How the left fell for the okeydoke
and how I checked out
I was “triggered” today by a tweet from Nina Power (English philosopher and senior editor of Compact), responding to “leftist” Nathan Robinson. Nina was bemoaning the fact that so-called Marxists (among whom I counted myself for many years) have abandoned their core interpretive framework (the shorthand being “historically situated material conditions”) in an incomprehensible embrace of transgender ideology.
“The sexual division of labour,” she said, “is central to a Marxist understanding of history. As Engels puts it: ‘Marx indicated that the oppression of women in a society was the measure of its general oppression.’ . . . How do leftists like Robinson explain the history of humanity except by reference to the reality of sexual difference under different modes of production? Is Marxist/materialist/socialist feminism simply now forgotten?”
Indeed, what ever did happen to the Marx-inflected feminisms of yesteryear? I’d like to outline a somewhat autobiographical answer to that, based on my engagement with these archaic forms during a pivotal era in global politics.
Pictured above is the DC instantiation of the historic international February 3, 2003 antiwar demonstration. With the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US, I went from being a lonely little communist in North Carolina with a very localized reputation to becoming a globe-trotting activist who was invited to write and speak around the nation (and even abroad). My fifteen minutes of (insular leftist) fame lasted just over three years, and culminated in a final spurt of more general notoriety with the investigation into the death of Pat Tillman.
The stars had aligned, so to speak. The Bush administration’s military belligerence in response to the 9-11 attacks was accompanied by a wave of anti-Islamic public rage in the US. for a time people felt compelled to fly American flags in front of their houses as a prophylaxis against being accused of insufficient patriotism. People have forgotten. It was like that, mad as fuck. The ghost of Joseph McCarthy was reanimated in Islamophobic form. Islamic people, and people who were mistaken out of pure ignorance for Islamic people, were attacked.
This was when I was most proud of what was still then called “the left.”
Within days of the attack and in the face of public opinion to the contrary, I participated in a panel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with academics and activists who opposed the imminent invasion of Afghanistan, which was already prefiguring the disastrous occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq. I was invited because (1) I was locally known for being a very active socialist with a pretty comprehensive organizing network, (2) I was comfortable with public speaking, (3) I had written a book (about my participation in the 1994 US military occupation of Haiti), and (4) I was a veteran . . . and not just a disgruntled vet who’d done his three years and hit the trail.
I’d been a lifer, a career soldier. A retired special operations guy with a military CV that encompassed eight different hot zones (from Vietnam to El Salvador to Somalia). The latter was important, and remained important, because I was the guy who could shield my comrades from all manner of criticism. My “patriotism” was well proven . . . or so it appeared. (In some cases, which I resisted with all my might, people even wanted me to play the left’s alpha male.)
At any rate—and here was my source of pride in the UNC panel and the once real left more generally (which put all of us on Second Lady Lynn Cheney’s list of “enemies of civilization”). We provided an outpost for the few who weren’t yet brave enough to speak up, behind which—as time passed—a nascent movement was able to shelter then expand.
Moving forward, though, not only was I not an alpha male, I was kind of an anti—alpha, based one my engagement with the left being co-rooted in feminism. Specifically, radical and materialist feminisms.
In coming to terms with my own military past, and the ways in which I was motivated to enter and continue along that path, I was confronted again and again with a particular construction of masculinity. The pursuit of masculinity was far more powerful in my formation and the formation of many men I knew in the military, in psychological terms, than anything called patriotism. “Patriotism” was just a vehicle for this objet petit a.
I wrote a series of essays for socialist publications about this, and those became a self-published book called Sex & War, which was eventually re-purposed as a Christian (rather long) reflection on the same, in a trade-published book called Borderline—Reflections on War, Sex, and Church [Wipf and Stock, 2015].
The aforementioned “masculinity” was (is) constructed as domination and conquest, and the feminists who were most credible (based on my own experience) and helpful in assisting my somewhat introspective journey were those now lumped together as “gender critical.” Finally, I was involved in all sorts of leftist conversations and debates that pitted Promethean socialists against more ecologically-minded ones, of whom I was attracted to the latter. And so, along with the rads and the Marxists, I incorporated “eco-feminists” like Maria Mies, Carolyn Merchant, and Vandana Shiva.
My first whiff of what was afoot in the academy (of which I had no experience) was when I withdrew Sex & War from Soft Skull Press and went with the self-publishing option. They’d assigned me an editor who looked like she was 12 years old. Her background was academic, and she kept trying to steer me away from my own sources and citations, in particular the radical feminists. Instead of helping me shape up the writing, she was hell bent on trying to change my mind about my core theses. I was still putting it all together then, but it reminded me at the time of when I was trying to get people to talk with me about feminism in the mid-to-latter-nineties (I was working then in Chapel Hill), and the students continually chastised me for my “wrong” choice of feminists. The name Judith Butler was always on their lips; but when I’d tried to read her badly-written academic navel-gazing, it gave me blinding headaches.
It was only later, during the antiwar period between 2001 and 2006-7 (after which I checked out to pursue my Christian conversion), that I began being corrected at various public events, by what to were my eyes children (I was a fifty-something then), for calling people who were obviously male or female by their normative pronouns. It seemed I was required, in the interest of “solidarity,” to pretend that some men are women and vice-versa. The immense interest in all things “trans” was a niche thing on the left. The only real “leftist” formation then that had gone whole hog on it was the cult-like Workers World Party (now called Party for Socialism and Liberation).
This conflict between the trans-ideology “feminists” and the gender-crits has been boiling over for the last decade and has infiltrated the entire culture to the point that it has become a main battle line in the culture wars. These culture wars, now inflamed for more general political purposes (The Battle of Woke Hill) have re-defined those hoary place holders of “right” and “left” along entirely different continua.
I remember now a brief conversation with an allegedly feminist woman. When I mentioned my reading of Catharine MacKinnon’s book, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, she reacted, to my shock and surprise, with, “That woman just needs to be fucked by an animal.” I mean, dayam! real out-a-tha-blue rage . . . The book, by the way, is still denounced with a strident earnestness in its Wikipedia entry. Gotta keep the kids away from apostasy.
The next time this shit came up was when I was working with a group of young academics and post-academics in the Triangle of North Carolina, I’d been saying more and more about this masculinity business as a deeply-seated psychological driver in war promotion, and the ways in which warmaking itself tends to reproduce this probative, violence-prone “conquest masculinity.” (Trumpism, anyone . . . Andrew fucking Tate!?)
At one meeting, when I brought the masculinity thing up, the youngsters became very resistant to what I thought was fairly obvious. They did not under any circumstances want to indict any form of masculinity, which baffled me. More confused, as one of their “leaders,” a fella named B*** P*** (whose main form of “activism” seemed to be “calling people out,” as it was named then), tried to explain. I’m paraphrasing, of course, but the gist of it was, given that he’d received most of his instruction in this gender business from his cohort and not direct study of the post-structuralist canon:
“The way to get rid of it [unspecified] is to mix it all up,” he said, throwing his hands in the air like he was casting confetti over our heads. His cohort nodded. “Mix it all up.” (He’s teaching high school students now.)
Not long afterward, I was invited to speak at and participate in a five-day international convocation of leftists in Sydney, Australia. During one of the discussion groups, I brought up conquest masculinity again, and with support from several women in the group, whereupon the facilitator—who dressed like a clown and expected people to take her “transgressive” outfit seriously—shut us down like lightning bolt hitting a generator.
“We’re not going to engage in essentialism,” she said, to the chagrin of myself and several of the women who’d displayed an interest in the topic.
By then, of course, I’d begun looking a lot more closely into this whole kerfuffle. When I reviewed the arguments—honestly, I tried to give the post-structuralists and pop-post-structuralists a chance—the TERFs (trans-exclusive-radical-feminists, an epithet designating an enemy who must be destroyed in the name of post-structural decency) were still far more persuasive, believing as they did that sex was a biological form with ontological status, and not some arbitrary assignment by the backward savages.
I’ve been a critical supporter of feminism, as a project to bring the standpoints and interests of women into public discussion, for as long as I’ve been a “leftist,” and even before to some degree. I simply could not reconcile (and still cannot) any “feminism” so defined with the erasure (or dilution) of women (a category that rests on a biological reality) as feminism’s subject. A man who intentionally dresses up to look like the (essentialist to the point of parodic) social construction of a woman, and even a man who gets his tackle surgically removed and replaced with a fake vagina, is not a woman; and he is not the same political subject as an actual woman . . . and vice versa.
Returning now to the dissolution of the political left.
Looking back now at the history of the left in the US, the rather large and politically effective formations of socialists in the US prior to World War II were hunted down, persecuted, and imprisoned during the Cold War. At the same time, the absolute shit show of thuggery in the Soviet Union served to discredit Marxists, even when unjustified. This suppression of the socialist left and the postwar period of Keynesian affluence whittled the numbers of active socialists down nearly to nothing. The whole Marxist project retreated into the Academy, where it was deconstructed into various new forms and foci by the “new” leftists. The grouplets outside the Academy, meanwhile, dissolved into warring ideological cults.
By 1996, when I left the Army, I embraced Marxism as a neophyte in the politics, but also as a highly life-experienced and well-traveled 44-year-old man who’d served more than two decades as a gray-area military operator for the American empire. I was not on top of every theoretical debate, but I could tell people, from first-hand experience, what it was like in Vietnam, or the civil war El Salvador, or during the Grenada invasion, or in the deadly dystopia of Mogadishu. I’d been in Guatemala and Haiti during their last coups.
The internet was a new thing then, at least for me, and I was all over it. I could have conversations with people in Dehli and Manila. I could look up references in an instant. And I could network as an autodidact. I joined a listerve called Crashlist. The ubiquitous Trot (the late) Louis Proyect was there. The late Andre Gunder Frank was there. Chinese economist Henry K. Liu was there. The Modern Monetary Theory guru Michael Hudson was there. They were having these great debates. They were posting content-rich articles and studies.
My chosen mentor was Mark Jones, a Welsh communist historian married to a Russian. He’d spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union (even got locked up there once). He also had recurrent cancer that claimed him in 2004. Mark was also what some might call an eco-communist.
The learning curve was steep, and I was a little drunk on it. From the cognitively restricted world of the Army, I was suddenly let loose on a vast intellectual playground.
The left appeared to be on the cusp of a resurgence (or so we told ourselves) with the WTO protests in 2001 and the Durbin Conference. Then the planes crashed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and everything changed in a flash.
Already, however, I’d found myself more and more isolated for having chosen the wrong brands of feminism. It was only my value as an antiwar veteran, inoculating the left against patriot-baiting, that temporarily rescued me and set aside my gender apostasy for a time.
I need to take a short detour here to explain why I put “left” and other words (like “feminism” sometimes) in scare quotes.
The Bush administration was an ambitious, murderous, and authoritarian outfit in every conceivable way. They were taken over by the ideologues of neo-conservatism every bit as much as Trump’s retinue would later become captives to millenniarian Bannon fantasies. One of the Bush hawks’ biggest supporters was Hillary Clinton.
Economically, both parties were still co-wedded to the neoliberal economic project (the Bush ambitions were understood as supportive of the American hegemony which underwrote neoliberalism from the outset). Clinton was a notorious racial dog-whistler and a dyed-in-the-wool opponent of gay marriage, the former of which cost her the black electorate in her contest with Barack Obama, a canny political operator who was nurtured by Chicago’s “Daley machine.”
All that was forgotten (or erased) by the time she made her second bid and ran into an unexpected challenge from the left, Bernie Sanders.
I’ll not linger long on what happened after Obama was elected, except to say that it gave us lefty hope-mongers a lesson in political reality that I’ve never forgotten. The antiwar movement that we’d in many ways gestated and nurtured had grown massive beyond our expectations. (Of course, the Bush administration did what it wanted anyway, and ignored us, having learned from the judo moves of the civil rights movement not to overreact.) But the day after Obama was elected, the antiwar movement fell silent, more precipitously even than the 2020 Democratic left insurgency came apart with the South Carolina Primary and Covid-19. The antiwar movement’s growth—which we’d myopically and over-optimistically missed—was not solely fueled by antiwar sentiment, but by opportunistically anti-Republican sentiment (and, to be honest, to some extent, by the disastrous failure of the war). Fucking Democrats! And we should have known better, but let me not digress.
The fact was—about which, again, we’d missed out of colossal self-deception—the American left was a political dead letter already, a seething little cauldron of sectarian squabbling and frequently shitty analysis (socialists have predicted eleven of the last three recessions). The “we-dream” (yes, I spelled that right) of “building” a leftist movement was an anachronistic fallacy, a possibility lost with the destruction of the trade union movement and the juggernaut of hyper-atomizing ideologies and brain-rotting technologies.
The sects, in desperate competition with one another for a handful of members, no longer emphasized their commonly held beliefs and goals, but shined klieg lights on their differences. It was, and remains, an arms race of denunciations, which was free ammunition for all those who opposed any form of left whatsoever. A similar dynamic took hold in the Academy, which is where the TERF wars originated. The leftist grouplets engaged a recruitment strategy of seeking out new members from among every “marginalized” group (or broken person) they could find, and they eventually fell all over themselves—with academic assistance—to see who could outdo the other in cheap-shot identity politics. The culture of “calling out,” of denunciation as political action (later called “cancel culture”), was already in place. I’d seen it among the young comrades who wanted to “just mix it all up.”
When neoliberalism, or the rule of finance capital, failed—decisively in 2008—it created an ideological scattering, a general loss of faith in all the old narratives. This is what gave rise to both Trump and Sanders by 2016. The Democrats mounted an offensive against Sanders at the same time they were secretly promoting the Republican candidacy of Trump (called the “pied piper” strategy). They’d doubled down on neoliberalism and neo-conservatism (interesting, isn’t it?) in policy, but pivoted to culture war talking points. Sanders was subjected to identitarian attacks on the culture side (old white man), while his popular proposals (like single-payer health care) were dismissed as zany “far leftism.”
I will say this, in passing. There were substantial numbers of Sanders supporters (look at DSA, as an example) among this seemingly resurgent millennial left who were themselves the captives of genderwang. Moreover, the Republicans won, and have continued to win (yes, assisted by grotesque gerrymandering—which the Supreme Court has just upheld again), especially among independents, because genderwang is so ridiculously easy to expose as a kind of conformative third-rail mass lunacy among the “more educated.”
Indeed, by then, those older feminisms for which Nina Power found herself pining have become the genuinely marginalized. I’ve watched nominees for federal courts stutter and equivocate when asked the simple question, “What is a woman?” I’ve watched a senile chief executive declare a national holiday for transgenderism on the high holy day of Christians. I’ve read about parents losing their children because they refused to put them on dangerous (and permanently sterilizing) puberty blockers. I’ve seen where public schools are indoctrinating children in this pernicious ideology. I’ve seen videos of drag queens addressing pre-pubescent students in public schools. Violent male prisoners can now claim to be “women” and be placed with vulnerable women in women’s prisons. Academics who refuse the Kool-aid have been fired and ostracized, then hounded online by virtual mobs. Women are physically attacked by men claiming to be women for refusing to validate their idiotic claim. Incitements to violence against “TERFs” are routine.
I have a lot of criticisms of Marxism, of leftism more generally, and of radical/Marxist feminisms. I’ll outline them in a moment. But let’s give credit where it’s due. When this nonsense was in its more embryonic stage, it was the rad-fems who told us—like Cassandra vainly crying out—that this “mixing it all up,” this intentional blotting out of recognition, this denial of both biological and social reality, was, at its very foundations . . . misogynistic. With no sense of irony, these “educated” culture warriors claim—after having erased actual women—that putting a definitional boundary around human females, as political subjects and actual people, is the “erasure” of those broken, deluded men-and-boys who think (or claim) they are women-and-girls and women-and-girls who’ve been convinced they are men-and-boys.
Essentialism, of which the rad-fems were relentlessly accused, had been resurrected as a good thing. In fact, most trans performances are cartoonishly essentialist versions of “femininity” and “masculinity.”
I’ve been persuaded that the whole notion of gender-abolition is misguided, but what was accomplished—against the vulgar late modern gender essentialism now embraced by the so-called rad-trads—by those earlier feminisms was the simple common-sense recognition—for a time at least—that what made one a male or female, a man or a woman, was determined at birth (non-normative birth defects notwithstanding). Women existed all along the historically contingent continua of “masculine-feminine,” as did men. The rad-fems, to their credit, never forgot this fundamental difference. What they demanded—righteously, in my view—was that this difference not be translated into a general political/personal power gradient. In fact, their focus remained on the sexual difference between men and woman, and on sex more directly, and the ways in which the difference was exploited to hurt women—the political subject of feminism. That’s why they continued, against the grain of liberal, libertarian, and post-structuralist “feminisms,” to talk about rape, pornography, and prostitution.
As Dr. Power noted, what’s left of the left, or what has been renamed the left (like the neoconservative Clinton), have adopted the puerile, oversimplified premises of libertarians. Rape, pornography, and prostitution can all be boiled down to nothing more than a question of “consent.” If this is Marxism, I’ll kiss your ass in the middle of Main Street.
How is it that these fragments of the left have joined with the ever more clueless, albeit culturally hegemonic, bourgeois and petite-bourgeois professional-managerial-academic class and adopted the dumbed down grammar of Murray Rothbard with regard to gender? Hopefully, I’ve at least a kind of a genealogical answer. Now I’ll risk a more philosophical/cultural suggestion.
The left, as we noted, is prone to sectarianism. It’s almost a caricature of the left. [See the Monty Python skit on it in Life of Brian (also a dig at trans ideology).] But what we are discovering, as the mainstream post-war cultural narratives have fallen further and further into disrepute, and as communications technology has inflamed the proliferation and dissemination of new—and sometimes bizarre—ideas, as well as encouraged physically isolated and alienated people into ideological silos, sectarianism is a human response to that isolation and alienation. Without a shared ontology, so to speak, we’ll be shattered into many, and sometimes hostile, phenomenologies. We will occupy the same physical spaces, but we’ll neither experience it in the same way nor know it in the same way. I tried to explain myself on this account—an account of metaphysical crisis, in the article linked here.
One of Marx’s theses, to which I still hold, was that the environment and the habits required to negotiate it will be reflected in our attitudes and ideas, even when our ideas appear to us to be independent of those environmentally-determined habits. The apparent destruction of metaphysical conformity is not the destruction of metaphysics. Everyone operates from a metaphysical foundation of some kind. We all require, as a starting point each day when we get out of bed, some belief about the way things are. When the realm of ideas has been atomized, when we no longer share some consciously acknowledged metaphysical outlook, we progressively lose our capacity to discuss, debate, and criticize ideas. We lose what Alasdair MacIntyre called, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, a “relationship of linguistic translatability.” We’ve been struck down like the Tower of Babel. We can only talk past one another. We become like that person who, when speaking to a person who doesn’t understand our language, only says the same things louder, as if an increase in the volume will fume up intelligibility. What do we have left in common, then? WWMS, What would Marx say?
Our shared environment, and the habits required to negotiate it, are all commercial. Everything is a transaction. And so, in spite of all our confused disagreements and contradictory grammars, we have come to share a transactional metaphysical outlook. One which we have great difficulty seeing beyond, simply because we have little experience beyond those commercial-transactional and technological habits.
This is situation that inheres with competition and conflict. More so, because we confront one anothr in a disenchanted world. And so now I come to my critique of the materialist—Marxists, leftists more generally, and even the materialist feminists.
When ideas can no longer flourish within a shared metaphysical space, they are replaced by ideologies. Authentic reason, and even authentic originality can only be derived out of some basis from which to differentiate itself. Originality has to origin-ate from somewhere. There has to be a soil from which the flower springs. “Originality” for its own sake, like transgression for its own sake, like rebellion for its own sake, is flotsam. There’s no anchor, no root, no source. Ideology tries to answer the problem of unstable metaphysical ground, of ideational quicksand, the vertigo of perpetual transience, by providing some new ground, some foundation, to substitute for what was lost with our general disenchantment, with the destruction of transcendence, with the “death of God.” Hanna Arendt described it thus:
An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea … As soon as logic as a movement of thought — and not as a necessary control of thinking — is applied to an idea, the idea is transformed into a premise [and] a whole line of thought can be initiated, and forced upon the mind, by drawing conclusions in the manner of mere argumentation. This argumentative process could be interrupted neither by a new idea (which would have been another premise with a different set of consequences) nor by a new experience. Ideologies always assume that one idea is sufficient to explain everything in the development from the premise, and that no experience can teach anything because everything is comprehended in this consistent process of logical deduction. The danger in exchanging the necessary insecurity of philosophical thought for the explanation of an ideology and its Weltanschaaung is not even so much the risk of falling for some usually vulgar, always uncritical assumption, as of exchanging the freedom inherent in man’s capacity to think for the straight jacket of logic with which man can force himself almost as violently as he is forced by some outside power.
The fences were torn down. They had to be rebuilt. They were rebuilt finally as fortresses, behind which armies were organized. My century, the twentieth, was a bloodbath of competing ideologies that made the so-called Wars of Religion look like child’s play. The lack of a shared language led us to shout, and when shouting failed, it led us to unspeakable violence. This is the nihilism about which the most prescient warned us, the loss of a relationship of linguistic translatability that (ahem) translated, at the end of the day, into a pure contest of power.
For a time, there was a partial rapprochement, as we were temporarily stunned by what had been wrought, like a dementia patient who has a sudden lucid interval. Let’s all sit down and make money together. That fundamental metaphysical incoherence reasserted itself when the money-regime failed, and failed again.
The left tried to make a comeback, but its most successful revivals were in conjunction with the Christian-led black freedom struggles of the sixties and seventies, and against the brutal American military occupation of Vietnam. But the contamination of libertarian individualism, combined with “rebellious” (but always commodifiable) hedonism, dissolved this left after the demise of legal segregation and the Vietnamese victory. Just as the millennial left surge fell into ruin with the loss of a focal point—the Sanders insurgency. Likewise, feminism—when it has attempted its own ideologization—has always had to attach itself to something else. That’s why we have liberal-feminism, radical-feminism, Marxist-feminism, third-world-feminism, black feminism, post-colonial feminism, post-structuralist feminism, and now even reactionary-feminism. It’s the reason MacKinnon’s attempt at “feminism-unmodified” was always going to fail (that, and the fact that sex is not synonymous with class). There has to be a focal point. There has to be a ground.
This is the hidden truth of that mental contortion called “intersectionality.” Metaphysical incoherence and ideological entrapment.
In throwing it its lot with identitarian liberalism, the left had decisively abandoned the working class and re-centered itself within the petite-bourgeois stratum of the Academy—an environment of competitive abstraction and intellectual arrogance. Feminism, which had always found its center along the petite-bourgeois border, was likewise swallowed up into the phagocytic academy . . . then spit back out as a cultural commodity.
And it could be capitalized. The gender industry is real, and so this ideology has found its metaphysical ground. In economic transactions. The circuit is complete, let the cycle of accumulation begin.
The “left” can’t deal with its own incoherence now, not only because they’ve tried to mix genuine and valuable Marxist insights with unexamined libertarian-transactional premises, but because they’ve become irrelevant. They’re trapped on a battlefield between several and far superior forces (themselves caught in an interminable trench war), and no one wants or needs them as an ally. On this one issue, especially—gender ideology—they’ve successfully cut their last ties to the working class . . . those few voices in the wilderness notwithstanding.
On gender, the left was so desperate for someone to like them, that they fell for the okeydoke, the line of bullshit, the long con. Yeah, I’ve been there.
Once the captives of this ideology, and in this generally warlike atmosphere (the transactional-individualist war of all against all), they could only express their earnestness and solidarity via the earnestness of their attacks on the apostates.
Is there a way out? Who the fuck am I to say? I know some things that are missing, but they comes from an archaic metaphysical standpoint. Do not cast the first stone. Forgive not seven times but seven times seventy. Wash feet. Visit prisoners. Feed the hungry. Care for the dying. Reject power. Turn the other cheek. Take up your cross.
That’s the missing ingredient into today’s crisis. We’ve lost the unnatural capacity to forgive.
Around 2006, I checked out of “activism,” and took up manual labor. I’d had enough. I was broken, exhausted, hopeless. I had to seek a ground. Found it in an open tomb.