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arcticdementor · 4 years

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There is, as happens so often these days, a spectre haunting the imagination of the western left. That specter is most commonly dubbed ”strasserism”, though it has other names, such as ”redbrownism”, ”nazbolism”, or more unwieldy names like ”Angela Nagle leftism”. When I came into the left at the beginning of the last decade, these terms did not exist in any meaningful way. As far as me and the people I knew were concerned, ”strasserite” was an incredibly obscure term used exclusively by online neo-nazis is their petty, internicine conflicts. None of us paid them or their silly ideological totems any heed.

At the beginning of the first half of the 2010’s, the left I was a part of was finally starting to feel hopeful again, after the disorientation and loss of direction that came with the fall of actually existing socialism. During the long winter years of the 90’s and early 00’s, people either hopelessly and bitterly clung to a prophecy that everyone else had now fully discarded, or they tried finding new boutique causes to replace the ones that had failed. To take my native Sweden as an example, two of the more significant new causes were opposing the neo-nazis and opposing globalization. There were some victories – or at least, people liked to think so – but the idea of actually achieving political power was dead in everything but name. The left mostly came to accept the role as the social conscience of liberalism, or in the case of antifascism, fancied itself as the Batman protecting end-of-history Gotham City. The streets of triumphant liberal society might have been gritty, the politicians corrupt and undeserving, but antifascist Batman still rose out of bed every night to protect the craven and the low from monsters lurking in the shadows. Or so they liked to think. Most of the time, they just hung out and drank beer.

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All the details of the intervening decade are beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s fair to say that the left today is more broken and politically defunct than at any point since the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, a case can be made that the crisis facing the left today is more serious than the crisis of the late 80s and early 90s. ”Left populism” as a political model has failed. Jeremy Corbyn has presided over the worst labour party showing in nearly a century. The ”Sanders moment” is over, and there’s no sequel to any of these failed left projects anywhere in sight. This decline is likely terminal and irreversible, because unlike the decline in the 90s, the left no longer has any significant working class support. In fact, with each new ”left revival” a la Corbyn, the constant bleeding of working class support only seems to accelerate. Comrade Bhaskar at Jacobin magazine touts the (in)famous AOC as the next new great presidential candidate and hope for global socialism, but anyone with an IQ somewhere north of the melting point of water – or at least, anyone who doesn’t have a paper he’s eagerly trying to sell you – knows that this is a truly desperate flight of fancy that will never come to pass, not in a million years.

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We first begin with the obvious. Strasserism does not actually exist. Nobody reads the Strasser brothers, not even the neo-nazis who threw accusations of strasserism at each other decades before anyone else. Nobody outside of Russia – and for that matter, nobody inside of Russia – cares about the intellectual output of the National Bolshevik party, if such an output were to be shown to exist. The reason the term strasserism has been brought out from the dustbin of history by the contemporary left is because said left is currently in the middle of a social and political panic, and this panic has at least two central functions. Firstly, panics such as these are one way for a group of believers to deal with a situation where prophecy fails. For the left, the only thing it knows today is constant failure. Like any religious cult, the failure of prophecy can only be redeemed by shedding the blood of those members identified as polluting the faith. The price of social cohesion is the turn toward constant purges.

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Partaking in this ritual of self-depreciation does not mark you as an outsider. It is only if you break the rules of the game, only if you acknowledge the man behind the curtain, only if you point to the basic truth hidden behind this outer layer of ironic self-mockery that you become one of us, one of the so-called strasserites. This truth is a fairly simple marxist truth. Classes have class interests, and so the idea that you could have a political movement – the left – that was well and truly dominated by one class, yet still wholly committed to the class interests of another class, but also just too bumbling and out of touch to ever do a good job of looking out for the class it supposedly ”really” cares about is, to put it extremely mildly, a dubious idea. It is much more likely that a political movement dominated by one class will also be more or less entirely dedicated to pursuing the class interests of that class, while also being unable to take any strong action that goes against the interests of its dominant class.

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There was a socialism before Marx, and it was utopian and based on human reason and moral progress. There are good reasons for why this brand of socialism fell out of favor, but within its context one can definitely hold the view that a small class of enlightened and educated well-to-do people, acting out of the goodness of their own hearts, will eventually bring about socialism by lifting up the poor, racist and/or stupid proles. You don’t have to agree with it, but it fits together.

A central premise of marxist, materialist or scientific socialism, on the other hand, is that classes simply cannot act this way. Classes pursue their own interests and act politically not out of greed, or generosity, or any other personal bit of sentiment, but due to historical and economical pressures. It is this very simple fact that makes the ”materialism” of someone like Bhaskar Sunkara at Jacobin magazine, and of most leftists of his stripe in general, so incredibly contradictory. For it to work, there has to be an unstated agreement among the faithful to never seriously use the tools of marxist analysis on the left itself. Any and all self-examination must remain on the level of personal discussion (”can person so and so really be a socialist, when her parents are so rich?”). The punishment for transgression against this agreement, for breaking the most sacred code of Omerta the modern left has, is swift and severe: you will get cancelled for this, and you will be added to the ever growing list of ”strasserites” and ”secret nazis” who tried to lure the faithful away from the true path. What happened to Angela Nagle is instructive in this regard; her article, The Left Case Against Open Borders, was an attempt to argue against unrestricted immigration from a class-based, materialist perspective. It’s quite likely – and also quite amusing – that she would probably have recieved less sustained hate online if she had written that immigration shouldn’t be allowed as long as non-white people talk funny and smell bad.

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I bring my own example up not to relitigate old battles but to underline the point that the sin that earns people the label of ”strasserite” or ”chud” or ”redbrown nazi” has nothing to do with racist animus, or even the issue of immigration more generally. Conjuring up the threat of racism and the ghosts of Nazi Germany is not done because it is true, but because it is necessary. In my case, having a father who came to Sweden to work from central Africa proved to be an embarassing but fairly minor speed bump on the way to declaring me a fighter for aryan blood purity. There is nothing foolish or irrational about any of this; our esteemed comrades are simply doing the only thing they can do, faced with a contradiction they are unable to resolve and a movement that is rapidly falling apart.

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While I don’t pretend to speak for anyone other than myself, I would claim that the ”strasserite” class-analysis of politics in the west and the role of the left today has a few central features. To start: as the economies in western countries have shifted over the past decades, a new sort of class of people has sprung up and grown in social and political importance. In the united states, the most common name for this class is PMCs; the professional-managerial classes. Their name is less important than their function and political trajectory. To brutally simplify things for the sake of brevity, the notable feature of many PMCs as political actors is a blend of political liberalism and cultural progressivism, merged with a political project aimed at increasingly subsidizing their own reproduction as a class, ideally by means of state transfers. The state should forgive student debt. The state should dabble in reparations. The state should hire ”ideas people” to write up reports and thinkpieces about reparations. The state should create new racial justice commissions, or just generally create more jobs that can employ people who by dint of belonging to this class feel that them taking a job at Walmart means that capitalism has failed and it’s time for a revolution. The most radical, put-upon and economically insecure parts of this class today naturally gravitate toward the left, because the left is – no matter what leftists delude themselves by saying – a fairly focused, competent and credible class project. When Corbyn came out of nowhere and became Labour party leader, it was a real grassroots movement that brought him there; a grassroots movement of students and people who either have ambition to move up the ladder or a legitimate fear of looming proletarianization, of falling down the social and economic ladder and finding themselves joining the proles.

The particular form of ”pro-worker” rhetoric these members of the PMC use mostly boils down to a sort of charity. Vote for us, and we’ll give you higher benefits and free broadband, Labour recently tried to tell the recalcitrant workers of the north. It didn’t work. This mode of ”charity” is hardly selfless – it would be a free ”gift” from these PMC activists given to their precious salt of the earth proletarians, and like all gifts it would be reliant on the goodwill and generosity of the giver. Its main function would also surely be to feather the ever growing number of nests for this class of comfortable, university-educated administrators. And when some leftists start seriously debating why ”racists” should be denied medical care from the NHS, one starts getting a sense of just how much hierarchical domination their future ”worker’s paradise” promises to deliver to the working poor.

The point here is not a moral one. After Labour lost, one exasperated member and activist despaired over how blind the workers were, how easily fooled they were by tory propaganda. ”Don’t they see how evil capitalism is? How brutal and unfair it is?”, this activist wrote: ”I have many friends with good grades who are stuck working at grocery stores, stocking shelves”. Anyone who pretends to be some sort of materialist cannot in good conscience make fun of sentiments like this; it is completely rational for someone in that position to think that ”the evils of capitalism” are somehow laid bare for the world to see when their friends are forced to stock shelves like a common peon in order to pay the rent. That the other workers at the grocery store probably find this way of thinking completely ludicrous and arrogant is obviously besides the point. Politically speaking, the fury and energy that proletarianization engenders should never be underestimated, because it causes political explosions. Jeremy Corbyn successfully challenged the political cartel that had been running Labour on the back of such a political explosion.

We should not make fun of an activist who despairs at the state of the world when good, solid middle class people with solid middle class grades can no longer achieve the middle class lifestyle they were promised. It is however a basic political truth that a worker’s movement consisting of people who are angry at the prospect social and economic ”demotion” – in other words, people who are fighting against the cruel fate of having to become workers – cannot ever succeed. Promising free broadband, or unlimited Space Communism, or some other stupid fantasy world where getting angry at having to work like a normal person is acceptable because nobody has to work won’t really change that.

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The grand political divide that sundered the house of modern ”socialism” boils down to the question of which class should have its interests taken care of in the first instance. It is all well and good to talk about ”doing both”, or try to soothe workers by saying that once socialism wins, nobody will work, so they’ll all be taken care of then. A century ago Joe Hill mocked the preachers who tried to placate starving workers by promising them there’d be plenty of pie up in the sky after they were all dead. Today, Aaron Bastani does an even more pathetic job within that vaunted political tradition, promising the british working class asteroid mining and fully automated communist holodecks once The Revolution(tm) succeeds. Until that day comes, though, it can’t really be helped that they’ll have to stay under the thumb of – and fight the battles for – the downwardly mobile professionals, huh? After all, who will build all those fancy asteroid miners if little Junior suddenly has to work at Starbucks like a common plebeian?

This is not a question of left incompetence, or Brexit suddenly wrecking everything, or something that Bernie woulda, coulda, shoulda done. The left is bleeding working class support everywhere. The left is picking up support among the more affluent and well-to-do stratas everywhere. The left is merging with greens and liberal ”progressives” everywhere. This is not incompetence, or cowardice. It is not personal, nor can it be fixed by the actions of individual persons; it is a vindication of historical materialism, and it is playing out right before our very eyes.

It is time for the ”socialism” of the professional and managerial classes and the socialism of the working classes to part ways. The former is moribund and a historical dead-end. The latter, I think, still has a case to be made for it. More importantly – and personal experience from outside the left bears this out – it still has an audience that is willing to listen to it.

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Workers aren’t stupid. They’re not evil. They haven’t been ”tricked by the media”. They need no false shepherds to guide them, no well-paid moral commissars to teach them to not randomly slaughter their neighbors because of muh racism. They have abandoned the left parties because the left parties have abandoned them, not ”culturally” as some proponents of identity politics would like you to think, but materially. They know their own class interests, and they know that the left is inimical to those interests. This is good news, at least for those of us with the courage and political will needed to help them free themselves from their so-called ”betters”. Let the Labour activists of London lament over how ”disappointed” they are that the working class has stopped following orders. We will not be like you. We will not promise new masters and new yokes to live under, new aristocracies and ”vanguards” to subsidize, new cadres of people selling them moral sermons and sensitivity courses. We will promise them a chance at revenge.

#malcom kyeyune #read the whole thing #professional managerial class

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tuchimuchibrainvomit · 7 years

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My Thoughts On Neo Yokio — I Might Just Surprise You!

Since I have a little time before I power through a 4-5 hour drive to Maryland. I wanted to try reviewing something that has taken over my eyes and mind for the past few days (and no, it is not Madoka). A tangent before we start, I tend to be one of those “Main-Subculture Hating Hipsters”, that will wait until every high up, every gossip, every hipster and every anime fan has shut up about something they deem as good before I check it out. Hence why I hit Madoka much later — when no one was talking about it. I wanna go in as blind or unbiased as I can. Call it being an “Asocial Hipster”, but when the internet finally shuts up about something, I’ll experience it and then come back to see what happened on the net and explore my own experiences solitarily. But the thing I’m reviewing today is quite different from that usual attitude of mine. Today, we are reviewing Neo Yokio!

Netflix’s, Ezra of Vampire Weekend’s and Jaden Smith’s anime... And... *sweats* Why I think it is a good show. In fact, I liked it a lot! Let me add a point of bias: in most shows, I don’t watch it sober on my first viewing. When I tried Neo Yokio sober, I was disgusted by the art style — but when inebriated, I could take in little moments and the bigger picture. Before watching it again whilst sober, taking in more detail and falling in love with it. It may have a role in why Madoka Rebellion was PERFECT THE WAY IT WAS AND DON’T CHANGE IT, HOMURA WAS IN FUCKING CHARACTER, FIGHT ME!! ... Ahem... Anyway, Go ahead boo now. I’ll wait... ... Now, LET’S BREAK IT DOWN!! Firstly, Neo Yokio tells the story of Neo Riche “Magistocrat” Kaz Khan, played by Jaden Smith. And honestly, the series is just a short slice of life. Simple and very clear that it’s just not anything special. But that’s the brilliance — in my opinion — of the series. With a kind of similar attitude as The Boondocks but less focused on Black Culture (Excluding Kaz and his posse Lexy and GollieB), and more on parodying both anime of the 90’s and early 00’s and the 1%. I want to focus on this 1% idea, and why it was very interesting and successful angle to attack with comedic parody.

We are in 2017. The political climate worldwide is ABSOLUTELY unbearable — hence why I live my life as a 23 year old loser artist as apolitically as I can. Even if it’s practically impossible... — And this is why Neo Yokio genuinely made me chortle the entire way through. So, let’s start with the main character: Kaz. Kaz is dubbed by the masses as “Neo Riche”, the highest class of Neo Yokio, and while he does his damnedest to deny it, he proves quickly that he IS Neo Riche in the first 3 minutes of the series — and it works. This aspect added a lot on my second sober viewing — where the jokes and satire made a bit more sense after I had my time with the laughs and visual insanity that Neo Yokio is. That’s when I found something charming and actually worth my time. Kaz — is the perfect MC for this ridiculous world. I like fashion. My boyfriend really likes fashion. And the idea of being the 1% is insanely charming and a way we love to playfully act together. And Neo Yokio plays into that — Kaz being just as flamboyant and unconnected in one way as his rival Arcangelo is flamboyant and unconnected in another, both stereotypical yet enjoyable plays of the 1% that many people despise so much in the political spectrum. Kaz doesn’t care about politics, and this is a perspective I rarely see about the 1% until Kaz and his friends start observing it, serving to — while confused in tone ending — comment on what often goes unseen by the 1% that is not focused in politics but in their day to day life. And it’s petty, stupid and hilariously over-the-top, as many people see the idealized lives of the 1%. Let’s talk about Kaz. I feel like Jaden Smith’s monotone mannerism and voice fit ABSOLUTELY perfectly for the kind of character Kaz is. He’s overly dramatic in a drab, pretentious way. He’s from an almost alien lifestyle and he is presented as such. Jaden fits personally with this and adds charm to it. Look at one of the BEST bits from Episode 1, where Kaz — depressed over being dumped AND failing an exorcism goes to a graveyard with his OWN grave just to lay there and wallow in his despair. This moment shows how we should see throughout the show Kaz — as weird, inconsequently rich, ignorant and yet funny and lovable. This makes him a great character to experience the world inside of Neo Yokio’s other classes. He is ignorant and therefore he is called out for it in many funny ways that can add some depth to him. Charles works in that manner, being a robot butler, who snidely chastises his master’s lack of consequence. But has a similar charm and enjoyment at Kaz, almost playing the role of audience proxy. And the more characters that come, play off of Kaz very well comedically. And from Kaz as well the references to Toblerones, high fashion like Louis Vuitton and Chanel, and the absolute joke they make out of Kaz’ bachelor status make him very personable. Next, I want to talk about the animation. When I first saw it, my gut reaction was “TRASH, BURN IT!!”

But after really seeing what the show tries, I started to understand it was —consciously and unconsciously — parodying: Shitty anime from the 2000’s, lazy techniques in anime as a whole and it made for a charming exterior. Seriously guys, Sailor Pellegrino’s name written in Sailor Moon’s title font, that’s hilarous! And whether or not, Ezra or the community says “it’s a serious story”, I’m basing this review after my experience and things I saw. In that, I want to talk about some of the social commentary. It all doesn’t work. They have an interesting episode showing Kaz’ ignorance in his inherent misogyny — but also, I feel like it doesn’t know whether it wants to comment on it or make fun of it. I saw it as really a mix of both. Some successful, some not successful, nobody’s perfect and yet I enjoyed it. There are some bits that I liked — being gay and all, Arcangelo’s VERY FLAMBOYANT portrayal was absolutely hilarious, I loved it! I love when they play up flamboyancy comedically, it often makes me fall love with a character. I loved Lexy chasing after the hottest lesbian in the town, knowing he wouldn’t make much out of it — even if he got Ranma’d to being Kaz’ date. I liked him calling out Kaz’ bull misogyny as both a good moment for Kaz and an interesting commentary, and using Ranma 1/2 as inspiration. I think that’s why I like gender benders as a whole. They tend to be wacky, campy and bring up new perspectives. But that’s just me, whether you take offense or not, is up to you. I can’t dictate that and I don’t judge people for their reactions to things. I just personally find most campy portrayals too ridiculous to be taken seriously, even if it is meant to be derogatory. Sure, they’re not great for LGBT or Women’s civil rights, but for the sake of a show that makes me laugh, I don’t take it seriously. If I wanted a serious commentary about more real life issues, I’ll go outside of anime and comedy films. As for other comments and the one’s it tends to get right: The ignorance of the Neo Riche. Kaz doesn’t even think of himself as Neo Riche, yet he is. And the character, Helena plays with that — while also making an army of fangirls, who follow everything she does in a completely hysterical manner. They are a nice poke at the masses that follow someone famous to the ends of the earth. Charles also plays with that around the penultimate episode — not spoiling. ;3 On to sound, while I didn’t pay much attention, classical style music is everywhere. No tracks stood out to me because classical is not my forte, but I think it fit with the Neo Riche-style. The acting is hokey, plays the gamut from Jaden Smith monotone to Lexy’s VERY black mannerisms — it made me feel remarkably at home. My family is absolutely like that in voice styles and ranges. It made me laugh even more. I personally liked the acting, seeing it as intentionally “bad” for the sake of comedy. The story itself plays between slice of life and a serialized story, which kinda mucks up the sudden tone shift in the end. Unlike Cowboy Bebop, we don’t have as much time with the cast as a whole to feel much for them in the end. But I’d hope for a Season 2 to really explore more of the side characters. I want to know more about Lexy and GollieB’s hole-in-the-wall bar, I want to see more of Helena’s followers — especially after the ridiculous things they do to be just like Helena, and the ending kinda shook me in a way I didn’t expect that was very cute going forward. I could go on, but I think it is time for me to sum up my thoughts on Neo Yokio: “It’s very good at what it does, but it’s not for everyone. It’s audience is like the Neo Riche, small and niche.” That is the best way to put my thoughts on it.

Some people will get it and enjoy it. Most others, will write it off as trite. And I understand that point while also saying: “Try watching it inebriated. Take in the campy ridiculousness of it all.” No matter what the creators and critics say, everyone’s personal experience will be different based on where they come from. I read it as a parodic farce and enjoyed it very much as such. As a serious story or social commentary — it fell a lot more than it rose. And that’s OK. The best parts of the show are when Kaz is with Helena, the Helenists, and his boys, Lexy and GollieB. Laughing when he’s dealing with his aunt (voiced by Susan Sarandon, so yes!) or wallowing in the “misery” of being privileged bachelor. I recommend it for those who want something that you can make fun of — as I found it making fun of itself. To people who love the fabulous rich lifestyle of fashion, fame and camp! And I recommend trying it alone or with friends, but most importantly — drunk and/or baked as hell! Always bloom proudly guys, —Tuchi OUT!

#review #anime discussion #anime gif #anime #netflix #neo yokio #my thoughts #jaden smith #ezra koenig #weird #kaz khan

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