The end of the “anti-idpol” left

I’ve been longing to break silence on this subject, and as far as I’m concerned the time is now. When I started operating as a leftist back in 2018, I did so as a very contrarian form of socialist. At heart, a libertarian socialist, but outwardly embracing all manner of plainly reactionary ideas alongside that, which were ultimately still motivated by some pseudo-rebellious animus against a lot of the rest of the left. I was converted to Marxism three years ago, but in a way that didn’t lead to me challenging a lot of the weird ideas and biases that I had as a vaguely right-wing populist libertarian beforehand. And so, for a time, I inserted myself into a certain “anti-idpol” camp of the left, the people who took the term “brocialist” not as an insult but instead a badge of pride. What foolish bullshit that was.

The “anti-idpol” left

The whole idea started as a vague collection of leftists on the internet who were united for a couple of years on the subject that liberal identity politics was bad, and that this therefore meant basically every left-wing approach to identity politics that wasn’t “idpol bad, class first” was reactionary, liberal, or some left-wing adaptation of previously right-wing talking points regarding “social justice activism”. This grouping is broad in scope, consisting of leftists from a wide variety of tendencies, including progressivism, social-democracy, Marxism (particularly Marxism-Leninism, for some reason), National Bolshevism (or self-styled NazBols anyway), and even anarchism in rare cases, and leftists of all these tendencies that can be called “anti-idpol” are united by a shared ideological critique of capitalism that emphasizes certain ideological shifts within the left, whether real or imagined, that supposedly led the left away from a more “authentic” socialist ideology, by which is meant a socialist ideology that focuses itself exclusively on class power, and towards a more liberalized and recuperated form of leftism that sublimates class in favour of a litany of social subjects such as race (or more accurately the subject of racial justice), gender identity, gender equality, sexual liberation, LGBT rights/liberation, indigenous rights, and the examination of the West’s colonial legacy, all of which supposedly form a broad edifice called “woke ideology”, which supposedly is a source of repression for the working class and thereby subordinates the left to the neoliberal establishment. The term for this in other left spaces is “class reductionism”, and unsurprisingly anti-idpol leftists hate it when you call them “class reductionists”. I myself used to make the absurd claim that the term “class reductionism” was specifically a product of anarchist ideology.

Looking back, I’m surprised it wasn’t more obvious how ridiculous this premise was on its face, but for such a broad concept a lot of strange ideas go into it. For starters, the base premise obviously shares a common conspiratorial idea with right-wing conservatism, in that right-wing conservatives claim that traditional values, and sometimes individual freedoms, are under attack by a progressive lobby geared around various egalitarian social causes, who supposedly produce political correctness as a way to suppress the masses, an idea that frequently takes on the name “Cultural Marxism” (itself a loanword from the Nazi concept of Kulturbolshevismus, or “Cultural Bolshevism”). The difference is that the left-wing version of this typically rejects the idea that such a conspiracy is Marxist in nature, and instead insists on it being purely a product of neoliberal capitalist ideology, sometimes even borrowing third-positionist language in describing “woke ideology” as “Cultural Capitalism”. There’s also broad populist ideas about race and social-democracy that get included, many of the r/Stupidpol population comprising essentially of edgy Berniecrats, and they often oppose “identity poltics” in the context of struggles for racial justice by making appeals to Fred Hampton’s rainbow coalition efforts as somehow a historical manifestation of their own ideas about class reductionism. Their class reductionism often lends to a reductive, and kind of outdated, form of economic determinism that holds that humans are only the products of external economic conditions, to the exclusion of all else, and in this way is invoked to remove the subtleties addressed by historical communist and socialist thought — this is what Vladimir Lenin referred to as “economism”. Sometimes discourse about “woke ideology” intersects with certain modes of anti-imperialism, resulting in a peculiar belief that “wokeness” is spread by US intelligence agencies to attack or subvert anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist forces, with a recent CIA ad allegedly confirming this. It also includes various meanderings about “cancel culture”, the 21st century’s worst alternative to the concept of political correctness, an ill-defined concept that seems to just mean getting called on the internet and that sometimes coming with social consequences. Some variations of “anti-idpol” leftism strive to rebrand patriotism, previously usually a conservative talking point, as a pillar of socialist ideology, often opportunistically employing certain Marxist-Leninist conceptions of “socialist patriotism”, and this sometimes plays into attempts to justify nationalism in a Western context from a left-wing angle.

If it sounds like an absurd, baseless, contrarian enterprise that serves mostly to repackage the exact same shitty conservatism into socialism, that’s probably because a lot of it is. And ultimately all of this is based on the same right-wing/reactionary confusion of capitalist recuperation of socially progressive causes, moving them away from their radical roots to opportunistically employ them as appendages of the liberal consenus, as somehow proof that corporations actually support those causes, which is then reinterpreted through anti-capitalist language to mean that capitalism generates them. Of course, not every anti-idpol leftist buys into the whole package. Many are simply leftists who, in contrarian fashion, take on arguments against feminism, trans people, various racial justice movements, decolonization, and other issues on the basis of populist argumentation or borrowing from the residue of “classical liberal” rhetoric.

Eventually, some of those leftists started examining subjects like intersectionalism, anti/post-colonialism, and the rest more, and decided that they couldn’t keep up the contrarianism anymore, but some others ignored that, kept to their ways, and got reactionary as a result. An example of the former would be the Australian anarcho-communist who went by Bat’ko, who turned away from the “anti-idpol” left after a while before disappearing from the scene. An example of the latter would be Pierre Tru-Dank, who never really took that route and only got more reactionary with time, and currently embraces is fascistic brand of socialism which he calls “Sorelian Marxism” while hanging out with other fascists and reactionaries and doing the same kind of edgy, quasi-fascist 4chan-style memes about “BreadTube” and other non-authoritarian leftists. Some “anti-idpol” leftists are in the peculiar position where they do not even consider themselves leftists, rejecting identification with the left on the grounds that, to them, “the left” is just a synonym for liberalism. Pierre Tru-Dank seemed to echo this sentiment when he once said “the left deserves to die”. Joti Brar, from the Communist Part of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) and the Workers’ Party of Britain, has said that the Workers’ Party of Britain do not identify themselves as “left” because she deems the term to be synonymous liberalism, “identify politics”, and “lifestyle fads”. Peter Coffin, who up until recently was probably considered to be part of “BreadTube” and now calls himself a “patriotic socialist” (or to be more precise, a “Castro-Humanist Yankee Barbarian”), has said that communism is not left wing, or right wing, but rather “outside both wings”. This line of argument, when you think about it, invites comparisons to Third Position ideology, which tends to entail a syncretic fusion of theoretically left-wing economics with far-right social values and nationalist politics, all while rejecting the label of “left-wing” as well as “right-wing” (“not left, not right, but forward” is a slogan attached to the Third Positionists).

The mainstreaming of brocialism

And now, it’s worth reflecting on the state of “anti-idpol” discourse on the left, in terms of the basic question, where is it now? One premise that kept it going was the idea that they were a counter-mainstream representation of a more authentic socialist politics, which was marginalized by more “liberal” and “idpolite” forms of leftism. The reality is that “anti-idpol” discourse, by which we ultimately mean contrarian and quasi-conservative attitudes within the left, are surprisingly mainstream on both the left and elsewhere.

If you look at the YouTube channel for Jacobin magazine, a mainstream democratic socialist publication (which, funny enough, is sometimes attacked by “anti-idpol” leftists), you’ll find a surprising amount of videos within the last year dedicated to the subject of “wokeness”, sometimes making points that vaguely resemble conservative social arguments. Videos such as “The Problem With “Woke” Horror Movies”, “”Whiteness” Doesn’t Explain Deaths of Despair”, “How Liberals Inflame the Vaccine War” (the first problem being the assumption that there’s even a “war” over vaccination), “Antiracism Can’t Overcome Capitalism”, “The Misguided Fixation on Racial Disparities”, “Stop Calling Picnics “Racist” Please”, “What’s Wrong With Post-Colonial Theory?”, “The Absurdity of “White Supremacy Culture”” (which appears to uncritically echoes Wall Street Journal talking points about academics declaring “math is racist” even though they never did), “Wokeness Is Hurting Democrats” (from Ana Kasparian of all people), “Cancel Culture Is a Symptom of Captialism’s Rot” (from Ben Burgis, who, let’s face it, will defend anyone if he thinks he can give them an argument) and my favorite one in particular, “Slavoj Zizek: Defend the Enlightenment!”, in which we are instructed to ponder the legacy of the Enlightenment over the movie Luca. How exactly this is supposed to be different from every time Jordan Peterson rambles about personal archetypes and the fate of Western Civilization in the context of Disney animated movies is sadly beyond my grasp. One spicy one in particular is “Is This A Class Reductionist”, referring to Martin Luther King Jr in which he seems to be framed as an advocate for “universalism” — a take that requires a grade school understanding of MLK’s thought that would ignore MLK’s writings in which he explicitly lays the problems of African-Americans at the feet of a system created by and for white Americans and explicitly argued that ending racism would require dismantling systemic racism. Let me repeat: this is a mainstream democratic socialist outlet, the same one that “anti-idpol” leftists have sometimes attacked for being too “woke”. Who knows, maybe that reactionary gaslighting actually worked on those idiots and this is the result.

Zero Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing now acquired by Repeater Books, spent some time on their YouTube channel laundering some fairly contrarian takes on the left. In fact, their social media account, seemingly run by Douglas Lain, has recently taken to defending Dave Chappelle over his show Closer, in which he made some pretty transphobic jokes on his set and declared himself “team TERF”, claiming that people who say that Chappelle is a transphobe have not watched the show while taking the opportunity to hock Ben Burgis’ book “Cancelling Comedians While the World Burns”, in which Burgis calls for a “smarter, funnier, and more strategic left” that shuts up whenever somebody says the n word live on set. After Zero Books’ acquisition, the channel seems to have rebranded under the new name “Douglas Lain: Inside Critical Theory”, and it seems that a lot of the channel’s older videos are gone. But the channel has some new videos, including an interview with everyone’s favorite token class reductionist Adolph Reed Jr, a stream about the Dave Chappelle controversy featuring Ben Burgis, a video seriously titled “Does Marxism Have Value for Black People?”, and a video pondering on whether or not the movie Judas and the Black Messiah is “counterrevolutionary”.

The Dave Chappelle saga has actually brought out a slew of hot takes from a clique of “anti-idpol” leftists, all of which have served to show whose side of the class war they proved to be. After Netflix released Closer, some of Netflix’s employees staged as walk-out to protest Chappelle’s transphobia and Netflix’s handling of employees who spoke out against the company. Terra Field was suspended by Netflix over her tweets on the matter and her apparently interrupting a board meeting to protest the subject, only to be reinstated after widespread coverage and backlash, with Netflix saying that they realized that Field’s actions were not inappropriate. Now, you would probably expect that the principled socialist position on this matter would be to take the side of the workers against Netflix, a major corporation, right? Well, I think most leftists got the picture, but some definitely didn’t. Peter Coffin was a BreadTuber who was not so different from all the others until ContraPoints got kicked off Twitter and he joined the chorus of people who talked incessantly about “cancel culture” because of it. Now Coffin is on record saying that the workers who protested Netflix are “ideological enemies” and even that they are “bigger defenders of the bourgeoisie than the bourgeoisie”. Peter Coffin presently calls himself a “Castro-Humanist Yankee Barbarian”, which might be half-ironic but suggests to me that the “Marxist Humanism” that I once associated with has gone off the rails and devolved into a twisted contrarian meme that exists principally to service the enemies of the working class.

Coffin made these comments in defense of another reactionary leftist named Haz (real name: Jon Zherka), the host of an out-there Marxist-Leninist podcast called InfraRed, who for his part condemned the workers who protested Netflix by arguing, bald-facedly, that “Just being employee doesn’t make you ‘working class.’” and even that CEOs are actually employees. He has also explictly referred to the Netflix workers as not only “petty-bourgeois” but also “social parasites”, accusing them of somehow draining and recycling the value produced by the working class (in other words, he actually accuses them of being capitalists). Jackson Hinkle, who desribes himself as both a communist and an “American Patriot”, condemned the Netflix workers for supposedly getting more attention than other striking workers. Angie Speaks, a contrarian anarchist who, like Peter Coffin, was a lot like the other BreadTubers until ContraPoints got “cancelled”, chimed in with her own take, in which she chastised the Netflix employees for protesting transphobia while pandemic and supply chain issues continue, as if she is some sort of authority on the issue of the class struggle. Aimee Terse (real name: Aimee Laba), the rich “anti-woke” leftist cum right-wing white nationalist, tried to delegitimize the walkout on the grounds that one of its leaders was an Elizabeth Warren campaign surrogate, and has otherwise referred to the employees as “reactionaries” and “on the side of the bourgeoisie”, without a shread of irony considering her own position. Jimmy Dore, the ex-Young Turk, also joined the effort to delegitimze the walkout by dredging up old tweets in order to cast the “leader” of the walkout as a homophobic racist, which is essentially the same tactic that right-wing outlets have done. And of course, there are Marxist-Leninists online who seriously believe that the workers who staged a walkout against Netflix are “class traitors” for going against their corporate masters, and who take this as proof of the LGBT community being “proof of the decadence of the West”, and then act utterly bemused when people think they sound exactly like the far-right. If these “leftists” were on the side of workers, they would not be defending corporations while slandering their workers as agents of the bourgeoisie, but instead they do, and so they have taken the side of the bourgeoisie against workers. This is what being an “anti-idpol” leftist apparently looks like in 2021. This appears to be what class reductionism currently looks like.

Transphobia

But nothing quite compares to the way Sargonite talking points have been mainstreamed by the BBC, and in the most disgusting way possible. Yes, I’m talking about the article they did with Lily Cade, and even though it’s not directly connected to the “anti-idpol” left, I’m bringing it up because I’ve never seen a sharper and more grotesque refutation of the idea that the talking points they insist upon are anti-establishment in nature. The article, titled “‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women’”, makes a litany of allegations towards trans women and in the process of this leverages arguments consistent with right-wing “anti-SJW” talking points on trans people, featuring opinion from lesbians who accuse trans people and “trans ideology” of silencing them and forcing them to have sex, as well as right-wing trans influencers who strive to undermine other trans people, with the thrust of the article being that trans people sometimes pressure or coerce lesbian women into having sex with them. Just that claim alone seems incredibly off-base, and has been challenged across the LGBT community, but what connects the article to Sargonite thought is that at some point they bring up Riley Dennis out of leftfield to claim that she argues that “genital preferences”, or “dating preferences” are discriminatory, based on a selective interpretation of what she actually said in a now-deleted video. In reality, Riley did not argue that “dating preferences” are in themselves bigoted, only that they represent some internal biases. But that’s only the beginning. The general thrust of the article is impossible to substantiate. There’s no hard evidence, only a series of claims from people who, if we’re being very honest, appear to be motivated by the desire to marginalize trans people because their existence offends their metaphysical notions of what being a woman is. If anything, as Kate Montgomery points out, most trans people are probably not of the opinion that you can choose who you are attracted to and therefore should not be called a bigot because of it. But that doesn’t matter for the BBC or the “gender critical feminists” they bring on, because the whole point of the article is to frame trans people as rapists.

And the worst thing about all of this? The author of the article seemed to be blissfully unaware of the fact that Lily Cade was a convicted and confessed rapist who sexually assaulted women. That never gets discussed in the article. Ever. And after this became public knowledge, she took to her personal blog to write three unhinged rants about trans people. In at least one of them, she names specific trans individuals and explicitly calls for them to be lynched. In another, she employes language about trans people that is eerily similar to the kind of rhetoric used by white supremacists about Jews, black people, and miscegenators. Throughout her rants she seemed to deal in obscenely lurid conspiracy theories about how trans people are smartphones, she at one point proclaims that gay marriage caused the fall of the Roman Empire, she proclaims that the “Great Replacement” has arrived and that it consists of trans people, and she repeatedly complains about men who masturbate to pornography, despite herself being a porn actress, a person who’s job it is to make people want to masturbate to your body. It also turns out that Lily Cade is pedophile, based on a Tumblr post she wrote back in 2018 in which she fantasized about having sex with someone under the age of 18, as part of a novel she wrote. This is the person who the BBC thought was a reasonable voice on the trans community, who they chose to represent in their article and to the exclusion of any trans person or anyone in the LGBT community who might oppose them. The BBC took the side of a violently transphobic pedophile and rapist in order to slander trans people. When Chelsea Poe, a trans porn actress, told the article’s author that Lily Cade no longer works in the porn industry and was a rapist, the conversation was deemed “not relevant to the piece”. This is the BBC.

Transphobes like to pretend that they’re shocking and transgressive in the face of a supposedly dominant “gender ideology”, but the truth is that, at least here in the UK, transphobia is actually quite mainstream in British political commentary. In the BBC (which, keep in mind, is basically the propaganda apparatus of the British state), for instance, there was a journalist named Jon McManus who, in a now-deleted tweet, compared trans people to Jimmy Saville, the children’s TV presenter who was discovered to be a pedophile after his death. There was also a WhatsApp chat group that was leaked to Buzzfeed and which consisted of women working for the BBC, and many of the older women within that group were transphobic feminists. The BBC has also had numerous news programs dedicated specifically to the subject of trans people and gender reassignment, in which they regularly platformed transphobic quacks as their main source of expert opinion to the exclusion of the actual trans community or LGBT people or even just other scientific experts who might oppose said transphobic quacks. The BBC has apparently even cited the LGB Alliance, an anti-trans activist group led by former gay liberation activist Bev Jackson, in their discussions of trans healthcare. Transphobes also can manage to a noticeable degree of public sympathy, if the media successfully frames their opponents as violent lunatics, and have in one stance cited someone who claimed that trans people are Nazis. That was the case for J. K. Rowling, as well as for Rosie Duffield, both of whom received death threats from a handful of friendless Twitter accounts and became the subject of media sympathy despite being transphobes. Transphobia is a actually so mainstream that transphobic “gender critical feminists” like Sarah Ditum and Julie Bindel can write articles scaremongering about trans people across mainstream news outlets; not just the BBC but also The Times, The Guardian, as well as The New European, where Sarah Ditum was given a front page to bitch about “the war on J. K. Rowling” while whitewashing her views on trans people. Transphobia is so rampant in The Guardian that a number of employees have publicly quit working for them. Even Lily Cade apparently got to just tag the BBC in her tweets where she proclaims all sorts of bigoted nonsense, with no pushback from them. Meanwhile, trans people are regularly denied housing and employment practically on the basis of them being trans, and trans students and academics, far from being privileged as certain reactionary conspiracy theories would suggest, repeatedly face harrassment and marginalization. In all, transphobia isn’t really as transgressive as transphobes seem to think it is, and if anything it’s probably actually in service of the powerful.

There’s also some rather prestigious transphobes in British society, and I mean besides the already mentioned J. K. Rowling. Richard Dawkins, one of Britain’s most famous atheists (though increasingly Christian at the same time), has repeatedly stated that he doesn’t think that trans men and trans women are what they say they are and that biological sex invalidates gender identity, despite a vast array scientific literature and studies existing to contradict his position (which, as an apparent scientist, you’d think he would know about and, as someone who insists that scientific truth is the only truth, you’d think he would defer to). Robert Winston, a Labour Party peer in the House of Lords, went on Question Time to argue that “you can’t change sex”. In the UK these people do not necessarily reflect popular opinion when it comes to trans people and their rights, but they are not on the fringes of “respectable opinion” either, and if anything they form part of the consensus of what the establishment actually thinks of trans people. The establishment is not the ally of trans people, and in fact the BBC doubled down on their article about trans people and dating, insisting that it followed their editorial guidelines, without any acknowledgement of the fact that Lily Cade raped women and called for trans people to be executed by lynchings. Of course, they did eventually delete the Lily Cade section of their article after increasing backlash, but even without Lily Cade’s contribution, the article is still essentially a cluster of undocumented assertions about trans people, nestled together with the talking points of actively transphobic organizations, and the only opposing trans voices being actively misrepresented, which is all a way to normalize transphobia among the general population by casting trans people as rapists and homophobes.

The reason why this matters is the simple truth that transphobia is often a big part of what is called the “anti-idpol” left, who embody it in varying degrees of sincerity and ambiguity. Caleb Maupin, a self-described populist Marxist (not to mention NazBol ally) who works for Russia Today, is in theory a supporter of trans rights, if we only go from what he himself claims. However, he doesn’t seem to have offer challenge to transphobes like Joti Brar, who complained about “trans ideology” being “anti-materialist” because in her words it says “you are who you think you are”, which according to her is “total idealism” and an affirmation that “reality is whatever you say it is”, as opposed to materialism, while insisting that she has nothing against trans people. In fact, Caleb not only didn’t challenge her pronouncements, but he appeared to nod in agreement with them. Caleb Maupin himself, despite claiming to support trans rights, appears to display visible contempt for discussing the validity of his possible trans comrades, saying in a response to Thought Slime, “the last thing that I ever did when I was working, assembling hamburgers, and running the fryer at a fast food place, was to talk to my co-workers about their gender identity”. The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) is notorious for its vocal pronouncements against LGBT people and especially trans people, casting “gender fluidity” in their terms as a “reactionary nightmare” while actually claiming that Western imperialism has embraced LGBT rights as a way to “castigate oppressed countries” (and by “oppressed countries” they mean reactionary dictatorships that just happen to oppose NATO). Jason Unruhe, a Maoist Third Worldist who likes to whine about “first world identity politics” while claiming the Katyn Massacre was a hoax, is also a notorious transphobe who refused to debate Zoe Baker (a.k.a. Anarchopac) on his takes on trans people, has frequently misgendered Zoe, and even declared that he does not respect Zoe’s right to life. George Galloway, another Russia Today henchman and also the leader of the Worker’s Party of Britain, has proclaimed that “gender is gender, it’s a physiological fact and no one can switch”, while also insisting that he isn’t against trans people (just like Joti Brar before him), has defended J. K. Rowling by likening people who apparently burn her books in protest of her transphobia to Nazis and accusing them of laying the foundations for the rebirth of fascism, and during his by-election campaign in Batley-and-Spen he criticized the Labour Party for being “too woke” by unloading a troth of transphobic talking points meant to gaslight the left. The Morning Star, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Britain, used to run articles in support of transphobic feminists such as Magdalen Berns, praising them for “standing up for sex-based rights” against “efforts to redefine gender”. They also published more than one article by Mary Davis, a transphobic feminist who frequently argues that trans people “only face discrimination” as opposed to women facing oppression. It was only after major backlash to a cartoon they released which depicted trans people as crocodiles that they felt forced to change their editorial line on trans people.

You might think that I’m only referring to tankies here, as though singling out reactionary Marxist-Leninists. But that’s just not the case. Glenn Greenwald, once a renowned progressive journalist at The Intercept, began a strange rightward shift after departing from The Intercept in 2020, and as part of this shift he began making transphobic denouncements of “identity politics”, complaining that trans people are getting more attention than gay people (which is simply wrong) and that they are “higher on the oppression hierarchy”. For this turn he has naturally been condemned by much of the rest of the left, with Noam Chomsky baffled and remarking upon his hope that Greenwald’s strange new phase passes soon. He was, however, granted audience with the Bad Faith Podcast to debate Nathan J. Robinson, and has also been a frequent guest on Jimmy Dore’s and Richard Medhurst’s shows. And speaking of Jimmy Dore, he has a very bizarre relationship to the whole subject. On the one hand, he has defended Chelsea Manning from apparent Democratic Party smears during her political campaign, he has condemned President Joe Biden for supporting anti-LGBT groups, and a part of his critique of the Clinton Foundation is that they hurt gay people. On the other hand, he did recently join the chorus of “leftists” and right-wingers in attacking the Netflix walkout, he has repeatedly platformed transphobic individuals (such as Glenn Greenwald, Tulsi Gabbard, and Nellie McKay), without ever challenging their transphobia, and has himself made an apparently transphobic joke in connection to Pete Buttigieg getting maternity leave. Tulsi Gabbard, hailed by Jimmy Dore as a more “anti-war” alternative to Bernie Sanders, introduced a bill that would define Title IX as based on “biological sex” and deny funding to schools that allow trans and non-binary students to compete in sports events, all this despite her claims to support the LGBT community. Slavoj Zizek, the renowned Slovenian neo-Marxist philosopher, has apparently railed against “transgender dogma” and described it as “incompatible with Freud”, and in general seems to be all over the place when it comes to the issue, claiming to fully support the struggle of trans people while also apparently making dubious and typically byzantine criticisms of the LGBT community. Angela Nagle, something of a washed up celebrity of left-wing intelligentsia, apparently spent some of her book Kill All Normies dismissing all non-heteronormative gender identities as just products of Tumblr, and apparently even defended Germaine Greer’s transphobia. Paul Embery, a reactionary social-democrat and trade union activist, argued in his book Despised that “identity politics” is one of the key reasons for the defeat of the Labour Party and the loss of its working class base, and as part of his argument against identity politics he endorsed the claims of transphobic feminists who argued that allowing trans people to self-identify would be an attack on women’s “sex-based rights”, supposedly allowing men to “invade women’s spaces”. Matt Taibbi, a progressive journalist and author who contributed to Rolling Stone, defended a book written by Abigail Shrier called The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, describing her arguments as “persuasive” and her critics as “triggered progressives”. Michael Tracey, another former Young Turk, has claimed that “gender identity ideology” is real and has argued that the presence of trans people in Black Lives Matter is proof that it is not a working class movement, suggesting by implication that trans people are agents of the bourgeoisie. Angie Speaks, who was an anarchist but now I’m not quite sure what she is, has repeatedly laundered transphobic attitudes under the guise of pearl-clutching critiques of “narcissism”, “ontology of gender”, “identity fetishism”, and “the cult of the self”, to the point of approving the harassment of a trans teenager by her parents over an apparent schizophrenic episode triggered by them. Rhyd Wildermuth, a former anarchist who is a friend of Angie, likes to deny that she is transphobic while insisting that she merely “critiqued much of the neoliberal (capitalist) dogma around trans identity and the aggressive subsection of twitter that has called for the death of cis gays who will not have sex with trans people, as well as the many rape threats against gender critical women on social media”. Aimee Terese, of course, frequently displays pretty overt transphobia on her account, going so far as to compare gender reassingment surgery to conversion therapy. Edwin Aponte, one of the founders of the populist “post-left” website The Bellows, complained that a piece on White Fragility written by co-founder Ryan Zickgraf was liked by people with “a lot of pronouns and shit”.

These people all probably think that they’re going against the mainstream of political thought and the establishment of capitalism by propounding bigoted takes on trans people and the LGBT community. But this supposedly transgressive character of their bigotry is an illusion, it thrives on a distorted view of establishment consensus conditioned mostly by the fact that their views are rightly despised by the rest of the left. In reality, transphobia is very mainstream. Opponents of “gender identity politics” not only are not silenced but they get to write books about their grievances and sell them for thousands of dollars, and make numerous appearances in mainstream media. Slavoj Zizek despite his Marxism is incredibly well-situated within mainstream philosophy and political commentary, being given regular mainstream media appearances and well-paid appearances at prestigious universities, all of which must pose a problem for the “modern day Diogenes of Sinope” image that’s been constructed around him by his admirers. Based on what I’ve seen and established thus far, transphobia, or at least dalliances with transphobia, aren’t even all that uncommon in progressive media. In fact, I’m actually kind of stunned to find as many transphobic progressives as I did. And in the end, the mainstreaming of transphobia anywhere, whether or on the left on the right, seems to lead to where we are now: a climate in which mainstream media can vilify trans people by taking the side of their abusers, particularly disgusting predators like Lily Cade, and defend having done so, for them to spread all sorts of undocumented bullshit about trans people so that the government can take away their rights or just keep them marginalized. This is what the “anti-idpol” leftists who engage in transphobia enable, and it’s disgusting. That’s what it matters to talk to about this.

Reactionary conspiracism

Plenty of “anti-idpol” leftists sometimes make the point about how “the old communism” has fallen and been replaced by an identity movement focused on “non-class-based” issues, which, for NazBols and some Marxist-Leninists, leads to a strange narrative of “degeneracy” taking over the left. This conclusion is often arrived at through pure speculation, off the back of some conspiracy, namely the idea that “woke ideology” was implanted into left-wing movements by the CIA in order to destabilize Marxist movements (who, we are to believe, are simply incapable of being schismatic and divisive on their own despite all historical proof to the contrary). An extension of this that I’ve seen is that Herbert Marcuse spread radical liberalism or something as an agent of the OSS (the precursor to the CIA) and the US State Department. Matt Taibbi advanced his own theory about Herbert Marcuse in which he blames Marcuse for every contemporary problem (real or merely perceived) with the left as it exists, citing him as the originator of everything from the work of Robin DiAngelo to the 1619 Project — in short, everything he doesn’t like about mainstream anti-racism. It’s very obviously an adaptation of right-wing conspiracy theory, and Taibbi’s narrative echoes key aspects of the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory propounded by right-wingers, particularly the premise that Marxist intellectuals turned to “identity politics” in order to explain how the conditions of Weimar Germany failed to produce communist revolution instead of Nazism. More recently, Taibbi’s basic premise that Herbert Marcuse ruined everything was echoed not by anyone on the left, but by right-wing national-conservative senator Josh Hawley, who in a speech to the National Conservatism Conference blamed Herbert Marcuse, along with Jacques Derrida and ultimately Karl Marx, for what he perceives as a society-wide attack on “traditional masculinity” (whatever that means, my guess is almost certainly a particularly tyrannical expression of patriarchal values).

Reactionary conspiracy theories infiltrating left-wing circles is, sadly, nothing new, and certainly not confined to the present era of online leftism. In 1999, Chip Berlet wrote an essay called Right Woos Left, in which he documented attempts by the far-right and fascists to launder anti-Semitic and generally undocumented conspiracy theories to anti-war progressives while pushing for alliances between progressives and the nativist right in order to oppose as a way to normalize neo-fascist politics, as took place throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Berlet’s essay is extensive in scope and makes for an exhaustive read, but it is an important resource in documenting the nature of conspiratorial politics and the history of far-right efforts to divide and recuperate the left for their own purposes. Berlet’s analysis documents the activities of progressives like Craig Bulet, a conspiracy theorist who frequently advocated for anti-government alliances between the left and the far-right, the Christic Institute, a progressive law firm that established ties with the far-right Populist Party and promoted undocumented far-right conspiracy theories, and the Lyndon LaRouche movement, which positioned itself as left-wing while promoting far-right anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and taking to the streets specifically to assault leftists and trade union activists. It also documents how neofascist groups such as the Liberty Lobby openly encouraged the activities of the LaRouche movment and other “breakaway groups from the Left” and called on the far-right to support them for the express purpose of weakening and disorienting the left, as well as Third Positionist groups like the American Front who brazenly argued that anti-racism is “nothing but a tool of the capitalist regime” meant to “destroy the self-determination of all races and keep ZOG [Zionist Occupied Government; basically a Nazi code-word for Jews] as the ruler of all”.

There’s something fundamentally relevant about all of this, since we have indeed seen modern “anti-idpol” leftists launder conspiracy theories from the far-right and even echo talking points from fascists. Aimee Terese blamed the riots that purportedly engulfed America last year (the majority which turned out to actually be peaceful protests) on “weaponized” anti-racist activism. She also appears to launder anti-semitic conspiracy theories, including ones which accuse Jewish people of wanting to control non-Jewish people through mass vaccination. Caleb Maupin has repeatedly defended Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam who is notorious for promulgating anti-semitic conspiracy theories the pit African-Americans against Jews, has expressly refused to disavow Louis Farrakhan under any circumstances on the grounds of his “anti-imperialism”, and his website still features a link to the Nation of Islam’s Final Call website. It previously also included a link to the white nationalist American Free Press. Caleb Maupin also wrote an entire book called Satan at the Fountainhead which blamed Jewish people for the 2008 financial crisis, and another book called BreadTube Serves Imperialism to promote another undocumented conspiracy theory which alleges that all of his left-wing critics are controlled by cult deprogrammer Steve Hassan as part of an alleged anti-communist psy-op. Maupin also repeatedly alleges that his left-wing and anti-fascist critics conspire to incite violence against him and other “anti-imperalists” for disagreeing with them. As I already mentioned, Matt Taibbi likes to propound his own version of the “Cultural Marxism” theory in which Herbert Marcuse is said to have singularly ruined everything. Glenn Greenwald has claimed China controls American foreign policy through Wall Street and that the mainstream media conspired to get Joe Biden elected by spreading misinformation. Why a Chinese-controlled US would then engage in aggressive manoeuvres to defend Taiwan from the grasp of the PRC is frankly a mystery. Some individuals, like Max Blumenthal and Rhyd Wildermuth, have whole conspiracy theories centered around Alexander Reid Ross, a liberal anti-fascist who works for centrist think tanks, with Rhyd in particular insisting that he is some kind of ideological puppet master of Antifa as well as an anonymous author behind whatever is inconvenient for him. Jason Unruhe alleged based on two unreliable sources that the Katyn Massacre, committed by the Soviet Union in 1940, was an anti-communist hoax that is allowed to perpetuate because of liberal identity politics. Jimmy Dore has increasingly become a fountain of conspiratorial thinking, usually centered around the idea that all of his critics are pawns of the Democratic Party establishment and are out to censor him. He also increasingly peddles anti-vaccination conspiracy theories, and then lies about it and claims he didn’t, while encouraging people to take ivermectin as a cure for Covid-19, only to later deny having done so! Jimmy Dore also was joined in spreading anti-vax nonsense by Richard Wolff, the famous Marxist economist and noted market socialist ideologue, who actually argued that a recent wave of strikes and labour walkouts was caused by vaccine mandates and that the left should call for working class revolts against vaccine mandates. Max Blumenthal also perpetuated anti-vax conspiracy theories on behalf of Jimmy Dore. On an episode of The Jimmy Dore Show, Max played a clip of a CNN interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, in which Sanjay Gupta asked for Fauci’s thoughts on natural immunity. Max cut off the interview after Fauci says “I don’t have a firm answer”, in so doing creating the implication that Fauci is acting at the best of big pharma to suppress the “truth” about natural immunity.

Haz from InfraRed has probably the most insane conspiracy theory out of all of them, in which he alleges that the United States of America became imperialist only because the British ruling class somehow took over America’s institutions and covertly seized control of the country. This is a straight echo of Lyndon LaRouche’s infamous claims that the British monarchy controls powerful institutions across the world and that British intelligence is responsible for various schemes to subvert America in some way, including rock music and the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and even for the installation of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany. The basic concept inevitably draws comparisons to the classic anti-semitic canard about how Jews supposedly control various powerful institutions and ultimately the dominant system. In fact, LaRouche himself connected the dots for us by asserting the existence of a “Nazi Jewish Lobby”, which of course he believes to be an agent of the British state, and he called for a “righteous war” in which America is to be “cleansed” by “eliminating” them from all American institutions. Oh, but if you’re thinking right now that that’s anti-Semitic, according to LaRouche that’s only becaue you’ve been brainwashed by the drug lobby or some Soviet psyop, both the same thing from his perspective. To be honest, the fact that there’s any one of these guys who I can compare to Lyndon LaRouche should be taken as a bad omen.

The fascist pipeline

I suppose far-right conspiracy theories make sense given the rather curious trend I noticed interpersonally. After I left Twitter for the third time, I watched people who were leftists and who were against “identity politics” eventually start to support identity politics of their own — namely, white identity politics. I watched as friends of mine went from just being edgy socialists and communists who didn’t like liberal and intersectional “identity politics” much to eventually adopting racist conspiracy theories, defending far-right murderers, laundering far-right talking points, playing with ambiguously anti-semitic conspiracy theories surrounding liberal reform Jews and pornography, theocratic controls on immigration, homophobic and transphobic conspiracy theories, and either fascism of some variety or just the incorporation of race “realism” and white ethno-nationalism. Or, no, sorry, “ethno-traditionalism”; a form of nationalism described by Eric Kaufmann which apparently “seeks to protect the traditional preponderance of ethnic majorities through slower immigration and assimilation but which does not seek to close the door entirely to migration or exclude minorities from national membership”. In other words, basically ethno-nationalism but with maybe slightly more caveats to give it the appearance of racial tolerance. And judging from the fact that more famous (or infamous) “anti-idpol” leftists have only gotten more reactionary with time, I’m actually beginning to think this is something of a trend. If you devote almost your entire politics to, or center your critique of capitalism around, vague, conspiratorial constructions designed to reinforce your own unwillingness to confront struggles of liberation outside of your own, just to keep hold of some reactionary, quasi-libertarian individualism (the “get off my lawn” attitude that has the habit of seeping into your attitudes towards minorities and non-conformists), you will not only eventually be alienated from most of the rest of the left, but you will also find yourself aligning increasingly towards fascist and reactionary politics that you will then either move on to or try to integrate as part of your own.

In fact, it’s probably not for nothing that, in my experience, when I tried to do my own “anti-idpol” experiments, and watched others do basically the same, I found that some very unsavory and reactionary characters would find their way towards us, and if I’m being perfectly honest, I can’t accept the idea that this is a coincidence. There is a reason that fascists and reactionaries come looking for semi-reactionary “anti”-idpol types, and it’s not necessarily because they’re looking for “authentic socialism”. It’s because they think you’ll be allies against the left and against socialism. They see the “anti-idpol” left as a breakaway movement from the left, just like the neofascists of the 20th century did, and just like before their support for, or at least interest in, “anti-idpol” leftists comes down to not just the fact that often times they sound like what they already think but also the desire to see the left either become like them or be destroyed. Of course, you being an “anti-idpol” leftist doesn’t automatically mean that you are a fascist, and in fact you might try to repel fascists by making your objections to them clear and telling them to fuck off. I did that, and so did some others. But certain others, however, have not been as prepared to do so. Angie Speaks is friends with Aimee Terese, and she’s practically a white nationalist at this point. Aimee Terese is friends not only with the reactionary Bronze Age Pervert but also Joseph Jordan (a.k.a. Erik Striker), a white supremacist contributor to the Daily Stormer, with whom she seems to nod in agreement about his musings on “the j-left” (or, “Jewish left”). When called out on this, she feigned ignorance and accused other people of policing her, only to police others for retweeting people she doesn’t like and then had Jordan white-knight her for all this. Terese ended up being featured on two white nationalist websites praising her tweets, including one outright neo-Nazi website called The American Vanguard. Tulsi Gabbard is pretty notorious for having several documented links with the Hindutva movement, a fascist movement in India that promotes the idea of a “Greater India” dominated by a religious and ethnic supremacist conception of Hindu identity to the exclusion of all religious and ethnic minorities. Rhyd Wildermuth has actually defended Wolves of Vinland, a neofascist group run by Jack Donovan, from accusations of fascism and insisted that they were merely a “pagan body cult”, while also softballing Milo Yiannpoulos and even comparing far-right terrorist Timothy McVeigh to indigenous resistance leaders. I have seen many people on r/Stupidpol and its cousin r/ConservativeSocialism identify with fascistic ideologies like National Bolshevism and quasi-fascist ideologies like National Communism, as well as spreading memes from actual fascist groups such as Alternative for Australia and embracing anti-semitic conspiracy theories (the New York Times was sometimes called “Jew York Times” over on r/Stupidpol). And sometimes, you see traces of a vague crypto-fascism rather than overt fascism. The Bellows actually sometimes has contributing authors such as Alexei Arora, who explicitly describes himself as a “Civilizational Nationalist” and “Caesarist”, at the same time as calling himself a Marxist socialist. We should remember that one other person who famously described himself as both a nationalist and a socialst was Adolf Hitler. Angie Speaks is not necessarily a fascist, at least not as far as I know, but she lauds the right’s “noble cultural aspirations” (forgetting, for a moment, that they would mean her own marginalization and persecution) while lamenting their rejection of economic systems that would “make these aspirations more than a mere fantasy”.

Caleb Maupin promoted a white nationalist group on his website, still promotes the fascist Nation of Islam to this day, and notoriously appeared at the Alternatives to Globalization Conference with the Eurasianist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, in which Maupin praised Donald Trump specifically for calling attention to “elite bankers” who were “not loyal to the United States”, which sounds pretty much exactly like what an anti-semitic fascist would say about Jews. And, whereas Caleb Maupin is vicious and hyperbolic towards left-wing critics such as Vaush and Thought Slime, he is remarkably civil and cordial when debating self-described fascists, such as Cultured Thug. That’s not even getting into the fact that Maupin’s employer, Russia Today, is essentially a fascist propaganda network. Jason Unruhe similarly has the habit of lashing out at other leftists during debates, in one instance he infamously rage-quitted a debate about socialism with Xexizy (which Xexizy’s detractors somehow interpreted as a victory), and like I mentioned before he has even refused to debate other leftists on some issues, but he’s quite polite and patient when he’s debating white nationalists like Richard Spencer and Joseph Jordan, as well as other reactionaries like Sargon of Akkad. The major exception that I’ve seen is his debate with Haz on decolonization, in which Unruhe quite rightly lost his shit when it came to Haz’s breathtaking ignorance about colonialism and US imperialism, and, to be fair, he has been losing quite a lot of patience for Caleb Maupin and Haz regarding their talking points on Antifa. Pierre Tru-Dank turned out to be a similar case to Caleb Maupin, showing nothing but contempt for mainstream leftists while cordially courting fascist audiences and having been friends with fascists for years, including Blackacidlizard and Giuli.

All the more damningly, we see “anti-woke”/”anti-progressive” tendencies in mainstream social-democracy lurch towards fascist rhetoric. Keir Starmer, current leader of the Labour Party, has talked a good game about how Labour should be more “patriotic”. Apparently his idea of what that means is to establish a “society of contribution” under the banner of “Community, family, country”, which is eerily similar to the “Family, Country, Work” slogan used by the fascist regime of Vichy France. Blue Labour also seems interested this direction, as suggested by the Young Blue Labour account endorsing the slogan and then almost immediately retracting it once it got enough backlash. This is not particularly surprising when you learn that the Vichy regime and its ideologues also drew upon what is called “Catholic Social Teaching”, an ideology that Maurice Glasman cites as his light in the darkness. It’s important to remember also that Maurice Glasman didn’t just want “controlled” immigration. Back when he was advisor to Labour loser Ed Miliband, Glasman wanted all immigration to be halted completely. Incidentally, this is probably the real reason why he was, at the same time, keen on welcoming members of the English Defence League into the Labour Party; not because of some high-minded bullshit about tolerance and intellectual diversity or appeals to common good, but because his politics is actually aligned with theirs, regardless of any obfuscation.

There are a couple of common tropes found among “anti-idpol” leftists that I neglected to mention at first but which go a long way towards explaining how the “anti-idpol” left ultimately becomes reactionary and even finds itself aligned with fascism in some contexts. The first trope is an aggressive tendency towards gatekeeping. This is basically when someone attempts to strictly delimit who gets to be and who cannot be a part of a given community, so as to try and control the boundaries and definition of said community on your terms. The gatekeepers believe that they represent “real” members of said community, guarding against poseurs. This leads us on to a second trope: that of elitism. Although it seems contrary to the overall populist trappings of their political worldview, their gatekeeping ways predicate on an elitist worldview regarding the authenticity of leftists or socialists. The basic premise is that the elitist “anti-idpol” leftist asserts that “I represent the original, old school left” (without understand what the “old left” was), or “I am an actual socialist, all you others are just liberals”, or the insistence that you are a preserving the authenticity of “real” socialism from the “fake left”. Because these people represent an abject minority of people let alone on the left, while going up against the vast majority of leftists, this tactic functions as a way of gatekeeeping the definitions of socialism or leftism on behalf of a small clique of individuals, and so is functionally elitist.

You see ideas like that all the time in certain populist and “anti-idpol” left circles, who have the habit calling everyone they don’t like “the fake left”. Caleb Maupin uses the term “synthetic left” to refer to leftists who disagree with him, typically progressives. Jimmy Dore similarly has the habit of using the term “shitlib” to describe leftists he hates, including Noam Chomsky. Jason Unruhe has his own habit of using the term “first worldism” to describe ways of thinking in the left that oppose his own. Max Blumenthal, the editor of the Grayzone, apparently replied to a blog article about conspiracy theories surrounding Alexander Reid Ross by referring to the author and similar leftists as “anarcho-neocon idpol lib gusanos”, in a screed that I’m honestly not sure I can tell is entirely serious. Aimee Terese does not call herself a leftist these days, but she still insists on calling herself a Marxist, and in fact she attacks the left for supposedly corrupting Marxism. Indeed, everyone who is her enemy or who she needs to denounce, such to the extent that she even refers to “wignats” (or “wigger nationalists”, a term often used by reactionaries to single out “problematic” elements of the white nationalist community) as leftists. Joti Brar follows a similar line of argument as Terese when she says that the Worker’s Party of Britain are not left-wing. Pierre Tru-Dank has used the term “leftoid” to refer to leftists he doesn’t like, usually progressives or socialists of a similar stripe, often in reference to leftists who emphasize socially progressive (or, let’s face it, libertarian) attitudes. Haz has also used the term “leftoid” in a similar way. Edwin Aponte explicitly told his colleague Ryan Zickgraf that he wanted The Bellows to represent a small clique of, in his own words, “losers”, and criticized Zickgraf for hanging out with more popular leftists such as the late Michael Brooks.

There is an example within fascism that I feel illustrates the visceral nature of gatekeeping elitism in its most reactionary form, and as strange as it may seem, it comes from the corners of black metal, or more specifically the more far-right bands. As a big fan of black metal, and well-aware of the controversies frequently attached to it, I’m sometimes in the habit of digging around a band I see to see if they’re bad news or not. One such example is Kroda, a Ukrainian black metal band (yes, I know, that’s often not a good start) whose members seem to explictly identify themselves with Nazism (former member Yulian “Viterzgir” Mytsyk even said in a 2007 interview that he thinks National Socialist ideology was “the only future” for black metal) and are members of other NSBM bands such as М8Л8ТХ and Paganland, while insisting that the band itself is strictly non-Nazi per se, preferring to call their music “Pagan Metal”. Needless to say, Kroda are bad news. The reason I bring them up, the main point I want to get across, concerns a statement made by Kroda back in 2009. In it, the band claims to have been attacked by anti-fascists before a concert in Warsaw in Poland, going so far to refer to left-wing anti-fascists as a “red terror”, directly comparing them to Bolsheviks. But here’s the real kicker. Kroda seem to accuse these anti-fascists of being fake metalheads, claiming that they know nothing about metal music and don’t listen to metal at all while nonetheless imposing demands on the metal community, the implication being that Kroda must be representative of “real” metal. Kroda also claim to not be fascists or NSBM, insisting that the label is more appropriate for bands like Der Sturmer or Thor’s Hammer, and that Kroda has nothing to do with politics, but at the same time they insist that the terms “Aryan” and “Race” are legitimate scientific concepts, suggest that anti-fascists are “brainless goblins” for pointing out the obvious racism of this premise, and complain that they get called Nazis over, in their words, “traditional European Runes and Sunwheels” (translation: Nazi symbols that are misleadingly billed as Pagan symbols).

Now what does this have to do with anything? Well, let’s take stock. I have seen “anti-idpol” leftists insist that they are interested in authentic socialism, or even that they represent the actual left, and that their opponents are obviously either liberals or reactionaries. This would entail that their opponents represent an intrusion upon, and wholesale capture of, socialism as a historical concept, and this is the premise that, inevitably, requires the employment of far-right conspiracies to justify. That is why you see some “anti-idpol” leftists employ version of the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, even if they might denounce it by name, because that premise is required to justify the idea that the rest of the left are invading and corrupting socialism. I have also seen some “anti-idpol” leftists arrive at a point where they insist that they are not reactionary racists, while also adopting racist pseudoscience in order to justify brazen racism towards Africans and African diaspora, engage in conspiracy theories surrounding Jews, and arguing for white nationalism rather than allow any small number of refugees into their countries. One might also look at how r/Stupidpol became a hot bed of anti-semitism that is then justified by facetious appeals to anti-Zionism. Elitism, conspiratorial thinking, denial and projection, all appear as hallmarks of a fascist worldview or tactical repertoire, and the fact that I only have to pluck out one neo-Nazi, from an NSBM band, and find examples of similar tropes and behaviour between that neo-Nazi and certain “anti-idpol” leftists, is very damning. Again, this is not proof that all “anti-idpol” leftists are necessarily fascists, but it does demonstrate that fascistic or semi-fascistic tropes do seem to be a part of the overall milieu, and this can explain why “anti-idpol” leftists might find themselves adjacent to fascists.

But there’s one other pernicious trope that connects the “anti-idpol” left to fascist thinking, or at least when it is considered: the concept of “woke capitalism”. This is simply a reference to the phenomenon of corporations and rich people ostensibly endorsing causes such as gender equality, LGBT rights, racial justice, and the struggle against climate change, to name just a few. It’s built on an obvious misunderstanding of the role of capital, a lack of knowledge of the phenomenon of recuperation (by which previous radical concepts are altered and remodelled into subservient forms by the ruling class), and requires you to ignore the fact that corporations and liberal politicians still spend money on anti-LGBT hate groups or how the American government still bends the knee to fossil fuel lobbyists, but despite this broad ideas about the threat of “woke capitalism” are spread by right-wing ideologues, populists, and of course the “anti-idpol” left. Implicit in the concept of “woke capitalism” is a separation or division from regular capitalism, or a specific phase of capitalism. The theoretical difference, I suppose, would be that “woke capitalism” is when corporations or the market tries to impel its working class to support progressive causes, as opposed to regular capitalism which is just about selling you shit. Instantly I’m reminded of the concept of “crony capitalism”, the idea of distinction between true free market capitalism and a falisified market system based on either state coercion or collusion between the state and the rich. This idea is usually associated specifically with the libertarian right, but we also see it employed outside of libertarianism, one example being right-wing nationalists such as Steve Bannon. Both “woke capitalism” and “crony capitalism” are described in a way that entails a certain unproductive quality, “woke capitalism” in particular cast as a phenomenon less interested in economic productivity and more interested in activism. Matthew Goodwin, a national-populist advocate of the theory of “woke capitalism”, seems to define the concept as a system in which multinational firms expound “a new belief system” (by which he seems to mean racial equality and progressivism) while avoiding taxation and exploiting the native (white) workers. This is important because the entire framework of “crony capitalism” in right-wing parlance comes from fascist economics, and in fact may have originally been codified by the Nazis.

Gottfried Feder, the main economic theoretician of the Nazi Party who is sometimes considered to be the mentor of Adolf Hitler, divided capitalism into two types: “schaffendes kapital” and “raffendes kapital”. “Schaffendes kapital” means “productive capital”, or “creative capital”, and referred to national capital as the source of economic utility, employment, and technological advancement. “Raffendes kapital” means “greedy capital”, or “parasitic capital”, and refers to finance capital, stock trading, and banking, which purportedly drained national resources for the benefit of a small clique of international financiers. Unsurprisingly, the Nazis believed that this “parasitic capital” was Jewish in origin and nature, while “productive” national capital was what real Aryan-German capitalism, “true” capitalism, was supposed to be, reflecting the “beauty” and “productivity” of German national character. It should be noted that the same division of capital defined by Gottfried Feder was originally devised by Otto Glogau in 1874, and just like the Nazis he believed that “Raffendes kapital” was the product of the Jews, who he believed didn’t work and instead “let others work for him” while speculating and making deals over the labour of others. It’s no surprise to know that Glogau’s ideas became influential within the anti-semitic German right into the early 20th century and found their way to Gottfried Feder and then Adolf Hitler. Now, why does this matter as regards “woke capital”? Well, even if the concept of “woke capitalism” is used in anti-capitalist leftist thought to denounce capitalism, in practice the concept merely entails a deviation from a more authentic or “true” model of capitalism, one that produces through labour as opposed to deriving life from “unproductive” activism. Both “woke capitalism” and “crony capitalism” are also sometimes, almost inevitably, tied back to Jewish influence. In the case of “crony capitalism”, the Federal Reserve tends to be a major villain in that ideology, and in right-wing circles we frequently see the idea that the Federal Reserve is controlled by Jews. As for “woke capitalism”, if as Tom Slater says “woke capitalism might give the capitalists a warm feeling it does nothing for those at the bottom”, then that would be by definition “parasitic”, and if you add the conceit regarding international firms in alliance with non-white workers, you get echoes of the Nazi “Raffendes kaptial” in “woke capital”, and from there it becomes almost obvious that modern concepts of “woke capitalism”, especially in their commonality with “crony capitalism”, echo from what is historically Nazi ideology. And so it should come as no surprise that fascists can find themselves attracted to the “anti-idpol” critique, and why some may speak of a pipeline between being a mere “anti-idpol” leftist and being a Nazi or NazBol.

Just how left-wing are you?

And when the “anti-idpol” leftists are not the unwitting allies, or even friends, of fascism, they often turn out to just be right-wing conservative stooges. Aimee Terese, for instance, has degenerated to a point where she argues against unionization and universal healthcare all while still calling herself a Marxist, and even before that she was seemingly more happy to talk to Oren Cass, a literal Mitt Romney campaign appartchik, than most of the left. Glenn Greenwald is already known for his willingness to appear on Fox News several times over, but his more recent turn is even more bizarre. He ended up as one of the only people in America to defend Matt Gaetz, the Republican congressman who is presently under investigation for trafficking minors for sex, on the grounds that Gaetz having sex with a 17-year old girl qualifies as “private adult consensual behaviour”. Jimmy Dore, like Glenn Greenwald, has made multiple appearances of Fox News, in which he often serves the purpose of being a leftist who attacks other leftists, and he has repeatedly praised the nativist ideologue Tucker Carlson in many of his videos without meaningfully challening his ideology. Angela Nagle, for her part, also made guest appearances at Fox News specifically to join them in bashing the left. She has also taken to writing for UnHerd, a weird conservative-populist and centrist magazine, where she argued that her native Ireland was a victim of “woke cultural revolution”. Tulsi Gabbard recently celebrated the defeat of former Virginia govenor Terry McAuliffe and his replacement by the Republican Glenn Youngkin because supposedly meant a “rejection of efforts to divide us by race, the stripping of parental rights, and arrogant, deaf leaders”. Matt Taibbi has openly defended the right-wing nativist Tucker Carlson and fully believed his claims that the NSA has been spying on him. Malcolm Kyeyune, a Swedish Marxist who argues for a kind of conservative populism, is part of the steering council for the conservative think tank called Oikos, which is headed by Matthias Karlsson, who was a leader of the right-wing (and crypto-fascist) Sweden Democrats. Edwin Aponte told Ryan Zickgraf (before he got fired) that he intended to model his website The Bellows after American Affairs, a conservative journal that was created specifically as a pro-Trump think tank and which Angela Nagle has also contributed articles for, and planned to invite Julius Krein, the founder of American Affairs whose work Aponte admires, to write for The Bellows or do a livestream. Benjamin Studebaker, who was a cohort of Aimee Terese on her podcast What’s Left, has actually argued for leftists to run as Republicans in order to win over working people in red states. And I’ve seen “anti-idpol” leftists actually endorse this idea, and this just tells me that these guys have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.

No seriously, I can’t stress this enough: there are people who actually believe that they can bring socialism to America by joining the Republican Party! They are fucking morons if that’s what they think, and you need to stop taking these fuckers seriously. Say what you will about the Democratic Party, I sure as shit do, I hate them, but at least there’s some “left-wing” in there. At least you can can faintly believe that there’s room for progressives to ever-so-slightly shift the party left, even if the end result of that is probably just going to be finally arriving at European rainbow capitalism after 20 years of stalling. The Republicans, on the other hand, are the people who think Joe Biden is a communist. What makes you think you’re going to have a chance at running as a leftist in the Republican Party and not be ostracized by your intended base and the rest of the party. It’s the same reason that, as I’ve discovered, running as a “left-wing conservative” anywhere in an electoral context (a.k.a. the only context for which it has any real purpose) is completely useless everywhere it’s been tried; ultimately, if people want to vote for reactionaries and conservatives, they will go to the right and reject all of these opportunists within the left. And if you are a social-democratic party trying to follow the reactionary pathway of trying to marry left-wing politics with social conservatism, all you’ll do is dilute your socialism and deal with the fact that nothing you do will satisfy the reactionaries who gaslight you into doing what they say. That’s what happened to the Labour Party after Keir Starmer took over as leader, and if anything they actually seem to be losing popular support. The French leftist politician, Jean-Luc Melenchon, seems to be floundering in French presidential election polls, often struggling to breach 10% and falling behind center-right candidates, and it’s possible that this has something to do with his own attempts to position himself as a reasonable alternative in the scope of what is otherwise conservative politics. His debate with the notorious far-right provocateur Eric Zemmour saw him highlighting points of agreement with Zemmour, including opposition to Covid lockdowns and even support for the French war in Mali. Concerningly, Melenchon did not denounce Zemmour for his support for the fascist Vichy leader Philippe Petain, and while he did denounce Zemmour’s more brazen bigotry towards Muslims, his own answer to this is essentially the same kind of assimilation politics favored by the right-wing across Europe; this is what Melechon calls “créolisation”, the idea that other cultures come together to form a single French culture, thereby all cultures are assimilated into one dominant monoculture. This sounds noble, enlightened, and liberal-minded in theory, but in practice things like this run counter to any and all sense of cultural independence, and thereby any real sense of freedom of expression, exist ultimately with the backing of authoritarian surveillance, and in France it’s apparently even considered a step backwards from the days of the French Revolution.

It seems to me that attempts to align left-wing politics with conservatism, or any kind of reactionary politics, to whatever degree can only make sense from the premise that you’re trying to win the favour of the working class, on the basis that they’re supposedly exactly as reactionary as you clearly are, largely for the purpose of electoral politics, to gain votes. And yet it seems to me that this approach has in no way succeeded in actually making the left electorally viable in any meaningful sense. Nor has it ever worked, at any time in modern history. A very old example is instructive here. During the 1960s, the Australian Labor politician Arthur Calwell, who was notorious for his racist remarks and belief in a white ethno-state, ran in three federal elections in which he lost each time, and with each election his party fared worse and worse, losing more votes and more seats. It was after Calwell resigned as leader in 1967 that the Australian Labor Party began to recover and eventually win power in 1972. During the 1980s, the French Communist Party was led by Georges Marchais, a man who attempted to incorporate French nationalism, based on a Jacobinite concept of France as a centralized monolingual, unitary state, into the party programme. He also complained to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union when an ethnographer they sent to France documented the existence of several distinct ethnic groups in France, which offended Marchais because it undermined his belief in France as “one country, one nation, one people”. For all that, the PCF continued to decline in French elections until a brief bounce in 1997 (by which point Marchais had been replaced), suggesting that appeals to ethnocentric and chauvinistic nationalism have done nothing to improve the political viability of the PCF. And remember when I mentioned Blue Labour’s approach to socialist politics earlier on? Ed Miliband tried it their way, or at least he welcomed Glasman and his ilk to his ideological circle. He lost to David Cameron, who promised a referendum on EU membership. In fact, if we take seriously that perhaps Keir Starmer actually is drawing from Blue Labour tradition with his “society of contribution” crap, then I don’t know about you, but I don’t think it’s helping Labour much electorally.

From this standpoint, it seems like things like “left-wing conservatism” don’t work, and only exist either as pseudo-rebellious contrarianism in the present context or just an opportunistic cover for what is clearly bigotry in the historical context. You can try to compete with the right on reactionary talking points, and it will never work, because you will always lose to people for whom it isn’t just a corporate sales pitch at the end of the day. That’s all social-democratic appeals to conservative communitarianism are! It’s a politically correct sales pitch to try and prove to your mortal enemies that you aren’t radicals. But hey, I doubt reality is going to stand in the way of the “anti-idpol” guys I know, particularly when some of them actually began considering that the 2020 US election was “stolen” from Donald Trump.

“Patriotic socialism” and the decolonization debate

And sure enough, the “anti-idpol” left has moved on to an exciting new project, a new way to consolidate contrarian reaction against “identity politics”. This is what is referred to as “patriotic socialism”, or “proletarian patriotism”. Terms like these remind me of concepts like “socialist patriotism”, which I experimented with like two years ago. The intent was to draw from Tito to present an internationalist, non-authoritarian, non-nationalist/non-fascist concept of patriotism, but eventually I stopped doing it. I guess I kind of forgot about it as I increasingly moved on from being a contrarian in order to properly embrace libertarian communism. But two years later, I find that there’s a clique of socialists trying to do their own take on “proletarian patriotism” or “patriotic socialism”, sometimes also called “Socialism with American Characteristics”, which seems to involve a repackaging of reactionary chauvinism in the context of a socialist ideology whose main purpose is simply to justify loving and defending America. The main representatives of this tendency seem to consist of Haz (a.k.a. Jon Bherka), Peter Coffin, Jackson Hinkle, and Caleb Maupin, most of whom at least claim to be Marxist-Leninists.

There’s honestly not much to it, but it seems to come down to defending America as well as its claims to indigenous land through variously elaborate arguments. Jackson Hinkle summarizes his claim that he is both anti-imperalist and “an American patriot” by saying “What would be the point of working to improve the lives of your fellow Americans if you hate America?”. The implication being that if you oppose his right-opportunist ideology, then you necessarily hate America, rather like what the Pat Buchanans and Bill O’Reillys of the world used to say. Haz has also taken to scolding the Communist Party USA for listing “Occupied Indigenous Land” as their location, which he deemed to be an insult to American workers, thus defining “patriotic socialism” in terms of opposition to decolonization. And on that note, Haz has the habit of opposing decolonization by appeals to what amounts to racial essentialism, as suggested by insistence that Jason Unruhe cannot know what indigenous people desire, seemingly because he is not indigenous. Haz also seems to believe that decolonization amounts to privatizing public land, and as part of his “patriotic socialism” he opposes efforts like the 1619 Project on the grounds that they “delegitimize the Republic”. I’m left to imagine he favors things like Trump’s nakedly propagandistic 1776 Project or Chinese style “patriotic education”, both designed chiefly to inculcate loyalty to the state and its narratives of legitimation. Another sign of Haz’s racial essentialism is his taking Luna Oi to task for marrying a white American anarchist, Emerican Johnson, which to be honest is a pretty good sign that this “patriotic socialism” sounds more like old-fashioned white supremacist racism than Marxism-Leninism. He also paranoiacally asks “what land do they want back that must lead to the destruction of the Republic?” in reference to indigenous sovereignty and decolonization movements. When grilled about US imperialism, he responds by asserting that “the republic was founded on seceeding from empire”, and this incidentally is how he gets into LaRouchian conspiracy theories in order to justify that premise. Peter Coffin seems to have taken the whole concept and ran marathons with it, going so far as to present himself as a ridiculous mascot figure with a star-spangled onesey and even a blue and white dyed beard. He really seems to be going all in on the “I’m a socialist but I love America” theme. Beyond that, Coffin also seems to engage in anti-decolonization arguments by claiming that decolonization amounts to the privatisation of public land at the behest of NGOs. All of this appears to be justified through ridiculously selective readings of Vladimir Lenin.

Caleb Maupin has been eager to point out that the Communist Party USA used to proclaim that “Communism is the Americanism of the 20th century”. Never mind the obvious issue that this would have been before a time where America’s legacy of white supremacy and colonialism was being reckoned with on a large scale, the other thing Caleb Maupin won’t tell you is that, for such a nice-sounding premise, communist appeals to patriotic chauvinism have never resulted in any significant gains for the communist movement or the working class. I already mentioned that this was true for the French Communist Party as well under the leadership of Georges Marchais, but in the American context, the Communist Party USA did attempt to make various appeals to American patriotism in order to win over a working class that they may have perceived as deeply invested in their national identity. Incidentally, they also tended to ignore racial issues and even the existence of racism itself, which had the effect of alienating African-American workers who would then move over to just about any movement that claimed to care about them and expound the cause of black liberation. This, as it happens, is why class reductionism tends to be looked down on as a retrograde failure, because it was tried by communists before and it lead to fascists like Marcus Garvey filling the gaps.

Of course, it’s worth noting that ideas about a “patriotic” socialism in a contrarian conservative context are nothing new, and the basic concept wasn’t invented by Haz, Jackson Hinkle, or Peter Coffin. Socially conservative viewpoints have been advanced under the cloth of Marxism by intellectuals such as Christopher Lasch and Michel Clouscard, and there have been many social-democratic politicians and intellectuals that have done something similar. Wolfgang Streeck, a Marxist, seems to have argued that opposition to capitalism is impossible without a clearly defined “national community”. If you somehow count Blue Labour and their ilk as socialists, then they’ve been around for years as an insular clique of elite ideologues who have even influenced a minority of Conservative politicians. “Socialist patriotism”, as a vague concept of love for the socialist homeland at the same time as denunciations of nationalism, was a concept upheld by basically every country that claimed to be based on some form of Marxism-Leninism, and was expounded particularly by Josef Stalin, the Communist Party of China (who define it as essentially just subordination to the Chinese state), and Kim Il-Sung, neither of which are particularly good signs for the trajectory such a concept could take in the present. More recently, Sean P. McCarthy, a leftist and host of the Grubstakers podcast, has argued that “religion, family, and the nation state are all things that give people a sense of community and duty counter to the alienation and loneliness of late stage capitalism and the left should probably shut up about abolishing them and let people enjoy things”, while Aimee Terese has broadly defended a similar vision of socialism against “degenerate leftists”. David Swift wrote a whole book accusing leftists who disagree with conservative and communitarian values as being “hobbyists”, while also defending the state of Israel.

Now, it’s no surprise that the people claiming to be “anti-imperialist” Marxist-Leninists and “patriotic Americans” have been getting embrassed and pilloried non-stop, and this position is bound to create a shitload of inconsistencies. For instance, how does someone who is both a “patriotic American” and a “Marxist-Leninist anti-imperialist” deal with the issue of China? Haz, for one, has, well, an interesting position, let’s just say that much. He apparently manages to be both pro-America and pro-China through what he describes as the “revolutionary defeatist” position, which is to say that he is rooting for the victory of China against America, under the hope that Chinese forces would destroy the American bourgeoisie and “decadent professional managerial elite”, and so being an “American patriot” in this setting means to sabotage American military efforts against China while agitating against US war with China. Whatever you can call this position, I fail to see how it can be categorized as “pro-America” by any stretch. Haz apparently loves his country so much that he wants it to be destroyed and taken over by China. How he doesn’t think to himself that this seems utterly insane is something I will never be able to understand. That’s not much of a surprise though, since his very love for America is incoherent. He loves America, but he also describes America as “the only successful anarchist revolution in the world” and castigates America for “overturning the customs, traditions, and civilizations of the peoples of the world, destroying states wholesale like a blind and reckless juggernaut, and imposing, wholesale American culture, ideologies and notions of ‘human rights’ upon all peoples, regardless of particular circumstances, conditions and histories”, while also rambling about the LGBT community and the George Floyd protests as “the whimsical hither and thither of the American public subjectivities” (yeah, this guy is reactionary as all hell). It actually looks like Haz doesn’t love anything about America at all, so his “patriotism” makes no sense except as an opportunistic, reactionary appeal to fascism. It’s also manifestly hypocritical to complain about America destroying the customs and traditions of the peoples of the world, while also seemingly opposing decolonization off the back of racialist might makes right arguments and nihilistic rejections of what he calls “more morality that means nothing”.

Also, I think these guys are just scolds. When the Communist Party USA decided to publicly reject the efforts of people like Haz, Peter Coffin, Jackson Hinkle and Caleb Maupin and created a poster against them, depicting them as chauvinistic intruders who needed to be swept away, they seemed to react by trying to cancel the CPUSA for absurd reasons. A self-described “Patriotic Communist” took to highlighting the original artist, ZayArts, depicting Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong twerking, calling him a “pervert” who “desecrates the images of revolutionary forefathers in favor of his distorted personal fantasy”, and called for images like that to be banned. Haz “patriotically” condemned the twerking image as an “epitome of Western nihilist degeneracy”. Some commentators described Zay’s work as “idpozzed”, a contraction of “idpol”, or “identity politics”, and “pozzed”, as in “HIV Positive”. Some, of course, opted simply to parody the original CPUSA poster, and to be honest they kind of make Lenin look racist. All of this suggests a deep-seated fascist and totalitarian attitude regarding art, culture, and propaganda, an obvious echo of Nazi conceptions of “degenerate art”, which makes perfect sense considering how this concept of “patriotic socialism” appears to be based around a socialist cult of loyalty to the state. Unsurprisingly, many of these “Patriotic Communists” are also Dengists, offering uncritical support for the People’s Republic of China.

New developments in Progressive Brocialist Thought!

Before I move on to my final reflections on the topic, while we are still talking about decolonization, I’d like to draw attention to one last, and very unlikely, sign of the mainstreaming of “anti-idpol” talking points in the online left. The newest source of this appears to be none other than Ian “Vaush” Kochinski, the self-described libertarian socialist or rather “progressive socialist” YouTuber and former protege of Steven “Destiny” Bonnell III (who himself has devolved into a rabid right-wing reactionary). Recently, there has been a conversation involving Vaush regarding decolonization, as BadMouse has highlighted his attitudes regarding decolonization. BadMouse’s new videos were pretty bad in many ways, but they brought forward some relevant issues with the discourse on decolonization on the left largely in response to Vaush’s own views. Although Vaush is known to many as sort of a “BreadTube” celebrity and frequently despised by “anti-idpol” leftists, he himself has taken on board quite a few “anti-idpol” stances in order to respond to the decolonization debate. In fact, Vaush explicitly referred to himself as “anti-idpol” during his drunken response to BadMouse and even actually proclaimed himself a “Western chauvinist” while dogwhistling about “moral relativism”. Keep in mind, this is supposed to be a left-wing, self-described “progressive socialist” approach to decolonization. His delegitimzation of decolonization as a broad whole by bringing up inter-Amerindian conflict as though it somehow can be equivocated with settler-colonial genocide, as well as leveraging one example of black people deporting other black people and reducing all anti-colonial discourse to “should we deport/genocide white people?”, together constitute an approach that could have been expected of lazy reactionaries like Carl Benjamin or StoneToss, or really any right-winger, not a serious left-wing critique of colonialism, but apparently this is a mainstream left-wing argument. I also find it amusing that he rightly criticizes Jimmy Dore for being an insane abuser and charlatan, only to take the exact same line Jimmy Dore does when he insists on the “Fred Hampton school of the Black Panther Party”, by which he just means vague talking points about how the elites fear racial unity and how white people and black people should all just learn to get along because he says so.

I would advance, from my own perspective, that Vaush’s attitudes towards decolonization, his self-described Western chauvinism, and his general self-declared contempt for culture, all stem from or intersect with his broad sense of anti-theism. He has, at one point, practically argued that any form of religious belief makes you inherently susceptible to fascism because all religious thinking is superstitious, irrationalist, and essentialist. He especially believes that being Pagan in a modern setting instead of just a secular atheist means that you have no control over whether or not you become a fascist because you cannot control what you end up as if you “accept irrationality and superstition as a viable way of interpreting the world”. This, mind you, is supposed to be a critique of essentialism, which nonetheless sounds very essentialist, not to mention colonialist. If you have completely lost agency to irrationality and “primitive” superstition, would it not follow that you need to be saved from it through external intervention? And if it does follow, then could you not extend that to colonization of non-European societies, and the erasure of their belief systems? What exactly do you think goes into justifying things like Manifest Destiny, the systematic genocide of Amerindian tribes? I would say that anti-theism is a much broader problem throughout the left as a whole, but it is worth pointing out here insofar as it intersects with and services the broader “anti-idpol” framework of colonial humanist ecumenism that Vaush so stubbornly advances.

Conclusions

So, to close out, I think the first thing I have to stress is that the “anti-idpol” left operates on an illusion. Their entire premise is constructed around a conspiracy theory that they themselves are the ones being silenced by the establishment in favour of the “woke” left. This is simply not the case. You can call yourself a Marxist and, if you peddle the same talking points as much of the right, you can get interviews on Sky News or some other mainstream outlet. Brendan O’Neill, a strange example given that he is ideologically a “classical liberal”, calls himself a Marxist, still justifies his right-wing ideology and its witless faith in progress by citing the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Leon Trotsky (which I suppose makes sense when you remember that this guy was a Trotskyist and member of the Revolutionary Communist Party during the 1990s), and he frequently appears on Sky News and contributes to mainstream right-wing publications. Ashley Frawley, an apparent Marxist who also peddles lots of conservative talking points (including the defence of corporal punishment as a parenting method), has also appeared on Sky News and was spotlighted on the neoliberal youth magazine OZY, and is also a senior lecturer at Swansea University who likes to gas about how happiness is actually a bad thing. Angela Nagle, as I mentioned before, appeared in Fox News as well as American Affairs, and her seminal book Kill All Normies ended up getting taken very seriously by mainstream outlets, even if it was also criticized and even despite the book itself not disclosing any of its sources and lacking a bibliography! Paul Embery frequently appears on Sky News as well as the well-funded far-right channel GB News, and his book Despised can be found in most major book stores. In fact, lots of “anti-woke” literature, not just from contrarian leftists, can easily be picked up and purchased in mainstream book shops. Books like The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds by the neocon Douglas Murray, Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (the latter himself a vulgar, anti-semitic, right-wing lunatic), and both of Jordan Peterson’s self-help books can all be bought at your local Waterstone’s. Hardly the mark of an underground anti-establishment political axis. And despite claim that J. K. Rowling is being silenced and having her books burned en masse, you can still buy all of her crappy books literally anywhere! Just to beat the dead horse a little more, take a look at the ouevre of Vivek Ramaswamy, a conservative who is the chief executive of Roivant Sciences (literally this guy is just a capitalist!), which includes screeds against “wokeness”, critical race theory, and “Corporate America” (the irony of a chief executive complaining about that is astonishing on its own), through not just mainstream liberal and conservative news outlets but also one of the largest publishing companies in the world.

It is impossible to take this “anti-woke” axis of authors and intellectuals as anything other than entirely mainstream and also thoroughly corporate. If we took seriously that this was a rebellious, anti-establishment, almost counter-cultural political movement being silenced and pushed underground by the “woke” establishment, you wouldn’t hear about them anywhere except in some fringe Discord or Telegram chat or the dark corners of 4chan. And even then it wouldn’t matter because, guess what? Their opinions are literally constantly being validated by the media and our political representatives. When I attempt to describe it as this point, the only thing I can say is that it feels like a cargo cult, almost completely divorced from the real world but kept alive through an insular, reactionary, and increasingly stagnant online meme culture; one that, if I’m being honest, seems specifically engineered to normalize increasingly reactionary, conspiratorial, and ultimately authoritarian ideas. I suppose this is one of the final connections to existing fascist tendencies in that fascism is only ever superficially subversive or revolutionary, appealing to surface-level contradictions in order to seem like a credible challenge to the system, without actually challenging it in any meaningful material way. That’s not even getting how hand-wringing about “wokeness” and “failing to be patriotic” are very much not confined to the hard right. In America you’ve got establishment Democrats like James Carville blaming recent Democratic losses on “wokeness", and in the UK the Labour Party’s more recent losses under Keir Starmer are being blamed on a failure to “embrace Brexit”, all carefully crafted to obfsucate failures to deliver on much-needed infrastructural, political, and economic reform.

The other illusion, when you really think about it, concerns the whole conceit of “identity politics” being addressed. The claim is opposition to “identity politics”, that is to say what they define as a politics or ideology that emphasizes some sense of identity whether personal or “essential”, or mobilizes individuals based on characteristics like race, gender, or sexuality to name just a few of the most obvious points. This is held to divide the left and make it amenable to neoliberal capitalism, and is often opposed in favour of some kind of class reductionist universalism in an attempt to ignore social conditions while excluding movements that try to represent them. Yet, even they do not really oppose “identity politics”. Because, in embracing transphobia, the appeal is inevitably towards the mobilization of individuals based on clearly-defined sense of shared sexual or gender identity, one based on clearly defined heteronormative boundaries. The transphobia laundered by the “anti-idpol” left, then, is ironically a form of “identity politics” by the common definition they invoke. And there’s more. By pushing for strict immigration controls, whether or not this is done for left-wing ends, the end is inevitably to control the “national character” so as to produce a monoculture against “multiculturalism”, which inevitably requires mobilizing society itself on the basis of shared identity — whether racial, national, or cultural — even if it is against the will of the citizenry or against any concept of compassion, since, ultimately, some kind of authoritarianism is required. I have to stress that. You need only look at the French government viciously oppressing Muslims in the wake of social panics brought on by terrorist atrocities, sending special forces to literally arrest children who fail to tow the government line, and you may also be interested in how people like Jacob Wohl are increasingly open about what conservative assimilation really means. Even if we appeal to vague concepts of humanism, all you’ve gone and done is transfer mobilization based around identity towards some concept of the shared identity of the human species, one which you might think is free of being an “identity” because of its theoretically universal quality, but in fact is still a constructed identity, one which demands the conformity of all other identities. That is why some of those who argue for “universal humanism” also oppose struggles for equality, justice, and liberation when it comes to race, sex, gender, and other things, even if those things can and have been argued on the basis of some concept of humanism. It’s also why, in discussions about transhumanism, ironically, the point eventually gets made that “pro-human identity politics” is necessarily to oppose Man’s total subjection by technology. And honestly, what could be more “idpol” than mobilizing the working class around Western patriotic mythologies while rejecting all critical examinations of white supremacy and colonialism! Or, for that matter, opposing the freedom to transgress the boundaries of identity on a personal level! In the end, the “anti-idpol” left is not actually against “identity”, or “identity politics”. They are only against mobilizing around identity in a way that connects to the liberation of historically marginalized groups as well as their shared lived experience up to the present, because, in their minds, it is inherently a threat to their own consolidation of identity. In other words, rather than actually opposing “identity politics” or “identity”, the “anti-idpol” left merely wants to mobilize around its own set of “identity” categories, and insists on doing so to the exclusion of all others. And sooner or later, that’s why some of them go towards fascism and adopt some concept of politics built around the preservation of white identity.

And you know, there’s just something funny about the way a lot of things ultimately go together. There’s the transphobia, there’s the pearl-clutching about wokeness which is really just a byword for contemporary progressivism, there’s the weirdly nationalist politics, there’s the opposition to “identity politics” which is actually just reactionary anti-liberation politics, there’s also contempt for sex workers involved, there’s appeals to conservative ideology, there’s anti-semitism both subtle and gross, and there’s a surprising amount of connections to fascist ideology, which then lead to fascists starting to think you’re their guys. The more I think about it, the more impossible it is to see these elements in isolation. Instead, I see hints that it makes more sense to think of them in terms of an interlocking network of reactionary tendencies that, one could argue, forms a complex ad-hoc strain of fascism, or crypto-fascism.

Besides which, class reductionism has a serious problem once you start considering the growth of socialism on grounds other than base economism. And judging by the way some “anti-idpol” left guys have gotten, I think they’ve realized that in the sense that culture, for instance, remains an important thing to consider even if you aren’t doing some reactionary culture war. But whereas a lot of leftists consider that point from the angle that we should dismantle and deconstruct all forms of oppression, and consequently spend a lot of time responding to right-wing arguments about various social issues, the “patriotic socialists” and similar types embrace this conclusion but take the side of maintaining them.

When I got into the left, I started off as a recovering right-winger, burned out from the right because of the obnoxious political Christianity of the Trump movement and the egregious authoritarianism and racism that I saw from so-called “libertarians”. I was lost, and then I met a communist who eventually converted me to socialism and then communism, Marxist of course. But the way he did it meant theoretically moving into the left but in a way that didn’t require challenging most of the things that ended up nudging me towards a more reactionary politics to start with except for the base economic arguments. And so I started out doing my own weird crypto-reactionary takes on socialism and communism, but the difference from where a lot of these guys are now is that, the entire time, I still thought of myself as doing just an extremely heterodox form of libertarian socialism. That showed in my opposition to increasingly sex-negative attitudes in some leftists, such as their desire to criminalize all pornography and sex work, in my distate for the way authoritarian regimes were defended almost on principle rather than critically, and how, even when I experimented with the more conservative ends of that, when I think about it, almost never argued like one when it comes to arguing with others in that scene. It was nothing more than an experiment, lying to myself in an environment that consisted of people who, if we’re very honest, were just scolds. Their sole purpose is to gatekeep and scold the rest of the left while doing jack shit other than maybe tell people to start a coop and stop masturbating. Meanwhile, over time, I started looking into my usual areas of interest and discovering intersections with real historical libertarian communism, such as the Surrealists and from there the Situationist International (from there is also how I started looking into council communism), and reckoning with my views on freedom more or less aligning with what Mikhail Bakunin said in Man, Society, and Freedom (1871). Let me quote him below:

I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation. It is the slavery of other men that sets up a barrier to my freedom, or what amounts to the same thing, it is their bestiality which is the negation of my humanity. For my dignity as a man, my human right which consists of refusing to obey any other man, and to determine my own acts in conformity with my convictions is reflected by the equally free conscience of all and confirmed by the consent of all humanity. My personal freedom, confirmed by the liberty of all, extends to infinity.

There’s nothing here that a Marxist can’t embrace, and I believe that you absolutely should embrace it, as I have done in my heart for a long time. In order to be a libertarian communist, you have support the liberation of all. This means that you cannot be satisfied with historical progress if it does not mean that all humans are free — particularly when, from my standpoint, historical progress has often meant the deprivation of freedom throughout the world. It also means that you can’t just marinate in some notion that all that matters is that other people leave you alone and get off your lawn. A great article on gay liberation by Novara Media illustrates the history of how such personal-isolationist notions of individual freedom ultimately resulted in some of the old gay-liberationists becoming reactionary and bigoted, resulting in their approval of authoritarian suppression of trans people and in the process neglecting the truly radical history of liberation activism. In other words, if to truly support liberty means to endorse the liberation for all, you need to have real solidarity for other people fighting their own battles and struggles for liberation, and you have to overcome the boundaries that stop you from doing that. And yes, this isn’t as easy some people make it sound. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.

And if you don’t, then there’s no telling how reactionary you’ll get, how much authoritarianism you’ll be willing to co-sign, and how willing you will be to accept the growth of fascism. And if you refuse to transcend the contrarianism being peddled in some corners of the left today, if you stay as some sort of “anti-idpol contrarian”, the only that happens is that you end up getting more progressively unhinged. Aimee Terese seems to be offering us a hilarious, almost tragicomic example of this. She’s apparently gotten so bad that even the fascists who flocked to her are now getting sick of her obvious psuedo-intellectual dillettantism, coupled with her reliance on a cultist fanbase that hangs on her every word, and her only response to this is just dismiss everyone around her as a leftist (while also doing that boomer right-wing trope that casts Adolf Hitler as a leftist). This along with the recent and incoherent “patriotic socialism” movement, along with just the turns to white nationalism I’ve seen, constitutes the inevitable destination of the “anti-idpol” left. And if, like me, you are opposed to that, then the right thing to do is think about where you are and walk away from this cancerous cargo cult.

One last thing…

Oh, and just one more thing, just to remove all doubt for any of these guys still lingering around. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Gender is not actually a binary. Nobody is saying that sex isn’t real. Detransitioning is so rare that it doesn’t matter and certainly not enough to legislate trans people away. Transness has been a thing forever, not only among humans but also in the animal kingdom. Being trans is not a phase to be grown out of. Most children are not being forced to “become” trans by their parents. If you accept trans people and treat them with the dignity and respect that they want starting from a young age, they will not be driven to suicide. Nearly all of the scientific community recognizes this, even if you don’t. None of this should affect you personally if you’re a cis straight person except on whether or not you accept trans and non-binary people for what they are and support their liberation. If TERFs are any indication, a lot of the people who hate trans people and accuse them of being pedophiles are probably just pedophiles themselves, and certainly abusers. If you’re actually serious that pronouns are a threat to civilization, then all you’re saying is that your civilization is weak, requires tyranny to survive, and deserves to die so that everyone can be free. And if you’re a leftist trying to justify transphobia, let alone as somehow an “anti-idpol” line, you’re nothing but a pawn, or rather “humans shield”, of the capitalists who are laughing in your face. Deal with it.

Libertarian Communism uber alles!