Culture War Blues

A preamble

Sisters and friends, at some point in the not-too-distant future, I will start a new project here to discuss the fuckery of the punch up between left and right identitiarians from a feminist and materialist POV, to think through how all of this is feeding into the crisis of democracy, and analyse how the disaster of 40 years of neoliberal hegemony is fundamentally to blame for this fucking shitshow.

As many of you know, I have spent the best part of the last decade critiquing and resisting the excesses of left identitarianism, and trying to raise the alarm about how they were handing the largest open goal in history to the right and hard right. Over the last two years my focus shifted to the rising tide of neoreaction and the way the hard right was weaponising the excesses of left identitarianism in order to push back against the gains made by the great rights movements of the last century. The racist patriarchal men decrying the ‘woke mind virus’ - and many of those repeating their talking points - are the crest of a wave that has been organising against the equality of women, gay people, and black and brown people since the early 1980s. They have played the long game, and are now reaping their rewards. Their appropriation of the discourse and movements that developed to defend women and gay people’s interests againt the excesses of left identitarianism has been staggeringly successful. As has the extent to which they have now fused that political momentum to racist discourses about the invasion and rape of Western culture by the barbarian other, and positioned themselves as the saviours of our civilisation against the corrosive forces of progressivism, feminism, gay rights, and anti-racism.

The bullying and coercive excesses of left identitarianism bear considerable responsibility for having created the situation we now find ourselves in. Although the continuing crises of capitalism, and the fact that our political and civil institutions allowed financialised capital to suck up the future and then run off with it in 2008 are the material conditions of possibility of the generalised rise of fascism across the Western world. Given that the media and all our institutions conspired to not tell the truth about what was happening at that time, and then spent a decade trying to force people to believe things which are manifestly untrue and absurd, it is hardly surprising that many people are compelled when hard right populists turn up and tell them that the ‘elite’ are lying to them. The fact that very little they say after that bears a significant relationship to reality seems not to bother many people. In conditions of political and economic insecurity and chaos, what many humans want are simple solutions, bullish slogans, and the promise of security and a return to greatness, even if they are based on just as much bullshit as the other people are selling. What many people want is a simple mechanism of splitting that allows them to project all their fear and insecurity onto the ‘outside’ or the ‘other inside,’ and to imagine that by annhilating that threat the golden age will be restored. This is the fundamental conceptual and emotional architecture of fascism. As many people have noted, we have been here before, and the conditions feeding the rise of this frankly terrifying form of patriarchal authoritarianism are redolant of those that fed its rise just under a century ago.

There are many different threads that have now been pulled into the rise of right-wing authoritarianism - QAnon, technofeudalism, conspirituality, the great replacement theory, anti-Muslim rhetoric, covid conspiracy, border invasion, fears about the lack of white babies, tradwifeism, pervert-panic, gender conservatism, evolutionary psychology, and all manner of anti-feminist claptrap about the softening and feminisation of our society - much of which has been given rocket fuel by the excesses of left identitarianism and the capitulation to neoliberal hegemony by the institutional left since the 1990s. Having spent the last decade mostly worried about the neoliberal 'left’s bullshit, I need to take a few months to spend a lot more time thinking about the hard right’s bullshit, widen my frame of thinking, and have some new ideas about stuff (one suspects the new ideas will be variations of the old ideas… because seriously, this is some patriarchal sovereigntist bullshit if ever I saw it).

I am also extremely aware that those of us on the materialist left – and especially the materialist feminists – have once again been left without political ground to stand on, given that that ground has now been pretty much torched by a bunch of bullying right-wing assholes who insist on asking us what a woman is because we’re not that keen on fascists. We are being thoroughly pincered between two identitarian tribes who both insist that anyone who disagrees with them must be a fully paid-up member of the ‘other’ and ‘opposing’ tribe, and will use whatever vicious lying slurs they see fit to try and enforce conformity with their worldview (often while chanting ‘free speech’ to justify what is flagrantly abuse). This is just how patriarchy likes it, because it is, in conceptual form, a system of rigid hierarchal opposition that facilitates the domination and material subjugation of those that it places in the position of the ‘other.’ It is the task of materialists and all those who wish to resist the systems of subjugation and authoritarianism to try and jam that machinery, and refuse to play the endless, mirror-image game of opposition. That means that both tribes will take us to be heretics and traitors. So be it. As Dworkin reminds us, when confronted by any form of patriarchal authoritarianism we have a clear directive: ‘Resist. Do not comply.’

It is my hope that this place might come to serve as one small corner of the internet where a bunch of still uppity non-compliant witches (and their friends) might gather, make space to have conversations, and find some shelter and solace from the patriarchal shitstorm we now find ourselves in. I might end up posting some notes here over the next few months, but in time I hope there will be podcasts, a bunch of essays unpicking the intellectual threads of right identitarianism, the re-outlining of materialist feminist principles under the heading of ‘anti-domination politics,’ and probably some notes about my garden as it goes through the wheel of the year. I have no idea yet how Substack works, and there is quite a lot of sorting shit out, both practically and intellectually before I’ll be ready to really get going. But please feel free to follow me here to get notifications when things get up and running.

Hope to see some of you soon. In sisterhood x

Edited to add: Apparently I started writing already. I’m hoping to start with the shorter commentary pieces every week or so, the longer essays will be along in a short while.