Finally, at long last, and not before time, there are signs, here and there, that parts of “the Left” are beginning to see identity politics as less than leftist and more as part of a corporate-bureaucratic takeover of politics and society. To which I say, what on Earth took people who consider themselves to be radicals so long to see the possibilities for this! The compatibility of identity politics and corporate capitalist power has been so obvious for so long now that we really need to seek an explanation as to why so many intellectuals, politicians, and activists on ‘the Left’ have failed to see it, asserting the very opposite. The fact is that corporate capital has not been quaking in its boots over identity politics, and has had no problem at all jumping on board. If anti-racism and anti-sexism is the big thing in radical chic, corporate capital has been more than happy to be in on it. The same with Greenwash and Girlwash.
The radicals and progressives have missed the alignment of the corporate form and the obsession with identity so much and so systematically that it is abundantly clear that there is much more than mere oversight going on. Which is to say that the political Left has lost sight of class, labour, and socio-economic relations in their obsession with other causes and identities. I am reading details on a forthcoming publication which seems to address these very issues. The book is by the Nigerian-American philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, entitled Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). I would need to read this book before being able to offer any extensive commentary. In the first instance, though, I certainly welcome the critical scrutiny of this issue; it has been long overdue. At the same time I am leery of the implication in the title that the problem is one of the corporate capture of identity politics rather than a problem inherent in identity politics. If identity politics has been ‘taken over’ by corporate capital, then it has to be said that this entire area is ripe for such a takeover. It is the inherent flaws of identity politics that concerns me, not any corporate hijack. We can take it as read that corporate power will seek to appropriate anything that useable and exploitable when it comes to reproducing the corporate form. But this is where identity politics is especially vulnerable, since there is nothing intrinsic in identity that makes it incompatible with capitalist social forms, still less the corporate form. As the old poem from the late 1960s by Christopher Logue Know Thy Enemy points out, capital really doesn’t care what colour, race, sex or anything people are so long as they work and make money for the system and don’t challenge it. There is not one demand within identity politics that cannot be satisfied within the capital system. Those demands may be a threat to certain dominant identities – let’s say straight white males – but is quite compatible with the reproduction of dominance on the part of other identities within a prevailing capitalist form. The anti-capitalist rhetoric of contemporary radicalism, framed as anti-racist and anti-colonialism, is just that – a rhetoric that gives the appearance of radicalism without having an ounce of socio-economic substance. This is the kind of anti-capitalism that makes ‘marxists’ very rich, to the obvious joy of political conservatives who delight in saying ‘we told you so.’ People who present themselves as radicals, despite their fairly comfortable positions within society, particularly within media and culture, are happy with that distancing from class and socio-economic relations and overlook the extent to which the lack of systemic force and social purchase – what we used to call class and dynamics – hobbles the realisation of their progressive ideals. The contemporary Left have effectively reverted to the position that Marx and Engels criticised in The German Ideology. In this work of 1846, Marx and Engels criticised those intellectuals and theoreticians on the Left who, in being intellectuals and theoreticians, inverted the relations between consciousness and reality, thus overrating the power of ideas and philosophical critique to create and change reality and who therefore sought to act at a remove from socio-economic realities and relations as well as class dynamics and, crucially, class agency. The contemporary detachment of ideas and culture from social reality and relations has issued from the expansion of organised education, media, and ICT in recent decades, and the concomitant inflation of discourse. We are now seeing the consequences of ‘the linguistic turn’ that was effected in the 1980s and 1990s, and can see that its effects on politics, culture, and society in general and leftist politics in particular are utterly baneful. In one area after another we see the same thing – the reduction of human relations to power and power plays. This is a power without purpose.
The people who do this in the cause of advancing Leftist positions fail utterly to see that this reduction to power has stripped Leftist politics of its entire point and purpose. The absence of foundations which results from an anti-realist ‘ontology’ means that all normative and political causes and commitments of the ideologues and activists are utterly arbitrary, no more than the expression of mere preferences, none of which can be justified by reference to realities. The only standards that seem to be being used are the impossible, ahistorical ones of unicorn land where all things and all people are perfectly equal and equitable and neutral – sexless, classless, raceless, the great bourgeois nothing writ large. But it’s bogus from first to last, as revealed in the militant assertion of the sinless state of some identities over the irredeemably sinful state of other identities. The whole thing is internally incoherent, and that will be the undoing of identity politics, with who knows what damage it does to culture, people, and society before it goes to its demise.
It should come as no surprise to find that the principal rallying points of identity politics to incite unity come not around positive agendas. Such positive agendas as there are in identity politics are differential and particular rather than universal and very quickly contradict one another, fracture, and dissolve in rancorous disagreement. The rallying points generating unity come around targets to demonize, hate, and destroy – white, male, straight, western, etc. As revolutionary slogans go, ‘smash heteronormativity’ is hardly ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity,’ but the whole point is not to unite and rally the masses but to divide and conquer. Religion, most specifically the Judaeo-Christian tradition, is a particular target, condemned as complicit in colonial appropriation, racism, and patriarchy. As if the Judaeo-Christian tradition has contributed nothing else, a wealth of history, continuing in the present day, to the contrary. I studied history to the highest degree of excellence not to be in a position of having to defend the discipline against ideologues who abuse every canon in the book.
To the accusations of complicity in ‘evil,’ I merely ask, who and what isn’t, if we are going to rewrite history with broad brush strokes from the present? We are not dealing with reconciliation and redemption here, but revenge pure and simple. This is not history but a demonology, and the result of this pernicious and divisive doctrine will be a very ugly society indeed.
There is also a kind of anti-capitalism which, on close analysis, is revealed not to be anti-capitalist at all. There is a condemnation of racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and ecological destruction, but no immanent critique of the capital system in terms of socio-economic forms, division of labour, material relations, class, and contradictory dynamics. Socio-economic reality and its component elements is simply glossed. The impression is given that capital can rule on once the favoured identities prevail, fuelled by clean green energy of course. The oversight is, of course, classically bourgeois, as in assertions that capital can be made to serve social and ecological ends. This is bourgeois precisely on account of identifying capital as a thing, a factor of production, instead of a process and relation. That identification naturalises and eternalises the capitalist relation instead of historicising it and rendering it subject to intervention and alteration.
Which is to say that in addition to examining the corporate capture of politics, culture, and ‘everything,’ we need to pay attention to the willing but unwitting agents of this takeover, those people demanding institutional transformation via cultural pressure over and against class and class struggle. Such people are currently the dominant voice of the contemporary Left, and I don’t consider them to be Left at all. Such people, as Norman Geras wrote in the 1980s, are not ‘post-marxist,’ but are ‘ex-marxist’ at best. In their anti-realism, I would identify them as anti-marxist. And to think that conservative critics still blame Marx for this. In the 1980s and 1990s such thought was identified by Marxist thinkers like Frederic Jameson, David Harvey, and Terry Eagleton as the cultural logic of late capitalism. In my own work I have described it as the cultural counterpart of economic neoliberalism.
My take on this is that Leftist politics has always had an ambivalent relation to the working class. In the 1990s I argued strongly for a regrounding of leftist politics in material roots, class dynamics, and labour as the value creating power. Marx’s commitment to the self-emancipation of the working class through working class self-organisation, autonomy, and initiative is clear and consistent from first to last in his work, all the way up to the Circular Letter he issued to the leaders of the new Social Democratic Party in Germany. I underlined that commitment in my work. Very early on, however, socialist leaders – on both the reformist and revolutionary wings – came to understand that the working class may not have been anything like as socialist as Marx considered them to be. There was quite a large disparity between the proletarian ‘is’ and the proletarian ‘ought to be,’ leaving socialism somewhat deficient in its motive force and agency. As a result, both Kautsky the Social Democrat and Lenin the Communist turned Marx on his head to argue that by its own efforts the working class was capable of achieving only of a ‘trade union consciousness.’ In fine, the working class was capable only of understanding its economic interests, with the result that socialism had to be brought into the working class movement ‘from the outside’ by socialist theoreticians and politicians. Whereas socialism for Marx was all about class consciousness arising organically from within the class struggle, to the theoreticians and intellectuals of the Left, consciousness was all about inculcating ‘the correct ideology’ (Lenin). This was not Marx’s view, the very opposite in fact. That Marx may well have overestimated or simply been wrong about the socialist potential of the working class led the leaders of the socialist movement to reinstate the very vanguardist model of revolutionary politics that Marx sought to consign to the past. The origins of the divorce between the working class and its supposed representatives in politics lie here – in the fact that the working class was not as socialist nor as revolutionary as Marx thought they were, or not in the ‘correct’ way. For so long as capitalism was the problem, and the reality of economics was the central issue in political struggle, then the Left had to keep its connection with and commitment to the working class alive. But once the world moved into the age of hyperreality with the ICT revolution, the expansion of media, and globalisation, then the direct relevance of the working class seemed to wither and die. The Left could explicitly abandon the working class as a huge historical disappointment of no further political use. If your first, and last, concern was with politics and power, and not people of any kind, then there was no reason to remain loyal to the people you have purported to represent. What was left of ‘the Left’ thus felt entitled to look around in search of more useful, more exploitable revolutionary agents. The working class were no longer fit for purpose. This is actually nothing new. In the 1950s there was much talk of the ‘affluent worker’ in the ‘affluent society’, leading many to think that the working class had now been fully incorporated into capitalist society. This led the likes of Herbert Marcuse to propose the ‘Great Refusal’ on the part of various marginal groups outside of capitalist society, including students, as though students were anything but thoroughly embedded in existing society. This was a politics of pure despair, and failed to anticipate the huge industrial struggles that were about to explode from the late 1960s onwards. Intellectuals and theoreticians, being so remote in their cleverness, miss an awful lot when it comes to social reality.
Since actually representing actual flesh and blood human beings was not the name of the game, merely the political advancement of an ideology, no class loyalty whatsoever was felt. Intellectuals like to think of themselves as declassé, even though they owe their place and earn their money from a very definite place within the system. They think themselves independent, and hence capable of give voice to radical, anti-capitalist, positions. Examine their social position, though, and it soon becomes clear that they earn their resources from and hence are dependent upon the very system they purport to criticise. This is a Left that is going nowhere. It can destroy, but it cannot create. And in destroying, it can clear the space for social forces which possess greater structural and institutional power. Hence the ease of corporate takeover.
I don’t know who Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is, other than the fact that he has all the right credentials. I have long since lost patience with reading supposedly ‘radical’ thinkers whose every thought and every piece of writing begins with identity, repeatedly making the statement that they do not want to hear from straight white males, dead or alive. Fine. Don’t listen, don’t learn, just read garbage like Margaret Attwood to feed your neurotic fears and fantasies. Such a Left will continue to drift into an unreality far from removed from ‘ordinary’ people. I’m not going that way. Instead, I will continue to be led by the quality of the thought and not the identity of the thinker. The people who do otherwise open the doors to intellectual debasement, political enfeeblement, and worse. But the fact that Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò has the right demographic characteristics (some of them, anyway), and is pointing out that much of the radical rhetoric of identity politics is bogus offers a glimmer of hope, at least. But how sad that supposed leftists, representatives of a tradition that stands in line of descent from the Enlightenment, pay more attention to the identity of the proposer than the quality of the proposer’s argument. And how revealing. Because the truth is that they no longer stand in line of descent from the Enlightenment at all, with the secular tradition of rights and freedom and truth and science between condemned as being as racist and as sexist as the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The attack on foundations takes in both the religious and secular traditions of the past. Such people are Puritans without history, floating down from their Empyrean heights in order to condemn everyone and everything that fails to conform to their impossible standards. It is for that reason that such a Left cannot create, only destroy, taking down huge chunks of culture and society before destroying itself. It lacks a means of realisation in time and place for its pure standards, merely denouncing reality on account of its imperfections. Should such a movement ever triumph, it will turn in on itself in no time. Such a movement cannot live without targets to hit. It cannot construct, only deconstruct. In the absence of foundations rooted in real possibilities, it mobilizes ‘against’ the things – and people – it considers evil, rather than mobilizes ‘for’ an attainable ideal. It lacks constructive energy, point, and purpose. The idea seems to be that by destroying all that exists on account of its complicity in ‘evil,’ the way will be cleared for a positive growth. That view is naïve in the extreme, and dangerous as a result; it is a modern-day variant of ‘the worse the better.’ The good doesn’t simply emerge through the destruction of evil, but has to be nurtured, created, and sustained. There is nothing in the full-blown negation which characterises contemporary leftism that is able to engage in the work of reconstruction. There isn’t even the will – it is negation and destruction that fires the ideologues.
There are still some socialistically-inclined writers and thinkers who are making these kinds of points in the hope that there may still be some people within the Left who are capable of thinking outside of the cultish mentality that has engulfed so many. There may not be many, but I suspect that there are far more of them than appears to be the case. Critics tend to keep quiet because they know fine well that the pinched-mouthed censors who are supposedly on their own side would immediately denounce any attempts to raise issues of class, socio-economic relations, and equality as evidence of a hatred of some favoured minority. Bullying and cowardice are rife in contemporary politics as culture. I comment very little on social media these days, but received precisely this denunciation in response to my argument for a greater emphasis on pressing socio-economic realities relating to class. I was informed, most haughtily, that I was ‘out of date,’ ‘it’s 2022 and it’s all about providing safe spaces for the marginalised.’ I replied that I was one of the marginalized and would very much welcome this safe space, given that I have spent a lifetime searching for it and have received minimal help and maximum hindrance along the way. I also stated that this person and all such woke scolds and woke warriors do not speak for me and do not represent me. Cue a level of abuse that confirmed the truth of my observations. Such people are about political agendas and power, and not about the people they purport to speak for. The person I encountered in this exchange – and I have had many other such exchanges – had all the classic hallmarks of hijack and takeover. It is vanguardism in action, in which the activists take the form of organized elites preparing for power and control, quickly supplanting the people they purport to act for, substituting their own voice for the voice of the people they claim to speak for. The oppressed and the marginalized they speak for are mere abstractions, ideal types and counters in a power play, and not flesh and blood human beings with a creative agency of their own. The whole approach is hugely destructive for the Left in politics, serving to cut it off from ‘ordinary’ people, who are now despised and dismissed for not having the ideologically correct views. People are called upon to act not as agents and citizens but as penitents confessing their sins. Public contrition, however, does not bring forgiveness, only the confirmation of guilt which merits a deserved damnation. All of this needlessly forces all those who are uncomfortable with the Manichean logic of identity politics to pick a side. Thankfully, many people, and in growing numbers, are demonstrating the will to express their discomfort. This is what it will take, people calling time on the nonsense, rather than continuing to let the malcontents set the rules they routinely break. The more that some refuse to play the game, the more others will find the courage to break rank. The problem is that it won’t necessarily be the Left that is the beneficially of this jailbreak but, ironically, the Right, the economic neo-liberal wing of which is the architect of this cultural divorce from reality. Many conservatives are currently repeating the old dictum that the revolution always eats its own children. I agree, only to point out here that the revolution that is consuming itself in the contemporary world is the neoliberal one. People like Douglas Murray are noting that the ‘woke’ ‘war on the West’ seems to be a particular affliction of the English-speaking countries. Indeed it is: just like economic neo-liberalism. One might be entitled to think that there could be some connection …
That too few on the Left have been prepared to speak out and speak up reveals the extent to which Leftist politics and culture has become detached from its social and class roots. The working class have been abandoned to consumer capitalism as a hopeless cause, a mass to be despised. It won’t end well. This divorce from an agency with the structural capacity to act has left the Left with a brittle and skewed diversity, socially weak and politically vulnerable. The Left is not robust, for all of apparent strength in the key media of society. The capture of cultural institutions makes the Left look stronger than it actually is socially. It has a big voice at the moment, but a puny social body. It has lost the heartland, the place where real people live. But does it need such people? Only if it is a genuine leftism. If it is cultural wing of the corporate form, it doesn’t need such people at all.
I shall repeat the criticisms I made back in the 1980s and 1990s with respect to identity politics. Identity politics erases class and scotomizes class dynamics, inhibits and undermines solidarity between people and atomizes society, complements rather than challenges the corporate form, and reflects concerns of the professional, educated middle class whose material and political interests are quite distinct from, even contrary to, the oppressed on whose behalf they claim to speak. I wrote this back in the 1990s and feel vindicated. The only thing I got wrong was the socialist potential of the working class. I now see the reasons why leftist leaders and intellectuals abandoned the working class – the working class is in part conservative and in part socialist, making it something that existing political platforms cannot accommodate.
We now have a position in which people who identity as leftists in politics are being forced to accept identity politics or take their leave of the Left. Which is merely to say that ‘the Left’ is now dead as a serious and substantive political and intellectual force.
I can go back to figures like Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, David Harvey, Norman Geras and Discourses of Extremity, Todd Gitlin and The Twilight of Common Dreams, Istvan Meszaros, Eric Hobsbawm, and many more such thinkers on the Left. These figures issued the warning with respect to identity politics back in the 1980s and 1990s. The warning was either ignored or dismissed as irrelevant for being based on a class and labour ‘metaphysic’ that was now out of date. What made it easier for leftist intellectuals and activists to abandon class politics for the inflation of discourse and culture was a) the political defeat suffered by the working class in the 1980s and b) the failure of the working class to think and act as leftist ideology said they ought. The whole thing is a nonsense, a reduction to power without purpose, leading to a politics that is utterly arbitrary. Unfortunately, these decades should have been the radical moment as the jury on neoliberalism came in with a damning verdict. This moment has been missed (and maybe even purposely diverted by certain forces – the corporate world shows a remarkable ease with identity, as do various established authorities). It has been obvious to me for decades that identity politics is the cultural wing of economic neoliberalism, now levelled on the group rather than the individual. What we have here is the classic swing between libertarianism and collectivism issuing from of a liberal ontology that falsely separates two essential aspects of human nature, individuality and sociality. The individualism of economic neoliberalism was always unsustainable, and was propped up in the short run by authoritarian forms. In the 1980s there was talk of ‘authoritarian populism.’ Now we see collectivism being reconstituted around favoured group identities, rationalized for leftist consumption as the fight against oppression. This is facile, mere surrogacy without substance. It is also divisive, with a reconstituted collectivism that is not genuinely universal but is instead centred on favoured groups against unfavoured groups. Universalism has been systematically deconstructed to death. It was done deliberately rather than resulting as an unintended consequence. Where the old Left referred to universal values, the new Left made a fetish of difference and otherness. But as Gitlin and Hobsbawm argued back in the 1980s, the loss of universalism effectively means ‘the twilight of the Left.’ The Left in politics has always given expression to universal values – liberty, equality, fraternity for all, not for the favoured some. Once those universal values have been discarded, there is no Left. And so it came to pass. In writing this I am not being wise after the event. I warned on this in my own writing in the 1990s.
On the plus side, the issues are now out in the open and those incoherent ideas that found a home in the Academy are now being subjected to public scrutiny. No wonder there is an attempt to suppress criticism and conversation – these ideas cannot bear examination. I spent the 1990s and 2000s trying to fight it within academia and was simply ignored. I was a minority voice swimming against the ‘post’ tide. These ideas have now broken out of academia and have entered into society via the capture of cultural institutions and media. Now, it is no longer mere academics and intellectuals like me challenging these ideas: these ideas are being scrutinized publicly, not least by ‘real people.’ The inadequacies of these ideas are manifest to ‘ordinary’ folk. Sadly, there are many who take the self-image of the proponents of these ideas at face value and identify this nonsense with the Left. Happily, a reality check is coming. And not before time. It will take the Left generations to recover from this. The aftermath will be like leaving an abusive relationship, not least the guilt and the shame, and the painful self-questioning as to how so many could have been so blind to have gone along with such nonsense for so long.
What will eventually defeat identitarian ideology and politics is that its ideas are manifestly incoherent and contradictory. The ideology is based on an explicitly anti-realist position that rejects foundations and ‘necessary relations’ between things. That being so, any normative and political claims and commitments that are offered can only be arbitrary. This was a point that I made at length in my work from 1997. My only surprise is that it has taken this long for the anomalies to become apparent, and even then only to some people. We are in the grip of groupthink at its worst, demonstrating a quasi-religious zeal that is impervious to fact and reason. This is a world in which understanding the truth of a view is a function of accepting it and acting on it. There is a self-referential, self-validating quality to the whole movement that makes it difficult for those caught up in it to break out of the cycle. And people on the outside, such as I, know that if we dare criticise we will have the cultural mob after our blood.
Without foundations, identity politics is empty and devoid of social content. It is for this reason that power and grievance loom so large in identitarian ideology, all relations reducing to power struggles in a world divided between the oppressor and the oppressed. Unable to motivate and mobilize social agents around substantive issues, least of all class position, resort is had to grievance and grudge, exploiting antagonism and conflict and feeding off the controversy. The world is divided between us and them, good and evil, and you are forced to take sides. But it is all a mere a power struggle, with power itself having no substantive, social, or normative force beyond arbitrary assertion and preference. Instead of a genuine politics, politics is theologized to become a war between rival gods, with no compromise being possible. Truth, after all, is non-negotiable.
Not only is identitarian ideology empty, arbitrary, and divisive, it is also self-contradictory. It will fall eventually under the weight of its own internal incoherence. Without an overarching framework based on a cohering ontology of the good, identity politics cannot but be at cross purposes with itself – in ticking one box, you may well find that you have to untick another box – trans and women, women’s rights and religious freedoms etc. In supporting one facet of this ideology you cannot but come to find yourself on the wrong side of another facet. If you make a stand in favour of women’s rights you will fall foul of trans-rights. All the fancy talk of intersectionality produced by the pseudo-intellectuals infesting this movement cut no ice here, since it is further recourse to words in an attempt to evade the horrible truth about reality. We are in the presence of people who have succumbed to the inflation of discourse, people who think that they can endlessly spin words to continue to evade the reality check. But it is no surprise that such nonsense has been able to get this far. It works by groupthink and intimidation. Given the propensity of id-pol crusaders to try and cancel any who dares challenge their precepts, it is no wonder that people stay silent and wait for the whole thing to blow over. What will happen, unless checked, is that id-pol will continue to wreak havoc in culture, society, and politics, continue to divide people against one another, until, like Ouroboros, it comes to eat its own tale. In truth, this mythical analogy honours the identitarians with more weight and significance than they merit, so I would instead compare them to a self-made monster that disappears up its own backside. And the sooner the better, for the health and sanity of society. It beggars belief that they have been allowed to get this far. The world is in desperate need of a radical politics. This isn’t it, and the fact that huge swathes of media and culture along with the corporate form are in on it should have caused the alarm bells to ring long before now.
This cultural mash-up of politics and religiosity which goes under the heading of ‘woke’ has all the hallmarks of a new Puritanism, with adherents seeing the world through the lens of good and evil and in the process dividing humanity up between the saved and the damned. The ideologues, of course, see themselves as the elect, the people who get to judge others. It’s a vanguard, yes, but a vanguard with a quasi-religious sanction and mission. It’s the most dangerous kind of vanguard of all, then – one that is composed of people who in acting righteously do harm by doing good. Such people know others’ good – and bad – more than those others do. They can read others’ motives and intentions and judge them good and worthy of salvation or bad and worthy only of damnation. What is most striking in this religiosity is the way that the ideologues engage in a form of justification by faith – you can only truly understand a particular viewpoint being advanced if you accept it in full and act on it. If you keep questioning and remain critical, and fail to act as ordered, then you are accused of criticising something that you do not understand. Gaslighting surrounds the entire movement – it is critics who are waging the ‘culture war,’ all evidence to the contrary. The only meaning that this denial of waging a culture war can have is this: by refusing to surrender to demands for contrition and obeisance you are guilty of waging war; by nothing giving in and by fighting back to assault you are waging war. In refusing to capitulate and join the zealots, those defending themselves are turned into the aggressors.
We are living through an age in which meaning is turned on its head, if it still exists at all. At least inversion has the merit of retain some kind of standard making meaning possible; perversion may be bad, but at least it implies the existence of a standard to be perverted. But I think there is something deeper going on. It is for this reason I dislike the term ‘woke.’ I was criticising such views in postmodernism and poststructuralism and certain feminisms long before ‘woke’ was heard of. I also locate those movements in the loss of foundations and overarching, authoritative grounds and meanings in modernity’s ‘death of God.’ In this context, ‘woke’ is not the problem but merely one possible, if pernicious and divisive, manifestation of a deeper problem. It may or may not be possible to turn back the tide on the ‘woke’ capture of cultural institutions and media, but the problem of meaning in the absence of an ontology of the good will remain. In the meantime, I will join others in using the term ‘woke,’ because at least people have some idea of what it refers to – nonsense that invents and inverts reality in the name of fighting oppression and providing safe spaces. The provision of safe spaces has made everyone nervous of saying anything lest they be cancelled.
The entire ‘woke’ movement engages in a circular reasoning that seems designed to sap the energies and waste the time of the critical and the reasonable, a war of attrition that causes people to surrender and acquiesce in search of peace. It is no wonder that the ‘woke’ seek to suppress freedom of speech, end dialogue, and coerce and bully people into silence – their claims don’t bear the light of examination and there is nothing to talk about in any case: you accept the claims advanced at face value or you are complicit in evil. People give in, since no one wants to be seen to be on the side of oppression. Instead of a world of active and informed citizens, we enter a world of bullies and cowards, a world in which all moral and rational controls have been suspended and anything is possible.
For all of the emphasis on language, it is apparent that in this inflation of discourse words mean anything, everything, and nothing. There is nothing stable upon which to rest meaning, only convenience and a changeable convention which is conditional upon power and its preservation. It’s a world in which buzzwords and slogans fit for T-shirts replace reasoning. You can spot the phenomenon a mile off by the terminology its adherents employ in place of argumentation. I can remember complaining to my DoS about papers in which the word ‘problematical’ would appear. These papers were always the same, with everything rendered ‘problematical’ and the excuse for lengthy discourse on a non-problem. This was the time when anti-realism really started to take hold in the humanities and social sciences. It was apparent to me there and then if there is no reality other than the one that is socially, culturally, and linguistically constructed and reconstructed, then there can be no possibility of meaning outside of that endlessly creative process in which the human agents themselves, in their manifold diversity, determine whatever standards may or may not apply. The problem is, though, that in the absence of objective standards and criteria, the very thing which deconstructionists sought to remove, we were being presented with a litany of ‘problematical’ problems that are entirely without resolution. That presumes, of course, that those interested in rendering everything ‘problematical’ were ever interested in resolution. It would seem, however, that the relentless problematisers of the world are more concerned to render the stable unstable and subvert existing institutions, structures, and relations than to construct new ones. To their relentless criticism of people and places past and present we need to ask: ‘compared to what?’ ‘compared to who?’ and ‘compared to when?’ The standards of unicorn land – or a Heaven of sinless saints – is no standard at all, merely a licence to seek and destroy people and places past and present.
This isn’t serious politics, it is the worst fantasy, pitching impossible ideals against inevitably compromised realities. It isn’t even serious leftist politics. What is most striking is how such politics, although presenting itself as leftist, negates almost everything the Left has stood for in history, morally, politically, and intellectually. Instead of a politics rooted in reason and reality, there is a religiosity which appropriates the worst aspects of religion at extremes whilst discarding the healing, the bonding, the mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. As a result, the whole temper is reactionary and regressive rather than progressive. Hence the attack on foundations doesn’t just target the Judaeo-Christian roots of freedom, morality, and rationality but also the secular tradition of ancient Greece and the Enlightenment. In my PhD thesis I sought to examine the philosophical and ethical origins and underpinnings of Marx, socialism, and ‘rational freedom.’ That took me back to Plato and Aristotle as well as to Aquinas and Dante – Athens and Jerusalem. I engaged in this work of origins in order to place Marx and socialism on a much firmer ethical foundation than mere human self-creation and social construction. The various ‘post’ schools of thought also went back, but not to secure and stabilize but to subvert and destabilize. We now see the result, and endless creation and recreation in which all things are fluid, malleable, plastic, and pliable – people as well as places. It beggars belief that people still can’t see this, but this describes nothing so much as neoliberal capitalism, a system, culture, and politics more transgressive of nature and human nature than any in history. I am resisting the temptation to keep saying ‘I told you so.’ But I told you so (see the worl of 1997 for one, but too many more to name. You can also find Terry Eagleton making precisely this point in 2004’s After Theory. This is not Leftism but the cultural counterpart of economic neoliberalism occupying the leftist space. People who think themselves leftist are swallowing it and, in the process, taking what’s left of the Left down sterile channels. This is counter-revolution in the name of revolution, preparing the psychic, intellectual, and cultural ground for the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form.
It is staggering that we have people who call themselves ‘Green’ who can be found asserting the preservation of planetary boundaries on the one hand whilst justifying the transgression of human and social boundaries on the other; on the one hand there is a ‘Nature’ that is to be obeyed, on the other hand there is a cultural creation through which human beings are free to choose any good, any identity, any pleasure they see fit. Necessity and freedom have been completely severed, with no mediation ensuring the necessary appreciation possible. No wonder social theorists and academics started by asserting that all things have been rendered ‘problematical.’ That wasn’t so much a statement of fact as a declaration of intent.
In the impasse, more terms have been added to give the appearance that critical thinking is taking place when it most certainly is not: ‘intersectionality,’ ‘toxic masculinity,’ ‘decolonisation,’ ‘cis heteronormativity,’ which should be ‘smashed’, of course. I watched as the accusation of ‘white male privilege,’ levelled at me on more than a few occasions, morphed into ‘white privilege,’ as the position and identity of women came to be destabilized and subverted. Garbage the lot of it, impossible to reason with and not remotely worth the effort. Once you start to reason you cannot avoid being drawn into the void of the unreasoning, legitimating their nonsense and compromising your own rationality. So I join with ‘ordinary’ folk here and dismiss it all for the nonsense it is. These people set out to confuse. The future lies with those who are not confused.
Take the slogans that are repeated like a mantra: ‘Trans women are women,’ ‘Words are violence,’ ‘Lived experience.’ There can be no reasoning on these bases, with any assertion launched from these directions being true by definition. Whatever words you use in order to reason and subject something to critical scrutiny can be claimed to deny some truth which supposedly supports the oppressed in the struggle against oppression, and hence can be condemned as violence. How interesting to see the people who do this engage in campaigns of intimidation, involving both verbal and physical abuse. As for lived experience, something isn’t true or right because it has been a part of your experience. To empiricists like Locke, of course, experience is the basis of knowledge, but by this they mean verifiable fact that all can observe. In contrast, ‘lived experience’ involves a reduction to an irreducible subjectivity in which there can be no negotiation because there are no shared standards. As for ‘trans women are women,’ don’t get me started. We are being asked to discard reason and reality so that some people can feel better about themselves. Not that they will. We are dealing with a neurosis here, something that can’t be resolved by the changing of words in order to change reality. In bending meanings out of shape, there is an attempt to bend reality – and people – into new shapes.
These terms are not genuine concepts supporting arguments but thought-suppressing, conversation-ending clichés involving assertions which are empty of substance. Whilst these phrases are reductive, they reduce to nothing but the assertion of the very thing which needs to be argued, the beginning and the end in one, precluding argument and analysis, ending debate, conversation, and critical scrutiny. These assertions are designed to prevent rather than invite questioning. Truth is given by assertion, falsehood implied by questioning. Any questioning here is destined to go round in circles.
And enough people fall for it or submit to it to make it a successful strategy. I have seen people I know, people keen to advance all the right causes, simply repeat assertions and accusations rather than offer supporting arguments. Clichés are ready-made arguments, just add water and stir.
Either you give in and accept or you go round and round in circles, identifying yourself as a non-believer and heretic to be burned in the process. I’ll offer an example of how this happens.
The assertion ‘trans women are women’ is met with the question ‘what is a woman?’ After all, someone making a strong claim to be something should be expected to be able to give some substantial idea of what that ‘something is.’ The answer given, however, is entirely lacking in substance: ‘anyone who identifies as a woman.’ That, of course, is not an answer but merely begs the same question as to the precise qualities which identifies a person as a woman. It is impossible to identify as a woman if you are unable to establish precisely the qualities which define a woman. The definition of a woman as anyone who identifies as a woman is not a definition at all, since it fails to identify the specific attributes constituting a woman. If you can’t establish the attributes of a woman independently of a self-identification, then that identification merely begs the question that identitarians cannot answer, or simply refuse to answer in the knowledge that any substantive definition here would contradict their claim. We are thus drawn into a world in which the primacy of culture and language is asserted over the reality of biological sex, inviting even the denial and erasure of biological sex. Again, that transgression via endless plasticity and creation characterises nothing more than capitalism and its conversion of substance in the realm of use value into exchange value.
Rather than let them lead you round and round in circles in the cause of transgression, it is wisest to simply expose the circular reasoning involved and move them on in order to waste someone else’s time and energy. Instead, we live in a culture in which the neurotics are being allowed to set the rules for the rest of us to follow on pain of abuse and cancellation. Simply, to identify as a woman presupposes that such a thing as a ‘woman’ exists in the first place and can be identified independently of anyone’s self-definition. And I bitterly resent that, at a time of seriously pressing issues of everyday concern to people, so much time is being wasted on these non-issues.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s I went out on a limb to argue strongly for the necessity of essentialist categories of being. Without those categories there is merely an accidentalism of discrete events and happenings, a conventionalism that reduces to power, and a social constructivism which begged the question as to why we should create this instead of that. This was a tough call on my part, seeing as anti-essentialism was the dominant intellectual mode of the age. Essences were identified as being timeless and fixed, eternalising and naturalising what ought to be socialised and historicised. This was caricature. For all of the grandiloquent language and terminology of the anti-essentialists, their work was intellectually shoddy, targeted against strawmen of their own invention. They created a (non-)problem in order to be able to offer their own (non-)solution. On social media I saw a ‘friend,’ a published author and university professor, criticize essences as timeless and fixed, freezing identities and relations oppressively. It was a standard rehash of common anti-essentialist tropes. I knew him to be a Marxist, so I simply commented ‘not in Marx.’ Immediately he backed down and supplied quotes which revealed the importance of essentialist categories to Marx. You cannot criticize the capital system as a dehumanisation if you don’t have some idea as to what human beings are in the first place, however much this essence is unfolded in time and place through social practice. What struck me most of all was the way that this particular character was merely repeating what the conventional wisdom/currently fashionable nonsense deemed to be true, rather than testing its very contentious claims. (I write further on this in ‘The Blight of Anti-Essentialism’ on Being and Place).
The anti-essentialists prevailed, with the result that we are struggling to define what anything is. Now, as people are trying to hold the line on biological reality, with biology professors coming to be hounded out of their jobs, I see how right I was to argue for essentialism. Essentialism, I make clear in my work, is not biology, but entails a normative dimension quite distinct from biological imperatives and from social biology. At the same time, essentialism is not against biology, but frames and preserves it, in the manner of Aristotle’s metaphysics, ethics, and politics in relation to his own biological and zoological studies. In other words, essentialism as I present it offers the protective metaphysical shell which makes ethics and science and politics as the science of the human good meaningful and possible. The argument that a thing is something essentially and essentially something includes the reality of biology and hence biological sex, even if it does not reduce to those things. The people trying to hold the line on biological reality are fighting the right battle, but one that is part of a much bigger war. In other words, whilst they may well win that battle – and the overwhelming numbers of people know the reality of biological sex – they won’t win the war as a result. People have complacently thought that whilst the deconstructionists may well manage to subvert and destroy the humanities and social sciences from within, they would be incapable of harming the natural sciences. The scourge of scientism here has encouraged that complacent view. Who, after all, thinks the humanities and social sciences as capable of generating real knowledge? Ethics is the realm of mere value judgements. Who cares about the damage that deconstruction wreaks here? The people who thought this, believing that the natural sciences, with their more direct grip on physical reality, would be safe, have been proven to be wrong. It has come as a huge shock to them. Many still don’t know what they are dealing with, thinking that the mere reassertion of scientific facts will suffice. This could work, but only as a holding operation, subject to further assault in the future. The Posts page on my Being and Place site contains numerous essays arguing for the need to establish the unity of fact and value as against their severance in the modern world. That separation is a pathology that leads to an assault on both ethics and science. Athens and Jerusalem stand and fall together as twin poles; when one pole wobbles under pressure, you can keep hold of the other to stabilize yourself. Lose one, and you will lose the other in short order. Science is not self-sufficient in itself but needs metaphysics: reality is independent of the tools, concepts, and methods by which we access, examine, and interpret it.
From the first in my work I argued that it is no step at all from the view that individuals are entitled to choose the good as they see fit, the view that rendered ethics to be mere irreducible value judgements, to the view that individuals are entitled to choose the truth in precisely the same way. Fact and value, science and ethics, are intertwined around the same reality. The anti-realist anti-metaphysics of the deconstructionists rendered science as vulnerable to assault as ethics. Ethics fell to subjectivism, even solipsism, a long time ago, and people under the sway of scientism either paid no attention or cheered. Many are now seeing the threat to science from the same source. This assertion of projection and imposture via cultural and social creation over disclosure is a war on reality. I note conservative critics who are currently arguing that the Left is waging war on reality. This is a superficial and shallow view motivated by political loyalties and confines us within the top soil of political conflict. The turn against reality goes much further and much deeper than the contemporary Left, a Left, it should be pointed out, has much more in common with Nietzschean nihilism, Humean scepticism, and neoliberalism than with Marx and socialism (to retain leftist credentials it has replaced the exploited proletariat with oppressed groups). The contemporary Left can be beaten and broken, it is intellectually and socially weak. The divorce from reality will, however, continue, for the reason that it lies in the DNA of modernity and Nietzsche’s ‘death of God.’ By that phrase, Nietzsche meant the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework that is grounded in objective reality, morality, and truth. Many cheered Nietzsche on in discarding religious morality and Christianity, even morality as such; they failed to see that Nietzsche also rejected scientific objectivity too as the mere projection of power. The contemporary ideologues are not Leftists at all; they are Nietzsche’s children, orphans no doubt, because Nietzsche would see them as engaging in precisely the idolatrous quasi-religious ‘humanism’ he denounced in the most vehement terms. The whole thing is a sorry mess that is taking time and energy away from more constructive endeavours that have the potential to put the social ecology on an even keel. And that might be the biggest scandal of all, the fact that these invented non-issues are consuming so much of the time and talent of society and culture. It is unproductive and decreative in the extreme. One could almost believe that a ruling class at bay had created a social and cultural virus to divide, divert, and check its enemies by having them fight among themselves over the wrong issues for the wrong causes. Capital and class anyone?
Andrew Ingraham, Headmaster of Swain School (b. 1841), is credited with the invention in 1903 of the phrase ‘the gostak distims the doshes’ in order to illustrate how meaningless phrases can snare people through a semblance of meaning. The Gostak concept is best known through the quotation of this phrase in the book The Meaning of Meaning (1923) by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. The sentence seems meaningful in that it is grammatically correct and is therefore something we can repeat as if conveying meaning. There is a subject (gostak) and an object (doshes), and these are linked by a verb (distim). Whatever is entailed by distimming, the gostak, whoever or whatever that is, carries it out on the doshes, whoever and whatever they are. We can see who is doing what to whom. What we don’t know is who or what the protagonists are and what is being done. The lack of substance enters us into a world of language without meaning.
What is a gostak?
The gostak is whatever / whoever distims the doshes.
What is distimming?
Distimming is what the gostak does to the doshes.
Who or what are the doshes?
The doshes are whoever or whatever the gostak distims.
Clear? We know the subject, the object, and the verb. And nothing else outside of these. This is a world of self-definition without substance. That this is so is readily apparent with respect to the phrase ‘the gostak distims the doshes,’ for the reason that no-one has any idea of the things these words represent. But the meaninglessness is less apparent with respect to the phrase ‘trans women are women,’ for the reason most sane and sensible people have some idea as to what a woman looks like, having known and encountered more than a few over the years (I had this one sussed from infancy, and I’m nothing special). The ideologues use words that seem to have meaning but which are entirely without substance. The meaning conveyed in these ideological exchanges are parasitic upon a realist metaphysics that the ideologues actually reject in their rejection of objective foundations. In truth, they are employing a terminology that can only be understood in its own self-referential and self-validating terms, each term being understood only in relation to other equally nebulous terms. Remove ‘woman’ as a thing of substance and the phrase ‘trans women are women’ is rendered to be exactly of the same status as ‘the gostak distims the doshes’ – we don’t know what we are talking about. At some point we are left to conclude that the destruction of meaning seems to be the entire point of such circular reasoning, plunging people into an unreality of words without referents, a world in which meaning is arbitrary and dialogue and critical scrutiny is impossible. People are free to believe and say whatever they like in such a world – so long, of course, as it conforms to the correct ideology, damning ‘the dominant ideology’ of oppressive systems, patriarchy, colonialism etc etc etc. And that’s revealing. In destabilising, subverting, and destroying objective standards and foundations, the ideologues and activists proceed to impose and enforce the entirely self-created and arbitrary standards of their own. In other words, they do not even offer a consistent anti-foundationalism; they are out to destroy in order to prevail in the ensuing chaos. Hence the reconstituted religiosity. Hence the fact that the people who are most vocal in denouncing the Judaeo-Christian tradition on account of its repressive moralism are the ones who impose the most straightjacketed of moralisms in their own image.
The Left used to be populated by critical minds. The loss of reality has been followed by a loss of reason; and by the end of the Left as a serious constructive force in politics. The Left has succumbed to the decadence that is in the DNA of (post)modernity. The thinking of so many who identify themselves as leftists is riddled with incoherence and inconsistency.
Attempts to argue this out with the ideologues are doomed to fail on account of the circularity and vacuity that results from the lack of substance, the denial of ‘essential’ reality. Attempts at dialogue continue because shared concepts and meaning seem to exist, as in the ability to identify what a ‘woman’ is. But when you realize that ‘woman’ in these ‘debates’ has all the quality of ‘gostak’ you have no option but to give up. All you can do is state the simple truth simply: to identify as a woman presupposes that you have some idea as to what a woman is in the first place. Somewhere, however much it may be a mere background assumption, a substantive conception of what a woman is must underpin these claims of identification, which means that substance is prior to self-definition, which means the anti-realists are charged with the task of identifying a substance that lies outside of the chain of their circular reasoning somewhere in reality. It’s no wonder that they seek to evade answering the question by drawing us into the net of circular reasoning. Until they are prepared to answer the question, no one need accept anything they assert: something isn’t true by self-definition alone.
More than anything, though, the ideologues seem destined to fail not on account of their lack of reason but their lack of joy. They are just not good company. Listening to people speaking in slogans they have learned can be amusing, until you realize that this repetition of mantras is sweeping through education systems and culture, destroying critical thought, intimidating people into silence and complicity. If such people were on the fringes it would indeed be funny, but they are not – they are the marginalized who are now in the centre and pushing critical thinkers to the margins. It might be best to employ humour instead of reason against the ideologues, though, because at least it involves a refusal to be drawn into their endless and unwinnable game. And if that is deemed offensive, then so what? Such people spend most of their lives seeking out offence in order to wallow in their victimhood status. It’s profoundly unsatisfying all the same. The ideologues have all the puritan’s hatred of joy.
It is a remarkable sight, people benefitting from all manner of cultural and economic privilege using their positions to denounce privilege and try to force others to confess their sins (holding out zero prospect of forgiveness). The thing that interests me the most in all of this is the silence and complicity of various institutions and authorities. I grew up during the time of industrial struggles, the Miners’ Strike of 1984-1985 being the greatest formative influence on my politics. I was in Sheffield at the time, and saw the Court of King Arthur himself. I can confidently state that the Yorkshire Miners were never given the spaces and platforms afforded to these people. So my critical eyes are turned to the money and power grab going on at the institutional and structural level, where political poseurs and billionaires are tipping each other the wink as the phoney war of culture and identity continues to draw radical energies away from those dreaded ‘c’ words – class, capital, and contradiction. I have never remotely considered witch- hunting to be something that radicals engage in. Only revolutions gone bad.
I return time and again to Max Weber’s response to Karl Marx: ‘where there is nothing, both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights’ (Weber, Politics as a Vocation). Self-styled radicals and self-appointed guardians of truth and virtue can repeat their buzzwords and slogans all they like, exulting in the feeling that they are engaged in a real war with a real prospect of victory, but it’s an ersatz war, not a real one, and there is no real victory this way. There can be no winners in the unwinnable game, only losers; we are being drawn into a game that makes losers of all of us. And it is all not merely pointless but joyless, a Misery Monopoly in which you go round and round forever, and winning feels just as empty and unsatisfying as losing. It is the waste of the radical moment.
It’s all very dull and predictable. And irritating, because people are so wrapped up in the phoney war, so hooked on the exhilaration of combat, as to be deaf to the warnings of pointlessness and joylessness issued long, long ago, not least by Nietzsche himself.
And now I see encouraging signs that parts of the Left are beginning to see identity politics as part of a corporate-bureaucratic takeover of society and politics. It’s much more than that, but we’ll take anything that points the way out of the cycle at the moment. The mystery is that it has taken supposedly critical and radical thinkers this long to see that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, and not just leftist politics. So many seem to have been spellbound by a terminology that seems to be radical but which is entirely without substance. And so many remain bound. Criticise them, or simply fail to join them in repeating the mantra, and you are exposed to vehement assault. All the time, what’s left of the thinking Left drifts away. I am now reading someone claim that people on the Left are now having to come to terms with and accept identity politics or take their leave of the organised Left. There is plenty that leftists have had to swallow in recent decades in order to remain within the fold of the organized Left. I looked at Tony Blair’s PFI and corporatisation of public business, his lies and wars, his contempt for working class people, and walked away without regret. In truth, I had drifted away long before Blair became leader of the Labour Party. But the problem with labour politics is much more than parties and politicians. The crisis in the agencies of labour with respect to politics and socialisation goes to the very heart of the working class. The truth is the working class is not the revolutionary subject the Left pinned its hopes on, so the abandonment of the working class by the ideologues and politicians of the Left was entirely predictable.
My favourite film director by far is Werner Herzog. He spoke some very pertinent words on the heartlands in an interview from 2020. He refers to the current fever for rewriting the past with horror: “It makes me cringe with despair because I love history.” History was by far and away my best subject at school, earning honours in the subject at university. What is happening today is not history but its very antithesis. The people who speak most passionately about the denial of science in the contemporary world need also to understand that there is a similar denial of ethics and history going on. These are my subjects. At the end of the interview, Herzog makes this very pertinent observation: ‘Nobody speaks about the heartland, the heartland people, the disenfranchised.’ I count as one of those people, having lived among them as one of them my entire life. Herzog comes close to praising Donald Trump here for his exposing the attitude of neglect at the heart of contemporary politics. Trump may or may not have cared for the heartland people he claimed to speak for, but at least he spoke to them, at least he pretended to listen. His motives may have been entirely political, but even here this had the merit of exposing the hypocrisy and the contempt that lies at the heart of organised leftist politics. Politics if it wants to survive has to find a better attitude to the heartland, Herzog concludes. That is certainly true of leftist politics.
I have covered a lot of ground in this essay. To sum, I am concerned to warn people of the pitfalls of a circular reasoning without substance, texts without referents, and words without meaning. The anti-realist chickens unleashed from the academic coup are now coming home to roost, with society and politics now bearing the brunt of the linguistic turn and inflation of discourse. In the above I analyse Andrew Ingraham’s phrase ‘the gostak distims the doshes’ as a phrase that is grammatically correct but utterly meaningless on account of its terms lacking in any substance. That lack of substance, I argue, applies to much contemporary terminology, with apparently meaningful terms being rendered meaningless. I don’t care that people identify themselves as leftist, radical, and progressive, spouting all the right words in support of all the right causes. I don’t take people by their own self-image and would caution people against misplaced loyalty. Such people strike me as dull, unthinking, and conformist to the core and I have no intention of following them, either to do good or evil. When I hear the repetition of the same phrases I switch off, for the reason that I know what is coming. It saves time and energy for more productive matters. People who speak in this manner are not actually listening to you, they are simply hijacking your ears, for the reason they think they already know the truth and are more interested in teaching you lessons than learning from you. Such people also repeat the same lines we have heard many times before. You hear certain key terms and phrases and you know exactly what they are going to say. Since they already know the truth, they have no truth to learn from others. George Orwell gives the perfect description of such people in Politics and the English Language:
“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases … one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.”
We have all met them. I first encountered such people at university, the people who, whatever the question, would say that Marx had the answer. I hung around them in the odd meeting of revolutionary socialists. I was and remain a socialist but found such people repellent and more than a little worrying. They didn’t like my refusal to conform and liked my questioning, contrary nature even less. They put me off Marx throughout my university years. Instead of Marx, I specialised in other thinkers and other areas. It was only a few years later that I decided to read Marx for myself and saw that he had far more to offer than the epigones made it seem. I’ve been sceptical of ideologues, activists, and vanguards ever since. I am alive to the way that critical thinking easily succumbs to campaign imperatives and party loyalties. I am neither an activist nor a loyalist. And I abhor mindless conformity and repetition of liturgical cant in politics as the betrayal of everything the Left is supposed to stand for. Truth will indeed set you free, whether this truth is scientific or moral or historical. It is better to know and face reality, and know one’s creative role and space within it. The people who engage in repetition and ritual show all the evidence of having fallen into the errors of groupthink, turning politics into a religiosity. Such people don’t think, they conform to their pre-written and ideologically approved script. These are rational human beings who have forgotten how to think, and forgotten that behind all thoughts lies a world of substance. Words are for meaning, and meaning implies substance:
“The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?”
– Zhuangzi
Without substance there are only the traps and snares of meaningless, malleable words in the hands of those who would seek to control your thoughts and actions. The further you go down that road, the less reality things will have, until one day there is nothing left except words, power, and conflict. Thankfully, people are beginning to spot the game being played and are ceasing to be cowards in face of the bullies. And I entertain the hope that one day soon people will manage to find their way back to reason and reality and escape this quagmire of seeking to define things by way of empty terminology. On the plus side, the nonsense that I once contested in academia is now out in the open in society, where many ‘ordinary’ people can see it for what it is and call it out in greater numbers.