Altered States
A Review of “Kill All Normies” by Angela Nagle
The implosion of the post 1989 liberal idea is one that animates many a brainless op ed piece from “quality” newspapers that really should know better. The rise of Donald Trump and the total inability of the Liberal political establishment to respond adequately to both him and his legion of far right followers does need serious examination however and in that regard Angela Nagles new book “Kill all Normies” performs a useful service. Nagle dives headlong into the foul sewers of the internet to chart the rise of the online (and now very much in the real world) alt-right. In doing so she uncovers a world of extreme racism, sexual bizarreness, bitter misogyny all wrapped together with a fevered desperation to break “taboos”.
Nagles investigation of the strange world of reddit sub forums. 4chan and other places where the alt right was “memed into existence” to quote the America Nazi leader Richard Spencer illuminates a world where large groups of (mostly) young men and teenagers gather to engage in racism, misogyny and bizarre pornography. What Nagle traces successfully is the genesis of the online alt-right in an internet culture where literally anything goes. Where the anonymity of twitter and online forums provide a chance for (to use Marcuse’s phrase) live without even “necessary repression”. This culture enabled the alt-right to grow and Nagle ably demonstrates it’s explosion in the online world. One of the flaws in the the book though is it’s failure to examine the role that wider popular culture played in popularising the themes of the alt-right. The Gavin Mcinnes’s and Milo Yiannopouplos’s might have come to personify this movement but it would not have been able to grow in the way that it has done without drawing on economic, political and cultural dynamics of the mainstream. The extreme misogyny of the alt-right online may be shocking to read but that this anti-woman creed should come as no surprise if you examine the political trajectory of the last thirty years as feminism virtually vanished as an active radical force, instead becoming entirely represented by the corporate feminism of the Clinton-Blair era. The culture in Western Europe and Northern America swung back towards an affirmation of the man as “lad” essentially a hard drinking man child who’s main aim in life is getting laid as often as possible with women as much a commodity as they were back in the Mad Men period. This development of reactionary, anti feminist culture is rooted in a real material basis which is the entry en-masse of women into the labour force in the 1960's and 1970's but not on terms that have been favourable. to either working class women or men as it coincided in Britain and the USA with a generalised defeat of the labour movement and this enabled the employers to use the entry of women into the labour force to suppress wages. What this resulted in was the end of the male breadwinner model and it’s replacement with families which had both parents working to bring home the same take home pay that one a man would have done in the early 1960's. The defeat of the workers movement and the flat lining of wages is the material basis on which modern reactionary anti feminism has been created. This is combined with the fall out from the 1960's and the sexual revolution which Nagle accurately points as having actually created a steep sexual hierarchy where the losers are very much told from every angle just how badly they have failed. This relates to the ideal post 1989 neo-liberal subject in the west and increasingly on a global basis. The ideal is a hedonistic, hard driving careerist who has little or no attachment to any community or even firm friendship group, who’s loyalty is purely to the next “opportunity”, who is life is a constant state of flux economically, emotionally and sexually. That so many women and men find this endlessly repeated ideal impossible to live up to should not be a surprise. For the frustrated and bitter men of the alt-right the online world has become a haven where all their rage can be expressed without consequence, where they can finally spew their inner biol. The key point here is that all reactionary movements have their basis in a failed revolution. The defeat dealt by capital to the workers movement in 1980's has created this culture where the possibilities opened up by the sexual revolution have been completely colonised by capital.
The material basis for reaction is important to analyse as it enables us to understand not only where the resurgent far right has it’s origins but also how to defeat it. The other parts of the alt-right that Nagle covers are it’s extreme racism and white supremacy. As with her examination of the alt-rights misogyny though Nagle’s analysis falls down in failing to look at the material basis for this. In the USA the emergence of the “Black Lives Matter” movement in response to the endless executions by cops of black people has seen an extreme reaction from the alt-right online not only in defence of the actions of the police but in terms of a bringing back of the worst kinds of open and ugly white supremacy. However disgusting this may be though it too has a material basis and again it lies within a thwarted revolution. The civil rights movement, the black liberation movement of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers say millions of working class black Americans drawn into mass political action, often armed and in defiance of the white supremacist state. This wave was defeated by a mixture of concessions and repression. The aim of Lyndon Johnson in agreeing civil rights legislation was to defuse what was becoming an. explosive situation and to cultivate a black middle class that would be more supportive of the system. This was combined with a brutally efficient state repression which saw the state assassinate Malcolm X and Martin Luther King as they became that most dangerous of things, a black radical leader who began to have an appeal far beyond black Americans. This was also true of the great Fred Hampton, a young revolutionary who had the ability to appeal to poor whites on the basis of class unity. The American states execution, mass imprisonment and suppression of the black liberation movement was combined with the deliberate flooding of black neighbourhoods with drugs and the atomisation of the working class via deindustrialisation. This defeat of the liberation movement was combined with a reassertion by the white power structure of it’s rule over black people using the weapon of mass incarceration. This was combined with the message from the 1990's that these struggles were somehow all over and the election of Obama was shown as proof positive that America had “moved on”. All Obama’s election actually showed though was the fact that Lyndon Johnsons plan had worked and that a few black people were to be admitted to the ruling class but that the essential structure would remain unchanged. If the Obama administration demonstrated nothing else it was just how little the personnel of the state actually matter if they are dedicated to advancing the interests of the American empire. The white supremacists becoming more confident and emerging from under the thin veneer of liberal anti racism shows just how shallow that latter actually is. It has been focused purely on optics, aesthetics. It’s vision of racism is that of a cartoon. The figure of the white racist in liberal minds was always a knuckle dragging white redneck,with a shaved head and a swastika tattoo. Therefore as long as this form of racism wasn’t visibly the liberals could lie to themselves and everyone else in thinking that racism had diminished. That a white supremacist power structure remained in place meant that under the circumstances of economic and political decay the most violent and dangerous forms of white racism came back and the liberals are totally unable to comprehend them.
Nagle also explores what she sees as one of the sources of the alt-rights success which is the woeful state of identity politics tumblr “leftism”. Nagle’s basic point here is that the “call out culture” of the tumblr and twitter “left” is one of toxic hysteria which the alt-right joyfully feeds on. spend any amount of time observing some of the pseudo radicals of twitter and you’ll see that Nagle has a point here. Twitter and tumblr both reward those who make the most hysterical noise with additional followers and that certainly feeds some of the worst elements of the “left”. It is certainly true the image of the left as being a collection of sour, hysterical idiots with little connection to any social reality is one that is rooted in truth. The much bigger problem for those of us who are revolutionaries is that characters such as this ever got such an audience in the first place. The politically empty idetitarians arose as a result of a quarter of a century where the “left” in it’s student-media sense came to be totally unmoored from anything to do with the working class movement. That’s by no means unique to this time period but at a time when the workers movement in Britain and the USA suffered myriad defeats and political reverses the retreat into a politics based purely on identity by many was a reflection of the decline of class struggle as a decisive political factor. Without being rooted in the social realities of the class struggle “leftist” becomes utterly meaningless intellectual masturbation. Without being immersed in the conditions of the working class and learning from that in terms of building a revolutionary response then the online “radicalism” of the shrill identitarians is one that is utterly devoid of meaning.
Nagle’s work is one that all Communists should certainly read as it provides valuable material regarding the success of the alt-right and the fascists in terms of their usage of the internet to popularise themselves and the failure of ourselves to adapt to it. What it suffers from is the very thing Nagle criticises the identitarians for though in that Nagle fails to explore the material realities behind the upsurge of the alt-right. If we are to understand where these reactionary forces have spawned it is vital that we clearly understand what produced them. Only then can we look to build a strategy to defeat them. Nagle’s work makes a contribution towards that which is valuable but ultimately falls short of providing any real answers.
