And when one looks at British Labour politics in the years after this piece was written Fisher kind of got his wish, and it was an absolute electoral dead end.
That may be so, but it doesn't mean there's nothing to it. Those "newer generations on the left" tend to think and behave in ways that can be pretty alienating to the rest of society, and so doom their prospects.
As Abe Simpsons famously said, "I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!"
> This is always said, but it is never true. The olds die, and the youngs become the old.
> As Abe Simpsons famously said, "I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!"
Yeah, but just because some "it" is current doesn't mean it's better. It's quite possible the hip new thing is just the youngs wondering off on a detour and getting lost.
I also strain to find really substantive criticism in Fisher's original piece. "Russell Brand as popular left vanguard" has not really aged well, he's done the standard turn from proto-dirtbag-left to exactly the kind of media-talking-head-dumbass the leftists Fisher decries predicted he would.
I am broadly (but weakly) class-first in my leftism, but the kind of purity Fisher is demanding is bad tactics, but also counter-materialist. Race exists orthogonally to class but still has material implications - which is simply to say, black people still get profiled by cops even if they own a factory. For a good analysis of this, see Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Barbara and Karen Fields. Conversely, "the means of production" is not what it used to be - capital operates correlated but not identical to control over information vectors, and owners of those vectors exercise great power over people who can control their own production but not the distribution of it; see McKenzie Wark's Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?
The left is traditionally focused on class because Marxism, via materialism, made strong arguments this was the lynchpin of inequity. But if you run that same materialist analysis today, the evidence for class's primary, let alone a sui generis status, is the weakest it has ever been.
Certainly a meme I've heard a million times. I think Obama even said it while he was still president.
But so what? I don't see what it's supposed to imply.
You've got a black guy living in poverty working two part time jobs no benefits, obeying one abusive authoritarian after another over his whole life.
Maybe that guy really does feel more solidarity with a black factory owner whose life does not resemble his in any way. But why is this?
It's not because that any black people are actually more affected by "profiling" than by their class situation. It's because they're economically conservative in the "embarrassed millionaire" sense -- more likely to view the robber baron as a figure of aspirational emulation than an exploiter. These types of people (they're the majority of every race of course) aren't leftists turned off by class politics, they're just on the opposite side: they're the economic right-wing. They're quite simply on the side of the owning class, even though they're not owners.
> if you run that same materialist analysis today, the evidence for class's primary, let alone a sui generis status, is the weakest it has ever been.
Huh?? People's day to day lives are still regulated by wages. Children's upbringings are defined by the competition to conform to requirements of the wage-paying institutions. How can class not be primary? Black or white, the odds have to be 90%+ that the last "or else" order you obeyed was delivered under a wage-based threat.
It's impossible to look at racial disparities in sentencing, qualitatively or quantitatively, and think this. The research is clear: The absolute richest black people get accused and sentenced like working-class white people. Working-class black people get treated like sub-humans.
> They're quite simply on the side of the owning class, even though they're not owners.
The most successful revolutionary leftist movements in the modern west are those taking up racial issues, from SNCC and the Black Panthers onwards.
> Black or white, the odds have to be 90%+ that the last "or else" order you obeyed was delivered under a wage-based threat.
The intensity of "else" in an "or else" order matters. Worrying about "the most recent one" is pure sampling bias. That's exactly the problem; the median worst case for working-class white leftists is losing their job. For others, regularly, it's their life.
I beg you, read some books by black, female, and queer leftists. They have good ideas.
It was a figure of speech, not any kind of "sampling" at all. I don't consider you to have addressed my point.
>That's exactly the problem; the median worst case for working-class white leftists is losing their job. For others, regularly, it's their life.
WTF is a "median worst case"?
You can certainly say: death rates for blacks are higher than whites. But the death rates in the USA are fairly low for any race; while the rates of having your entire life structured around class-imposed labor obligations are practically 100%! For every race!
You'd be surprised. While basic prejudice of course exists, much commonplace "profiling" is simply driven by statistical signals that happen to correlate with various sorts of bad behavior. Socially aware minorities who wish to actively mitigate this part of the problem (which is otherwise the hardest to address, for fairly obvious reasons) might want to start dressing up with suit and tie when out in public, and driving cars that are nicely-maintained but not too "blingy".
Of course, this goes to show the extent to which police profiling is in fact about broader notions of class and subculture, and not limited to race.
Having said that, the counter-examples to even that are legion: the professor who’s detained opening the door to his own house, the birdwatcher who gets the cops called on him, the college student shot while lost in the suburbs, the executive who’s pulled over all the time when turning into his neighborhood. (I’ll add to that a friend who was an NFL player whose frequent and threatening run-ins with the cops while playing in Georgia weren’t caused by sartorial or automotive lapses, but his white fiancé.)
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/03/19/race-class-deba...
In aggregate, the accumulative benefits of capital are denied them; black wealth crosses generations at a fraction of the rate white wealth does. In this sense it is hard to make a case for any black American being a member of the true capitalist class.
This is a relevant fact that seems like it may be amenable to intervention.
> black wealth crosses generations at a fraction of the rate white wealth does
Note that the factors that drive wealth preservation are also what drives wealth accumulation in the first place. When you've always been living in a more-or-less chaotic environment and almost no one around you is intimately familiar with a feasible alternative, it becomes really, really hard not to eat your marshmallow (or, to use a different image, your "seed corn"). This has nothing to do with race per se of course, but plenty with material conditions, even in a Marxian/Marxist sense.
You can stop writing after this, you've already agreed with me that class is not the sole driver of material inequality.
"Subculture" is also rooted in an ideology not centering class, and as you've used it (and as you ridiculously asserted elsewhere in the comments "the right has always been working to address prejudiced attitudes"), I suspect here it's a dogwhistle.
Of course, I could not agree more about that. My point is simply that a class-aware analysis might have plenty to say even about things that are often reduced to matters of "race".
> "Subculture" is also rooted in an ideology not centering class
Subculture in practice is highly correlated with class. In fact you might even call it a dogwhistle for class itself; though this discounts the extent to which "low-class subculture" may in fact be a fixable problem, in a way that would not increase alienation or marginalization for low-class folks and may well mitigate these things, while driving a renewed "working class cohesion" and perhaps "class conciousness" that should be compelling from even an orthodox Marxist point of view.
It seems like a category mistake to talk about class as "driver" of inequality.
Class is a _type_ of material inequality. So it can't "drive" material inequality. Right? What could that even mean?
Maybe this is taking "class" to mean something like birth class, like inheritance, or parental status... which then it actually does make sense... but that's not what the word means at all in Marxist terminology. It's not what leftists are saying at all.
Personally I am more agnostic about Marx's specific conclusions today; but if Fisher wants to call certain classes "class" but others "identitarian" I'll take his terms. But then I get to say "class is a driver of inequality" because it absolutely makes sense to say "Labor's subservience to capital is a driver of material inequality" even as it is also one type of material inequality. (Unless you think it stands so far apart from other kinds of inequality it cannot influence them at all - absolute bullshit.)
As I mentioned above, please also read Wark, where she covers in detail why she thinks Marx's analysis of extant classes is insufficient for today even as it purely pertains to labor relations.
Right. And to be concrete, it means people who control the distribution of wages, vs. people who are dependent on wages. A focus on class is a focus on the relationship between wage-workers and shareholders.
> it absolutely makes sense to say "Labor's subservience to capital is a driver of material inequality"
Well, I don't get it. Labor/capital is one form that subservience takes. It is a form of material inequality. I don't see how you can say that the subservience can "drive" the inequality.
"Subservience" is not a very specific term here btw, it's basically metaphorical... an individual laborer is literally subservient to their specific employer, but "labor" is not literally subservient to "capital." More specific concrete language would be much appreciated.
Edit:spelling, clarity
Sounds like a deflection, and inaccurate. The issues don't arise "outside" of the movement, they spring inevitably when there is enough traction and zeal because the mob doesn't understand nuance. Mobs are dogmatic and orthodox, and everything is a nail. The Fabians (a bougie socialist club intent on popularizing Socialism) had this fear about laymen should Socialism be in vogue, the Catholic Church about the Bible being interpreted by the public, etc. - they were all correct. Media of course is in it for the money, they just do what they've always done which is exploit salience.
Religious and other highly-conservative groups on the right practice exactly the same sort of shame, shunning, reactivity, and condemnation behaviors. They've practiced them longer than "woke" has been a thing[0].
Yet they get to rail about these things in the press without being told to take the log out of their own eye by either their own members or the supposedly-hostile press. The public lets the right set the agenda on "PC" or "woke" discussions instead of simply rolling their eyes and being like "how can the group that is trying to cancel people for not being obsequious enough to Trump say shit like this?"
It clearly isn't a communication style thing alone that results in people disliking it, or results in it being ineffective with some people. People who identify any complaint about any white person's behavior w.r.t. race as a personal attack on them don't care about the framing, they care about the message. "We fixed racism in the 60s, stop trying to be reverse racist" and stuff like that.
[0] See https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0924S9N7W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... from almost 30 years ago, talking about a long history even then, for instance.
one of the things the left is good at is being willing to admit to ideology. it is okay to have reasons, intentions, and motivations. pretending one does not, pretending ideological choices are innate and universal, and pretending one can avoid specificity when speaking are failures.
i just see them parrot 'narrative' over and over
Dressing up thoughts in symbols may seem like a marketability approach, or maybe an attack vector in the best traditions of fiction (the best sci-fi is, after all, merely a glass darkly by which to critique contemporary social ills), yet as Blair reminds us:
>"In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations."
So, jumping on pop-culture loaded symbols & jargon is a quick way to hijack sentiment or thought along well-dug rut of loaded connotation. Entirely valid critique.
Critical use of the term “woke” originated within the Left before the critique was superficially adopted by the Right and then the term was stripped of all meaning and used as a generic term for everything non-Right by the Right; much the same as happened with “political correctness”, which it became a drop-in replacement for on the Right, before it.
The obvious reason is ad-hominem thinking is very human and natural, and people will be more receptive to the same message sent by someone otherwise aligned with them than someone otherwise opposed to them.
Another possibility is that this article just plain expresses it better, more effectively, or captured an important nuance that your preferred people missed.
Player A joins the match for the other team after the half, but does not have the opportunity to make a goal that puts his team in the lead because the team's score has been adjusted from the unfair treatment. Has Player A been unfairly discriminated against?
Should your team just be happy they are now in a fair meritocracy and just get on with making goals instead of whining?
Player A's game is long ended. They won't even play again. But it's a long championship and they are winning. Now your team is on the last round and will tie with them on points if you win, but will lose on the goal-count tie-breaker. Should the referee grant you 30 goals on your game with an entirely different adversary?
And your adversary is on the same situation, they will also tie with A's points if they win. Now what should the referee do?
A solution here is largely academic, and not readily reached due to massive amounts of missing information.
However if the question is simply, is it fair for someone to lose first place because the second place categorization was biased? Sure, it definitely can be.
Do you really think this is how anyone on the left views the situation?! Folks on the left watch all the right-wing efforts to block LGBT rights, oppose Black Lives Matter, ban a religious minority from entering the country and conclude, "yep I disagree with those guys on issues, but it is true they're the ones working to fight prejudiced attitudes"?
Are conservatives not by definition trying to conserve the status quo?
https://kottke.org/21/02/conservatism-and-who-the-law-protec...
You could argue that progressive mechanisms like affirmative action are just the same in reverse, and it's true that progressive politics in the US still has a conservative tinge.
But there are differences. AA is seen as a temporary rebalancing measure, while conservative privilege is seen as the natural and divinely ordained order of things, for all eternity.
It's essentially personal monarchy, as against anti-conservatism which is more layered and complex.
IIRC, in the American context there are very, very few conservatives like that. Everyone has some revolutionary project they're working towards, they're just very different and incompatible.
From one perspective, A lot of rank-and-file "conservatives" are probably more likely to take the social conservative stances in earnest, while being open to progressive economic policy, while the majority of their leadership absolutely prioritizes economic conservatism over the social element. The leadership merely uses the social aspects as a carrot to motivate what voting-base they can get, co-opting social conservative leadership into their own ranks, while obscuring the United States Chamber of Commerce lobby agenda. Rank-and-file conservatives are given reinforcement by their leadership to disapprove of progressive economic policy aesthetically, but are not ultimately able to fully overcome the pull of some of the material benefits that could be politically had without wrapping specific progressive political agenda into one big package with cultural divisions.
And that's not to deny that their aren't small business/contract work types that are both socially conservative and economically conservative through-and-through, but they aren't numerous enough to fill out the vast voting ranks need.
You could probably make the case that the Democratic Party are the real economic conservatives in a sense; Wanting to maintain the 30 or 40 year globalizing economic status quo, whereas "conservatives" that identify with the Republican party want to roll back to an idealized past, with a more nationally focused, but still liberal economy.
Then there is also the problem of popular US politics and their terms being too narrowly scoped when considering political movements from a fuller perspective. "Conservatives" call Democrats leftist as a pejorative, when neither Democrats or most self-identifying leftist would really consider the Democratic party far from center on economics, and probably conservative from a global perspective.
I disagree. The "neo-reactionaries" I'm familiar seems ridiculously, over-the-top radical. It's like libartarianism taken so far it had an integer overflow and wrapped around to monarchism.
It's not conservative to want to blow up society an replace it with a mockery of an old one that rejects what everyone across the political spectrum actually believes now.
Notably, the voters tend not to like neoliberalism and globalization and to be big fans of "why don't they just..." solutions for various problems—say, "why don't they just build a wall at the border?" Sound like any recent, prominent R politicians? Yep—he seems to have noticed the large gap between the Republican Party platform and what the average Republican voter you talk to at a diner says they want, then exploited that gap, which worked because the gap is very real and pretty large.
This occasionally got a bit weird, like in some of his speeches about how he'd provide "beautiful" healthcare to everyone, which seemed strangely close to some kind of (very vague) messaging about adding a public option of some kind of universal coverage and was met with cheering by his audience. This is because left- and right-wing populism in the US share a surprising amount in common, but those issues and commonalities are often ignored or deliberately sidelined by party elites. This is related to how laws that get passed and policies that are enacted are disturbingly disconnected from public sentiment generally.
(none of this should be taken as an endorsement of the former president, I'm just observing the lay of the electoral landscape and how he exploited that. I am also not claiming that a similar difference between typical voters and party leaders/platform doesn't exist for the Democrats—it absolutely does. This is all probably a result of our really shitty FPTP elections.)
My understanding is that "woke" started as shorthand for criticism from POCs towards their nominal white allies (progressives, Democrats, etc). "I know you're trying to help. Please stop."
One recurring affront, of allies doing more harm than good, that I've observed many times is "white knighting" (correct term?).
A white person will argue in defense of a black position (or cause). While there's black people present, trying to be heard.
The correct action would be for a white person to concede their time to a black person. So that we can hear first-hand their input about policies and decisions impacting them. "I don't know. Let's ask a black person what they think."
My criticism of wokeness, as a middle class white blue hair, is that maybe haranguing people is not the most effective strategy. Just like how fat shaming back fires.
Personal example. I have a friend whose compulsion is to correct my misgendering of others, while I'm talking. Each and every time. Are they really listening to me? Or are they just waiting for me to fuck up and pounce, demonstrating their greater virtue? It's exhausting.
Sure, I want to get the genders correct, and certainly don't want to inadvertently offend any one, especially not punch down. But decades of habit don't change over night. And how the fuck am I supposed to know when someone's picked a new pronoun for themselves? Is there a gender registry some where I can reference in real-time?
I can't comment specifically on the reactionaries' criticism of wokeness. I assume whatever they're fluffed up about is just part of another grift.
One example would be people who are elevating Zelenskyy to superhero status. It's quite likely that Zelenskyy is a flawed person, like the overwhelming majority of us, and making weird lionizing memes of him echoes the same shirtless horse-riding personality cult stuff that preceded Putin's actions.
Yet, however overblown the worship or however ineffective 'thoughts & prayers' may be for Ukraine, there's an actual population of people being invaded by another country for reasons most people find entirely objectionable. This stands regardless of whether or not someone is suggesting we boycott the YMCA for not putting a Ukranian flag emote in their twitter profile.
Because two groups can agree on the problem but disagree on the solution. For the left, the solution to the "woke" problem is de-centering identity in order to further the cause of anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, etc; for the right, the solution to the "woke" problem is to deny that any of the problems raised by the "woke" are problems at all -- and in fact to center identity.
> The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.