx” will continue to haunt the victors of the Cold War so long as exploitation, and violence remains their tools to secure their control of the world? I suppose in some senses, it definitely is – but not by very much. At the very least, Parenti distinguishes himself by embracing that communism was and is a working-class movement, and whatever its mistakes, it shows not just what the working class can build, but if truly unfettered by a constant siege against them by the lieutenants of capital, that they could build something even greater than anything that ever came before in history.

Conclusion

Blackshirts & Reds is much more focused on offering polemics than a work of history, but that does not mean that it is not a very well-researched book; for a work of 160 pages, it is meticulously cited, and almost no line goes without one. As for the contents of the book, can I say that it ‘changed my life’? Well as someone who’s only first read it this year, what I can say is that living in an area where the Communist Party of Britain (glorified Labourites that they are) still has a hub where they meet not that far from where I live, and having started to dive into various Marxist books, I can honestly say no. Then again, Corbynism notwithstanding, I’ve not been bombarded with the continuous background radiation of anti-communism that the United States produces***********, nor am I from a post-communist region whose been fed an unpalatable diet of nationalist tripe to the point that the penetration of foreign capital as public services are ripped away is rarely given another thought. I also can’t help but note that Parenti does describe suppressed radical left groups in America, but only discusses ‘successful revolutions’ in some detail. The book doesn’t appear to be that interested in going over even an American context for radical groups in the struggle against capitalism – and it seems to be because they failed, or aren’t very going anywhere (maybe ended up as a ‘political cult’ in all but name, following the whims of a vain, petty-bourgeois leader). This is kind of a problem since new people coming in to those politics are not only not engaging with their domestic history, they are also not given any tools to challenge the existing social order at home, and instead – turn towards post-revolutionary societies to cheer on, falling under the assumption that they’re the key to the new world, when they’re just as trapped in the era of late capitalist modernity as everywhere else, with positional moves proving very difficult.

So, I’m not really that beholden to Michael Parenti, or this book. Having said that, I do genuinely think that it is remarkable that such a book with the content it has, much less the argumentation within it was written before the 1990s were finished, and that so much of still feels fresh. I think that in light of the climate crisis*************, rise of the far-right globally, the war between Russia and Ukraine, the crises produced by globalisation, this work has an endured relevance to these times. It primarily served as a necessary (over)correction to anti-communist notions prevalent in the post-Cold War era and holds a dire warning that the blackest of reaction is never far away from the retreat of socialism.

Notes:

*- As one might expect especially if they’re students of history, there are competing tendencies of Marxism-Leninism, so what might be okay for one is opposed by the other. Those MLs who happen to be ‘anti-revisionist’ are not likely to take to Parenti due to the ‘positive’ (if critical) description of socialist countries that they deemed ‘revisionist’, or even ‘social-imperialist’. The dry focus on theoretical engagement not displayed by Parenti here, is also the another reason for their hostility, though others have been known to enjoy it for its accessibility, even if they’ve developed beyond it.

**- Hope that clerk was still around to see whether Donald Trump was to his liking. He certainly didn’t have the theoretical ‘insights’ of Mussolini, but he certainly had the pomposity and reactionary fervour down pat.

***- This in part, explains why the revolutionary left is hostile to the reformist left i.e. social democrats.

****- A more contemporary adage is that “liberals would sooner ally with fascists than communists”.

*****- The Libya Parenti refers to here is Libya under Muammar Gaddafi. That Libya hasn’t existed since 2011, and is now effectively replaced by warlordism. In other words, Gaddafi’s Libya may have survived the Cold War, but it certainly didn’t survive the post-Cold War.

******- This sentence should perhaps clarify what the interests of the United States had actually represented in the Cold War, shorn off of the obfuscatory slogans, which even George Kennan himself criticized.

*******- I’ve mentioned this in the notes to this, but since the eve of the end of the Cold War, a number of think tanks and the Cold War intellectuals that were involved in them had taken interest in the kind of modernisation that China had taken. Having drank the Friedman Kool-Aid, they were under the belief that China’s forays with marketisation will lead to not only the overthrow of communism, but the introduction of liberal democracy. The US state Department decided not to wait until this process happens ‘naturally’ and used the National Endownment for Democracy (NED) to support so-called ‘pro-democracy’ activists in China, alongside Chinese dissidents. The fruits of the NED’s activities reached its crescendo in the 1989 Tianamen Square protests, where the popular discontent for various issues that had emerged as a consequence of Chinese marketisation (worker’s rights, living costs, etc.) were highjacked by a student clique demanding ‘democracy’. In any case, the events of Tiananmen Square had shown quite clearly that this fantasy of a Chinese-style colour revolution was not going to happen, or at least succeed. Which is why it is just as well that there were other sections of the think tank-domiciled intelligentsia who were happy enough that China had embraced capitalism, yet felt that its transformation into a Western-style liberal democracy was always farcical, however, these people often resorted to essentialist and racist arguments presuming to know how the Chinese thoughtwhich amounted to saying that democracy was too alien a concept for them (Samuel P. Huntington), and were insted impressed with the ‘neoconservatism’ expressed in the Chinese political system.

********- Historical materialism? In my Michael Parenti book? It’s more likely than you think.

*********- Even if one agrees with the principle of setting up a ‘consumer society’ within the framework of a socialist system, as Parenti appears to, the error of Nikita Khrushchev was to bring that consumer society in competition with that of the United States, especially as early as he did. The United States not only benifitted from its neocolonial relations with its de facto dependencies, it also was virtually untouched (in the mainland) from World War II, and its currency – the dollar was literally the international reserve currency. This allowed it to make a virtually endless supply of consumer goods, in comparison to the Soviet Union. As stated in the following paragraph, this had not only set the seeds for various problems which successive leaders were unable to meet – most notable of which, migration from the Soviet Union to the West, particularly the US in pursuit of the romanticised ‘consumer utopia’ it was presented as, ever searching the “American Dream”.

**********- Churchill’s own legacy has come under scrutiny relatively recently with the Black Lives Matter Movement and works such as Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, and Churchill’s Secret War. Of particular focus is his role in the Bengal famine of 1943-44, in which 3 million deaths occurred as a result of the requisitioning of the wheat grown in the Indian subcontinent with 70,000 tonnes between April to July of 1943 exported from India to the Allied forces in Europe to assist in the war effort, and purposefully ignoring the Indian viceroy Archibald Wavell’s requests for food aid towards Bengal, contempuously accusing the Indians of “breeding like rabbits”, and even complaining that Gandhi hadn’t died yet. If Churchill was going to accuse Stalin of being a cold-blooded killer with no regard for human life, he should’ve attended to the plank in his own eye. Even today, for all of this talk of Soviet censorship and historical revisionism, the hagiography of Winston Churchill, one of the greatest servants and exponents of British imperialism in history ensures that he is remembered as a war hero, an ‘apostle of freedom and democracy’, and not a bloodthirsty, barely-sane warmonger, white supremacist, and utterly unrepentant colonialist “whose views were not all of that different from Hitler’s”.

***********- Yes, communism gave people more agency than under tsardom, colonialism, and fascism. Deal with it.

*************- Many radical left-wing organisations, including socialist and communist parties had also arose in the United States, although perhaps comparatively late to that of the European parties, and under different conditions. Nevertheless, the histories of groups like the Socialist Party of the United States, the Socialist Workers Party (US), the African Black Brotherhood, the International Workers of the World (Wobblies), and the Communist Party of the United States of America are largely erased from popular narratives of American history or portrayed (certainly and obviously) in the latter as subject to Kremlin influence (this is technically true, but not in the way as is usually presented). If there is a somewhat charitable representation of this radical history, its likely to be of CPUSA’s role in building the New Deal of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration – that is to say, it is subsumed into the historical trajectory of American liberalism, instead of contextualising it in even internationalist progressive movements (through in the CPUSA’s case, it’s partially their own fault, with this “communism is as American as apple pie” stuff). The point is, even those harsh conditions produced contradictions from which emerged a radical politics whose histories prior to the Second World War is largely erased. The explosion of the New Left, which came with Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and so on – is not too easy to ignore, but their presentation in popular media (as expected) seldom deals with the complexity of their political practice.

*************- Wrote this piece during COP28. Make of that what you will.

See also:

• Michael Parenti
  • ‘Yellow Parenti’
  • “Read Parenti!”
• ‘Actually existing socialism’
• history of communism
• The new communism
• end of history (what Parenti is giving the middle finger to)
• Books that I read in 2023

“Peaceful road to Socialism”

The “peaceful road to socialism“, is a term used to describe almost exclusively the government of Salvador Allende in Chile, which lasted between November 1970 to September 1973. Allende’s government undertook a wide set of initiatives intended to redistribute wealth across the country, and make Chile more economically self-sufficient. But these set of policies earned the ire of sections of the Chilean middle-class and especially the Chilean right, as well as drawing the attention of the United States – who immediately set about working to destroy it. The “peaceful road to socialism” is often used pejoratively by those critical of the stance that socialism can be achieved through parliamentary means, and the eventual collapse of Allende’s government in three underscores that, but it is also used by those sympathetic to the legacy of Allende’s struggle for social and economic justice. A more neutral term is “the Chilean road to socialism”.

On 5 September 1970, Salvador Allende, who represented the Socialist Party and Unidad Popular (Popular Unity), a coalition party of various groupings running the gamut from centre-left to far-left, won the 1970 presidential election. Allende became the very first Marxist brought to power through liberal democracy – undermining the notion that if socialism were brought via ballot box, it would lose. However, the US – which tells the world that it doesn’t deal with the democracies of other countries, had serious concerns.

The Allende government did not simply have importance in the context of Chilean political history – particularly the history of working-class struggles and the legacy of the “Socialist Republic of Chile” of 1932 which lasted a mere 100 days, or simply the context of Latin American governments adopting dirigisme policies – The “peaceful road to socialism” is also to be understood in the context of the latter half of the Cold War that it existed in. There is of course, the descent into (or in some cases, the installation of) military dictatorships that would arise between the 1970s and 1980s, and of importance were a set of high instability for both the capitalist and socialist worlds. In the latter case, the Sino-Soviet split had not only led to severe tensions in Soviet-China relations (to the point of border skirmishes, and the threat of open conflict), it had forced socialist states to side with one power over the other, and risk the antagonism of the opposing nation. Even so-called “non-aligned” countries had to gamble whether on what power they wished to maintain relations with. In the case of Chile, it chose to favour the Soviet Union, with the possibility of positive relations with Cuba also influencing this stance (altough the latter as well as Chile would make steps to normalizing relations with China). Even so, even the Western Communist Parties – which held a pro-Soviet stance, would eventually break from this as a result of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, adopting what was called “Eurocommunism” – rejecting Marxist-Leninist vanguardism for seeking legitimacy through a parliamentary framework. Meanwhile, capitalism was also not without its crises: in response to the global economic slump, and the failure both of Keynesian-inspired methods to reverse inflation and of the currency devaluation of a numbers of Western nations (West Germany & UK), President Richard Nixon suspended the convertability of the US dollar into gold – which would later turn out to be permanent: The “Nixon shock” had smashed the ‘gold standard’, leaving the dollar – the international reserve currency, a ‘floating currency’: it had nothing backing it at all to stabilise prices.

The UP coalition were well aware of these global problems, and Allende referred to his politics as representative of a “third way” between capitalism and communism – now both in crisis. Socialists, revolutionary and reformist – watched with great interest on how this program would play out. The UP adopted a ‘developmentalist’ set of policies intended for economic redistribution, social welfare, and control of its own resources. One course of action, signifying the seriousness of its nationalisation projects as well its anti-imperialist defiance, was Allende’s decision to nationalise the copper mines without any compensation to the foreign companies in control of it, particularly ITT & PepsiCo.

The developments in Chile received the massive support of Chile’s working class and indigenous populations. However, capital – both domestic and foreign, were not pleased, and the Chilean right – who held substantial power in the Constituent Assembly and penetrated the armed forces. There were murmurs between them that Chile had succumbed to communism, and this demanded a nationalist struggle. The US was also happy to help: the advice Nixon gave to the State Department was to “make the economy [of Chile] scream”. Everything from strikes (from landowners, capitalists, and notably the wives of various military personnel), ‘lawfare’, assassinations, and coup attempts were set up and enacted to cause disruption and chaos.

In the perspective of revolutionary socialists who criticised Allende for class-collaborationism, these scenarios were the inevitable response to social democracy in Latin America, and the building of socialism required a firmer approach than parliamentarianism. However, the Chilean road to socialism was not merely a path of nationalised indutries, and considerable thought and planning was dedicated towards the transition from capitalism to socialism with the use of newly emergent systems planning.

In 1971, economists within the Allende government sought the assistance of the British cybernetician Stafford Beer to apply his theories to Chile’s economic development. Beer would meet with Allende in November 1971 to explain the cybernetic models that was to be applied to economic management. Allende understood very well what Beer was proposing, and called for the system to encourage worker participation, to be decentralised, and anti-bureaucratic. The project would acquire the name, “Synco” among the Spanish-speaking peoples of Chile, but in English it was called “Project Cybersyn”. Cybersyn was supposed to network all of the firms in nationalised scetor of the economy, link them to a central computer in Santiago, and provide a measure of the status of production, and give real-time responses to economic crises. It had only been used once to respond to a truck driver strike ostensibly motivated by the massive shortage of goods in 1973, but organised by various private industrialists to prevent the distribution of these goods; leading to the mobilisation of 200 truck drivers to distribute goods into the cities. Cybersyn was, even in its prototype stages, declared a success. However, the 1973 coup ushering in Pinochet regime would put an end to the project – its full potential never realised.

When tensions emerged between one of the parties which formed UP – the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) with the Allende government over the pace of socialist transition, Allende himself was forced to respond to the attempts to restrict his executive power from the right, by enacting policies by plebiscite. Unfortunately, whatever the pace Allende moved, his enemies moved faster. The Chilean congress had passed a motion accusing Allende of violating the Chilean constitution and of various abuses of power, which allowed for the Chilean armed forces to take action. It was the signal to the coup in motion, and the beginning of the end of the Allende presidency.

The end and aftermath of the journey to socialism

By 1973, two coup attempts had been made on Allende. By September 11 of the same year, the third time was marked by its success. Tanks entered the capital, and figher planes flew over the presidential palace, shelling it. The putschists in the Chilean military demanded that Allende surrender, while the members of the Socialist Party plotted their escape asked that Allende join them so that they could launch a counter-coup in a future time. Allende refused both options. In what would be Allende’s final speech to the Chilean people, broadcasted by radio, he declared that the putschists in the Chilean armed forces had betrayed the oath that they were sworn to protect, that he would defend the constitution to his dying breath and that as dark as the days events were, brighter days will return to Chile. Allende was dead by 2pm. The Chilean military arrested everyone, including their own who showed loyalty to Allende and refused to side with the coup. People who were associated with the political left, or suspected of left-wing sympathies were rounded up, beaten, tortured and killed. The “peaceful road to socialism” was over. What Chile went towards was the road to fascism and the bloody path to neoliberalism. The Chilean coup was a prelude to a period of political repression which saw the deaths and disappearances of 3,000 people over 17 years in Chile, and a wider campaign of ani-communism called Operation Condor, installing right-wing or military dictatorships across Latin America, leading to the deaths of 60,000 people – half of which from Argentina. Chile would return to liberal democracy in 1990.

Legacy

The collapse of the “peaceful road to socialism” had brought international discussions among the Left globally on its successes and failures. For the revolutionary left, it represented an ultimately naive (if promising) and tragic attempt to acheive a society beyond capitalism without class struggle, and treating the state apparatus as a neutral tool, rather than a weapon of class suppression. Even among the New Left intellectuals, notably Ralph Miliband, commented on the moderacy displayed by the Allende government in its programs (while also commenting on the somewhat celebatory responses found in the press of his country, even from so-called “democratic socialists”) and reemphasized the neccessity of class struggle.

For democratic socialists, particularly those committed to the expansion of democracy via a constitutionalist framework (and certainly ones more internationalist than the chauvinistic types Miliband referred to), there is an emphasis not on Allende’s failures, but on his steadfast courage and principled commitment to his politics, in all of its complexity. Of particular inspiration is the pursuit of the “peaceful road” up until its final moments – of particular symbolism is the manner of Allende’s death by gunshot. The rifle from Fidel Castro was offered to Allende to signify Cuba’s solidarity with the Chilean path, which Allende declared would be peaceful. Given the choice to seize power, or even to defend himself, the risk of other people being harmed, or his principles violated was not one he was willing to take, and so Allende’s rifle took the life of one person in his entire struggle: himself.

In both opposing perspectives, Salvador Allende occupies the role of a martyr of socialism – all the more significant in the afttermath of the Cold War, and in the Chilean left – he occupies a position close towards beatification, if not outright apeotheotic.

The 2021 election of the leftist Gabriel Boric, has little resemblance to the context in which Allende was brought to office. Organisations such as the Progressive International, and the movement of the “Pink tide” within Latin America, are circumstances created in the shadow of a post-Cold War climate which the Left is only started to step out of. But the legacy, iconography and continued relevance of the tragedy that beset the Chilean people, with the fall of Allende’s government, continues to drive Chilean politics. Even now, even if his laws have been overturned, the deep privatisation of Chilean economy installed by Pinochet is something that Chile has not yet overcome – and it remains an open question as to whether it eventually can even through the parliamentary means. A ‘peaceful road’ so to speak.

See also:

• Salvador Allende
• The other 9/11
• Democratic socialism
• “socialism with a human face”
• Reform vs revolution
• 2021 Chilean general election

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

“Dat Dress” – A (Kinda) Defence of Performative Politics – AOC at the Met Gala

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala or the Met Gala is an annual event hosted by the aforementioned museum in Manhattan, New York City, which to a loony leftie such as myself – is the very definition of bourgeois decadence. Gaudy costumes galore feted by the ‘influencers’ within the super-wealthy, with access at around $30,000 a ticket. Regular days to go to the Met Museum is around $25 for viewing at hours between 10am to 4pm. Taking attention away from Lil Nas X’s Saint Seiya cosplay was New York Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s $30,000 mostly white dress emblazoned with “TAX THE RICH” in bright red paint covering her back and rear. This of course, got sections of the Right a bit riled up. At least the sections that take themselves too seriously, particularly the conservative PAC which wants to have her fined for wasting taxpayer’s money, and believe it or not – I don’t think there even half as pissed off as they make out. Of importance to me is the reaction on the Left to this, which seems to be divided from “slay queen!” (do people still say that?) to calling bollocks on this stunt. Of course, a lazy person like myself is gonna give my two cents on this.

One thing needs to be clear: It really doesn’t matter whether AOC paid for the dress herself or not, or for the tickets – it’s still a $30,000 dress, and if not for the Met Gala giving a ticket to her, it would still cost $35,000 to receive one to go. It is rich people nonsense that I don’t fuck with and wouldn’t want to even I became wealthy. This defence from AOC supporters around it not being her (or taxpayer’s) money, or her friend designing (and putting the slogan on) misses the point so completely, I wonder if they were aiming for it. The issue, fundamentally – is about optics, and what it means for radical politics.

Make no mistake. This was performative. It was virtue signalling. But that in of itself isn’t the issue. Where some of the critics of AOC’s presence go wrong is in the notion that performance shouldn’t exist in politics. This is nonsensical, wrong-headed and unreflective. Think of the history of protests, and of in current ones, quite often – rely on performance. Think of the Extinction Rebellion protests, think of sit-ins, hell think even of Shia Lebouf. There’s a reason why they’re called demonstrations. Of course, Ocasio-Cortez’s presence at the Met Gala was not a demonstration, but performative politics doesn’t always take the form of demonstrations – there’s of course literally political performance art, like that of the ‘Artist Taxi Driver’. But when people really complain about performativity, as in AOC’s dress stunt, their concerns are around three principal aims of performativity:

• What does it signal?
• Whose interests does it represent?
• What does it disrupt?

The last is probably the most important because it allows the space for new conversations around a political issue. The critics of the AOC Met Gala stunt on the Left are correct in saying that AOC’s advocates grossly overestimate what it disrupts and what conservation it generates. It cannot be said that it challenges the status quo, because raising tax is not down to talking to, or posing in front of super-wealthy celebrities to “start conversations” about whether people in their tax bracket should pay more. It is for politicians like her to decide on what the tax should be raised to. Believe me when I say nobody was talking about whether the US top marginal tax should go back to pre-JFK levels, or about capital gains tax at that gala. So it fails on its own social democratic aims (if they were indeed her aims), and it’s sad that so many on the left, including commentators like Owen Jones, used such a cretinous line of argument to defend this. It would be more honest to say that AOC just wanted to have fun, and hang out with rich folks and finesse the Right while doing it. I would’ve accepted that, not this “start a conversation” dog bollocks. Joe Biden, obviously well-known for his socialism, had already made it part of his platform (with of course a nebulous concept of “fair share”). The real conservation that should be had on this, is whether on the Left have become overly reliant on individualist performative acts, over collective action.

Many on the radical left had accused AOC’s dress stunt as some sort of recoup of radical politics and a clear example of ‘capitalist realism’. Capitalist realism is a term coined by the late critical theorist Mark Fisher, is used to describe implicit acceptance – if not endorsement – of capitalist ideology, or the logic of the current social and economic relations produced under late capitalism. The problem with this line of argument, is that in spite of right-wing hysteria and the increase in popularity of left-wing politics – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has not actually in this instance, co-opted any radical politics. Social democrats talk about taxing the rich all the time. Hell, there are varieties of conservatives who are quite happy to see the rich “pay more tax”. Social democrats do not seek to abolish capitalism, but make interventions through state power to make capitalist relations more amenable to labour. The “TAX THE RICH” slogan is consistent within the politics AOC espouses. Indeed, it is now consistent with the politics the Democratic Party now claim. What it doesn’t say is how much America’s wealthiest should be taxed. Biden accepts the existence of billionaires, while AOC does not – or at least she says she doesn’t. House Democrats themselves seem to be fairly reticient of even Biden’s tax plan, so really the only thing that AOC could be signalling to – is them.

That said, it is not incorrect to point out the ineffectual nature of this even if this was the case, since Establisment politicians do not respond to public shaming in the same way. That is to say, they are largely shameless as a result of the experience of being career politicians. There is a conversation to be had about the horizon of social democratic ambitions lowered in response to neoliberalism or even to a history of capitulation to the power of American capital, if that’s what AOC’s critics are advocating. The bottom line is, if the radical left already dismiss AOC as a faux-radical, ‘pseudo-leftist’, then what she wears to a billionaire gala – and what slogan she puts up – shouldn’t made the radical left angry, rather we should be indifferent about it. And identify that the capitalist realism is not in sloganeering which falls within social democratic politics while hobnobbing with glitterati, since that had existed ever since social democrats were a serious electoral force – but in our reaction and overreaction to said sloganeering and our dependence on a culture of what my good friend calls “celebrity left”.

Mark Fisher, in his investigation on how ‘capitalist realism’ emerged, was not focused so much on individual actions – though that was there, but in our collective malaise, the mental health crisis linked to the rise of neoliberal political consensus, our reliance on self-care in response to the atomisation of society that neoliberalism created – essentially ‘the privatisation of stress’, the new emergent decentralized bureaucracies to manage our productivity, and the impotence of serious resistance to the conditions neoliberalism created. He diagnosed everything from popular culture, to education, to work, and ultimately to modern protest strategies and tied movie quotes and film scenes to our social relations metamorphosed by neoliberal capitalism. Capitalist realism is a term used to describe a systemic issue, not to brandish individual failings. Much of the complaints about AOC’s slogan weren’t just criticizing for co-option, but paradoxically, lazy and toothless sloganeering. But surely the question should be – if radical politics on the left is about building power through collective struggle, why does it matter what a socdem politician wears? Why is so much of politics and political discourse dependent on using or viewing popular politicians espousing left-wing stances individually do? And not about the coherence in strategy and tactics in leftist politics? It’s quite telling that this tale obscured almost completely the action done by police abolitionists, who to put it bluntly – got their asses kicked by the NYPD, despite demonstrating peacefully. However, this peformance if you will – by black autonomists was not enough to overcome the spectacle of a white dress and three words of red paint, worn by someone who supposedly wasn’t supposed to be there.

It really shoudn’t be about AOC, or what you would do, or what slogan one politician uses. The problem of performance on the left should be solved collectively, and emphasis should be on what it disrupts and conversations on the new possibilities that we can work towards.

See also:

• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
• Capitalist realism
• “progressive-neoliberalism”
• ‘Champagne socialism’
• The ‘aristocratic embrace’ of Ramsay MacDonald
• Modern social democrats and “celebrity left”
• The left needs to have fun too
• The left and ‘g-checking’
• Social media and the online Left

Thoughts on Football and “progressive patriotism”

It’s a subject that would probably beg the analysis of CLR James if not for the fact that his background was that of a middle-class Trinidadian primarily interested in the sport of cricket, and the other inconvenient fact that he’s been dead for 32 years.

The English (men’s) football team has naturally been a source of intrigue, and excitement for the tenure of UEFA Euro 2020, owing to their surprisingly impressive performance throughout the tournament. The expression, “football’s coming home” – a line from the chorus of Frank Skinner and David Baddiel’s 1996 single “Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home)” is a nationalistic ear worm burrowed into our collective consciousness deeper than the other three-word national memes like “Get Brexit Done”, and “Vote For Saxon”.

But how does this tie into “progressive patriotism” discourse? The answer is that unsurprisingly, that football is the site of a culture war. When the English (men’s) national football them took the knee, many English football supporters booed. Some defended their discontent saying that politics should be kept out of football (as if politics is out of anything in our social life), but those of us who weren’t born yesterday, see this for the bullshit line that it is whenever England face off against Germany. Or France. Or even Argentina. Prominent right-wing voices such as Nigel Farage have frequently associated Black Lives Matter and Marxism; Home Secretary Priti Patel and Boris Johnson affirmed that fans can show their displeasure as much as they liked. Gareth Southgate, the manager of the squad defended his players’ right to protest. It’s hard to say whether any of the players will turn into England’s Colin Kaepernick – highly unlikely given that Kaepernick’s silent protest occured in the height of the first Black Lives Matter protests, and he’s still out of a job. England’s most visible sports activist at the moment happens to be Marcus Rashford – whose campaign for free school meals is credited as doing what Her Majesty’s Opposition couldn’t: Get the Conservative Party commit to a U-turn. Perhaps the British right were a bit conscious of these things when the tournament began, and expected an early crash-out. But then came a surprise: England started to win. And win rather consistently. They won their group games. They never even conceded a goal until the semi-finals against Denmark. And tonight, they might even win the tournament against Italy.

Over the space of a season, Raheem Sterling went from pillored in the press as a gang-glorifying thug to a national hero. Southgate is the subject of reworded Atomic Kitten songs. What’s going on? Was it that the England men’s football team was strategically reoriented from its reliance on a few good forwards and a really good goalkeeper, to a team that balanced offense and defense effectively? Was Gareth Southgate’s quiet and analytical style proven to be better than Kevin Keegan’s combative and furious approach? Was it that this generation of English men’s football was actually uniquely good? It might be any of those things, or the answer could be in between. In any case, right-wing commentators were given the choice either to eat crow, or jump on the bandwagon as left-wing football observers gave mocking boasts of how “Marxism Wins Matches”, with memes abound of Southgate writing lines of the Communist Manifesto on his notepad, and Harry Maguire captioned as “saying” that the win was inspired by the revolutionary spirit of Rosa Luxemburg. But then sections of the left commentariat began to take the idea on some level seriously, talking about a “progressive patriotism”. And I think that this needs to be unpacked a bit with a few anecdotes.

When I left Ruskin House after the match, I saw an Asian family near another pub opposite the road with the little kids cheering “England, England!” as cars beeped rhythmically. It felt surreal, and even heartwarming. As soon as I got into the tram though, there was a very familiar chorus of “You’re shit, and you know you are!” sang by a group of mostly-white young men. To me, I think that illustrates what the modern football fandom of this country really is like. I saw that Owen Jones video today with him accompanied by Ash Sarkar and Billy Bragg. Jones was quite shameless about him tying the excitement around the game to his politics, which….fair enough. But with Billy Bragg complaining about the “Marxist left” reducing everything to class, and how it would be bad cede nationalism and patriotism to the far-right; and Ash Sarkar talking about her and her partner’s English identity, not to mention that tweet with Paul Mason getting happy-clapppy about the Queen’s thumbs-up, I’m finding it all rather strange.

For myself, I can’t say that I’ve ever been made to feel English. I remember an encounter where one guy in school explicitly hold me that I’m not English, and I took that to heart. No football team, or tournament is gonna change that either. There’s a reason why England football fans tend to behave like such louts, and that is because of the deeply embedded nationalism that they are socialised into. English people have been repeatedly been told that they once held one-quarter of the globe, and encouraged by our media to see these war narratives played out between twenty-two men over two hours. Sure, Jordan Henderson gave a really sweet message to a non-binary fan, and Southgate is taking a vocal stand against racism, but this is a highly commercialised sport, and even if England didn’t even qualify, they’ll still be millionaires. If a “progressive patriotism” exists from football, it’s highly likely that it will be expressed primarily by the footballers with a rather limited (at least for now) impact on creating social change among a nationalist fan base which still doesn’t have the maturity to not bully Danish boys when they win, or think twice before they call a 12-year old weeping German girl a “slag” not having the temerity for being a passionate as they are during a loss. “Progressive patriotism” is subordinate to the social relations of this country – the United Kingdom, and the culure it produces. It stands up to “God Save The Queen”, not “Jerusalem”; it only tolerates players kneeling when they win, and when a bus parade with them occurs, I’ll probably hear a slightly nicer version of “Two world wars, one (euro) cup”. I’ll bet 20 quid on it.

Things I Get Sick Of Hearing With Regards To Brexit

It’s three months until the transition period is over, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has decided to make this absurd posture around the EU not giving the UK a fair deal because the Withdrawal Agreement he already agreed with the EU he now wants to change with this Internal Markets Bill – which would allow the UK to alter parts of the existing Withdrawal Agreement to whatever it wishes. It would seem that the PM is convinced that we would have a Canada-style arrangement with the EU. Though a ‘Canada-type deal’ would still have tariffs on meat and eggs and quotas on other foodstuffs (cheese) from the EU. Given that the latest fiasco is around the import of food to Northern Ireland from the UK, which is apparently serious enough to break international law over by insisting on changes to the existing Withdrawal Agreement – a ‘Canada-style deal’ is perhaps not really the best comparison since from what limited knowledge I have on trade agreements, Canada doesn’t pick-and-choose what parts of an existing trade arrangement unilaterally. Ah well, modern politics is nothing if not spectacle.

Take for instance, the Tory “rebellion” – a motley crew of disgruntled MPs and grandees within the Conservative Party who supposedly threaten mutiny over Johnson’s bullish proposal, and Leader of the Labour Party Keir Starmer, who now as part of his “Mr. Sensible” schtick, is now talking about – get this – “getting the Brexit deal done”. It is worth noting that Starmer went on TV implicitly trying to force Corbyn to a Remain position and in the general election last year was an influential part in introducing the “second referendum” option on the manifesto, which eventually led to Labour being slaughtered. It is also worth noting that after becoming Party Leader, he had effectively abandoned the firmly pro-Remain stance he spent the better part of four years championing – including his (in)visible role in the “People’s Vote” campaign. Starmer and the Tory ‘rebels’ are playing the role that they’ve become accustomed to playing – oppositional politics. In Starmer’s case, it’s a bit harder because he’s doing this by constantly triangulating. Which makes him look ineffectual for those who aren’t taken by the whole “suit-and-tie and slick hair gel makes me a real statesman” aesthetic.

While even the most quixotic of the Remainers have come to terms with the fact that none of the leaders of the main political parties want to even mention rejoining the EU, Lexiters unfortunately do not share the same muted reflections – one of the sillier takes on this was an exclamation that because the UK has intiated trade relations with Japan – displaying an interest towards the Trans-Pacific Partnership membership, that the public voted against globalisation and trade deals. Expect that ‘s not what they did – they voted to leave the European Union. Ask most Brexiteers what globalisation is, they wouldn’t be able to tell you. They don’t give a fuck about globalisation. They give a fuck about the European Union, which as the narrative goes – is blocking good trading agreements that the UK feels it’s entitled to. We have punters bleating about WTO rules like they suddenly understand international trading agreements. Nobody bothered to tell them that every nation on WTO rules is at least on some form of trading agreement – otherwise it wouldn’t work.

This is what I find so sad about the Lexit position: beyond the nationalist aspect, they’ve never actually managed to capture and focus the discontent towards the EU, and sought to ride the wave of anti-EU sentiment and drive Corbyn to introduce socialist policies without the fetters of the EU’s state aid regulations. On this, they shared a similar silliness that I found on the Remain camp, which seemed to be more convinced of “one more heave” politics with the ‘second referendum’ guff, than actually taking the time to mend the cultural barriers the post-industrial parts on Britain faced themselves in. Lexit is even sillier in that for all its supposed internationalism with peoples who caught the bad end of the stick with the EU (Greece, African migrants, Catalonia, etc.) it ultimately reduced itself to nationalist rhetoric – with talk of “sovereignty” and “national liberation”. The only tendency post-referendum that died a death more embarrasingly than Stop Brexit/Final Say are these guys for sure. Yet they can’t seem to shut up.

See also:

• Brexit
• Lexit
• Blue Labour
• ‘left-nationalism’

The New Labour Leader, and the future of myself in the Labour Party

As one I might except, I wasn’t fully in the mood to write anything – and also wanted to wait until things settle down.

As predicted by the majority of observers –  Yesterday, Keir Starmer had won the leadership election winning 56% of votes (225,135) from the Labour membership, and is therefore the new Leader of the Labour Party. Rebecca-Long Bailey came second with 27% (117,598) and Lisa Nandy third on 16% (58,788). 62% of the membership had participated in the leadership election.

As predicted by the majority of observers – Angela Rayner had won the deputy leadership election winning 53% of votes (228,944), second is Rosenna Allin-Khan with 26% of votes (113,858) and Richard Burgon with 21% (92,643). The deputy leadership contest went to three rounds – Dawn Butler was knocked out in the first round with 11%, Ian Murray was knocked out in the second with 14%.

The Labour national executive committee saw a complete wipe-out of the Labour left. Johanna Baxter and Gurinder Singh Josan were elected along with Carol Sewell elected to the NEC as the BAME candidate.

In Starmer’s pre-recorded victory speech he said that the people now have to trust Labour with “good government”, and apologised for the “scourge of anti-Semitism” within the Party, and will do everything in his power to get rid of it. Some on the left of the Party fear that this will be used as pretext to make summary expulsions. The Labour Party Democracy Reviews are likely to be discontinued under the current arrangement of the NEC.

True to his campaign call of “unity”, in the reshuffle of the shadow cabinet, Starmer removed nearly all of the previous cabinet members of the Corbyn era who didn’t already leave on their own – such as Diane Abbott who stepped down as Shadow Home Secretary. Lisa Nandy – who came third in the leadership election – was given Abbott’s former post. Barry Gardiner was removed from his post as Shadow Climate Change and Trade Secretary. Ian Lavery also was asked to resign as Chair of the Labour Party – Angela Rayner has replaced him. Anneliese Dodds is the new Shadow Chancellor. Rachel Reeves is the…Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Rebecca Long-Bailey, the runner-up occupies the post of Shadow Education Secretary.*

All appears to be once again well in in the Labour Party. Never again shall it discuss or priotize class politics save for a marginalised left. Never again shall we have anyone but professional politicians in slick suits and polished hair – if not confidence in interviews or even recorded video messages. And never again shall we have a leadership that openly calls itself “socialist”. Labour should prioritize “winning” – not for the working class – oh no, no, no. Winning on the basis of liberal values. This is wonderful message to send the members – a politicized young, and a re-energized middle-aged and elderly who joined or re-joined because of Jeremy Corbyn – which ultimately tripled the membership. I can anticipate Starmer prioritising attempts to build up momentum for the fourth battle in the Brexit culture wars (2016 referendum, 2019 EU elections, 2019 gneral election) which is likely to end badly, and will not bring back the Leave seats lost to them.

As of myself, while every vote I’ve ever taken was Labour – I’ve given myself a year as to whether I want to engage in Labour activism any more. I still think that every vote I’ll ever take will be for Labour – but emphasis should be on every vote. I’m a patient person – but not that patient. In as far as my CLP goes – I don’t think that I’ll go to any more of its meetings for the forseeable future. The basis of my support for the Labour Party will be towards its left-wing MPs, or “leftish” ones. Ironically, I’m in the same position I was five years ago – looking at Twitter to validate my stance. However, one thing is certain: the Labour Party is the Labour Party and the primary objective of the Party is to win. I strongly doubt that it’s going to do that with Starmer as the helm – but if it does win, I’d rather it do so as a party I feel can protect my interests, and it’s looking less and less like a party that can – successful local activism on the Mental Health (Use of Force) Act, notwithstanding.

Corbyn reminded me what was important – and that is the struggle of the working masses against those who hoard wealth. That mass politics can acheive something. And the importance of a few victories in the long march of socialism. I’m a committed socialist now. And I don’t feel the need to be part of the Labour Party to call myself one. As Tony Benn once said: “[The Labour Party] isn’t a socialist party. It is a party with socialists in it.” He also advocated extra-parliamentary movements (if somewhat tentatively) and on that principle – if only because it’s parallel to my own, most of my activism will be doing that. These revolutionary socialist parties don’t interest me very much – the prospect of ending up in some Leninist sect is not exciting.

This is a period more of reflection for me – and a hell of a lot of reading. I’m lucky enough that I live in Croydon to be near Ruskin House – so that seems very interseting and as a club steeped in the history of the labour movement – it’s of incredible importance. However, the coronavirus crisis has exacerbated its financial issues – and has the potential to threaten its existence, so everything’s on a knife edge. It may be possible to start a crowdfund if worst come’s to worst.

Community activism is something that I’ll get into without the Party engine in it. There’s loads of stuff going around to help marginalised people. Certainly beats going into the Labour Party meetings.

I suppose it’s easier for me to walk because I don’t have a position – let alone a paid one in the Party. I guess the crisis for me is to what degree I’m committed to democratic socialism. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the new Labour Party as a whole.

2/07/2020 update: Keir Starmer on 25th June 2020 fired Rebecca Long-Bailey with the rationale that Bailey shared an article by the Independent that contained an “antisemitic conspiracy theory”. This “conspiracy theory” is apparently found in the article with featured an interview by Maxine Peake who drew links between the Israeli security services’ propensity to apply excessive force and linked that with the murder of George Floyd by US police. Much of the discussion is around the conspiracy theory is ‘obviously’ the suggestion that Peake asserted that Israeli security services trained the US police the techniques used to kill George Floyd. Notably, Starmer has not clarified what the conspiracy theory actually was – nor has he responded to any calls for him to do so. In any case, Bailey’s replacement is Kate Green. Green was the chief organiser of the Labour leadership campaign of Owen Smith, who challenged Jeremy Corbyn in the so-called ‘chicken coup’.

The Meaning of Trevor Philips

On the 8th March 2020, Trevor Philips was suspended from the Labour Party.  Trevor Phillips has – for a very long time now – used his platform as the former EHRC head to voice his dismay at the current generation of activists from multiple marginalised communities, and indeed those in support of those activists – on the basis that they’re trying to undermine freedom of speech. Indeed, in his last documentary Has Political Correctness Gone Mad?, Philips attempts to make the case that social justice activists are now more concerned with condemnation of regular people and policing behaviours than making British society more equal. At one point, he likens them to Stalinists and Maoists. What powers these activists and groups have to “silence” or “police” people beyond a reaction from the intransigent prone to complain about political correctness he hadn’t clarified. But as a consistent appeaser to reactionaries, aggreived Little Englanders, “Very Serious People” and the wider “freeze peach” crowd, it was as much as anything he’s done recently.

Naturally, you will not find an ally in Trevor Philips in me. That the first president of the National Union of Students had reduced himself to the proverbial man ranting at cloud is regrettable but not entirely unexpected. He was always a simpering liberal. For him, the road to racial equality at the end is engaging in respectability politics and victim-blaming as its means – viewing material gains through his elitist lens. I recall in the documentary Things We Can’t Say About Race That Are True his framing of the interview he conducted with Les Ferdinand on racism in football to make a point about the “real taboo”: black bosses. Not Ferdinand’s brother Anton being called a “black cunt” by John Terry. Apparently the lack of black coaches in English football is the real problem and not the underlying culture that allows for this problem. He did this again fairly recently, regarding the the lack of representation of BAME people in executive positions in business. This is the fight that Philips was really interested in: Whether our corporate overlords are black or brown, than whether or not they can feel comfortable in the streets or a workplace without having dehumanizing jibes thrown at them. Black faces in high places.

It is from this respectability politics that Philips is motivated to oppose multiculturalism – and went to head with Ken Livingstone during his tenure as Mayor during the early years of the Greater London Authority, and invoked the ire of Operation Black Vote. It is also where his apparent issue with Muslims – which is the basis for his expulsion from Labour – seems to come from. For him, Muslims seem to represent a faction within British society that is impervious to ‘integration’. Consistent with the patrician faction of liberals such as Anthony Flew, Richard Dawkins and Anthony Giddens – Philips identifies multiculturalism as a threat to Britain, following a curiously crude interpretation of it existing as British state being the manager of different identity groups – all apparently monolithic, steadily encroahing on the British core in exchange for their culutral values remaining untouched.

His anti-Muslim animus motivated him in writing and on TV, to continuously refer to the Rochdale sex trafficking scandal, arguing that authorities ‘not wanting to look racist’ addressing the problem of Pakistani men grooming young girls – who were white. No mention of the lack of trust the authorities had within Asian communities, or indeed that ‘white’ (non-Muslim) grooming gangs are greater in number. No, just blame the victim – the Pakistani and Muslim community as a whole. It’s ‘cultural relavitism’ that have them a chance to exploit those girls, and the Left making excuses for them. They are a ‘nation within a nation’. Giving the amount of times he blames the Left for teachers not supporting black students, for protecting the feelings of Muslims who were “segregating”, and other grievances – I can’t help but womder whether his issue is really with the Left, or whether it is a convenient all-encompassing shorthand for identity politics and marginalised groups as a whole, but he feels he can’t outright say every individual group he charges with victimhood. If anything, other than Simon Danusck, I’ve never seen a more right-wing Labour Party member, or a former equalities campainer and leader work so hard to undermine the gains in British society.

Philips now charges the Labour Party of having become a “totalitarian cult”. Perhaps he should have spent more time musing and speaking on whatever draconian policies the party has, instead of suggesting that the Labour Party has a uniquely anti-Semitic culture that needed to be addressed.

See also:

• “Freeze peach” (coming soon)
• A list of Labour Party suspensions/expulsions on racism allegations (coming soon)
• Black liberals (coming soon)
• Red-baiting (and why reactionaries do it) (coming soon)
• Respectability politics (coming soon)
• Multiculturalism (coming soon)
• Can black people be racist? (coming soon)