Along with doing a monthly update of my own and other people’s writing, I’ve decided to try a monthly ‘open comment’ post here on From The Forests of Arduinna. As I’ve been cutting back and will soon completely end my social media use, this will be a more sane way of having conversations with people (that is, you!) who read me.
This month’s topic is on “the old left.” You’ve probably noticed, as have countless others, that some old foundational core of the left has been pretty much abandoned in what we label the “woke left.” There was once an attempt to draw in large groups of people by speaking to their material concerns, but now very little is about economic or material problems and now mostly about identity.
What are the problems you’ve seen? Why do you think this is happening? Do you still identify with the left? Have you found yourself in the position I mention in my previous essay, where you’re suddenly labeled right wing or reactionary for still holding on to core leftist values the “woke left” has abandoned?
Respond any way you like, and I’ll take some time to reply. Note that these won’t be immediate social-media replies (we rarely take time to think about our responses any more), but I will definitely reply.
I saw an old politically incorrect with Bill Maher episode from the '90s in which Karen Finley proclaimed smugly that white people are poor because they're racist. As somebody who has worked with the poor I can say that I have seen more open bigotry from that demographic than I see in others. But this goes across all racial demographics. While I'm sure everybody here hates Thomas Sorrell he did write correctly that White liberals tolerate in the fold, and often fetishize, behavior and attitudes in Blacks that they abhor in poor Whites
I've noticed that too when it comes to hostility towards men. You have to specify that it's white men that you are blaming. Almost invariably when a friend posts about an obnoxious encounter she had with a man she specifically notes that he's white despite it being completely irrelevant to the story.
I can't fathom how anybody can say with a straight face that white men are more backwards when it comes to treatment of women, gays, minorities, classism and so on then men of other racial groups. I'm sure you could cherry pick examples of it but looking at it systemically and not as individual incidences it's clearly not the case.
I can only talk about the internet left because that is admittedly my only actual experience, but then, I think super-wokeness is an internet phenomenon in the first place.
I think that the difference between 'actual left' and the 'liberals' is what applies here. I know its not original, but I think its applicable anyway.
The actual left still speaks to the material concerns of everyday people and is not circling the wagon by alienating the not-as-woke by refusing to talk to them. They are (important!) anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist with a keen understanding of propaganda and narrative management.
Prominent media/internet figures that I count among them are Lee Camp and Eleanor Goldfield (who says she's pagan by the way), Jimmy Dore, Graham Elwood, Caitlin Johnstone, Aaron Mate, Glenn Greenwald, Danny Haiphong, Briahna Joy Gray, Katie Halper, Ryan Knight, even people like Russell Brand and of course their many many guests whom I can't name all. I think you called them the dirtbag left a while ago.
Now, liberals are different. Liberals are the pretend left that has been bred by publications like the New York Times or the Huffpost. They are preoccupied with the most infinitesimal distillations of ephemeral wokeness (while at the same time, fuck them, willing to use misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia when it suits them) and use these as a cudgel to silence both the population and the actual left. These people are journalists and authors with contacts to power OR ambitions to well paid careers at these publications and all the well-off people who read newspapers like that and are actually quite comfortable with the status quo.
And of course there are just many many non-wealthy propagandized people who make up the liberal left. The New York Times is the absolute plague.
I suppose this is a fairly non-spiritual and not super original analysis but I guess it can start us off with some basic thoughts...
I'm German by the way, so from an American perspective this is an outside view. But I feel like the discourse is even deader and more boring here in Germany, and even more hopeless, so I follow the English language one. As long as, frankly, empire exists in its current form, nothing here in Germany will change anyway, in my opinion.
I was familiar with most (but not all!) of your list, so you've just given me some good new people to check out, thanks!
An interesting thing, and perhaps you are aware of this, there is a large smearing campaign happening against some of those (especially Aaron Mate and Glenn Greenwald). There's been a significant push to label them crypto-fascists by the "woke" American left, especially by specific Antifa figures like Alexander Reed Ross (and even Shane Burley, who used to write for the press I run, has also taken up these smears in social media posts).
In fact, I mentioned on social media that I read Greenwald and someone suggested I'd gone "radical traditionalist."
And you're right that there is money and financial interest in a lot of this. I've started tracking the funding sources of orgs and sites that push the woke line and am starting to see some interesting funding patterns (including The Ford Foundation and Open Societies Foundation).
But even without getting into conspiracy, there is the basic fact that, if you are a tech worker with a six figure income in a west coast American city, it's easier to post #BLM on your twitter and learn to be "woke" than it is to support economic policies that would make the lives of all the poor, especially black people, better.
If you're part of the professional managerial class (the "petite bourgeoisie"), you definitely don't want the people worse off than you talking about redistribution of wealth. Much better if they talk about systematic oppression, because then you can perform some sort of public support and keep your way of life intact and unnoticed.
Sistersmith: Thanks for this. I agree with you on pretty much every point. It also occurs to me from reading Rhyd Wildermuth's (especially the recent) posts that in the U S of A we are dealing with puritanical liberals versus a left that can't decide whether to maintain a materialist (give people real benefits = old left) point of view or get into cultural issues (which are too varied and too fluid to be the basis of a political movement). Almost all of the writers you name, particularly Jimmy Dore and Briahna Joy Gray, talk about giving people real benefits (Medicare for All, end of endless wars, debt forgiveness) and let people make their own decisions. So the old left still exists.
The cultural-warrior left worries, though, because the cultural wars are endless--and profitable. (And the cultural left abdicates its responsibilities to NGOs and foundations, which we are discovering are wildly corrupt. Consider the work of Anand Giridharadas.)
I am reading a catalogue essay about the amazing Greek painter Yannis Tsarouchis (give his work a look) and the essayist talks about Western religion as requiring confession. The "left" has to stop being confessional--asking for us to list our sins and then canceling people with elaborate penances. Surprisingly, the origin of this idea is Michel Foucault.
I am lucky in that I can follow Italian politics and events closely: In Italy, the old communists are still around (although some remarkable people have died in the last few years). The idea of equality and real benefits still animates Italian politics.
At the same time, the old left in Italy has a tradition of service. A representative of a labor union helped me to get my correct "social security number," for instance. Arci is an enormous association of groups that originally was the communists creating organizations for "leisure" time for workers. The Italian LGBT movement comes out of communism = read Mario Mieli's Toward a Gay Communism, eh.
Rhyd Wildermuth's writing on right-hand religion (restrictive) and left-hand religion (disruptive) points toward a problem in the U.S. left--the reliance on belief and the reliance on U.S. cultural paradigms, which very often have become religious.
As someone with Hermes on the mantelpiece, I can deal with restriction/disruption. The last "Mercury in retrograde" was loads of fun.
But the U.S. left can't get itself out of "believing." "Be" the change is not leftist praxis. There has to be action, not just self-improvement.
And, yes, the NYTimes is pretty much bourgeois good feelings on parade. Thirty-six hours in Rio, indeed.
You bring up something I think is crucial and deeply missing in the modern conceptions of the left.
Old union houses and party halls (be those anarcho-syndicalist, socialist, communist, etc) were not just political sites but cultural sites. They functioned a bit like the village church did in medieval villages (and even still in some places in Europe). You met there for community, for help, to find work or other opportunities, to talk about your grievances, even to find a mate. They were social services places too.
Your wife have a miscarriage? The guys there tell their wives and they go take care of her while you work.
Your husband locked up by the police? They go bail him out.
What passes for that kind of solidarity in the US are basically pop-up "mutual aid" networks, but you better have the right politics and use the right pronouns if you want help. In that way, they function more like Christian urban homeless shelters, places where you can get a free meal and a spot on the floor to sleep on but you have to listen to a two hour sermon before you get to eat.
And you're totally right about the confessional part, remembering that "confession" wasn't just telling what you did wrong but repeating dogma weekly in mass ("I believe in the God/ I believe Gender is Performative").
Things have changed a lot since I got involved in the left. In the mid 2000s I was involved in an anarchist activist scene in Canada. At that point there wasn't a woke left. There was a student movement left and labour left who were entangled with parliamentary politics. There were also some ancient Stalinists and anarchists of various descriptions. At that time I was reading folks like Freddy Perlman, Feral Faun, Gilles Dauve, Alfredo Bonnano, Zig Zag, Federici, etc. Most of the leftists I interact with today only know Federici. I think they are really into Donna Haraway, bell hooks, and whomever else they were told to read in school. No one at the time apologized for reading books by men or white men. Life happened and I ended up back in the US and now in Europe.
In the US my connections with the left were slim to nil. I listened to Chapo for a few years before losing interest during 2020. I was involved in a failed attempt to organize grad students with the SEIU. I also went to a few BLM protests in St Louis where I was told that I was supposed to be a human shield for black and other non white protesters. I thought this was both strange and stupid. It would never have happened a few years before. No one seemed to care about your race at an anti-globalization protest.
Today the folks I know on the left in Europe are former squatters and are either fully absorbed in woke politics or find it obnoxious, humorless, and puritanical but are politically estranged from struggle. It seems like the folks involved in the woke left are more likely to have gone to university and studied something like gender studies, anthropology, fine art, etc (no surprise). Some of them are also now involved in parliamentarian politics via a new identitarian left party. I tend to think (like many) that wokeness has its origin in the American university system. However, I also think there is a connection between an increasingly identitarian woke left and the world of therapy and mental health. I personally think the identitarian woke impulse is fueled by a sense of victimhood and resentment an impulse that seemed largely absent from the anarchists scene of the mid 2000s. Folks weren't talking about their traumatic experiences with white cis het men or whomever. Folks weren't involved in politicizing the bathrooms of art spaces. Folks were more likely to be fantasizing about autonomy from the state and capital via ecovillages or building working class organizations to fuck with landlords and politicians.
Today, my politics are mainly centered around my hatred of work and my desire to live as I choose. I'd probably identify as a Leftist if asked but I'm more likely to read Ernst Junger than Karl Marx most days of the week. I didn't vote in the last US election. I haven't voted in the last twenty years. My girlfriend also still identifies as a leftist if pressed but she would rather talk about UFOs than woke shit (which she has little time for, more than me but that aint hard).
__"I personally think the identitarian woke impulse is fueled by a sense of victimhood and resentment an impulse that seemed largely absent from the anarchists scene of the mid 2000s. Folks weren't talking about their traumatic experiences with white cis het men or whomever. Folks weren't involved in politicizing the bathrooms of art spaces. Folks were more likely to be fantasizing about autonomy from the state and capital via ecovillages or building working class organizations to fuck with landlords and politicians.
__
Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm working on a book regarding all of this, and i really think ressentiment is the key issue here. I keep thinking to an experience I had at Occupy Seattle, where a General Assembly were completely hijacked by a person who had a literal manic episode. That person demanded everyone take responsibility for her trauma (she was a trans women sex worker) and wouldn't let the meeting continue until she felt satisfied with people's responses.
The only thing that ended that melodrama was the arrival of the riot cops demanding we all leave the square. It felt almost like the two events were related, though I know they were not.
Also, you mention Donna Haraway. I think she is key to a lot of this, even more so than Judith Butler. Her works provides a perfect justification for the declarative internet identity that most of the woke left now assumes is matter-of-fact. That's pretty much the point of the cyborg: you are already in the machine, part of it, so use the machine to create yourself. So now we have 200 variants of neo-pronouns, a hundred different genders (or 58 genders according to Facebook's gender selection option), and no end to configurations of sexuality.
Haraway is also interesting because she too has moved away from more traditional left positions towards interspecies sci-fi post-capitalism. Is Haraway's political development part of a more general movement in academia away from the old left towards wokeness or radical liberalism? Also, if we are in a moment where there is "no end to configurations of sexuality" this can be connected to something beyond the internet, such as the growth of university education and particularly the growth of particular fields such as gender studies. Both the university and the internet are subject/subjectivity forming devices. And what does it mean to have one's sexuality/sex/gender organized in this manner rather than via the family, neighborhood, village, tribe, as was the norm for a long ass time?
Yes yes yes, a thousand yes to everything. Especially:
"Folks were more likely to be fantasizing about autonomy from the state and capital via ecovillages or building working class organizations to fuck with landlords and politicians."
Came here to repeat my comment on your "Declining Sperm Counts" essay:
This is tangential to your main point, but you mention that mens' movements are considered enemies of the Left. Do you think that studies and discourse in the vein of the "Mythic Masculine" (Ian MacKenzie) or "Inner Throne" (Eivind Skjellum) type of thing might have the future potential to reclaim a model of masculinity for the left? Right now my impression is that those viewpoints are so obscure that Centrist Leftists have not bothered to notice them, let alone critique them. On the other hand Charles Eisenstein -- he is not exactly a famous figure, yet he is an ascendant leftist viewpoint. And even he had a Mythic Masculine course at some point. It wasn't one of his most popular ones, but it was there.
As far as your broader point, about my experiences with the "new left"...
* First note that one of the few other authors on Substack whom I bother to subscribe to, Matt Taibbi, has been saying rather similar stuff to you, for a year or more. Do you read his stuff? Now, I criticize Matt because a lot of his writing makes it seem like American 20-somethings with teal haircuts are _literally_ a new Red Guard who are about to make the streets run with blood. My reply is that the "woke" firings and so forth that Matt complains about, are actually performed by middle-class HR bureaucrats because, like everything else they do, they believe rightly or wrongly that it's to their corporate advantage, including at the newspapers and Universities which are all corporations anyway. It's not the 20-somethings with teal hair who are literally destroying peoples' lives; it is to the advantage of these corporations and Universities to funnel all dissent and political discourse into predictable channels that they can supervise and excommunicate people from. So they do so and then _make a show_ of mouthing the woke buzzwords. But in the end it's all for profit and control, by the bureaucrats, not the woke kids. In his later writings Matt seems to acknowledge that idea. How about you?
* IMHO the core of the entire problem was identified by my other favorite Druid, JMG: Long ago he wrote that, at the end of an Empire, it is a real tangible problem with real-life effects, that words have lost their meanings. Every political or cultural term has been grabbed up to swing like a blunt instrument by partisans seeking any momentary advantage, so all our vocabulary now carries around huge amounts of contradictory baggage and nobody can be sure how sincere a speaker is, or what they actually mean when they use some highly charged word. Since the meanings of technical and useful cultural/political words have become hopelessly muddied, this makes it impossible to have a dialog and address real problems. And thus, confused vocabulary is a significant factor in the collapse of a late-stage Empire.
That seems to be my experience, that nobody can talk to each other anymore because the words carry too much baggage, and that means younger people picking up this "woke" vocabulary can't even really _think_ clearly anymore. I am firmly convinced that the vast bulk of young activists today are not malicious, they want justice and fairness and compassion. But the failure of language and thought is yet one more millstone, in addition to economic and cultural ones, which holds them back from achieving it.
__"it is to the advantage of these corporations and Universities to funnel all dissent and political discourse into predictable channels that they can supervise and excommunicate people from"
Yeah, definitely. Especially because they can shape that dissent away from any sort of populist anti-capitalist desire.
But I would add to your point that if it isn't the teal haired 20 somethings destroying society, we'd also have to admit it wasn't the average Trump-voter destroying society either. Try getting the woke to admit that.
In general regarding Matt, he's another one that leftists aren't allowed to read anymore, along with Glenn Greenwald. I follow them both, of course. :P
And speaking of the "other" druid, I have a review of his latest book coming up soon. It's pretty positive.
Eisenstein is great. And so is the idea of the Mythic Masculine. But in this climate, to even say 'masculine' without the all important "toxic" before it is a kind of suicide on the left.
Which is why more and more men just gravitate towards the right.
Some very good observations here. I would only add that as a *practical* political matter, universal programs are always popular and targeted ones never are. For example, in the US, Medicare and Social Security would be hard to mess with (though our neoliberal overlords really want to) but "welfare" was an easy target. The latter being means-tested and targeted to "the poor" -- nobody, of course, wants to be poor or considered poor -- and the former being universal. Idpol of course by nature turns away from the universal.
Absolutely. You know, there is a program in Oakland to test a form of basic income, but it is only given to randomly selected qualifying black and indigenous families.
It's been called an early attempt at reparations, but of course that sort of thing will only increase racial tension when you target it only based on skin color.
The more universal way to do this would be to target an income threshold. That would still mean black people receive the majority of the benefit (because capitalism keeps them poor), but that would also capture in other poor people. And since that would include white people, the woke left intelligentsia (many of them professional managerial class) would oppose it viciously.
Have you taken a look at Peter Barnes' "With Liberty and Dividends for All"? Barnes does a kind of mental judo on long held divisions and argues that every Americans can get a nontrivial annual income if every resource that is not produced by creativity and labor (from minerals to band-with and more) was publicly owned and subject to bids with the highest bidders getting access and the proceeds divvied up equally among everyone. The basic idea started with Thomas Paine and has had advocates that today would be considered right leaning in some cases and left in others. It's a short book.
I don't know how to classify my politics anymore. I think I'm sympathetic to the idea of being a "LeGuinist Anarchist", but I am definitely feeling further and further estranged from woke thought.
I'm black and middle class. I've never been poor but I spent a large part of my childhood in a poor/working class, multicultural neighbourhood. My family was definitely more comfortable than most of my friends, including the white ones. I bring this up because, based on my experience, a lot of the stuff that the "Woke" attribute to racism/anti-blackness seems to be more linked to poverty.
I used to call myself Woke. I think things started to change in 2016 when Trump was elected. It seemed to me that there were real, material reasons driving people to vote for him but almost no one in my real life circles wanted to hear that. Instead it happened because all white people are irremediably racist and because...**RUSSIA**. I still had some hope at that time though because that was when Bernie Sanders entered the spotlight, and I was hoping that eventually we would get to a place of the left centring material conditions, and pushing for policies that could benefit all working/middle class people.
The so called "racial reckoning" that started last summer has been a turning point for me. I think if there is any way I could describe how I feel about what has happened, it's that I feel gaslit. Suddenly my social media was inundated with posts about how much the world is against me because of my race. This did not match up with the world that I actually live in. Have I experienced racism? Yes. But is it a factor in every single breath I take? Absolutely not. I'm educated, I've had a lot of opportunity to travel, I don't lack materially - overall I would say that I live a very privileged life. And yet my phenotype is supposedly some sort of unescapable caste, that will doom me and my kin for eternity.
Anyways, I don't really know what my politics are any more. I found myself drawn to reading right wing twitter threads critical of Critical Race Theory just so I could see **something** that would rebut what to me seems like utter insanity. I'm glad to have found your writing, and AngieSpeaks videos for counterpoints from a left wing perspective. I am not interested in being part of a Left that can only see me as a downtrodden victim with zero agency.
I have a somewhat... complicated relationship to the whole "woke"/"anti-woke" discourse. I don't really see a conflict between identity-based and class-based politics. For me the adoption of, say, feminist critique (a la Federici) isn't a retreat from class analysis, but rather an essential part of the understanding how capitalism and class reproduce itself. Same goes for race. For me the question of whether "race" or "class" is more important borders on nonsensical—they're all part of the same machine.
I do think that there is a somewhat interesting story about how identity politics—which is something that came from Marxist thinkers like Fanon, Davis, Lorde, the Combahee River Collective, etc.—got co-opted by liberals—but also I think the solution isn't to abandon identity altogether, but rather to show that leftists are the ones who have a better, more comprehensive solution, because we do. "Everyone deserves to have their needs met" is always going to be a more appealing story than "maybe if you elect a Democrat we'll give you a tax credit for doctor's visits so long as you fill out this mountain of paperwork and can prove you're searching for a job."
For me the most interesting side is the personal side: given that we all live in a deeply cruel, unjust world, how do we make the most of the one life we have to live? The idea that we must constantly burn ourselves out fighting for justice that will never come strikes me as some sort of vestigial Christian belief. But striking the balance between apathy and zealotry is hard.
There's also the interpersonal side of things, too. Something I think a lot about is how social justice rhetoric gets weaponized in personal interactions. There are a lot of genuinely abusive people out there who are all too happy to co-opt social justice logic as a tool of abuse. I don't think it's anything unique to social justice—abusers can craft whatever is around into a tool for controlling others—but it's sad to watch. What hurts the most is that, inevitably, it's always the marginalized and oppressed using it to abuse other marginalized and oppressed. Hurt people hurt people.
Somewhat related to this is the absolutely bizarre intra-community queer discourse. My partner is a writer and so I'm privy to the gossip of the trans literary fiction world, and every week there's somebody getting dogpiled and harassed because they made uncomfortable art, or because they had the temerity to disparage YA, genre fiction, fanfiction, or popular art. But in those cases, I think it's less an insidious ideology and more just the fact that the people running these harassment campaigns and doing this discourse are literally just children. The perennial problem with the queer discourse is that two years after you come out you're not really interested in talking about being queer online anymore, and so the discourse is entirely dominated by those least qualified to speak.
Yes, I am deeply at odds with many leftists of all kinds (hardcore Stalinists, postmodern liberals, raging angry anarcho-punks, insecure white wokes, etc.), and yet I can't consider myself anything else. What I simply can't stand anywhere is just good old fanaticism and dogmatism. The feeling I have with these cliques is that gods help you if you happen to either counterargument a Woke about an overcomplicated theory, a hypocritical Stalinist about the guy's despicable behaviour, or a liberal about their rampant pro-capitalistic attitude. And that's not healthy. And that's the very reason why the left can never agree or build a coherent and cohesive front. The right also has its inconsistencies and infighting, but they are usually so dogmatic that they'll prioritise one absolute truth. On the left, being critical is the basis of a healthy political attitude, but at the same time there's still a political need to gather and unify in order to pursue certain goals. Although, as mentioned above, not as consistently. Meanwhile, this pointless emphasizing of two sides where one is the chosen path leads those who disagree with certain individuals in both sides to be mislabeled either as an adversary (a "dirty cuck commie" or an "oppressive fascist") or worse, as an "equidistant" (a term we use in Spain nowadays), i.e., a careless moderate or unengaging simpleton that tolerates the other extreme.
I'm always going to be an anti-fascist and I'm always going to align with leftist concerns, but I refuse to be set on a scale or a graphical measure of any kind, cos these bloody categorisations are ruining humanity and our place in existence (which is outside of our hubristic and egotistical minds).
Urbanites and people with that mind need to meet more farmers, native peoples, and traditional cultures and stop pretending to represent or understand their history from a room.
I saw an old politically incorrect with Bill Maher episode from the '90s in which Karen Finley proclaimed smugly that white people are poor because they're racist. As somebody who has worked with the poor I can say that I have seen more open bigotry from that demographic than I see in others. But this goes across all racial demographics. While I'm sure everybody here hates Thomas Sorrell he did write correctly that White liberals tolerate in the fold, and often fetishize, behavior and attitudes in Blacks that they abhor in poor Whites
I first noticed that sort of thing in talks about "toxic masculinity," that there was a double standard there:
Women are constantly victimized and should be afraid of men.
But also,
A white woman who is afraid of a black man is racist.
There are many, many more contradictions with that, especially around gender.
A person should never be shamed for whom they desire
But also,
A gay man who doesn't want to have sex with a trans man is an evil transphobe.
I've noticed that too when it comes to hostility towards men. You have to specify that it's white men that you are blaming. Almost invariably when a friend posts about an obnoxious encounter she had with a man she specifically notes that he's white despite it being completely irrelevant to the story.
I can't fathom how anybody can say with a straight face that white men are more backwards when it comes to treatment of women, gays, minorities, classism and so on then men of other racial groups. I'm sure you could cherry pick examples of it but looking at it systemically and not as individual incidences it's clearly not the case.
absolutely. I think they are actually kind of disgusted by anyone who works any sort of manual labor, especially.
Okay, I'll make a start.
I can only talk about the internet left because that is admittedly my only actual experience, but then, I think super-wokeness is an internet phenomenon in the first place.
I think that the difference between 'actual left' and the 'liberals' is what applies here. I know its not original, but I think its applicable anyway.
The actual left still speaks to the material concerns of everyday people and is not circling the wagon by alienating the not-as-woke by refusing to talk to them. They are (important!) anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist with a keen understanding of propaganda and narrative management.
Prominent media/internet figures that I count among them are Lee Camp and Eleanor Goldfield (who says she's pagan by the way), Jimmy Dore, Graham Elwood, Caitlin Johnstone, Aaron Mate, Glenn Greenwald, Danny Haiphong, Briahna Joy Gray, Katie Halper, Ryan Knight, even people like Russell Brand and of course their many many guests whom I can't name all. I think you called them the dirtbag left a while ago.
Now, liberals are different. Liberals are the pretend left that has been bred by publications like the New York Times or the Huffpost. They are preoccupied with the most infinitesimal distillations of ephemeral wokeness (while at the same time, fuck them, willing to use misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia when it suits them) and use these as a cudgel to silence both the population and the actual left. These people are journalists and authors with contacts to power OR ambitions to well paid careers at these publications and all the well-off people who read newspapers like that and are actually quite comfortable with the status quo.
And of course there are just many many non-wealthy propagandized people who make up the liberal left. The New York Times is the absolute plague.
I suppose this is a fairly non-spiritual and not super original analysis but I guess it can start us off with some basic thoughts...
I'm German by the way, so from an American perspective this is an outside view. But I feel like the discourse is even deader and more boring here in Germany, and even more hopeless, so I follow the English language one. As long as, frankly, empire exists in its current form, nothing here in Germany will change anyway, in my opinion.
Ah, just to add, when I say 'I think you called them the dirtbag left a while ago' I of course understood that that was tongue-in-cheek.
I was familiar with most (but not all!) of your list, so you've just given me some good new people to check out, thanks!
An interesting thing, and perhaps you are aware of this, there is a large smearing campaign happening against some of those (especially Aaron Mate and Glenn Greenwald). There's been a significant push to label them crypto-fascists by the "woke" American left, especially by specific Antifa figures like Alexander Reed Ross (and even Shane Burley, who used to write for the press I run, has also taken up these smears in social media posts).
In fact, I mentioned on social media that I read Greenwald and someone suggested I'd gone "radical traditionalist."
And you're right that there is money and financial interest in a lot of this. I've started tracking the funding sources of orgs and sites that push the woke line and am starting to see some interesting funding patterns (including The Ford Foundation and Open Societies Foundation).
But even without getting into conspiracy, there is the basic fact that, if you are a tech worker with a six figure income in a west coast American city, it's easier to post #BLM on your twitter and learn to be "woke" than it is to support economic policies that would make the lives of all the poor, especially black people, better.
If you're part of the professional managerial class (the "petite bourgeoisie"), you definitely don't want the people worse off than you talking about redistribution of wealth. Much better if they talk about systematic oppression, because then you can perform some sort of public support and keep your way of life intact and unnoticed.
Sistersmith: Thanks for this. I agree with you on pretty much every point. It also occurs to me from reading Rhyd Wildermuth's (especially the recent) posts that in the U S of A we are dealing with puritanical liberals versus a left that can't decide whether to maintain a materialist (give people real benefits = old left) point of view or get into cultural issues (which are too varied and too fluid to be the basis of a political movement). Almost all of the writers you name, particularly Jimmy Dore and Briahna Joy Gray, talk about giving people real benefits (Medicare for All, end of endless wars, debt forgiveness) and let people make their own decisions. So the old left still exists.
The cultural-warrior left worries, though, because the cultural wars are endless--and profitable. (And the cultural left abdicates its responsibilities to NGOs and foundations, which we are discovering are wildly corrupt. Consider the work of Anand Giridharadas.)
I am reading a catalogue essay about the amazing Greek painter Yannis Tsarouchis (give his work a look) and the essayist talks about Western religion as requiring confession. The "left" has to stop being confessional--asking for us to list our sins and then canceling people with elaborate penances. Surprisingly, the origin of this idea is Michel Foucault.
I am lucky in that I can follow Italian politics and events closely: In Italy, the old communists are still around (although some remarkable people have died in the last few years). The idea of equality and real benefits still animates Italian politics.
At the same time, the old left in Italy has a tradition of service. A representative of a labor union helped me to get my correct "social security number," for instance. Arci is an enormous association of groups that originally was the communists creating organizations for "leisure" time for workers. The Italian LGBT movement comes out of communism = read Mario Mieli's Toward a Gay Communism, eh.
Rhyd Wildermuth's writing on right-hand religion (restrictive) and left-hand religion (disruptive) points toward a problem in the U.S. left--the reliance on belief and the reliance on U.S. cultural paradigms, which very often have become religious.
As someone with Hermes on the mantelpiece, I can deal with restriction/disruption. The last "Mercury in retrograde" was loads of fun.
But the U.S. left can't get itself out of "believing." "Be" the change is not leftist praxis. There has to be action, not just self-improvement.
And, yes, the NYTimes is pretty much bourgeois good feelings on parade. Thirty-six hours in Rio, indeed.
You bring up something I think is crucial and deeply missing in the modern conceptions of the left.
Old union houses and party halls (be those anarcho-syndicalist, socialist, communist, etc) were not just political sites but cultural sites. They functioned a bit like the village church did in medieval villages (and even still in some places in Europe). You met there for community, for help, to find work or other opportunities, to talk about your grievances, even to find a mate. They were social services places too.
Your wife have a miscarriage? The guys there tell their wives and they go take care of her while you work.
Your husband locked up by the police? They go bail him out.
What passes for that kind of solidarity in the US are basically pop-up "mutual aid" networks, but you better have the right politics and use the right pronouns if you want help. In that way, they function more like Christian urban homeless shelters, places where you can get a free meal and a spot on the floor to sleep on but you have to listen to a two hour sermon before you get to eat.
And you're totally right about the confessional part, remembering that "confession" wasn't just telling what you did wrong but repeating dogma weekly in mass ("I believe in the God/ I believe Gender is Performative").
Things have changed a lot since I got involved in the left. In the mid 2000s I was involved in an anarchist activist scene in Canada. At that point there wasn't a woke left. There was a student movement left and labour left who were entangled with parliamentary politics. There were also some ancient Stalinists and anarchists of various descriptions. At that time I was reading folks like Freddy Perlman, Feral Faun, Gilles Dauve, Alfredo Bonnano, Zig Zag, Federici, etc. Most of the leftists I interact with today only know Federici. I think they are really into Donna Haraway, bell hooks, and whomever else they were told to read in school. No one at the time apologized for reading books by men or white men. Life happened and I ended up back in the US and now in Europe.
In the US my connections with the left were slim to nil. I listened to Chapo for a few years before losing interest during 2020. I was involved in a failed attempt to organize grad students with the SEIU. I also went to a few BLM protests in St Louis where I was told that I was supposed to be a human shield for black and other non white protesters. I thought this was both strange and stupid. It would never have happened a few years before. No one seemed to care about your race at an anti-globalization protest.
Today the folks I know on the left in Europe are former squatters and are either fully absorbed in woke politics or find it obnoxious, humorless, and puritanical but are politically estranged from struggle. It seems like the folks involved in the woke left are more likely to have gone to university and studied something like gender studies, anthropology, fine art, etc (no surprise). Some of them are also now involved in parliamentarian politics via a new identitarian left party. I tend to think (like many) that wokeness has its origin in the American university system. However, I also think there is a connection between an increasingly identitarian woke left and the world of therapy and mental health. I personally think the identitarian woke impulse is fueled by a sense of victimhood and resentment an impulse that seemed largely absent from the anarchists scene of the mid 2000s. Folks weren't talking about their traumatic experiences with white cis het men or whomever. Folks weren't involved in politicizing the bathrooms of art spaces. Folks were more likely to be fantasizing about autonomy from the state and capital via ecovillages or building working class organizations to fuck with landlords and politicians.
Today, my politics are mainly centered around my hatred of work and my desire to live as I choose. I'd probably identify as a Leftist if asked but I'm more likely to read Ernst Junger than Karl Marx most days of the week. I didn't vote in the last US election. I haven't voted in the last twenty years. My girlfriend also still identifies as a leftist if pressed but she would rather talk about UFOs than woke shit (which she has little time for, more than me but that aint hard).
__"I personally think the identitarian woke impulse is fueled by a sense of victimhood and resentment an impulse that seemed largely absent from the anarchists scene of the mid 2000s. Folks weren't talking about their traumatic experiences with white cis het men or whomever. Folks weren't involved in politicizing the bathrooms of art spaces. Folks were more likely to be fantasizing about autonomy from the state and capital via ecovillages or building working class organizations to fuck with landlords and politicians.
__
Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm working on a book regarding all of this, and i really think ressentiment is the key issue here. I keep thinking to an experience I had at Occupy Seattle, where a General Assembly were completely hijacked by a person who had a literal manic episode. That person demanded everyone take responsibility for her trauma (she was a trans women sex worker) and wouldn't let the meeting continue until she felt satisfied with people's responses.
The only thing that ended that melodrama was the arrival of the riot cops demanding we all leave the square. It felt almost like the two events were related, though I know they were not.
Also, you mention Donna Haraway. I think she is key to a lot of this, even more so than Judith Butler. Her works provides a perfect justification for the declarative internet identity that most of the woke left now assumes is matter-of-fact. That's pretty much the point of the cyborg: you are already in the machine, part of it, so use the machine to create yourself. So now we have 200 variants of neo-pronouns, a hundred different genders (or 58 genders according to Facebook's gender selection option), and no end to configurations of sexuality.
Haraway is also interesting because she too has moved away from more traditional left positions towards interspecies sci-fi post-capitalism. Is Haraway's political development part of a more general movement in academia away from the old left towards wokeness or radical liberalism? Also, if we are in a moment where there is "no end to configurations of sexuality" this can be connected to something beyond the internet, such as the growth of university education and particularly the growth of particular fields such as gender studies. Both the university and the internet are subject/subjectivity forming devices. And what does it mean to have one's sexuality/sex/gender organized in this manner rather than via the family, neighborhood, village, tribe, as was the norm for a long ass time?
Yes yes yes, a thousand yes to everything. Especially:
"Folks were more likely to be fantasizing about autonomy from the state and capital via ecovillages or building working class organizations to fuck with landlords and politicians."
Came here to repeat my comment on your "Declining Sperm Counts" essay:
This is tangential to your main point, but you mention that mens' movements are considered enemies of the Left. Do you think that studies and discourse in the vein of the "Mythic Masculine" (Ian MacKenzie) or "Inner Throne" (Eivind Skjellum) type of thing might have the future potential to reclaim a model of masculinity for the left? Right now my impression is that those viewpoints are so obscure that Centrist Leftists have not bothered to notice them, let alone critique them. On the other hand Charles Eisenstein -- he is not exactly a famous figure, yet he is an ascendant leftist viewpoint. And even he had a Mythic Masculine course at some point. It wasn't one of his most popular ones, but it was there.
As far as your broader point, about my experiences with the "new left"...
* First note that one of the few other authors on Substack whom I bother to subscribe to, Matt Taibbi, has been saying rather similar stuff to you, for a year or more. Do you read his stuff? Now, I criticize Matt because a lot of his writing makes it seem like American 20-somethings with teal haircuts are _literally_ a new Red Guard who are about to make the streets run with blood. My reply is that the "woke" firings and so forth that Matt complains about, are actually performed by middle-class HR bureaucrats because, like everything else they do, they believe rightly or wrongly that it's to their corporate advantage, including at the newspapers and Universities which are all corporations anyway. It's not the 20-somethings with teal hair who are literally destroying peoples' lives; it is to the advantage of these corporations and Universities to funnel all dissent and political discourse into predictable channels that they can supervise and excommunicate people from. So they do so and then _make a show_ of mouthing the woke buzzwords. But in the end it's all for profit and control, by the bureaucrats, not the woke kids. In his later writings Matt seems to acknowledge that idea. How about you?
* IMHO the core of the entire problem was identified by my other favorite Druid, JMG: Long ago he wrote that, at the end of an Empire, it is a real tangible problem with real-life effects, that words have lost their meanings. Every political or cultural term has been grabbed up to swing like a blunt instrument by partisans seeking any momentary advantage, so all our vocabulary now carries around huge amounts of contradictory baggage and nobody can be sure how sincere a speaker is, or what they actually mean when they use some highly charged word. Since the meanings of technical and useful cultural/political words have become hopelessly muddied, this makes it impossible to have a dialog and address real problems. And thus, confused vocabulary is a significant factor in the collapse of a late-stage Empire.
That seems to be my experience, that nobody can talk to each other anymore because the words carry too much baggage, and that means younger people picking up this "woke" vocabulary can't even really _think_ clearly anymore. I am firmly convinced that the vast bulk of young activists today are not malicious, they want justice and fairness and compassion. But the failure of language and thought is yet one more millstone, in addition to economic and cultural ones, which holds them back from achieving it.
__"it is to the advantage of these corporations and Universities to funnel all dissent and political discourse into predictable channels that they can supervise and excommunicate people from"
Yeah, definitely. Especially because they can shape that dissent away from any sort of populist anti-capitalist desire.
But I would add to your point that if it isn't the teal haired 20 somethings destroying society, we'd also have to admit it wasn't the average Trump-voter destroying society either. Try getting the woke to admit that.
In general regarding Matt, he's another one that leftists aren't allowed to read anymore, along with Glenn Greenwald. I follow them both, of course. :P
And speaking of the "other" druid, I have a review of his latest book coming up soon. It's pretty positive.
Thanks for replying! I will definitely look forward to your book review!!
Eisenstein is great. And so is the idea of the Mythic Masculine. But in this climate, to even say 'masculine' without the all important "toxic" before it is a kind of suicide on the left.
Which is why more and more men just gravitate towards the right.
Some very good observations here. I would only add that as a *practical* political matter, universal programs are always popular and targeted ones never are. For example, in the US, Medicare and Social Security would be hard to mess with (though our neoliberal overlords really want to) but "welfare" was an easy target. The latter being means-tested and targeted to "the poor" -- nobody, of course, wants to be poor or considered poor -- and the former being universal. Idpol of course by nature turns away from the universal.
Absolutely. You know, there is a program in Oakland to test a form of basic income, but it is only given to randomly selected qualifying black and indigenous families.
It's been called an early attempt at reparations, but of course that sort of thing will only increase racial tension when you target it only based on skin color.
The more universal way to do this would be to target an income threshold. That would still mean black people receive the majority of the benefit (because capitalism keeps them poor), but that would also capture in other poor people. And since that would include white people, the woke left intelligentsia (many of them professional managerial class) would oppose it viciously.
Have you taken a look at Peter Barnes' "With Liberty and Dividends for All"? Barnes does a kind of mental judo on long held divisions and argues that every Americans can get a nontrivial annual income if every resource that is not produced by creativity and labor (from minerals to band-with and more) was publicly owned and subject to bids with the highest bidders getting access and the proceeds divvied up equally among everyone. The basic idea started with Thomas Paine and has had advocates that today would be considered right leaning in some cases and left in others. It's a short book.
I don't know how to classify my politics anymore. I think I'm sympathetic to the idea of being a "LeGuinist Anarchist", but I am definitely feeling further and further estranged from woke thought.
I'm black and middle class. I've never been poor but I spent a large part of my childhood in a poor/working class, multicultural neighbourhood. My family was definitely more comfortable than most of my friends, including the white ones. I bring this up because, based on my experience, a lot of the stuff that the "Woke" attribute to racism/anti-blackness seems to be more linked to poverty.
I used to call myself Woke. I think things started to change in 2016 when Trump was elected. It seemed to me that there were real, material reasons driving people to vote for him but almost no one in my real life circles wanted to hear that. Instead it happened because all white people are irremediably racist and because...**RUSSIA**. I still had some hope at that time though because that was when Bernie Sanders entered the spotlight, and I was hoping that eventually we would get to a place of the left centring material conditions, and pushing for policies that could benefit all working/middle class people.
The so called "racial reckoning" that started last summer has been a turning point for me. I think if there is any way I could describe how I feel about what has happened, it's that I feel gaslit. Suddenly my social media was inundated with posts about how much the world is against me because of my race. This did not match up with the world that I actually live in. Have I experienced racism? Yes. But is it a factor in every single breath I take? Absolutely not. I'm educated, I've had a lot of opportunity to travel, I don't lack materially - overall I would say that I live a very privileged life. And yet my phenotype is supposedly some sort of unescapable caste, that will doom me and my kin for eternity.
Anyways, I don't really know what my politics are any more. I found myself drawn to reading right wing twitter threads critical of Critical Race Theory just so I could see **something** that would rebut what to me seems like utter insanity. I'm glad to have found your writing, and AngieSpeaks videos for counterpoints from a left wing perspective. I am not interested in being part of a Left that can only see me as a downtrodden victim with zero agency.
I have a somewhat... complicated relationship to the whole "woke"/"anti-woke" discourse. I don't really see a conflict between identity-based and class-based politics. For me the adoption of, say, feminist critique (a la Federici) isn't a retreat from class analysis, but rather an essential part of the understanding how capitalism and class reproduce itself. Same goes for race. For me the question of whether "race" or "class" is more important borders on nonsensical—they're all part of the same machine.
I do think that there is a somewhat interesting story about how identity politics—which is something that came from Marxist thinkers like Fanon, Davis, Lorde, the Combahee River Collective, etc.—got co-opted by liberals—but also I think the solution isn't to abandon identity altogether, but rather to show that leftists are the ones who have a better, more comprehensive solution, because we do. "Everyone deserves to have their needs met" is always going to be a more appealing story than "maybe if you elect a Democrat we'll give you a tax credit for doctor's visits so long as you fill out this mountain of paperwork and can prove you're searching for a job."
For me the most interesting side is the personal side: given that we all live in a deeply cruel, unjust world, how do we make the most of the one life we have to live? The idea that we must constantly burn ourselves out fighting for justice that will never come strikes me as some sort of vestigial Christian belief. But striking the balance between apathy and zealotry is hard.
There's also the interpersonal side of things, too. Something I think a lot about is how social justice rhetoric gets weaponized in personal interactions. There are a lot of genuinely abusive people out there who are all too happy to co-opt social justice logic as a tool of abuse. I don't think it's anything unique to social justice—abusers can craft whatever is around into a tool for controlling others—but it's sad to watch. What hurts the most is that, inevitably, it's always the marginalized and oppressed using it to abuse other marginalized and oppressed. Hurt people hurt people.
Somewhat related to this is the absolutely bizarre intra-community queer discourse. My partner is a writer and so I'm privy to the gossip of the trans literary fiction world, and every week there's somebody getting dogpiled and harassed because they made uncomfortable art, or because they had the temerity to disparage YA, genre fiction, fanfiction, or popular art. But in those cases, I think it's less an insidious ideology and more just the fact that the people running these harassment campaigns and doing this discourse are literally just children. The perennial problem with the queer discourse is that two years after you come out you're not really interested in talking about being queer online anymore, and so the discourse is entirely dominated by those least qualified to speak.
Yes, I am deeply at odds with many leftists of all kinds (hardcore Stalinists, postmodern liberals, raging angry anarcho-punks, insecure white wokes, etc.), and yet I can't consider myself anything else. What I simply can't stand anywhere is just good old fanaticism and dogmatism. The feeling I have with these cliques is that gods help you if you happen to either counterargument a Woke about an overcomplicated theory, a hypocritical Stalinist about the guy's despicable behaviour, or a liberal about their rampant pro-capitalistic attitude. And that's not healthy. And that's the very reason why the left can never agree or build a coherent and cohesive front. The right also has its inconsistencies and infighting, but they are usually so dogmatic that they'll prioritise one absolute truth. On the left, being critical is the basis of a healthy political attitude, but at the same time there's still a political need to gather and unify in order to pursue certain goals. Although, as mentioned above, not as consistently. Meanwhile, this pointless emphasizing of two sides where one is the chosen path leads those who disagree with certain individuals in both sides to be mislabeled either as an adversary (a "dirty cuck commie" or an "oppressive fascist") or worse, as an "equidistant" (a term we use in Spain nowadays), i.e., a careless moderate or unengaging simpleton that tolerates the other extreme.
I'm always going to be an anti-fascist and I'm always going to align with leftist concerns, but I refuse to be set on a scale or a graphical measure of any kind, cos these bloody categorisations are ruining humanity and our place in existence (which is outside of our hubristic and egotistical minds).
Urbanites and people with that mind need to meet more farmers, native peoples, and traditional cultures and stop pretending to represent or understand their history from a room.