PUBLIC BONUS: Cis Solidarity with Trans Struggle, Jack in Conversation with Rowan Fortune & Twilight O'Hara
Another free public bonus in which Jack steps sideways a little from the usual IDSG focus. In this episode, Jack hosts a conversation with comrades Twilight O'Hara & Rowan Fortune of Anti-capitalist Resistance about their blistering and important essay A Trans* Guide to Cis Solidarity: Beyond Oppression. This conversation was recorded in January before the show's return from hiatus. https://anticapitalistresistance.org/a-trans-guide-to-cis-solidarity-beyond-oppression/ Rowan on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rowantree.bsky.social Twilight on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:az4mtz2vt545x2mlifptup2r Rowan on Mastodon https://mstdn.social/@rowanfortune * Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Just introducing this episode, which is not on the usual IDSG topic, subject matter, but as I explain in the episode, this was recorded during the hiatus that Daniel and I had, towards the end, towards the very end, but even so, and I thought I'd use the dormant platform that I had.
As you know, Daniel and I are now back to it, and I'm recording this intro A couple of days before we record our next main public episode, so look out for that.
In the meantime, here, as I say, is a free public bonus episode on a, I would say, related but not directly related, but very important topic that I feel passionately about, in which I speak to two brilliant people, and I hope you enjoy it!
And welcome to this free public bonus episode of I Don't Speak German.
It's not a mainline episode because Daniel's not here, because we're still on hiatus for the regular episodes, but it's a platform.
It's not a gargantuan platform, but it is a platform, our little show.
And it was just sat there not doing anything.
So I thought, hey, why don't I do something with it?
Something hopefully maybe useful.
And so I thought I'd invite on to the show a couple of really interesting people, friends of mine online, if I'm not presumptuous to say so, Rowan Fortune and Twilight O'Hara.
So welcome to the show, Rowan and Twilight.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So the occasion of your coming on is an article, which you co-wrote or an essay, which you co-wrote back in April, 2022.
Now, which I know I is, this is a bit embarrassing because I know I did read it at the time and I probably just retweeted it and said, yeah, this is really good.
Everybody should read this.
And then didn't really do anything else, which is kind of part of.
The essay is actually an attempt to, part of it anyway, well the essay is actually an attempt to address, because it's, well, it came across my desk again and I saw it and I thought, that would be, that might be a good use of this dormant platform that I have lying around.
So, why don't you tell us about this article and what it's about?
The article is called Transguider CIS Solidarity Beyond Oppression, and guests, you can fight between you to decide which of you is going to explain it to me.
I'm happy either way.
Would you like me to start off?
No, you can go ahead with it.
I mean, this piece was a collaboration between the two of us, but Rowan definitely took, I would think, the hand and actually the writing process.
So if you want to take the lead on this, I'm okay with that.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, I think I tend to structure a lot of our work, and you provide a huge amount of the content on Discord, and then feel like you don't, you haven't done as much sort of... I think it was before, but I always get reminded of Ingles writing a 15-page essay for the Holy Family, which Marks sent off and finished into the 200-plus page book.
I feel like that's how what happens between us ends up, is I will talk about ideas and you will spin them into something.
A lot more substantive.
I'll definitely accept the flattering comparison to Mark's.
Well, I think it's pretty flattering to compare myself to Ingalls, anyway.
That's pretty teeming, isn't it?
No harm in aiming high.
It also implies that you take a concise, readable, original document and blow it up into something that's three times the length and harder to read.
I do tend to do that.
Unpacking tends to be what I tend to do.
And just adding.
But yeah, with this one, I mean, it kind of flowed quite well out of discussion.
I think it was one of the easier pieces that we've collaborated on, both in terms of the writing process and how quickly it was finished, especially relative to how polished it is.
I think the more unwieldy collaborations we've done, there was a three-part series that began as a review of Oh, Holly Lewis's... I can't remember.
The Politics of Everyone?
Everybody?
Yeah, The Politics of Everybody, and then just sort of spun out from that.
It was also in part a response to a gender abolitionist trans woman, which is a perspective we've always disagreed with, but that was much less focused and has far more in it, even though I think it might have come after this piece, that I now disagree with.
In terms of the progression of ideas, there are areas of this piece I think we've progressed from, but I don't think the substance is really something we would alter.
And I think that substance is looking at... Well, it kind of really starts with a fundamental question.
Which is, what are the obstacles to solidarity for trans people?
Because we both felt then, and I think still feel now, that the current direction of travel is pretty grim.
And neither of us are really convinced by Optimistic assessment of the situation, and the left tends to be, I think, hyper-optimistic in a very glib way.
It tends to treat optimism as a kind of performative duty, really, rather than... It's a kind of obligation.
It's an a priori.
If you aren't optimistic, you can't win.
Ergo, be optimistic.
Yeah.
And I'm an anti-pessimist, and I know you are too, Tui.
Pessimism, for me, is just pragmatically wrong.
But yeah, glib optimism doesn't really help the situation.
It's because we're anti-nihilists that we feel like we have to more properly address what is very clearly a pervasive mood and attitude in our era, and for good reason.
It's not arbitrary.
If we want to combat that, we can't just tell people, you feel hopeless, but have you considered having hope?
Yes, yeah.
And I think that's our feeling.
I remember we had this discussion where we were looking at the left's repeated engagements with Afro-pessimism and separatist queer and women's movements.
All stuff that we definitely do want to counteract as well.
And just kind of missing the point of what those people are saying completely.
In the sort of theorization of sort of despair or separatism or whatever.
And it's a quite extreme comparison, but we kind of said in several conversations that it's a bit like going to somebody who's about to jump off a bridge and telling them that if they do that, it will kill them.
Which is, you know, I feel like most of the left's engagements with these feelings of despair kind of amount to telling a suicidal person that suicide tends to produce death.
It's not very helpful.
I mean, hold on, people do that with suicide as well!
You know, you can only know if life gets better by living it.
It's like, that is so profoundly refusing to take seriously what the person in question is dealing with.
Which, if you actually want to reach them, this is a bit cynical of me, but especially with the left, more so than with the suicidal people, I get the feeling that the left is trying to blindly convince others of the need of optimism as a kind of way of, it's talking to itself through other people.
It's not interested in dealing with these issues, because if it was, it would be taking a pragmatic approach of, what is their problem?
What does nihilism psychologically do to address the problem?
What might an alternative be that would meet that need in a superior or more satisfying sense?
And that's not the terms that anyone engages on the left, I should say, with these issues.
I get it, because for whatever reason, which we can talk about, the left is very, very bad in the current era.
About confronting the very obvious fact that what we've been doing for decades doesn't work.
Yeah.
No, I think that's the methodological assumption.
You're not going to sell any newspapers to pessimists though, are you?
Correct!
There's no market for a nihilist worker.
Nihilists won't join the vanguard and pay a monthly membership fee.
Whatever.
That's enough of a topic that could be an entire podcast episode of its own.
Yeah, absolutely.
But I think it is important to this, because I think that insight is the core one that drove this piece, that sense that the Left didn't really act as it was claiming.
It didn't act in a way that aligned with the motivations it claimed to have.
It's not bad faith in the sense of being disingenuous.
I think it's Sartrean.
They are unaware and they are trying to be unaware of the reality of their own psychology because it's very easy to fall into a routine where even if you don't really think it's going to work, You are contributing to something.
You are a part of something.
You are doing something to live your values.
Whereas, for better or for worse, you know, working through all of these ideas that we've been working through over the last couple of years, I think has taken us in some very interesting directions.
But it's also made me feel a lot.
So that the situation is worse than I think most people permit themselves to admit.
Yeah.
I mean, I would say if I have, you know, one of my areas, there's a really big area where we would alter this piece, which I'll get to in a bit, because it kind of thematically follows one of the core points of the essay.
But I think if there was an area where I would update the piece, I think I would have to actually make the situation sound a bit more grim than this piece does.
And maybe that's not even a reflection of the inadequacies of the piece, but a reflection of the development of the situation.
I would think, sadly, I think it is just that things have gotten noticeably worse in two years.
Yeah, yeah.
And in the US, there's now the very real possibility of return to a Trumpian government, or if not heralded by Trump, then one of his acolytes or imitators.
And who knows how such a regime will try to reinforce itself And certainly it's going to be devastating for trans people who could suddenly find that laws that have already been devastating for trans people in some states become enacted at the federal level.
And certainly the fight back in individual state level arenas will become harder, if not impossible.
And in the UK, I think we're very realistically heading towards a general election where we might have prime ministerial debates about trans women's genitalia and things like that, with the two parties trying to compete over who can be most awful to minority that accounts for less than 1% of the population.
And after a five year period of a 186%, I think it is now increase in hate crimes, which, yeah.
And like it is, it's, it's alarming how much of that is being confected.
I think, I mean, I stand Anything I say in this, I stand to be corrected, but it's alarming to me how much of this is very obviously being confected at sort of the top level.
This is not Never Dream of denying that there's a widespread amount of bigotry against all sorts of people among just the population as a whole, but This is not a natural groundswell that the avalanche of anti-trans legislation, anti-LGBTQ plus legislation generally in both the United States and America and other places, it doesn't seem to me to be a response to a great and swelling demand from below.
It's working the other way.
It's very, I mean, like you have operators like Rufo in the States who are And people like him who are very, very openly just confecting these moral panics and passing them on to politicians and media figures that want to use them.
And for what it's worth, this is a terrible, it's a terrible skill for someone to have, but Rufo is quite good at identifying, because you're right, at least I think you are correct, that there is a lot of this is being directed by Certain powers-that-be, influential people, etc, etc.
But they're also doing a very good job of, they couldn't get away with this if there wasn't some kind of resonance with a certain group of people.
Critical race theory, no one knows what critical race theory is, because why would they?
It's, from what I understand, because I don't know what it is, it's predominantly a legal theory, tradition.
Like, in terms of the actual phrase, critical race theory, but you've almost certainly seen this, Jack, because you seem to know more about Rufo specifically than I do.
I saw a bunch of your not-tweets.
What are Blue Sky?
Skeets?
Blue Sky is sort of officially Skeets now, yeah.
Yeah.
But, quite literally, he chose critical race theory because it was a phrase that was unfamiliar, could so immediately and readily be identified for what its new meaning, what it would be assigned, and it could be used as a catch-all to demonize anything relating to race in a kind of all-encompassing conspiracy.
And that really works for a lot of middle-class white conservatives, etc.
Because it just feels so true to them.
And the same thing is happening with trans people, and I only say that to be like, you're right that this is being directed, but it couldn't be foisted upon an otherwise unwelcoming populace.
And the sad truth is, there are plenty of people who They might not have known they were transphobic until someone told them, but now that someone has told them... Yes.
That's a great way of putting it, yeah.
Sort of spontaneous, deep-seated bigotry just sort of auto-generates.
The minute they know about the existence of a particular community, right, well, I hate them, and I feel like I always have.
Yeah.
Since we are literally less than 1% of the population, it is entirely feasible for most people to have gone their entire lives without knowing that they've known a trans person.
So it's like, the fact that people hate that is weird, right?
But it's not, for the reasons we just talked about, which is frustrating.
Yeah.
Fits in so well, because this always happens with every group that becomes the target of one of these confected and establishment co-opted moral panics.
You know, you ask the British public how many illegal immigrants there are, you ask the British public how the percentage of the population that's Muslim, radical Muslim or whatever, you ask the British public the percentage of the population that's transgender, you ask the British public the percentage of the population that's whatever, whatever group, okay, and they will vastly overestimate the amounts in exactly the same way that people do with the trans community in the United States.
Yeah.
They assume the threat must be pressing because they hear so much about it, and it feels so worrying to them that it must be a big thing.
Rufo came up through the Discovery Institute, and these people got this sort of manipulation through wedge issues down to, ironically, a scientific technique.
So I think that's partly... He started off doing exactly this stuff with homeless people.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
I did not know anything about that history.
Yeah, he started his career doing exactly this kind of scaremongering about homeless, unhoused people for the Discovery Institute, which is literally a sort of a far-right Christian creationist propaganda account.
I have heard of them.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's a real tension.
In the essay I highlighted as I was rereading it, I reread it today and yesterday, I highlighted a bit where it was kind of towards the end where I said, transness is constructed as weird by reactionaries.
And it's not that I really disagree with that phrase now or anything.
I mean, I think that's entirely true.
But I probably wouldn't frame it that way, where we're writing this piece today.
Because I think our emphasis has been more and more looking at the way in which ideology and so-called false consciousness is embedded in the structures of society in the way that this organically reproduces these Prejudice is such that reactionaries don't really have to do very much work.
I mean, one of the things about these people, although they do have techniques that have been honed for, you know, sometimes centuries, often centuries, They nonetheless also don't really have a huge amount of resistance and often just people who just repeat what they feel is already out there in terms of social prejudice.
And so there is an element definitely in which transphobia has been a wedge issue and I think it applies very differently to the United States and the United Kingdom.
Yet to fully theoretically work out why the UK is so organically transphobic, especially in, I find, the middle classes.
And I think that accounts for, to a large extent, why the British media is so organically transphobic.
There are almost no really pro-trans outlets in the UK, and most of the sort of progressive outlets, bar only really the independent They're only okay, they're not brilliant.
And obviously Pink News, but that's completely its own separate thing, since it's an entirely weird-based organization.
Really, they're the only gleaming exceptions in a quite sordid assortment of just organically transphobic media outlets.
The Guardian, I think, is one of the worst, but the BBC is appallingly bad, especially with their now infamous story that tried to, on a very, very weak basis, pose trans people as a sexual violence threat to lesbians.
I mean, by weak basis, they cited a cis woman who was herself, I believe, guilty of sexual assault Yes, I remember that.
Yeah, the BBC.
Oh, I can't remember the name of who it was, I used to know it.
Yeah, and a hate organisation's internal polls that didn't actually substantiate the claim of the piece.
So even the hate organisation internally wasn't able to substantiate the outlandish claims being made.
But nonetheless, this was cited as evidence for the claims.
Yeah, I remember that case.
I'll put a link in the show notes linking to the YouTuber Sean's videos on this, because he did a series of videos.
He's one of the best YouTubers that there is.
He did a series of videos about this, about the BBC.
And the outrageous way they behaved in this case.
So, yeah, if people want to know about that, that's honestly the best place to go, some YouTuber, but it really is.
There's a pretty direct correlation between YouTubers being good and how few videos they make.
And Sean barely posts, so he's really good.
Yes.
I mean, bar some of the sort of just fun YouTubers, but yeah, if you're doing serious content as an individual, it's definitely a strong correlation.
But yeah, I think, you know, when you look at the sort of middle class nature of British transphobia, and then I think that links to the way that our institutions are highly rigidly gendered in Britain.
I think a lot of middle classness as an ethos is highly gendered, and that's very strictly enforced.
But I also think that it comes down to the historic defeats in Britain and America being slightly different, and the nature of progressive politics in the two countries being different.
I think that there wasn't as much progressive politics outside of the labor movement in Britain, historically, as there is in the US, where there is a much larger liberal progressive movement that operates living outside of Class politics in its strictest sense.
And I think the defeats in the 80s of the Labour movement did a lot more damage to progressive politics as a whole in Britain than it did in the US, where those defeats weren't simply the defeat of progressive politics, since some of it existed outside of those defeats in terms of the Thatcher-Reagan reactionary period.
And I think those defeats in Britain has left the forces that would create a good theoretical framework for counteracting transphobia in disarray and allowed for a lot of reactionary thought to gain currency and track within the labor movement itself, in fact.
I think that's why there's so much left transphobia in Britain, which is a relatively minor phenomenon in the U.S.
as far as I can see.
I'm not denying that there are left-wing transphobes in the U.S., so-called.
They're definitely a marginal force compared to What I gather it's like in the UK.
There are so many prominent organizations that even as someone outside of the country is very Yeah.
Hard not to notice.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's not fundamental.
I think an organization, when you look at the Labour Party, which is very differently historically constructed than the closest equivalent in the US, which I guess would be the Democratic Party, but it's such a bad comparison.
The Labour Party is absolutely rife with transphobia.
I don't think an actual equivalent in the US would be today.
Obviously, that's a weird what-if history.
But nonetheless, it doesn't seem to be a huge immense problem within the DSA.
As many criticisms as I do have of the DSA.
Transphobia isn't a special problem they seem to suffer.
No.
Where you get left transphobia in the US it seems to be in some but not even all of the sort of more Stalinist style politics.
And like, yeah, that's just such low expectations anyway.
It's not surprising.
Also, those are mostly irrelevant.
But in the UK, there are a lot of groups like Women's Place UK is probably the most prominent that regard themselves as fundamentally of the left and are Completely one is single issue transphobic organizations, as far as I'm concerned.
Insofar as when they do anything else, it's really just cover for transphobia.
It's a way of either gaining credibility or seeding transphobia into something else.
And that can be shown by the overwhelming tendency of their sort of interests and campaigns.
But yeah, I mean, to return to the article, I think it's really fundamental to sort of tease out the complexity of that, the idea of a wedge issue and then the social base for it.
I think that within Marxism, that phrase that's often repeated about the ruling ideas being the ideas of the ruling class is commonly really poorly understood.
It's seen as a kind of statement of conspiracy, almost, that the ruling class sort of dictates the ideas of the rest of society from above through its own machinations and sort of moustache-twisting, evil ways.
When in which case, you know, Marx's radicalism is kind of just lost.
It makes what is a matter of social reproduction one of intentional conspiracy from behind the curtains.
Exactly.
Which makes it impossible to understand what, frankly, I think is the best point in the entire German ideology, which is, you know, where that quote comes from, of the need for revolution being that it remolds the consciousness of those doing revolution.
Completely undermining that reading, the conspiratorialist reading of The Ruling Ideas quote undermines the ultimate point that he's trying to make in that entire book, which is not that entire book, excuse me, that section, excuse me.
Well, yeah, I mean, that book also has the weird and very, very long attacks on Stirner.
It's mostly about undermining Stirner.
Stirner certainly felt so.
My copy of the German ideology is just good stuff at the start, and the introduction basically says, yeah, that's all you need.
You don't need the rest of it.
Yeah, same.
That's mine as well.
I think the way that quote is misunderstood is that it also misunderstands what is meant by ruling.
I mean, this is related to what you're saying, obviously, but it takes ruling to mean, To refer to government diktats and policy and stuff like that.
By ruling ideas, I think obviously in an early way, in terms of the development of the theory, he's referring to something that's better understood through something like the Gramscian idea of hegemony.
No, absolutely.
It's the social organization and the experiences that that gives rise to, that Marx is primarily interested in.
And, you know, Marx famously did not believe that the capitalists had a very good grasp of their own system.
In fact, if they had, he would have had less work to do.
They're impelled by the structure of their system to do things that might be in their personal interests, but are actually against the interests of their system as a whole.
He points that out repeatedly.
Yeah, absolutely.
They don't act in the kinds of concerted ways that a deep understanding would imply, nor could they because it wouldn't be a system if there'd be a conspiracy again.
There'd be a conspiracy, yeah.
And yeah, I think there's a tension between that and then the fact that there are genuine, for want of a better word, conspiracies.
There is the fact that the gender-critical, anti-trans, anti-gender ideology stuff was to some extent confected within the Vatican as a part of the Vatican's already rather confected sort of pseudo-feminism, which was mostly an attempt to undermine women's reproductive rights.
And that that was very systematically spread, but then it found very fertile soil in Britain.
And through Britain, I think that's been transmitted elsewhere.
And I think Britain does seem to be a major sort of transmitter of this idea.
It seems even more confected, apparently, in the Russian context, where from the reading I've done, it had even less of a social base before Putin took hold of it.
And Putin, I think, even references people like Rowling in His language around this.
It's very clearly something that Putin is engaged with as part of his broader conversation with what he regards as the sort of, quote unquote, degenerate West.
The same is, I think, true for the way that the GOP took this on.
But I think it found far more fertile ground in America in ways that, you know, were organic but unexpected and have definitely played into The Republicans' hands.
I mean, a really good example of this is the quite vile Libs of TikTok individual, I forget her name.
And if you look at the way she operated, she didn't really jump on queer people At all.
She apparently spent a long time trying to find a niche and tried all kinds of quite quixotic and often ridiculous ones.
I think there was a time when she was taking on the perspective of a health plan, watching Biden in the White House.
And yeah, like ridiculous stuff that didn't take off.
It took her a long time to find queer people as her primary target.
The people who are the sort of quote unquote thought leaders of the right and the far right, I don't think really anticipated just how well attacking, and not just queerness, but I think very specifically transness, would play, and how well that that would engage with cis anxieties that I think are pre-existing.
And something that I think I've done more and more thinking of subsequent to writing this article, and actually a lot lately, especially around the death of the young transgender woman, Brianna Gay, who was horrifically murdered.
And the trial for her murderers has only recently finished.
Especially in response to the trial, because there was a lot of very disturbing material in the trial about the way that those murderers operated, and their motivations, and the way that they talked about and thought about Breonna Gay, is to kind of really realize the degree to which trans people, I feel, represent an almost perfect and quite disturbing
object of fetishized violence for cisgender anxieties that pre-exists sort of an awareness of trans people.
I almost sometimes now think that if trans people didn't exist to persecute that sort of conservative notion of cisgender people would have to invent us as an object in some sense where we are very distressingly ideal.
I think that there's a failure to understand, and I think it's kind of the dark side of some of the points that we made in this piece more optimistically, about the interconnectedness of oppressions and the fact that trans liberation, which I think is a fundamental point of the article, that trans liberation is also liberation for cis people, is that trans
Persecution and trans oppression is also a very effective way for cis people to deal with the unstable boundaries of being cis.
The constant catch-22s that I think are imposed on cis people's own sense of gender.
Ideals that are not intended, because there's no intended, but are inherently impossible to realize.
Models of masculinity and femininity that they will necessarily fall short of.
And having people who simply opt out of those models, In a way that is regarded as just obviously perverse, I think is, in a quite horrific way, quite helpful to the stabilisation.
And then it wasn't just the details of the case and the way that they dehumanised, which I think, in terms of Brianna Gay and her murders, but I think The response to it from the media was quite astonishing, both in the degree to which they weren't interested, which I think obviously there's all kinds of reasons for that, not least embarrassment, especially for liberal outlets like the BBC and The Guardian.
who fueled the very hatred that got this young woman killed.
But also, I think there was a rather concerted denial that the motivations of the killers were transphobic, despite extensive evidence of them using transphobic language, and quite amazing justifications for that conclusion, including that they intended to kill non-trans people as well.
Which, if someone had planned, you know, a racist murder, but also planned to kill some white people, you know, it would be pretty staggering to claim that they were then not racist, especially if they were caught using clearly racist language to describe their victim.
And I don't think that that argument... People to this day claim that the famous murders of the three civil rights leaders in Mississippi, they could... Well, you know, two of them were white.
It can't have been about race.
People still... People say stuff like that.
Yeah.
No, they do.
And I think when you see those kinds of arguments... Anything to deny.
Neil Roger killed men as well, so it can't have been about misogyny.
Yeah, I've definitely seen that one, especially around insult killers, whose ideology actually does justify killing men, but on a misogynistic basis.
I mean, it's such a bad argument.
I don't think it should be really treated as an argument.
I think it's not really expressed as a way to convince people that don't already accept that viewpoint.
It's expressed to deal with the anxiety that a particular crime act of violence inspires.
I think when people are making such elaborate sort of arguments that aren't at all convincing to deal with and argue away the transphobia, it's because they recognize something of this crime in themselves.
I'm not for a second saying that Guardian journalists secretly want to go out and stab trans women.
But there's a level of discomfort here which I think suggests that they see something uncomfortably familiar in the thinking of these people.
This is in no small part the result of an atmosphere that they helped facilitate the creation of.
Absolutely.
Ergo, they cannot confront the reality of the situation without at least partially implicating themselves.
And for some reason, people don't like doing that.
I don't know.
But I also think that it's more than just that sense of implication.
I think that there's a logic to this violence that is inherent to transphobia, much more so than I think the more common reason for which trans women are killed.
The sort of common motivation there is what I've heard referred to in the trans community as the sort of desire to cruelty pipeline, where
Usually, invariably, a cis man will desire a trans woman, will date them, will feel implicated in their transness in a way that makes them question their sexuality because they're transphobic and don't accept that the woman is a woman, and as transphobes invariably also homophobic and therefore feel like those implications are negative.
And then they will kill the trans woman in order to eliminate the source of their shame.
And I think that... They have a homophobic moment towards themselves, which they then transfer on to the trans woman.
Absolutely.
And I think, like, that's obviously, there's a lot going on there.
And that's quite common because male sexual violence and male violence to women is common.
And I think it plays into that and the commonality of homophobia.
But I think what happened with Breonna Gay, well, he wasn't an example of that.
And I think what happens in a lot of especially fantastical violence towards trans people isn't really an example of that, because I think the shame comes prior to Trans person?
I don't think the shame is expressed because the trans person was involved in their lives.
And in fact, in almost no sense in this case, and in many other murder cases, was Brianna Gay really involved in their lives?
They found her as a fetishistic object of violence.
There was no implication and then shame.
So the shame, I think, comes before Brienne really enters the scene.
And the shame is internal to those people.
And I think it's internal to their own sense of gender and the instability there.
I don't think it's an accident that these two kids were clearly deeply troubled and deeply unhappy people.
I'm not going to sort of psychologize them because I don't have the material to do so.
But I think that there's a different dynamic than the sort of cruelty to the desire to cruelty pipeline, which is an absolutely real dynamic as well.
And as I said before, probably the most common reason trans people are actually murdered.
But I think I don't think it's the most common reason for fantasies of violence against trans people, which I think are actually quite common in broader popular culture as well.
I think those fantasies are entertained because there is a certain level of reassuring cis people in their genders in those fantasies, and I think that's linked up to something that is quite A more positive point in the framework of this essay, which is this idea that, as I said before, that trans liberation is liberation for everyone.
That really, there is no stable notion of gender within current society.
We coined the term gender transcendence.
Which essentially just means gender liberation.
We think transcendence is just a better term for it.
To sort of frame that, the exact quote in the essay is, the oppression paradigm mistakenly assumes that trans liberation, gender transcendence, is simply for trans people, whereas in reality trans liberation is the particular political form that the transcendence of gender must take in our particular situation, but nonetheless is universal.
I think there's a more sinister side to that universality, and I think that's become more clear subsequently as things have gotten worse.
And it's about shifting those dynamics.
I mean, I think a huge part of our essay is about shifting those dynamics.
But it's in a very, very vicious spiral the other way right now, I feel.
And I think it's, yeah, I think our work is cut out for us, definitely.
It certainly seems like transphobia is like the mascot issue for the vanguard of the modern fascist movement.
That's what it is.
It's certainly, to put it as weakly as possible, it's certainly one of, you know, and I don't want to sound like the importance here is sort of an instrumental one where you use the trans issue as like a, you know, canary in the coal mine or anything like that.
This is one of the problems that the left has.
It thinks of this issue in a sort of instrumentalist way as almost a factor in sort of, quote unquote, more important dynamics.
And I think that's something you even touched on in the essay.
But yeah, it's certainly one of those issues where you can tell who somebody is the moment they start talking about this issue in certain ways.
You can tell pretty much almost like clockwork what most of their other positions are going to be, and if they fit into that broader fascist resurgence.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I think it's become a sort of meta-prejudice because it's a prejudice that explains for the person who's prejudiced other prejudices.
That's a really good way of putting it.
It reminds me of the term umbrella conspiracy when applied to things like QAnon.
That's a really good term for that, actually.
I'm sure I'd heard that term, but yeah.
I mean, there's a kind of, I think, almost instinctual sort of inverted sense of intersectionality within reactionaries.
They get the linkages between the different groups they want to oppress often better than, I think, a lot of strands of the left does.
The left is always trying to, I feel, sort out where its priorities should lie.
Whereas the right simply just goes for particular targets.
And I think just by going after and after and after different people, I mean, you can see that in this sort of aforementioned trajectory of Libs of TikTok, just trying different things until they see what works.
that they're really able to seize on to where the linkages are weak, where the strands of solidarity can break.
And yeah, I mean, a huge part of our, because you sort of mentioned it in terms of sort of lefts, sort of, I don't remember the exact word you use, but sort of the mechanical way that the left engages with these things.
Instrumentalist is what Jack said.
Yeah, that's better than Is this kind of critique of the notion of ally?
And yeah, I mean, do you want me to cut the battle?
Yeah, no, I'd really like to, and I was just going to mention one of the phrases that you use quite early in the essay when you start talking about this, when you start talking about the problem with consciousness on the left regarding this issue, is the phrase, the state of being forever out of sync.
That was one that jumped out to me from the essay, so maybe unpack that a bit.
Yeah, I mean I think that's become compounded and I think in a way, although it was kind of, there was a rhetorical element to that, but I think it was maybe even a bit Too mechanistic in framing it as constantly.
I think we said five years, and I think just constantly out of sync is better than putting a particular date on it, a particular number on it.
But yeah, I think one of the things you realize, especially after you've been a few years in any struggle around a particular group who are marginalized, is
The degree to which the sort of organic language and ways of thinking of the struggle are just woefully inadequate and rife with naive, vulgar assumptions that don't really grasp the experiences And this kind of links up to something that both Twy and I have been kind of looking at, which is sort of standpoint epistemology.
And that kind of links up to a broader interest we both have in American pragmatism and standpoint epistemology is raised in the course of the essay.
We sort of talk about good and bad standpoints in terms of humanism.
And standpoint epistemology, I feel like, is something that the left has, especially the Marxist left, has broadly misunderstood and gotten wrong.
It's usually seen as a sort of an attempt to introduce a kind of relativism into politics, and that's associated with... Idealism!
Yes, exactly.
Yes, yes, the great fear.
Often very poorly defined.
And it's not- If defined!
If defined, yeah, absolutely, no.
It involves an idea.
Yes, yes.
Ooh, that's a yeah.
Which we hate.
We actually forego all ideas.
Me and Rod are just primitivists.
We just go on pure instinct.
It must be material.
It must be made of matter, or I don't want to know.
I was going to say that.
Idealism is when the world doesn't exist, and you can kick a rock and it won't hurt.
Yes, yes.
Refute, revust, etc.
This has been a pet peeve of Rowan and mine's for a little while now.
No, we'll be careful on this subject.
Kicking the rock was a misrepresentation of the idea it was actually in reference to.
Yeah, exactly.
Yes.
I think we'll stay clear of the metaphysical arguments because that could take up a lot of time.
I think both Twy and I could definitely get into that.
But there are, I mean, there are links.
Absolutely.
But I don't, I don't think with a sort of broad, you know, an audience that isn't completely steeped in like, um, the, the ideological training of far left organizations, you're going to actually encounter much pushback to the idea that, yeah, ideas are important and they make people do things sometimes.
Yeah, yeah.
A notion, I feel, that Engels and Marx, in fact, shared, but there we go.
Well, given that they were revolutionaries and they, yeah.
Yeah.
It's a point of transmitting ideas.
Yeah.
Whatever.
Let's move on.
Yeah, no, we will move on.
Now, revolutions happen, you know, unless you can encourage ideas, but there you go.
Yes, there's so many mysteries in the way that certain Marxists think about Marxism.
Deep, profound mysteries that I think aren't supposed to be resolved.
So the problem is not how they think about it, it's how they avoid thinking about all of these different issues.
Yeah, absolutely.
But to get back to the sort of defence... It becomes a way of explaining why you shouldn't phone the police when a member of the Central Committee is accused of sexual assault of another member of the party.
That's all it becomes.
Actually, that's just a hypothetical, I'm sure.
The Left would never get that bad, surely!
Anyway, I beg your pardon, please go on.
No, no, no.
I mean, I'm always willing to take some time out to have a small kick at the SWP.
But yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, it's the standpoints.
I mean, The feminist theory was heavily influenced by a sort of set of things by Nietzsche, Marxism and American pragmatism, which I think all actually trace back to Hegel.
I'll be careful not to go there.
I mean Nietzsche more complexly because he hated Hegel but also said a lot of the same things.
I won't get into that either.
But standpoint theory had this sort of triumphant of influences and Marxism was by far the largest influence on standpoint theory and that's simply because when Engels uses the term like Proletarian science, what he really means is much closer to what standpoint theorists mean by standpoint.
His use of the term science is slightly gobbled by the fact that the word has changed in its meaning quite fundamentally since his day.
And by a standpoint, both Engels and the standpoint theorist feminists meant that there are particular social locations that encompass both broader social knowledge, the knowledge of the dominant groups, and at the same time, knowledge that is excluded of those who are being
socially marginalized, and that by the very fact of encompassing both of these things are more objective than a viewpoint outside of that.
And this is always framed in the context of processes and developing consciousness, so it's not seen as something automatic.
Contrary to certain bad faith critiques, a standpoint feminist never said that women just fundamentally, by virtue of being women, have this kind of greater objectivity.
It's only through struggle that women gain that.
And collective struggle in particular.
It's a social experience.
And struggle being built into certain positions in society as a fact of life because of oppression.
Yes, yeah.
It's socially organic and occurs at a collective level, and the reason why it's not automatic is of course it can be blocked in all kinds of ways, and consciousness might not be developed.
And actually the feminists that developed this theory were quite brutal in terms of evaluating where those blockages occurred.
They weren't in any way optimistic about the development of consciousness and actually regarded developing consciousness as a fundamental task of feminism.
And all of this was rooted in the fact that many of these women had gone through Marxist movements and had learned apparently better Marxism than many of the Marxists they'd left behind, who mostly managed to catastrophically fail the women's movement.
The tragedy of the 20th century leftist thinking is that so many of the people who were best suited to and clearly have shown signs of understanding All of these different aspects of some of these subtleties of Marxist theory.
Find Marxist organizations in the actual living tradition so off-putting and hostile to the very nuances that they're trying to bring to the table that they go to other places.
Yeah, no, I completely agree with that.
I mean, I think, you know, while Marxism was failing women, it was simultaneously failing black people and so on and so forth.
And often it took Women and Black people to found over their own Marxist organizations or to literally leave Marxism behind, albeit still often highly influenced by the insights of Marxism.
Insights that then Marxism wouldn't see reflected back to them because they messed up their own theoretical understanding to a certain extent.
And I mean, I think these tragedies become kind of perverse in some instances.
I mean, slightly a tangent, but you know, I think To a large extent, the degree to which gender criticals have found inroads into certain strands of feminism, it's largely been those strands that were failed by the labor movement and Marxism.
And, you know, I think you have a quite obscene situation sometimes where the selfsame Marxist men who drove women out of Marxism have subsequently married those women and those women have in some instances become TERFs and then they've developed a You know, those men have developed transphobia on the basis of what those women say.
So there seems to be almost like a circularity, I think, to some of these prejudices developing out of the failures of Marxism to encompass the oppressed in ways that actually develop nuanced and complex theory that is inclusive and is able to respond to new developments of political consciousness, such as the
sort of explosion of, I think, trans consciousness in the last 10 or so years, which isn't to say that that's new in its entirety.
There's always been trans consciousness, but the degree to which it's developed a collective identity is relatively new, and I think it's obviously a part of the reaction that we're now seeing.
But in terms of those standpoints, I think standpoint is a really useful framework.
For thinking about the problems with the notion of allies and the benefits of a notion of a sort of humanistic approach.
And it's really kind of about that.
I mean, I wouldn't necessarily even just say instrumentalism, but a kind of false instrumentalism.
It's an instrumentalism that doesn't really serve its own purposes.
It's, you know, the tools that aren't working very well for those who are wielding them.
The concept of ally, I think, is fundamentally rooted in the very alienation that it wants to overcome and collapses back, as we say in the article, in notions of toleration in quite, you know, sort of liberal terms.
As a way of dealing with the marginalized and their differences.
It preserves the marginalized as they are, and preserves indeed the ally as they are.
I think where we've developed a little bit, Twyla and I, is that we now see ally a little more generously as a stage of necessary consciousness.
Something I think that we've agreed is that is that if there is that development, if there is that inadequacy and a kind of blockage occurring, then that has to be something that needs to be worked through rather than just condemned.
And we've used sort of the comparison, very loose comparison, of Marx's concept of the class in itself and the class in and for itself.
In that we see sort of allies as a kind of class-in-itself stage of connection to the oppressed and marginalized that doesn't go far enough, but recognizes the problem within the current social terms that are given to it.
In fact, actually the comparison works, I think, quite well.
I'd agree.
And developing past that, I think, is really kind of where we're at.
It's difficult to see how.
I think not because it's inherently impossible, but because I think to talk very much like a Marxist, the balance of forces are not really conducive to that development right now.
But the development is towards As I say, a sort of humanistic standpoint, a standpoint that's grounded in that possibility of universality that doesn't exclude the particular experiences that it's encompassing.
And I think that's where we get to a sort of more psychological framework.
And we turn to From, as I think we invariably do quite often, despite the fact that From was appallingly bad on queer issues.
I think he was a very astute thinker and offers actually quite a lot of tools that are conducive.
I think also he complements a lot of our other thinking.
As I think both Twy and I have increasingly gravitated towards the notion that Marxism, if it's to develop an ethics, must develop a virtual ethics.
It must be an ethics rooted in practice rather than some imposed schema or whatever the hell utilitarianism is.
I'm never really sure it doesn't look or indeed act like an ethics, kind of loathe to call it one.
But yeah, it can be quite clever, I'll grant it that much at least.
But yeah, and the framework that From used is very much a Marxist virtue ethics, which is something I think we both feel needs to be developed.
Obviously, the development of that is organic and through struggle, so it's not simply a theoretical project to develop that.
They're not taking Marxist to task for not having written a particular book on the subject.
But it is something, I think, that needs a greater degree of theoretical concern.
And I think, for us, that psychology that he deploys is Really conducive to this notion of a solidarity that's outside of this framework of allies that is more organic.
I don't really name it.
I mean, we use various different terms like friendship and This particular term I quite like.
Camaraderie is another one I think we threw out.
But we also stole a term from somebody.
I mean stole.
Took because it was good.
Oh yeah, flower bomb.
I think that's quite good.
But in a way, we don't want to... I mean, we think kind of part of the mechanistic element of Allies is precisely the idea that that relationship needs a single name, rather than being a more organic more difficult to pin down thing.
But I think where it can be pinned down, it's in that psychological relation that From sets up.
I think you're maybe being a little bit hard on your own essay in some ways, because I don't Don't find the approach to allyship censorious or condemnatory or anything like that.
There are moments of criticism of what one might call toxic allyship, like, you know, tone policing people over things like that.
And it's so hard to talk about some of the problems with the way, the mistakes that comrades make when they talk about these things or talk to each other about these things without sounding like you're falling into a version of the sort of The Wokeness Panic, or as it used to be called, Political Correctness Panic or whatever.
But yeah, this is what I wanted to ask you about.
One of the things definitely in play here is the dynamic of just social media, of just social media conversation.
And I was wondering if you had thoughts on how directly that plays into the problems with allyship and how it manifests in the left today.
But as I say, on the whole, I think your address to allyship in the essay is really quite constructive rather than overly critical.
That's actually quite reassuring to hear, because it has been our main thing we were thinking of sort of updating about the piece.
I mean, we are quite happy with this piece, to be clear, we're not... I think the issue, obviously Rowan you can interject and tell me if you disagree, but how I...
I really appreciate something that you said at the very beginning of this talk, and you posted about it, I believe, on Blue Sky, about the initially, like, whenever this first came out back in January 2022?
April.
April.
Of posting it, sharing it, complimenting it, and then not doing a lot with it.
I really appreciate having come back to that.
Like, that was something that very much personally bothered me, because you are not alone in that.
That was the overwhelming response.
It was genuinely quite frustrating to see how nice people were about the piece, and then to seemingly not then take away What I thought was the main point that Roan and I were trying to communicate, but I tend to, I can't control the behavior of others, obviously.
If I could, I would organize the mass proletarian revolution with my mind right now, as the dirty idealist I am, and I can't.
So, I always want to try to turn around and be like, what can I do differently to have... if people are reading this and are not engaging with it the way that Rowan and I would like for them to have, it doesn't accomplish anything for us to, you know, complain about it, basically.
Like, sucks that we're in this position, I guess, but ultimately, we are the ones who have the agency here to, we can write a piece, and rewrite a piece, and try to communicate these ideas in new ways that relate to people and hopefully resonate in different ways, and we have to do that.
So the thing with this piece is, like, allyship is, I don't necessarily think the issue is we were too One-sidedly critical of it, but that we failed to illustrate what in allyship was useful that nevertheless pointed to, indicated, contained within itself the seeds of further germination towards what we are trying to get towards.
Of, I think maybe Rowan and I were trying to put forward an idea of what is beyond allyship,
Without working through the contradictions in what allyship was, communicating that to the ally audience, so that they can work out in their own heads how these contradictions play out for themselves, and move on to the next, wherever that is, because the whole point is that Ronan and I can't have a utopian, this is the exact, here is the, this is the term, this is the exact relationship between trans people and cis people that needs to exist, like,
That's not how this works, or at least isn't how it should work for a philosophical Marxist.
So anyway, I just wanted to get on it.
Our problem for me personally was not that.
I'm glad that we didn't come across as being too critical, but I still think that that is the critical failure on our part, or the crucial failure, is not too much criticism, but criticism that did not result in the audience moving forward with the subject that we hoped they would.
Does that make sense?
I realize I kind of rambled there for a little bit.
That makes a lot of sense, and I'd like to clarify, I don't even necessarily think it would have been a fault if you'd been more critical.
I mean, I think you could have put more criticism in there and it would have been fine.
But yes, I get what you're saying, yeah.
I mean, I think, like, there's a lot of complexities in terms of, like, the way... I mean, it's always difficult.
We do mostly write to a Marxist audience, but, you know, within the ACR and outside, I think we have quite good reception within the ACR.
I'm quite proud of the ACR.
I don't want to be, like, recruiting or anything.
I find that habit annoying.
But it's, yeah, it's quite moderately popular.
Just, you know, for the wider audience, it would be fair to represent the ACR as a revolutionary socialist organisation?
Yeah, I mean, we're a complex thing.
We emerged out of a multi-tendency group, of which I was part, and the older sort of socialist resistance group.
And they're, I guess, the official fourth international group in the UK.
I'm not a Trotskyist and have never been one, but I quite like the SR people as far as the Trotskyist tradition goes, I think.
I'm actually quite open to sort of different tendencies and a plurality of thinking whilst holding a coherent line on things that matter.
And, you know, especially where, like, you know, you see things internationally, I think they've been really great.
You know, both, for example, Being rigorously opposed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and simultaneously the polling situation in Gaza, and so on and so forth, where I feel other left groups have been caught in
Contradictions of thinking that are rooted in an attempt to geopolitically place themselves that makes no inherent sense to me at all, and I think actually detaches them from the broader working class with whom they're trying to have a discussion, especially the younger working class, who I feel intuitively do not like compromises on things like Ukraine and Gaza for just basic human reasons.
But yeah, I mean, I'm not trying to just glibly attack the rest of the left.
There are great other good organisations that I have a good relationship with.
But I think the essay is framed as an address to the left.
It's an address to cis comrades within the left.
This is partly why I thought it would make... I mean, apart from just sort of the jokey thing I said at the start about this being a platform that at the moment Daniel and I aren't doing anything with.
Daniel and I, in our different ways, are both people of of the socialist left and we both try to be cis allies or cis comrades to trans people and to the trans struggle.
So it seems like an appropriate, particularly think since lots of our audience are people who are involved in anti-fascism, so there's going to be a lot of people in our audience.
A huge number of people in our audience that are from a socialist tradition of some kind or an anarchist tradition of some kind.
This is, I mean, this is kind of an opportunity for me to do what I felt was like the most instructive thing I could do with the essay you wrote, which was to get it to the people, or at least some of the people, that it was aimed at.
No, absolutely.
I really appreciate the opportunity, the invitation to come on here and do that.
Yeah, I couldn't convey that strongly enough.
It's a real... I mean, I've wanted to... I recently appeared on a podcast with you talking about Lovecraft, which is obviously a very different setting.
Very interesting story you chose.
Yeah, it was a lot of good fun.
But I, you know, previously wanted to be...
In a podcast conversation with you, or just a conversation, because I definitely admire your work, and I've long admired Don't Speak German, so it's a wonderful opportunity to appear on the show.
And I think you're absolutely right.
I think one of the issues is that we ended up in a conversation, I think, with a very small number of left, of Marxist organizations within Britain, most of whom didn't really even formally respond I think there's, there's a, and I, you know, I don't want to moralize the problems here.
You know, I think there's a, there's a real difficulty of theoretical communication on the activist left.
I mean, I don't like the term activist left, but if I'm for want of a better one, the left that is engaged in politics, in actual struggle, the outside of, you know, exclusive academic concern.
It's not particularly good at communicating with itself.
It's rife with with sectarianism and also just, I think, a lack of genuine interest in teasing apart Ideas that I think are contrary to pre-existing assumptions.
There's a lot of, I think, not quite laziness, because I think that's too moralistic a term, but there's not really a lot of enthusiasm for this kind of thinking, for the kind of thinking that I think engages with the obstacles that have clearly been confronting the left since before really any of us were even born, really, actually.
These problems predate all of our lives, I think.
The impasses that the left faces and the fact that we haven't not only not built the world we want, but haven't really even developed the struggles necessary to build that world.
And I think in a particular case, like the trans struggle, where things are heightening, I guess Twy and I kind of felt like there was a sort of no reason to be patient.
Really, if things don't change dramatically and fast, then the situation becomes pretty unlivable for our community, insofar as it isn't already in many, many areas and places and for particular subsets of people.
And yeah, you know, I think that's really the thing that I said at the beginning that motivated the piece is sort of looking at the inadequacy of current models of solidarity and trying to branch outwards.
In actual fact, you know, a lot of solidarity is not even Marxist, it's explicitly liberal and so that falls.
easily and organically into these modes of ally consciousness, where you don't really attack the assumptions of society as a whole, and so you have to fit solidarity with trans people into those inadequate assumptions.
And I think that's why, you know, we still primarily do try to talk to the radical left, because Otherwise, the obstacle seems insurmountable.
But yeah, it is definitely difficult to convey these ideas, and I think people want a prescriptive, mechanistic answer to them.
The listicle is a very completely inadequate, but a very tempting thing to adopt, because it It gives people a sense of purpose and something to do, and you've got a certain set of instructions, write your MP, etc, etc.
Which, you know, we're all doing, and isn't working.
It gives people a comforting checklist that they can tick the things off and think, oh, well, I've done that, then.
Yeah.
And there's a phrase... Which is a very understandable, very human impulse to look for that.
I mean, I was doing it as I was reading.
I caught myself doing it as I was reading the essay.
You know, we all do this.
Yeah, I mean, something Brian and I have talked about, because we've talked a lot about the problems of moralism, but we've also talked a lot about the problems of moralizing moralism.
And I think that's a trap that the left often finds itself in.
It is an anti-moralistic tendency, and anarchism has its own sort of anti-moralist traditions that overlap and depart.
I think the trap it constantly falls into is to just moralize moralism, to just find a higher order of moralism.
Yes.
You know, there's this really silly right-wing charge that's levelled at Marxism.
I can't remember the latest populariser, but the original, I think, is Eric Vogelin, that Marxism is simply a sort of new Gnostic cult.
It has, like, got some kind of direct lineage to the medieval Gnostic cult.
The most modern populariser you'll be thinking of will be James Lindsay.
That is the guy, yes, who is not I mean, to be fair to Eric Voegelin, as weird as Eric Voegelin is, and as wrong as he is, he is a considerably more sophisticated thinker, which is not actually that high a praise.
I actually think Voegelin can be kind of fun in a silly way.
Lindsay is not fun in the slightest, or even vaguely interesting.
I think that the kernel that these people are getting at that is completely bizarrely muddled and doesn't really require this notion of Gnosticism specifically.
Is this tendency of Marxism to get into this kind of trap of moralizing moralism and then see itself as a kind of elect that exists above society rather than as a part of society that has to change through changing society?
I realize this is a little bit late in the conversation for us to be doing this, but I think it might be useful to define exactly what we mean by this, because I don't think we've actually introduced what do we mean by moralizing moralism.
So, I mean, for me, moralism is an attempt to explain things through essentially a kind of magical category, a category that just sort of introduces an element that isn't actually explanative.
So, moralism isn't just about moral judgments.
A really good example is when somebody says that the reason why the world is bad is because everyone is stupid, or the reason why the world is bad is because everyone is fundamentally evil.
These aren't really explanative ideas.
They're not even trying to be.
They're just ways of Organizing the things that you don't like into a neat parcel that no longer requires an explanation.
They're a way of avoiding having to explain.
It's just question begging.
You're just restating the question in a way that sounds like you've answered it.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, the question then immediately becomes, why are people stupid?
How are they stupid?
Et cetera, et cetera.
Why have they been stupid in different ways at different times?
Which is the ultimate, for me, just the ultimate, like, if that is somehow an all-encompassing solution, or answer, then nothing should have ever changed.
And it does.
So... Relatedly, if people are just stupid, and we are people having this conversation, from what standpoint are we making that judgment?
Yeah, and I think by moralizing moralism, I mean that Marxists recognize all of that, which is fine as far as it goes.
I mean, Marxism isn't the only anti-moralistic tradition.
Nietzscheanism is an anti-moralistic tradition, for example.
But he's a lot more keen to zero in on the more traditionally moralistic aspect of it.
That is his concern.
Whereas Marx is concerned with what you and I are talking about.
Like, Jack indirectly invoked it, but it's the theses on Feuerbach.
of who educates the educators.
And Marxists know this.
They know that by rote.
They know what that means.
Well, that's the thing, they don't know what that means, excuse me.
They have heard that, and they fail to extrapolate any useful information.
I realize that in a different context, Jack, you invoked this as a derogatory term, and rightly so in that context.
On the other hand, I almost feel like the problem here is a lack of instrumentalism.
These ideas are internalized with no thought given to what the actual consequences of, other than a nominal disagreement with Feuerbach, what does it actually mean to say that the educators must be educated?
Because it does mean something.
It means something foundly important.
And it doesn't really go anywhere.
Kind of hit on what I was saying.
I think the thing is, Marxists recognize moralism, but then they explain moralism moralistically.
They don't want to explain why people resort to those pseudo-answers.
If people are resorting to a pseudo-answer, there's a reason for that.
That answer is doing something for them.
It's fulfilling a social function.
Marxists simply condemn the moralism, and you see this in, you know... Yeah, the ruthless criticism of all that exists means that you don't approve of anything, ever.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You're not interested in working people through the process and out of moralism.
And moralism is pervasive, like, moralism isn't something you can just easily avoid.
It's pervasive in way in which humans think about these problems.
And so I think Marxists end up in this track where they do start to see themselves as a kind of elect.
And in that sense, that very limited sense.
I don't mean to push back on you on this.
I don't know if this is actually what you meant or not.
Do push back on me on anything.
Well, no, just saying that you said a second there about this is like endemic to how humans think.
You can, if you disagree with this, I don't know if this is what you were actually getting at or not, but the way that that's phrased almost makes it seem like it is a... Oh, yeah.
A historical... Yeah, no, it's not.
You're right.
It's endemic to how we think in class society.
It's endemic to the symptoms of class society, I think.
The option that we have available to us, when we do not have actions that can be taken, immediately obvious apparent actions that can be taken to actualize that criticism, those thoughts, In a material form, or in a practical, sensuous way.
And I don't know if you've noticed this, the class struggle is not doing particularly well in the West right now.
Not from our side, anyway.
Very good point, very good clarification.
The class war is going better than ever for certain people.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, even then, I feel like we're more heading towards the common ruin of the contending classes than whatever.
I mean, Capitalism Victory doesn't really look like anything because their system is inherently contradictory.
Capitalism is just the prolonged non-victory of the proletariat, slash the continued existence of themselves not accidentally going into apocalypse, which, yeah, they are beating the proletariat, great, awesome.
The apocalypse part is- That's not going so well, they're not beating the earth.
They're trying, that's probably their problem.
But yeah, moralizing moralism, I think, is a really fundamental form.
There's a phrase that is used in the essay that I think actually was originally yours, Twy, of a moral administrative framework.
That's kind of what a listicle is.
And I kind of feel like that is That is the role that the listicle plays, and it's why it's a very reassuring format.
I mean, we kind of almost intentionally titled the essay in a way that sounds like it will be a listicle, a kind of BuzzFeed piece.
Maybe that was to our own detriment.
Maybe, you know, I think we thought that was going to lure people in into a certain mindset that we were then going to try to criticize.
But unfortunately, I think it led to people just thinking that it was going to be something that it's not, and then being disappointed when The guide basically says cis people should see themselves as involved in the praxis of working out the transcendence of gender with us, which is actually an incredibly non-straightforward guide, which was our point.
If the answers were straightforward and we knew them, we would have solved the problem already.
Hooray!
Pat ourselves on the back.
And obviously, that hasn't happened.
We don't have the answers.
Not worked out, anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I do hate to do this, but it does remind me a little bit of the bit in Life of Brian, you know, where Brian shouts to the crowd, you've all got to think for yourselves, and somebody shouts back, well, how do we do that, Lord?
Yes, yeah, that's a great...
Yeah, it's bad.
for that for sure i mean i basically like the brian directly calls parallels to radical um specifically trotskyist parties even which is um a weird call out but true yeah yeah no that's that is fair - He's a trust.
I thought it was the Judean Liberation Front, I think is the organization in the movie, isn't it?
I mean, yeah, in the context of the UK, it's going to have to be Trotskyist groups, because they're obviously not talking about Stalinist groups.
So yeah, it's it's not.
Yeah, it's not.
I mean, I don't think they really cared very much who they were lashing out at.
specifically like i don't know no model of of the particular marxist tendencies they were mocking i should be a lot of that was coming directly from cleese who was quite the reactionary and it's a sort of whole sort of yeah well he was even then i'm afraid but um yeah it whole sort of judean people's front joke has become the absolute standard of the anti-left pub bore i'm afraid in britain but you know that doesn't change the fact that the original satire does have some
have some good points yeah yeah i hate living in america sometimes but it is good to be away from stuff like that I did not know what you were talking about there.
We all have our separate, horrible, chauvinistic cultures to protect.
Horribly fucking, their own unique... Yes.
No, it's... You know, I am a nationalist in the sense that I do think America is exceptionally bad, and I imagine you feel similarly about your own country as do all radicals about their own.
It's hard not... I mean, like, I do, I do, I'm wary of... It's called revolutionary defeatism, I believe.
Yes, exactly, yeah.
I am wary of... I mean, you know, yeah, Orwell had some good criticisms of that tendency on the left, which is, again... I mean, Orwell did a lot of moralizing moralism, but sometimes he was quite astute at recognizing the moral.
I've got a little bit of a search for middle-class socialist, just in general, which is actually not entirely, like, dismissive.
I actually quite like Orwell.
I've been... we've had quite a few conversations where I'm defensive of Orwell, but that is unquestionably his Yeah, position on things.
Yeah, and he would have agreed with that.
I mean, he wrote about the fact that he was a socialist from a middle-class imperial background.
He was very conscious of that himself.
He was very conscious that he wasn't organically of the working class.
Yeah, which is to his credit.
I don't necessarily... it doesn't make what he's doing right, but it's certainly a lot more interesting, tolerable, perceptive than Sorry, I—this is a thing where, like, I can attest to this—I end up ranting about Orwell all the time, because there is, for the last few years, I feel like there's been this tug of—oh, go ahead, what, Jack?
Same.
No, I'm the same.
I cannot get past the bit in Notes on Nationalism where he basically steps out of his own time and place and explains today's pro-Russia tankies.
I just, uh, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think we have to put that on Uskai, if I remember the quote you were talking about, which I hadn't read that before, but you pointing that out really reminded me.
I think I've talked about that with Rowan since then, just the idea of Orwell's analysis of nationalism, which I took from you taking from Orwell.
But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, like, really bad anti-Orwell stuff on the left.
He's kind of... There's a lot of anti-Orwell stuff.
There's so much silliness about people just trying to claim Orwell as, well, did you know he was actually a democratic socialist?
Which is true, I guess, but like... Yeah, meaningless.
So what?
He just added his name to your side, which doesn't mean anything.
I love about Orwell especially is, like, 1984 is great, not because it's political analysis, some of which is good, some of which is meh, but perfectly summarizes the absolute despair that anyone aware of what Stalinism had become must have felt at the time.
I think the pessimism is wrong politically, but it's incredibly evocative and resonant.
I mean, I'm on my hobby horse now, but 1984 comes with an appendix, which is an essay about Newspeak as a thing of the past.
So the book contains the fact, as it were, within narrative that that system died, that it's over.
And he does say, if there's any hope, it lies with the proles.
Like, he is saying there is some.
Yes, then double think.
I mean, it's a great... 1984 is a great satire of capitalism.
And as soon as you realize that... I mean, let's not get into this huge debate, but the Soviet Union became some variety of capitalist society.
As soon as you get that, it becomes obvious what satire of capitalism in one form.
And I don't think anybody can understand the world, particularly the world today, without really getting their head around the concept of double thick.
Because the minute you get what Orwell is actually describing with that concept, you see it everywhere.
Everywhere.
And it's terrifying.
But it is key, isn't it, I think?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, we're in pro-Orwell company here.
Yeah, hell yeah.
Yeah, really like this has nothing to do with gender and I can't imagine Orwell actually had very good takes on gender of all things.
No, he definitely would have been terrible.
I mean, I mean, his treatment of women was bad enough.
I can't imagine he would have been.
He was he was cranky and insulting about anybody he considered a crank or a weirdo.
And that included like vegetarians and people that drank fruit juice.
And yeah, he was very homophobic.
I mean, let's not.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Don't just try to sort of.
remember where I was.
Rowan, you were talking about moralism and morality.
I was.
It wasn't a bad digression, though.
It was quite...
I'm going to jump in and link it to what you were saying earlier, which was that both of you, in fact, want Marxism to contain a kind of value ethics.
And I agree with that.
In fact, I don't know if you have thoughts on this, but I'd be very attracted to the version of Marxism as an ethical theory that I get from Terry Eagleton, who employs ideas from Walter Benjamin and Norman Geras before he went bad.
Where Marxism contains a kind of ethical core which goes back to Aristotle, which of course, you know, Marx was a classical scholar.
He wrote about Democritus and Epicurus for his doctoral dissertation.
He was steeped in the classical philosophers.
He gets his basic idea of the good, you know, ethics not as a kind of set of prescriptions for other people.
But as a personal standard for life, for the good life, with the classic somehow being Marx, both Enlightenment and capital-R Romantic spin, that it needs to be universalized.
And that's a key concept in your own essay about this very issue, the concept of universality.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I've been very influenced, albeit with obvious and quite extreme caveats, by the work of Justin McIntyre, who is essentially now a reactionary.
A very strange kind of reactionary.
Of the weirdest variety, to his credit?
I don't know.
I mean, he doesn't Gavid, there was a period at least where he didn't talk to non-Catholics, so, like, whatever.
I mean, you know, that's weird.
He still engages in very good faith with the Marxist tradition as an ex-Marxist, and I think understands the Marxist tradition quite well as a non-Marxist, as is quite rare.
I think his views on ethics and his quite devastating critique of modern ethical theories, by which I don't mean like contemporary, I mean of modernity, are very astute and quite useful.
And I mean, I wouldn't, I would be shocked if Eagleton wasn't influenced by MacIntyre too.
What I know of Eagleton, of course, Eagleton has his own Catholic Flirtations.
So that would not be a surprising reference point for him.
No, absolutely.
Yeah.
Very influenced.
Very sympathetic, at least.
Like Eagleton.
I don't know him on this subject, but I do quite like him.
But he's written so many books, it is impossible to read them all.
I mean, it's also kind of what field, like, there's Eagleton on literature, and then there's Eagleton on ethical theory, and so on, like, you could just explore a particular avenue.
And he, I mean, he does link up his ideas quite well.
My only criticism of Eagleton is he sometimes gets into quite weird moralistic territory himself, especially in his, like, rather bizarre, and we've both sort of had some fun at this in the past.
His article, blaming football for the lack of a revolution in the UK, which The Guardian obviously quite merrily posted, because why wouldn't they?
Which was just very weird.
It's one of the weirder pieces.
It's a bit like some of the stranger stuff you see on the Jacobin where they call Pokemon Go neoliberal, but don't really give a reason for doing that.
Football!
A Dear Friend to Capitalism by Terry Eagleton.
The World Cup is another setback to any radical change.
The opium of the people is now football!
It was going to be the opium of the people thing.
I mean, I don't deny that football obviously does supply an outlet for It's funny, not because it's entirely disconnected from reality, but because it's disconnected enough to make the framing of it absurd.
I love that article.
That's a classic.
It is a classic.
But I do like Eagleton.
He wrote a book on evil that I adored.
It's a great one.
His book on tragedy is wonderful.
Radical Sacrifice is a great book.
Yes, that is really good.
Yeah, yeah, no he has a lot of like, yeah, I mean he's interested in those kinds of nuances.
And things like tragedy and evil and so on, I think get neglected a lot.
A particular favorite of mine is, I don't agree with across the board, an old Marxist philosopher called Lucian Goldman, who was very interested in Ponce's, Pascal's work.
I think I had a really astute reading of Kant.
He was neither dismissive nor did the silly common thing in Marxism of becoming a neo-Kantian.
But I actually understood Kant as a tragic bourgeois thinker, incorrectly.
But Lucian Goldman often reminds me of Eagleton.
In that recognition of historical tragedy, I trust philosophers and historians a lot more if they have some sense of tragedy in their framework and in their way of understanding things.
And Eagleton definitely does.
In very much the Corbyn way.
Another person who does that within the Marxist tradition I think quite well is Bloch, who despite being the sort of philosopher of hope, even understood hope as constitutive of what human beings are, in ways I quite agree with.
Really actually had a profound sense of the way that consciousness can become blocked and tragic, and I think had one of the most tragic accounts of reactionary mind as a kind of expression of a torn consciousness that's unable to find any realization in the world.
I'm an almost kind of phenomenological lens.
I really like that stuff.
I think there's far too little of it in contemporary Marxist writing.
In fact, we begin our piece with a quote from Neil Faulkner, his final book, Mindfuck, he talks about psychology of fascism and to re-energize that project that he felt had sort of languished in Marx's theory of understanding the psychology of fascism.
I think Wagner was somebody else who really grasped those nuances, that kind of sense of tragedy and the way that that plays out in class society.
Definitely had I admire Faulkner so much.
He's such a great speaker as well.
I always enjoyed his public speaking.
Wonderful, yeah, yeah.
He had a lot of energy and he energized people around him as well.
That quote, I think, really does slide.
The quote is, on the one hand, atomization, alienation, and anomaly compounded by the general stresses of social life in an exploitative class society can cause implosion, regression, and the onset of mental illness.
On the other, involvement in activism and struggle can become a journey in solidarity, self-discovery, and self-realization.
In many ways, I feel like that quote does actually articulate the core substance of what Brian and I are trying to get at in the piece.
100%.
Yeah.
And I think that the left, Mark's left would do a lot better if it just tried to more consistently Not just grasp, but to instantiate within its own activities that idea of process, that idea that consciousness is on a progression.
People are on a journey and to try to find ways to realize that, rather than... We're all embedded with each other in the social relationship.
And it's dialectical, it's all mutually influencing and mutually changing and constantly growing.
The self is a work in progress, constantly.
Because everything is.
Because everything is just in the nature of reality as we have it, is a work in progress.
So of course we're no exception.
No, absolutely.
I mean, I think the great insight that Hegel had and that he took actually, I think, from a lot of very interesting sort of mystical thinkers from before him, especially the European hermetic tradition, is this idea that the individual is the absolute core thing.
It's the most valuable thing, but that it isn't a pre-given thing, that it is socially realized.
That plays very heavily in Marxist thinking and in Nietzsche's thinking as well, another name we've mentioned quite a lot.
And I think in both instances, I'm directly inspired by Hegel's primary insight there, that the idea of the individual is the main fruit of society, but always a socially contingent, socially constructed thing, that there is no individual selfhood without social basis.
It seems like an obvious one, but I think it so often is implicitly or explicitly denied in broader ways of thinking and in the ways that class society teaches us to think, where we're either set up to see the individual as a ready-formed thing that's just pre-given as the base atomistic unit on which society is built, rather than the other way around.
Or to see the individual as a kind of inherent problem.
You know, you certainly have lines of Marxists who even see themselves as anti-individualistic, which has probably been used to Marx, but there you go.
Very much so.
But yeah, and I think that runs, you know, right through our thinking in this.
I think that going back to Aristotle and the virtue ethics is actually really important to this kind of thinking because I don't think you can really realize this kind of model of solidarity except as a system of socially developed values that occur through particular practices, repeated socially and in time.
And that's a fundamentally Aristotelian way of looking at the development of something like solidarity, and also the possibility of it not being developed.
And it's why we gravitated towards, I think, a quite Aristotelian thinker, What I fear about a lot of the other models of solidarity is that a lot of them are quite radically anti-Aristotelian.
I mean, as well as being anti-Hegelian, Marxist structuralism is very anti-Aristotelian.
Because it's very opposed to the notion of agency, of agency as a social phenomenon.
It sees structures as almost existing in lieu of agency, in lieu of people.
And I think it supplies, although it can supply many insights, and I've gained insights from reading structuralists, queer theorists, They can have quite devastating critiques of, for example, gender criticism and the way in which it is, in fact, not at all critical of anything.
And the way that it uses sex as a kind of be-given category that exposes a quite You know, there's a lot of really good material there, but when it comes to modeling solidarity at a theoretical level, I don't think it applies really very much at all.
It's certainly an irony that Fromm is guilty of similar things, but as with Aristotle, you can salvage the shape of the thinking aside from the erroneous conclusions that an individual thinker comes to.
Fromm's system is wiser than his conclusions a lot of the time.
Absolutely.
No, I think that's very true.
The central problem is that we are stuck in the system of commodification, that our psychology is literally stuck in the system of alienation and commodification.
That is the central insight, isn't it?
writing about and critiquing the Austrian school of it.
I mean, aside from just the joke of countering the Austrian school with the Frankfurt School, which I just thought was funny inherently, given the reputation the Frankfurt School has.
No, absolutely.
I like that.
I mean, like, yeah, I mean, I think generally, you know, I think we all should hope that the structure of our thinking is more, is wiser than we are, the way that we methodologically approach things.
leads to better conclusions than we contingently will sometimes.
I mean, one of the things I really like about Marx's engagements with the world is, as a Florida person as Marx was, and he certainly wasn't always ahead of every issue, As some of the sort of more over-the-top sort of St.
Mark's versions would like to insist he must be, is that he would always play a decent catch-up game when he saw agency arise.
He was always, I think, historically acute to where struggle occurred.
And I think Fromm's method supplies a way to do that as well.
I think Educators must be educated.
Yeah, exactly.
It's not that we should expect... I mean, it would be absurd to expect anybody from outside of a group of the oppressed to be ahead of that group.
I mean, that would be completely ahistorical to expect that.
Yeah, what we should expect is openness to new areas of struggle, and I think that's what's been lacking in Marxism for quite a long time, if not for most of its tradition.
That it is often a retroactive application of Marx's lines of thinking, rather than an attempt to respond to struggle as and when it emerges organically.
It's not about being ahead, it's about being able to see new forms of struggle as what they are.
And it's perfectly reasonable that as trans people initially come into consciousness, that there would be some slowness in comprehending the lines of that marginalization and the way in which it is a problem for the universal ambitions of Marxism.
The problem is that that persists, and it keeps on happening.
You know, I think there's already intimations.
Dwee and I sometimes think about sort of where the next lines of struggle are going to be, sometimes pessimistically in terms of like, well, what group is Marxism going to be playing a chess game with next?
And, you know, I think it's already apparent.
Around a lot of the struggles that these people are going through, I increasingly see a political consciousness emerging around the experiences of people with dissociative identity disorder and political consciousness emerging around that.
I mean, I think the key litmus test for our ideas is does it give people the tools to be able to respond to those phenomena, those social phenomena, as they appear rather than, you know, decades down the line after the struggle has already been sort of cemented and the group has gained some
Some degree of social acceptance, which is assuming a lot in today's context, given the scale of the crisis and given the ecological dimensions of the current crisis.
And yeah, I think, you know, I think that I will test for any theory of Of what it means to be trans right now is if, can it model a plausible type of solidarity that can actually salvage this political identity in the current conflict?
Something, you know, I feel is kind of historically tragic is that trans people, we've never had, I think, this degree of political consciousness before, have had moments of near liberation historically in terms of, I think, the potentiality to develop often alongside and within feminist and marginalised sexuality movements.
And that, I think, in many ways was happening in interwar Germany and in the very early Soviet Union.
And in every instance, it was very quickly crushed by a reactionary wave.
Historically almost ceased to exist.
I mean, the issue of the erasure of those instances of trans people being erased, that kind of particular form of historical revisionism has been very relevant lately as a particular Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, who is quite infamously transphobic,
who was being investigated by the Labour Party for not transphobia but anti-semitism after denying that trans people are victims of the Holocaust, which is a very bizarre bureaucratic thing for the Labour Party to do, to investigate her for anti-semitism when she was making an explicit claim about trans people, but then subsequently also found her completely exonerated by the fact that she obviously had
That trans people were victims of the Holocaust, as indeed all serious historians that have evaluated the matter have attested is the case.
You know, I think that there's a degree to which trans people are... I mean, I think in the essay we talk about how the oppression of trans people is built atop of other oppressions.
And historically I think when we've risen previously we've risen as a part of those other groups, not at all.
I think what's unique about this, and you kind of raised it earlier about social media and the way that it intersects with trans experiences, I mean you raised it in terms of allyship and I actually might come to that because I think it's really relevant, but I think one of the things the internet has done is supply a means by which trans consciousness can overcome its most fundamental problem, which is our very small numbers and geographical disbursement.
We're not naturally all in one place, although, for obvious reasons, like other queer people, we gravitate towards centres of population.
Even then, we are so infrequent in the general population that it's very hard for us to develop a political and collective consciousness without something that just really breaks down all geographical boundaries, as the internet does.
And I think that's one of the reasons why trans consciousness has emerged as it has now.
I don't think there's anything novel about that.
Particular insight.
Loads of people have had it before.
In terms of the way that the Internet then interacts with both the development of that consciousness and also allies and reactionaries, I think it's been largely quite devastatingly bad.
I have a lot of criticisms of Web 2.0.
I think it was largely, it was entirely an attempt to monetize the Internet that motivated it.
It's proven to be quite a disaster in many respects, even as it's facilitated good things.
It's a two-sided phenomenon in that way.
But nonetheless, I feel like the internet is one of the most alienated and alienating arenas for many people.
And I think that the way that that has shaped solidarity has very much been to sort of dry freeze the level of allies, like to just dry freeze that moment of consciousness, not to allow people to progress beyond it.
Because the kinds of involvement that would allow for a deeper kind of solidarity are not well facilitated on these platforms.
It isn't inherent to the idea of the Internet as such.
I think it's the way that the infrastructure of modern social media operate that has made things particularly vicious.
But I think also that that infrastructure was inherently implied by the Internet plus capitalism.
I don't think there's a utopian alternative where the Internet doesn't eventually become something like Web 2.0.
If not Web 2.0 exactly, as long as it emerges under capitalist conditions.
I mean, one of the things you touch on in the essay is the problem of stigmatization and categorization as a kind of dehumanizing impulse, and that just seems to be baked into the way social media operates.
Sometimes, anyway, and I'm not criticizing anybody, because again, we all do this when we encounter this system, the social media system, but it's like a way of getting people to sort of auto-sort Into boxes?
Yes, there's stuff in your essay about stigmatization and categorization as kinds of dehumanizing impulses, and I was noting that that seems to be encouraged in the structure of social media.
No, absolutely.
And I think it's a pervasive problem as these structures have become more and more embedded in different aspects of people's lives.
I don't think people realize the degree to which things like dating apps and obviously things like, you know, how people even acquire work now are all embedded in these social media structures.
And I mean, it's certainly not new to me to note that the sort of ways of reactionary politics that have emerged from social media, from QAnon, to incels, to the alt-right, are almost entirely online things that have their entire social basis is that.
And I think there's But I think there's a more pervasive form of alienation and a sort of reactionary tendency that goes on in the internet in terms of the way that the structures that formulate these websites are very, very much prone to sensation.
You know, lack of complex deep thinking and a lack of real engagement with other human beings as human beings.
I'm very critical of attempts to eliminate the anonymity of the internet because to do so is to jeopardize the safety and ability to be online of many, many marginalized people.
That's a solution to a nonetheless genuine problem.
Which is that the anonymity on the internet does create, I think, quite vicious social dynamics.
Again, like, eliminating it, especially by government dictators, an absolutely terrible idea, will probably eventually happen.
It's been thrown around enough different states with quite a lot of enthusiasm for obvious reasons that it seems inevitable that it will happen eventually.
But yeah, I mean, social media is, I think, a problem that the left has under-theorized.
I don't, and, you know, I think he feels the same, I talk to why he feels the same as I do on this question, that, like, we don't really have a solution to this problem.
It is definitely a problem, and I don't think the left knows how to engage with it.
You know, there are some sides of the left that do advocate just not being online at all, but I feel like that's obviously not even addressing the issue.
It's just personally opting out.
And then there are, you know, sides of the left that I think, or common sides of the left that just treat the internet as a propagandistic tool, as if it's just like a replacement for sort of 20th century newspapers, they can just use quite naively.
Yeah, it's kind of a mess, and I think it's not good territory for the left in general anyway, because these structures are inherently inhumane and inhuman and dehumanizing.
Turns out we don't compete as well in those spheres as the far right, unless we ourselves adopt quite reactionary and dehumanizing thinking, which is, I think, one of the many reasons why online Stalinism is such a thing.
Yes, yeah.
We mentioned a little bit earlier about the inverse ratio between the quality of the YouTuber and the frequency with which they produce videos, and that's really just an instantiation of the old shit-to-quality-work paradox, isn't it?
You know, the fash can turn out vast amounts of ...material and conversation material and entertainment material, because they're not bound by reality or research or facts or anything like that.
They can just say things.
They can just endlessly say things.
And people who are critiquing them, or on the other side, are bound by having to actually do research and things like that.
Although I have a lot of sympathy for the actually existing sophists that Plato sort of, I think, quite glibly dismissed sometimes.
The horror of sophistry as a category that you find, especially within Plato's version of Socrates, is very much that realization, that sort of horror that If people are willing to just bullshit their way through complex social problems, and they're willing to do that just as given, they don't care the harm it causes or even the self-harm it causes.
There's no real reasoning with it.
It's very hard to know how to deal with that socially or ethically.
And, you know, the capacity, I think, for the reactionaries to do that is, you know, the ability that especially out-and-out fascists have to lie is astonishing.
It's actually, unless you've had the misfortune of arguing with one of them, something I don't do anymore, but used to sometimes online, it is actually quite a bewildering experience.
They don't merely lie, in that I don't really think that they believe that the truth exists.
It's almost at that level.
Whatever they say to carry their point is true by virtue of that.
It represents a greater truth to them.
Yeah.
And if this was a Twitter thread, this would be the point where somebody would post a screenshot of that Sartre essay.
And yeah, I mean, that's a good essay.
No, it is.
I mean, I have issues with Sartre, but I actually admire a lot of his work.
And yeah, that's one of the pieces I do admire.
And I think like, yeah, It's a real difficulty, and I think the internet has exacerbated it quite a lot.
Obviously, the sort of, I think, complacent Marxist response is that the internet is just a social symptom itself, but I think that's kind of lazy, like everything is by that logic.
I didn't really evaluate any social phenomenon.
We should just look at the whole and not, like, any of the particulars.
I think the internet creates a... That sort of answer for a Marxist is like a biologist responding to, is this animal with... Well, it's an organism.
Yes.
And?
Yes.
No, it's exactly that.
I mean, I don't feel like there's any serious... And I get why there isn't serious engagement, to be fair, because I don't think that there's an easy solution.
I don't think...
I guess it's a chicken and the egg problem.
But we do need to start, I think, very seriously thinking about how we engage with these structures and coming up with potentially even quite experimental answers in terms of our engagement.
But yeah, I mean, as things are, you know, I think the left kind of is just trying to outpace the right in hostile territory in terms of where the internet is.
Marginalized groups that are dependent on the internet for the sustaining of their consciousness are at a massive disadvantage.
I mean, it's a subject of a great deal of perversity that trans people's political consciousness depends on the very spaces where they're often most vulnerable.
You know, it's the online spaces that especially put young trans people into proximity with those who are I think it's no exaggeration to say we want them, you know, essentially dead.
Yes.
You know, if they're not willing to enter the incredibly unhappy state of quote-unquote de-transitioning.
And, you know, a lot of young trans people, in order to gain consciousness, have to be on spaces where they are essentially relentlessly bullied who they are and relentlessly undermined in that very consciousness that is developing uniquely in those spaces.
And it is only, I think, something like a bust and optimistic but, you know, purposefully and not falsely optimistic labor movement that can answer these kinds of problems.
It's only, you know, through a much more vigorous class struggle, you know, you can develop the kinds of mechanisms, social forces that I think can do anything about these problems.
And that's another reason why I think we look quite persistently to the left, as much as we do find ourselves in philosophical conflict with a lot of Marxists.
I fundamentally feel like Marx's notion of class struggle is the only way to salvage this particular moment.
I mean, obviously, acutely for trans people, but also acutely for many other people, and more generally, I think, increasingly for the species.
At least a species living in social conditions that are actually worthwhile living in, that can, you know, achieve anything like human flourishing, in terms of the ecological crisis especially.
Yeah, it's...
Yeah, it's a difficulty.
I mean, I think there's a, you know, to theorizing today as a Marxist, when you're theorizing against such a low level of the kind of activity you need to see, and to not moralize, you know, even the metamoralism of Marxists, like, you know, even their moralism has a social reason, even that's responding to a real need.
It's responding to that That crisis of organising is historically profound, and in a context where the struggles seem, not just seem, but are existential, potentially.
And moralism is a refuge at the end of the day.
It's a way of feeling a lot better about a very grim situation.
And yeah, it's not particularly surprising that Marxists resort to that, given just how grim the situation has become.
I'm aware I'm talking a lot, and I don't want to sort of offend Ethan talking too much.
I mean, we've actually done more than two hours of conversation now, so we have a show.
Yeah.
It's good to hear.
I'm terrible when it comes to tracking time, as Twy can attest to.
I don't know.
You don't invite somebody on a podcast because you don't want them to talk, so don't feel bad about it at all.
On the contrary.
I'm just aware I'm a co-guest.
But yes, Twy can also attest I can definitely rant.
You typically have something interesting to say, so that's not a problem.
That's very kind, yeah.
Exactly.
Thank you very much.
It's been really interesting.
I mean, unless there's anything else you wanted to specifically cover, but yeah, I'm definitely happy.
Very good, yeah.
Wonderful.
So, before you go, Rowan and Twy, can you tell the listeners where they can find you online?
Shall I go first, or do you want to?
Yeah, go for it.
This one.
Yeah, I guess.
I'm on only really one place in terms of a central hub, Runtree.
The address is runtree-editing.uk.
My blog is on there.
I kind of recently had to archive most of it because I got hit by a It was kind of my own stupid fault, but I got hit by a copyright troll, an old image on an article that I transferred from another website.
That sent me into paranoia mode, so I didn't risk any of the other articles being hit.
Costly to be hit by a copyright trawl.
So I took them all temporarily down.
I'm currently re-releasing stuff and hoping to sort of get more back into writing stuff, but there'll be a lot of content sort of coming out on that, old and new.
It covers a lot of the subjects that we've discussed already.
There's lots of stuff on gender, Marxist theory, as well as reviews, etc.
Where's that?
That's the Rowntree Editing website, so just rowntree-editing.uk.
My blog is right there.
It's also my business, and anybody's welcome to hire me as a freelance editor if they would like, but not the primary reason I'm here!
I'm only on Blue Sky right now.
Jack, you mentioned getting kicked off of Twitter.
I got banned about two years ago for pretty much the same basic reason you did.
So, it was the best thing to happen to my mental health in years.
I'm on Blue Sky at RadicalTwilight.BSky.
Oh my goodness, BSky, because that's how Blue Sky does it.
You know, .social.
Well, this is everything that I hoped it would be and more.
Thank you so much, both of you, for coming on the show.
It's a great pleasure to have you and a great honor to have you.
Thank you.
That really is an excellent essay, thought-provoking, very stimulating, very important, I think.
And it is directed to comrades within the left or the Marxist left or whatever, but it is very applicable beyond that.
So if you're listening to this and you're not a Marxist, If you are, or whatever, and you haven't read it, I really do think it's very worth your time.
It's a really valuable, important intervention, I think, and it deserves to be shared and discussed and thought about.
And I hope that I've done my little best to promote that, this show.
But yeah, thank you both for writing it, and thank you both for coming on.
This has been a delight.
Likewise, very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And so that's the end of the episode, everybody.
There will be more episodes.
That's about the most I can tell you at the moment.
So stay tuned.
And you know where I am on Blue Sky.
I'm not on Elon's Nazi chan board anymore.
I'm actually properly not on it anymore because they chucked me off.
They locked me out of my account for saying, Nazi scum, follow your leader.
And I got an email that said, you're locked out until you delete this email.
And I'm never deleting that email.
I mean, that tweet, I'm never deleting that tweet.
So I'm out of Twitter completely, so I'm on Blue Sky.
So if you want to find out, if you want to keep up to date with what's going on, what isn't going on, come to Blue Sky and follow me on there.
