Vampires aren’t actually real, though. Class is: a reply to Mark Fisher’s castle of bollocks

2019 update: five years down the line, I still don’t think that the article I was replying to here was a very good one, but I think that I let myself be provoked into responding in a way that mirrored some of the flaws of the VC piece. I still broadly stand by pretty much everything below, but I’ve had another attempt at writing what I think is a better, more generous critique here.

2017 disclaimer: For obvious reasons, I feel a bit weird about people reading this piece now. If you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, then having a permanent public reminder that you spoke ill of them while they were living doesn’t feel particularly great either. I still broadly stand by the content of this piece, and if the tone is a bit heated then it’s worth bearing in mind it was written as a reply to something that was also very strongly worded; still, in retrospect it strikes me that I may have made a mistake by reading the Vampire’s Castle article primarily as a piece about Political Strategy, and if I’d read it as being primarily an emotional response to a distressing experience it might have inclined me to be a bit more charitable in my reply. Of course, there’s never a clear line between the political and the personal/emotional/affective, but we can’t treat the two as wholly interchangeable either. I would encourage readers to donate to the memorial fund for his family if you feel able. And if you’re new to Mark Fisher’s writing, then please don’t let that one awful article be the only thing you read of his – he wrote so much stuff, and a lot of it was vastly more interesting and worthwhile, so I’d strongly advise you to spend some time looking through the rest of his work.

In recent days, Mark Fisher’s latest article, which I think is supposed to be about the left, and strategy, or something, has drawn quite a bit of attention. It starts out with a portrayal of how miserable and depressing he finds left-wing twitter, which I have some sympathy with, because I also don’t think twitter is a very good medium. That’s why I don’t use it, or pay any more attention to it than I absolutely have to, which is not very much. This solution might sound quite simple, but it seems to be absolutely beyond Mark Fisher’s imagination; I respectfully suggest that if he followed it, he might well save himself a lot of grief.

As I’ve said, I also dislike the general atmosphere in which twitter conversations are often conducted – in fact, reading Fisher’s article reminded me of this much better piece from last year about how they’re set up to ensure that Who Shouts Loudest Wins (BELATED EDIT: Ignore this bit, that particular link doesn’t work any more) – but that doesn’t mean I agree with all of Fisher’s criticisms either. In particular, I was a bit taken aback by his casual, offhand reference to Owen Jones as “the person most responsible for raising class consciousness in the UK in the last few years”. That’s quite a big claim to make, and if I was going to make a claim that ambitious, I would at least attempt to support it – have Jones’ articles and speeches really done more to increase awareness of class antagonism than, for instance, David Cameron and his habit of sitting in gold chairs while waiting to make speeches about austerity? It seems at least worth considering. But, as we’ll see, Fisher appears to view backing his points up with evidence as being a terrible crime against style, to be avoided at all costs. A serious attempt to evaluate the claim that class consciousness in Britain is mostly dependant on Owen Jones would also probably require an attempt to establish what we actually mean when we say “class”, and Fisher isn’t very interested in that either.

The point about Owen Jones is central to one of the biggest problems in Fisher’s argument, which is worth going over again. “If this is what happens to a left-winger who is actually succeeding in taking the struggle to the centre ground of British life, why would anyone want to follow him into the mainstream? Is the only way to avoid this drip-feed of abuse to remain in a position of impotent marginality?” As it happens, the question of whether or not to follow Owen Jones by getting a prominent position in the media isn’t that relevant to my life either way, but – if we’re going to talk about class – I can see how the question might sound a lot more relevant to a well-regarded academic who sometimes gets to write in the Guardian than to most workers or claimants. What’s of more interest is the opposition he sets up between “the centre ground of British life” and “impotent marginality”. As it happens, I don’t think there is a “centre ground of British life”, I think that “British life”, like capitalism, happens everywhere, and that’s where our power to act on it is. The Scottish anti-bedroom tax campaigners who were able to move an evicted woman back into her home, the workers at Glasgow homelessness services who staged a successful wildcat strike recently, the construction workers who fought for a year at Crossrail and got Frank Morris his job back – all these people may be a long way from “the centre ground of British life”, and a lot more marginal than the likes of Jones and Fisher, but are they impotent?

After this, Fisher goes on to talk about how inspiring he found the People’s Assembly in Ipswich, and how brilliant it was. Not having been to the Ipswich People’s Assembly, I can’t really comment on this; I might find it more convincing if he then provided some examples of useful, productive activity that’s come out of Ipswich People’s Assembly beyond just having a big meeting, but I suppose that would violate Fisher’s Golden Rule of never backing his assertions up with evidence.

He then talks about Russell Brand, and how great his Newsnight interview was, and how upsetting it was that nasty people went on about him being a sexist instead of just concentrating on how great it was. As it happens, I agree that that interview was great, and that it offered up opportunities to talk about revolution that should’ve been embraced, but I’m not so sure that having concerns about Brand’s gender politics makes you a cloth-eared petit-bourgeois narcissistic moralist. In passing, it’s worth noting how he describes his enthusiasm for Brand: “Malcolm X, Che, politics as a psychedelic dismantling of existing reality: this was communism as something cool, sexy and proletarian.” When looking for ways to suggest the idea of communism as something sexy and exciting, he doesn’t pick France ’68, or the refusal of work in 1970s Italy, or the Poll Tax Riot or Millbank: he goes straight for an invocation of the names of more Great Men. I think this is quite a revealing choice.

In another telling reminder of his class position, he admits that Brand should face questions about his behaviour and language, but “probably not in public in the first instance”. Now, if I had the chance to pop round to Russell Brand’s house for lunch and quiz him on his understanding of feminism, I’d be perfectly happy to do so, but I don’t really have any connections to the rarified world of mega-celebrities, so if I’m going to raise questions about his behaviour, doing so in private isn’t really an option for me.

Here, once again, Mark Fisher’s (lack of) understanding of class rears its confused head: “But, once class had re-appeared, it was impossible not to see it everywhere in the response to the Brand affair… Others told us that Brand couldn’t really be working class, because he was a millionaire… It’s also alarming, actually distressing, that they seem to think that working class people should remain in poverty, obscurity and impotence lest they lose their ‘authenticity’.”

Poor, poor Russell Brand, alone with his millions, being oppressed by people who aren’t millionaires saying that he’s not really working class because he’s a millionaire. Apparently, Mark Fisher shares Julie Burchill’s understanding of class, where it’s nothing to do with your position in society or what your material interests are, or whether you work for a living or live off other people’s labour: it’s just, like, a thing, you know, it just is? Russell Brand, Sir Alan Sugar, David Blunkett: they’re the proper working class, and you’re not. Calling this nonsense out for the bollocks it is has nothing to do with “authenticity” or saying what people “should” do: having to work for a living is really fucking shit, and if I could trade my class position for Russell Brand’s I would do so in a heartbeat. But I can’t, and if I did become a millionaire then my material, economic interests would be different to what they are now. This isn’t moralising about authenticity, this is very basic class politics.

Next Fisher introduces us to “two libidinal-discursive configurations” that he finds problematic. If you know what one of those is when it’s at home, it’s probably safe to say that you have a level of education at least vaguely comparable to Mark Fisher’s, which could be read as raising some questions about who Fisher is writing this article for and what their position in society is, questions that might be interesting for people who want to talk about class, but nevermind that for now.

The first is “the Vampire’s Castle”, which appears to be Fisher’s spectacularly pompous way of saying “feminists on twitter”. Since I try not to pay that much attention to twitter, I find it hard to evaluate Fisher’s claims: perhaps it genuinely is the case that all vampires/internet feminists do “hold immense wealth and power”, and that they not only use “all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented” but are actually “worse than Christianity”. If he provided some evidence to back up his claims, perhaps I’d be won over to the perspective that people being rude on the internet is genuinely worse than the Spanish Inquisition; as it is, though, and this is a recurring theme, no actual examples are ever given, so it’s quite hard to get over the suspicion that perhaps he is talking a terrible load of old shite.

He bangs on about the Vampire’s Castle for an impressively long amount of time without ever citing one example of it at work, so rather than go through every one of his claims and append a note saying “perhaps this is true, perhaps it isn’t, it would be nice if there was an example provided so I can make up my own mind about how convincing your analysis is here”, I’ll skip on to his next “libidinal-discursive configuration”, “neo-anarchism”.

“Neo-anarchism” is an old bugbear of Fisher’s, so it’s nice that this time round he at least makes an attempt to define what it is, even if it’s mostly negative: “I definitely do not mean anarchists or syndicalists involved in actual workplace organisation.” I would be quite interested to know what he thinks of anarchists or syndicalists involved in actual workplace organisation, but Fisher doesn’t bother to tell us; I suspect that, since anarchists and syndicalists involved in actual organising have very little relationship, positive or negative, to famous lefty men with platforms in the media, he just doesn’t find the subject that interesting.

Neo-anarchists are apparently defined by not remembering anything other than capitalist realism, with their political horizons fatally limited by not being able to remember a time when the Labour Party wasn’t shit. This is where his refusal to talk about anarchists of the non-neo-variety becomes most frustrating, because Fisher’s writing on neo-anarchism amounts to a strange, covert, and deeply disingenuous defence of the Labour Party and parliamentary politics, not by engaging with any actual critiques of Labour but by the following device:  “Some people don’t like parliamentary politics/They’re daft – I’m not talking about the proper grown-up ones like SolFed, I mean the daft ones/They’re just young and foolish and they don’t remember when parliamentary politics was good and not shit”. By pulling this manoeuvre of disassociating the “neo-anarchism” he dislikes from proper real anarchism, and then refusing to talk about the latter, he ducks the question of whether there are any serious critiques of the Labour Party that don’t just come from historical amnesia. A serious, intellectually honest defence of parliamentarianism would require engaging with the actual history of Labour, and the criticisms that have been made of that entire history; much easier to just say that the reason people are anarchists is because they don’t like Ed Miliband and don’t know enough about Tony Benn or Nye Bevan.

For Fisher, with his Great Man theory of history, effective resistance comes only from within parliament or the mainstream media; attempts to make a difference outside those arenas are “uselessly resisting”. No wonder he’s not keen to talk about workplace organisation.

Following these two big piles of libidinal-discursive bullshit, he explains why he felt the need to devote so many words to tackling the urgent, pressing problems of vampires/feminists on the internet and anarchists doing PhDs: firstly, because they have been “been allowed to prosper by capital because they serve its interests”; nevermind the actions of the Labour Party over the 20th century, from entering a coalition government with the Tories in the 1930s to enforce austerity to using the Social Contract to keep wages down in the 1970s, or from backing World War I to doing the same with the Falklands War: it’s twitter feminists and anarchists doing PhDs who really serve the interests of capital.

Secondly, because of “communicative capitalism” or “capitalist cyberspace”. You can tell he thinks facebook and twitter must be really bad because he calls them capitalist twice in a row, a term he never feels the need to apply to the mainstream media, the Labour Party or parliament in general. Apparently the rise of social media makes it impossible to ignore people having ideas you don’t like. This is a bit of a low blow, but I’ll go for it anyway: perhaps if Fisher fucked off out of academia and got a real job somewhere, preferably doing manual labour but really just any job where you have a supervisor constantly breathing down your neck to make sure you’re working and not pissing about on the internet, he might find it considerably easier to escape “the psychic pathologies propagated by these discourses.”

Next, he comes to propose a solution: “it is imperative to reject identitarianism, and to recognise that there are no identities, only desires, interests and identifications”. In so far as I can work out what he means – and I’ll admit that I’m a bit shaky about the difference between an identity and an identification – this reads like another load of old bollocks to me: desires and interests are real, but they aren’t all there is. Experience exists as well, and it matters. For instance, the question of whether or not we should downplay Russell Brand’s sexism because he says important things looks very different if we look at it from a perspective informed by the experience of Respect, the Scottish Socialist Party, Wikileaks, the Socialist Workers Party, and all the other political projects that have been wrecked by powerful sexist lefty men and their egos. I don’t know why Mark Fisher is so reluctant to talk about experience, but since he’s so keen to talk about class, here’s a suggestion: perhaps it has something to do with the massive gap between the day-to-day experiences you have when you’re an acclaimed academic and published author and the day-to-day experiences of most other working-class people?

There’s not much to say about the rest of the article, apart from a telling note at the end, where he calls for us to occupy the enemy terrain of Capitalist Twitter and “start to use it for the purposes of producing class consciousness”. We’re right back to the Second International-influenced views of Lenin and What Is To Be Done? here. For Lenin, “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes.” Likewise, for Fisher, class consciousness is not something that arises from our day-to-day experiences (there’s that word again!) of life under capitalism; it is something that has to be produced by clever, famous men like Owen Jones and Russell Brand.

Lenin wasn’t just wrong; it depends what perspective you look at him from. From the perspective of an emerging Soviet bureaucracy needing an ideology to justify their rule over the workers, Lenin’s ideas were correct, vital and necessary. Likewise, if I was a very slightly famous academic with aspirations to a big career in the media, I can’t think of anything better than Mark Fisher’s ideas to justify my aspirations to myself. But, for the rest of us – those of us who aren’t faced with the dilemma of whether or not we want to become the new Owen Jones – there’s nothing particularly useful or relevant there.

Post-script:

As I make fairly clear in this article, I think that being an academic and then slagging off other people for being academics without ever acknowledging your own position is ridiculously hypocritical. I’m not an academic, but I also really don’t want to be a ridiculous hypocrite, so I will take the space here to acknowledge that I have had the privilege of going through higher education, and although I’ve never done a PhD myself, a fair few people I know are doing them, and the experience of speaking to some of these people has helped me to develop and clarify my own ideas in all sorts of ways. I don’t think that doing postgraduate study makes them bad people, although if they claimed that they were only doing PhDs so they could “move towards the centre of British life” in order to wage the class struggle more effectively I would mercilessly rip the piss out of them. The question of education and how it affects our class position is an interesting one, and one that should be explored properly in a serious and honest discussion about class, which I really don’t think is what Mark Fisher was trying to do. For what it’s worth, earlier this year I had an attempt at formulating some of my views on the subject here.