[The following is interspersed with real-life quotations from really existing Nihilist Leftists.]
If you’re a leftist, then you know one. For he is the salt in the soup of leftism. He symbolizes its most daring aspirations. He knows before you know. He has heard it all before. He has channelled Adorno, slept with Bordiga, inhaled Dauvé. He is on friendly terms with both Hegel and Marx, whom he ultimately considers useless, and the French Situationists, who ‘have their faults’. For, at the end of the day, we are all doomed. Capital will prevail. It always had and always will. ‘We’re all fucked’ is the The Nihilist Leftist’s answer to liberalism. ‘We’re all fucked’ is the kind of protest he feels at home in. This is the horizon of his engagement, the place that makes him feel welcome.
Yes, it’s him. The Nihilist Leftist as the highest stage of the Leftist identity.
One thing to know about the NL is that he considers his own contribution as a ‘radical critique’. A critique of what? Of capitalism, stupid. And to be fair, there are different levels of ‘being fucked’. What matters is that this is happening: that capitalism fucks us all. Except, it does so in different degrees. And the task is to find out what specific degrees a black woman from Baltimore with a Master’s Degree in engineering is fucked rather than a white car salesman from Buffalo. Or not. Because, make no mistake, intersectionality theory is not really an option. For capitalism is all about reification. Everything is always-already reified. Thoughts, actions, free speech. Especially the latter. Free speech is just a liberal illusion. A free exchange of ideas? Always-already mired in bourgeois self-delusions, fake, mediated. This is what the NL learned from Hegel. A ‘normal life’? Fuck it. Normality is Death! The powerful sway of the capital over every aspect of human life, over culture and its products, over language and its manifestations. This is what he learned from Adorno. It’s called Negative Dialectic, stupid. The NL is probably more Hegelian than Hegel himself. There is no self-serving cynicism involved in any of this.
But if you think the NL has no credo, think again. Because he does. For if everything under capitalism is already reified, we should strive to expose reification everywhere we can. Especially in the value-form. There is a big word. And you can be sure that the NL will use it. Poured proudly over pages and pages of his dissertation. Of course, there is no need to understand it (‘understanding is a liberal illlusion’). And yet, it is obviously a big thing. He can intuitively sense that. It’s a big thing for capital. But by far not the biggest. For there are other reifications. And they fuck us up way more than the value-form ever could.
We may be governed by real abstractions, says the NL. He knows this word, too, because he wrote 57-page articles about it for ‘the journal’ (‘it’s a collective’). But that’s not where it’s at, not for the NL. For the NL, there can be no more egregious form of reification than the reification of sex. It’s practically everywhere. Oh God, we’re so fucked. Just the very idea that women are women. You should put that in quotation marks, mate: “women”. That “women” alone can give birth. That “women” alone can breastfeed. That is perfect ideology, no: it’s prima philosophia. It’s metaphysics. It’s positivism. The naturalization of something socially constructed like sex. Or perhaps we should say gender. Yes, mate, erase sex. It’s gender. Because gender is fluid. It is also socially constructed. That means, yes, it is not real. Except that it is real when children are assigned a wrong gender at birth. Then they need to change it. For they need to have the correct gender. They need to be assigned the correct social construct. Not everyone is cis. But that doesn’t matter, ultimately, because everything around us is reified. The personal. The political. Except trans-women. Who are women. Definitely. No reification to that.
Hegel may have taught us that the concept is the thing itself. That the dynamic of presuppositions and appearances against the movement of thought itself will bring about the truth. But he never said that trans-women could not be women. And I will take his word on that. Says the NL.
Except that it’s all capitalism, stupid. That’s why, also, capital is the real subject of history. Not the ‘working class’. The working class doesn’t even really exist. It is just a reification. A liberal illusion. It profits from capital. It buys stupid cars and washing machines. Consumption is the only thing they care about. And being racist. And fascist. Oh God, we’re so fucked. The right-wing militias are coming after us. Haven’t you seen the footage from the Capitol? Trumpism lives right among us, and you think the very real fascist threat is just a means to divert attention away from the ‘real’ problem of capitalist exploitation? How dare you!
Workers only want to get their fair share of lager, their stupid TV programs, their Brexit. The Brits deserve their Brexit. Parochial gammon. Racists. They are everywhere. We’re fucked. I learned all this from Adorno. Says the NL. The Neoliberal Leftist.
For at a certain point, it really no longer matters anymore.
Great stuff Sensible Beefheart Kapitan. Like Don, you too have a beef in your heart against society, and also against the critics of society: absolutely necessary! Is your sensible sensing Kantian? I have no idea, but.. umm, at the very least I find it Neat Neat Neat. I liked your text on the PMC leviathan and now I find your love of music cryptically interwoven into satire, which is then smuggled into actually existing critique. I look forward to more. Aufhebunga-Bunga!
fucking great, solid stuff