Can the Left meme?

One of the reasons for the year's sabbatical I took from this project - and for the rather depressed and mopey posts for a year or two before that - was that I had come to the conclusion that the goddamn fascists had eaten our lunch. It wasn't inevitable that *chan-based meme culture would become White Nationalist Boogie Wonderland. Anonymous - as came out of Chanology and went on to become a social movement which put the fear of the Lord into various governments and multinational corporations after that - was smashed by state action, with the help of various informants, in the 2013-14 period. Meanwhile, the culture was being deliberately infiltrated by meme-planting Nazi scum, co-ordinated ("marblecaked", as we used to say) from Stormfront. The vacuum was filled.

Bear with me for a moment while I go on one of my Abe Simpson-style long stories that don't go anywhere ("I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time..."

Many moons ago I was rooming with a guy who was an Army Reservist, a generally decent character but a "bro" in every sense of the world. One night I was woken from a slumber because he'd gotten a bunch of his buddies around to watch porn. I got up and, being young and naive, had no idea what the attraction was. That's just gross, I said. Look at that guy, he's naked except for a false nose, glasses and a tie because he's ashamed to be in this. The sex is not erotic in any way, you can't actually be getting turned on by this. Why exactly do you watch this stuff?

He looked at me as if I was stupid, and said: "Because it's naughty."

THERE, comrades and friends, lies the central secret of meme culture. Being bad is its own reward. Lacan spoke of this as jouissance, the pleasure which turns into pain, the obscene pleasure which is commanded by the very Law forbidding it. The chief cause of crime is the criminal law, as R. A. Wilson might have put it.

And the problem with the modern Left is that we're too good for our own good. The glory days of social-liberal politics were the 60s and 70s Reichian hippies, making their stand for (a very masculinized) sexual liberation. Once they took cultural power in the early 80s, sexual libertinism became the new orthodoxy, which is why you had the Alex P. Keatons of the era rebelling against it and becoming Reagan Youth. Then the hippies came back as the neo-shamans and ravers of the 1990s and fought against the orthodoxy of neoliberal rationality/rationalism. Now we've once again swung back to the point where - as the noted asshole P. J. Watson puts it - "conservatism is the new punk rock".

What I'm saying is that the modern neoliberal-Left is aligned with the Superego against the Id. Liberal politics or conservative-left politics (as opposed to radical-left politics) are all about restricting how people talk, restricting how people can behave, setting rules of the type which are beloved by both neoliberalism and traditional SocDem statism. People keep saying this, or at least saying that the modern alt-right/neo-fascist movement is "the Id" come to life - in the case of the Dorito Mussolini now squatting in the White House, someone called him "a YouTube comments box come to life". Remember how everyone has been saying for the last 10 years don't read the comments? Well, that didn't work as a self-defence mechanism for the neoliberal orthodoxy of the mass media, because the repressed always returns. (The metaphor of anonymous Internet comments as being "below the lines" of the article is a pretty clear spatial metaphor of their psychic role, just like Jung's dream of successive sub-basements, later ripped off by Lovecraft in "The Rats in the Walls".)

To sum it up, the "Left can't meme" because it is clearly more fun to be a Nazi in the year 2018.

***

I raised this issue on the CM Facebook group and I got a lot of valuable counterarguments. One ran thus:

The left CAN meme. Just browse /leftypol/, or even some parts of leftbook.

Ha ha, but /leftypol/ is not the Left. At least, it's not the Left that Chaos Marxism wants anything to do with it. Those fuckers are mostly tankies.

(If you're a tankie, you've read too much already. GTFO OFF THIS BLOG!!!) 

Now let me backtrack slightly and I do know some very decent comrades who do come out of the self-described Marxist-Leninist tradition.* A "tankie" is not just someone who goes carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao. A "tankie" is historically someone who believes in the Russian Tanks road to socialism - someone who not only sees nothing wrong with building a new world on the crushed bones of the Bad People, but actively sees that as a good thing. The "new world" they want is a properly organised one, not a democratic-egalitarian one. As Trotsky noted, the British aristocratic Fabian reformers Beatrice and Sidney Webb hated the Russian Revolution until it was thoroughly Stalinised.

* Note that Trots never call themselves MLs, but just "Leninists", or "Bolshevik-Leninists" on occasion. Chaos Marxism is anti-Stalinist, post-Trot and post-Leninist.

A tankie is someone who reuses the iconography of the Stalin and post-Stalin/Warsaw Pact era, not in the sad, half-ironic sense that another neo-Leninist might (as melancholic reminders of a future which never happened), but in that they actually think Joe Stalin, the Gulags, the Great Purge, barbed wire and concrete walls right through the centre of Europe, corrupt rule by an arrogant bureaucracy etc., were a good thing and they would bring them back (or defend them, in the case of the DPRK or even modern China). Because Joe Stalin (Enver Hoxha, the Korean Kim Dynasty, etc) were tough guys, Big Daddies, who pwned the hated enemy. Because that's the final argument isn't it? The Red Army chased Hitler back to the Berlin bunker and therefore Stalin was just all right by me.

What exactly is the difference between this and a MAGA-hat wearing, Pepe-meme sharing Trumpist? You tell me.

"Horseshoe theory" is centrist bunkum. There is no inevitable identity between the far left and the fascist right. Stalinism at least paid lip service to democratic ideals that outright fascism happily danced on the grave of. But there always has been an essential identity, a "dirty secret" shared between Stalinism and the fascist right. Stalinism is essentially red-brown politics, not socialism but a disgusting parody of socialism which has a sneaking affinity for actual fascists. Before there was Stalingrad, there was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and before that there was the Third Period, the German Communists actually lining up with the Nazis against the hated social democrats and liberals. Sam Charles Hamad (who doesn't speak to me anymore) was the first to point out that this wasn't just realpolitik, "enemy's enemy" stuff, but that the Stalinists had a programmatic commonality with the fascists - against the alliance of the Western allies, for strong-state autarky and an "ordered" society. And we're going back there, in the form of the Berners 4 Trump, "Lexit", Putin and Assad = Cool Bastards "alt-left".

Meme-Stalinism, then, is nothing but *chan-fascism with different-colored memes. Just masochistic surrender to Big Daddy as a fuck you to a liberal establishment which COMMANDS you to be liberated and to think for yourself. Leonard Cohen said "give me back the Berlin Wall, give me Stalin and St. Paul", but that was irony. If that's your proof that "the Left can meme", I don't want any part of it.

Chaos Marxism stands against the tide, in opposing both neoliberal "don't read the comments" goodthink and red-brown masochistic authoritarianism. Give us proof that our Left can meme. Please.

... okay, I don't like to end on a down note, so here's a song the best Leftist meme of 2017:

 

Against Pamphlet Marxism

As we have always said here, textual fundamentalism is the enemy. As any postmodern literary theorist can tell you, a text can bear any interpretation a reader puts on it. Textual fundamentalism - "if it's in X BOOK it's true" - either turns into solipsism, with every nutbar reading into the texts what she wants to see; or into crypto-personalism in that you need an Imam or a General Secretary to tell you what the text really means. And then you get into meta-personalist silsilas, or chains of authority - Lenin interprets Marx for us, Stalin interprets Lenin, Mao interprets Stalin, history of shaving.

Bear with me a moment - I heartily recommend the works of Michael Muhammad Knight in general, and Why I Am A Salafi in particular in the current juncture. Some of you may have a wrong idea by reading excitable "war on terror" screeds from either the crypto-fascist Right or the neo-Stalinist Left, that Salafi means "the bad kind of Muslim", House of Saud/al-Qa'ida/Da'esh style. In fact, as MMK explains, the term actually means those who attempt to follow the example of the salaf, Prophet Muhammad's original companions, and to critically appraise or chuck out wholesale the 13 or 14 centuries of Islamic civilisations and movements that followed.

Now, this may lead, depending on which authorities you follow as to what was actually being done in 7th century CE Arabia, to cutting off thieves' hands and selling concubines. Or, it may lead - as it has in the case of the followers of Rashid Khalifa or Edip Yuksel - to ultra-progressive Islam of the type which suggests that Muhammad's "true" message was similar to liberation-theology Christianity and all those verses of the Qur'an which are troubling to modern liberals were mistranslations by The Conspiracy. See, textual fundamentalism gets really odd-ball when you're not only interpreting the original texts but suggesting one, true, correct translations into other languages.

But any Marxist will see the similarities with our own tradition. The reason I didn't get into the Marxist or Leninist traditions until quite late in life was that my lived example, when I was young, were the kind of Trotskyists who solved every problem with appeals to the Holy Scriptures - the Gospel according to St Karl, the Letters of St Leon to the Schismatic Belgians, etc etc etc. And like the Bible or the Qur'an, the Collected Works of the Marxist Prophets are so voluminous that you can find quotations to prove anything you want to prove. Lenin, in particular, was an effective politician precisely because he was not afraid to practice exactly what he had been preaching against two years ago, if he thought it would work.

Anyway, I had enough of a background in fundamentalist Christianity that that method of arguing held no interest to me. It doesn't matter what anyone said or wrote, except to the extent that it offers a guide to action - and those actions can only be judged by their results. I enjoy reading Lenin of 100 years ago, for example, on why a "United States of Europe" would just mean a cartel of the existing colonial empires, as an argument made by a clever politician of a different era. But if you use that as an authority to argue for Brexit today, you are as brain-dead as any Saudi sheikh using hadith to argue that women shouldn't drive.

Anyway, here's MMK on "pamphlet Islam", which was supposed to be the point:

... one of the dominant themes of what I called "Islam" in my teen years was Islam's awesome clarity: The message presented itself as so simple that it could fit inside a pamphlet with large font and bullet points. For me to reconsider my teen Salafism, I'd have to reconsider what Omid Safi has called "pamphlet Islam": an Islam forged in the "serious intellectual and spiritual fallacy of thinking that complex issues can be handled in four or six glossy pages". These expressions of "pamphlet Islam," readily available at almost any Islamic center, bear titles such as "The Status of Women in Islam" or "The Islamic Position on Jesus" and thus rely on the assumptions that (1) there is such a possibility as a definitive "Islamic position" on anything, and (2) the author has the "Islamic position" on an issue nailed down firmly under his/her control, with no room for it to move...

Safi argues that we can and must do better than "pamphlet Islam" and I agree, but I'm also afraid that our efforts might only produce bigger pamphlets. Progressive Muslim reformism, with all its performance of theoretical sophistication, sometimes makes for its own counterpamphlet that's no less simplistic.

Some ex-Spartacists made a similar point about their former comrades in the late 80s:

the Spartacists have decided that Soviet defensism is the "central question" at all times and in all places. Those who don’t agree are automatically denounced as State Department socialists. This travesty of the Trotskyist position of defense of the Soviet Union has one advantage. It is easy to teach to new recruits. But if revolutionary politics were so simple a moderately intelligent myna bird could learn the formula in a matter of weeks.

Add to this the comment I say from some old "M-L" online saying that the best thing he loved about the works of Stalin was that "they were easy to understand and digest", as opposed to high-philosophical Marx or clever-clever Trotsky.  I hope you can see the point I'm making. Especially re: Syria and now Iran. If the politics or the religion are straightforward and don't need you to think, it's probably not healthy.