- Amazing Brexit: Identity and Class Politics
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
This shell of a once fighting left embraces the culture of identity but excludes the entity of class. As a result poverty has become the P-word, and the poor the pariahs of neoliberal dystopic utopia. When we talk about class in a Marxist, materialist, scientific sense, we are talking about a relation of power, specifically about who does and who doesn’t have power to shape society. Identity politics makes this conflict of interests in society invisible. Neoliberal economics, however, is class war. It has advanced in part because identity politics depoliticized the public.
- The "Anarcho-Liberal"
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2011
The diversity of the global justice movement is undeniable, but to the extent its prominent intellectual voices represented broader trends, we can see the crystallization of a new type of radical that would come to prominence on the Left. The reconfiguration of the Left at the end of the twentieth century created a void. The “anarcho-liberal” filled it.
- As Trudeau cracks down, the left drives protesters into the right's arms again
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2022
Divide and rule, the cultivation of tribalism, is an insurance policy against successful dissent and the threat of revolution.
- Beyond Neoliberal Identity Politics
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
Neoliberal identity politics (NIP) is a great weapon on the hands of the privileged capitalist Few and their mass-murderous global empire.
- Bourgeois Feminist Bullshit
The Rebecca Traister view of gender and the world...
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
- Burying the White Working Class
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Liberal condescension towards white workers is code for a broader anti-working class agenda. The white working class is a zombie that doesn't know it's dead. Or if it's not fully zombified yet, its members are all too busy cleaning their AR-15s and posting racist comments on YouTube to vote for a progressive. That is, if they're not already on the Trump bandwagon, which they probably are. At least that's what the Democratic Party wants you to believe.
- Catherine Rottenberg's Neoliberal Feminism
Book Review
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2019
An interview with Catherine Rottenberg, author of The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (2018).
- The CIA Reads French Theory
On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
A recently unclassifed CIA documents reveals that in the 1980s, the agency had its analysts devote substantial time and resources to studying trends in French theory, and specifically, the work that writers like Michel Foucault, Jacques, and Roland Barthes were doing in undermining the Marxist left. The CIA saw this trend as beneficial to the maintenance of American power, and capitalism generally, because it undermind the idea that there could or should be fundamental revolutionary change.
- Civil Liberties in the Fight Against Fascism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1945
Fighting against an evil, like anti-Semitism or racial hatred, does not mean calling on the state to suppress the evil.
- Class Notes
Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2001
Reed argues against the solipsistic approaches of cultural or identity politics, and in favour of class-based political interpretation and action. Class Notes moves on to tackle race relations, ethnic studies, family values, welfare reform, the so-called underclass, and black public intellectuals.
- The Culture War is nothing but a bourgeois distraction from the only war that really matters - Class War
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2020
Middle-class squabbling over statues and outdated anthems only serves to fill up the political discourse with meaningless hot air and to perpetuate a system that keeps them comfortable and the working-classes quiet.
- The deadly racism of the 'anti-racist' liberal imperialist
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
When it comes to hypocrisy, the pro-war Western ‘liberal’ is in a class of his own. While professing opposition to racism, the pro-war liberal is cheerleader for the most dangerous and deadly form of racism in the world today - contemporary US/Western imperialism.
- The Evil of the Lesser Evil
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2008
Lesser-evilism as a progressive strategy has succeeded -- succeeded in making American politics progressively more and more right-wing.
- Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1995
A discussion of feminist theory, particularly the usefulness of postmodernism as a theoretical concept. From the book "Feminist Contentions. A Philosophical Exchange."
- Foucault and Neoliberalism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2015
Michel Foucault has a reputation, especially in the academic world, as a radical. This collection of essays explores another, less acknowledged, side of Foucault's thinking: his embrace of some key elements of neoliberalism.
- From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
As is ever clearer and ever more important to note, race politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do.
- How the left is being manipulated into colluding in its own character assassination
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2021
This is the left's dilemma. We struggle to win the argument in a corporate media environment that not only denies us a hearing but also promotes the voices of those like Freedland trying to destroy us from the centre and those supposedly on the left like George Monbiot and Owen Jones who are too often destroying us from within. We need to find ways to turn the tables on the war criminals who have been gaslighting us in demanding that Assange, who exposed their crimes, is the one who needs to be locked up. We need to make clear that it is those who are so ready to smear anti-racists as antisemites – as Corbyn’s successor, Sir Keir Starmer, has done to swaths of Labour party members – who are the real racists. And we need to unmask as war hawks those who accuse the anti-war left of serving as apologists for dictators when we try to stop western states conducting more illegal, resource-grab wars with such devastating results for local populations.
We must get much more sophisticated in our thinking and our strategies. There is no time to lose.
- How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind
An autopsy
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2022
For two years the left has championed policies of surveillance and exclusion in the form of: punitive vaccine mandates, invasive vaccine passports, socially destructive lockdowns, and radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations. For the entire pandemic, leftists and liberals - call them the Lockdown Left - cheered on unprecedented levels of repression aimed primarily at the working class: those who could not afford private schools and could not comfortably telecommute from second homes.
- How the People's Climate March Became a Corporate PR Campaign
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2014
I've never been to a protest march that advertised in the New York City subway. That spent $220,000 on posters inviting Wall Street bankers to join a march to save the planet, according to one source. That claims you can change world history in an afternoon after walking the dog and eating brunch.
- The Invisibility of Fascism in the Postwar United States
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2014
Vials examines the use of the term "fascism" in post-war United States politics since the Tea Party have twisted its meaning to denote a left-wing phenomenon.
- The Left Continues to Destroy Itself and Others With Evidence-Free Destruction of Reputations
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2021
Equating accusations with proven fact is reckless and repressive. It is also standard behaviour in liberal politics, whereby they ruin lives without a second thought.
- Liberal Antiwar Activism is the Problem
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Every election season, veterans and their families are used as political pawns. During the Democratic National Convention in Philly, the Khans, the mother and father of a Marine Captain who was killed in Iraq, conveniently filled the role for Hillary Clinton and the Neoliberals. At the Republican National Convention, Patricia Smith gladly took the stage for the Neofascists and talked about the death of her son and the non-scandal that is, Benghazi. In the meantime, anyone who opposes U.S. Empire is shit-out-of-luck when it comes to presidential elections and the two major parties. Here, we should commend Gary Johnson and Jill Stein for remaining principled in their views surrounding foreign policy, militarism, torture and surveillance. They’re the last of a dying breed.
- Liberal Condescension
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. election, a debate has erupted on the liberal left about the best way to deal with working class people who voted for Trump. The disagreement, for many of the participants, appears to revolve around whether liberals ought to spend their time giving patronizing lectures about white privilege, or patronizing lectures about other aspects of reality. What people on both sides of the debate seem to share is the assumption that the job of middle-class liberals is to lecture the working class.
- Liberals Beware: Lie Down With Dogs, Get Up With Fleas
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
An examination of the dishonesty in the New York Times' efforts to undermine President Trump, and broader criticisms of other tactics used by the liberal establishment to the same end.
- Liberals - Liberalism - Liberal Left: Ulli Diemer - Selected snippets & quotes from Radical Digressions
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2018
- Liberals and Ultra-leftists: A Marriage Made in Hell
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
What liberal defenders of ultra-left violence don’t realize is that it’s not the Nazis legally marching down main street that will sabotage U.S. democracy, but the paramilitary police state that will crush all legitimate dissent. Ultra-left violence plays into what apologists for police militarization have been saying all along -- that the police have to keep ahead of the increasing violence in the streets with updated weapons and paramilitary training. Ultra-left violence, far from stopping fascism, enables it. It makes martyrs of the right and helps white supremacists recruit more angry right wingers to their cause, just as every wedding party the U.S. bombs in the Middle East recruits angry family members to the jihadis. With every violent clash between ultra-left and ultra-right, the militarized police will grow stronger … and they’ve got minorities and peace activists in their sights.
- Like a Dull Knife: The People's Climate "Farce"
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2014
Even in a top-down format, one hopes the upcoming march could draw much-needed attention to the climate movement.
- The Morning After
Sex, Fear, and Feminism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1994
When Katie Roiphe arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1986, she found that the feminism she had been raised to believe in had been radically transformed. The women's movement, which had once signaled such strength and courage, now seemed lodged in a foundation of weakness and fear. At Harvard, and later as a graduate student at Princeton, Roiphe saw a thoroughly new phenomenon taking shape on campus: the emergence of a culture captivated by victimization, and of a new bedroom politics in the university, cloaked in outdated assumptions about the way men and women experience sex.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - October 15, 2016
Lurching to War
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
Published: 2016
The risk of nuclear war is as great now as it was at the height of the Cold War. From the time the Warsaw Pact dissolved itself and the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States has single-mindedly pursued a hyper-aggressive strategy of surrounding Russia with hostile military forces and missiles aimed at the Russian heartland.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - June 18, 2015
Corruption
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
Published: 2015
Corruption - or at least some types of corruption - are much in the news, with the ongoing scandals in the Canadian Senate and the recent U.S. targeting of the Swiss-based football federation FIFA for alleged bribery. In this issue, we look at these and other forms of corruption. Diana Johnstone writes about the double standards displayed by U.S. institutions, which happily target enemies and rivals, while ignoring the much greater corruption that underlies the power structures in Washington. We feature an article detailing how much money U.S. Senators received from corporations prior to their vote on the TPP negotiations, as well as materials on criminal conduct by some of the world's biggest banks, and an article on the work of investigative journalists in exposing corruption.
- The Passion of Richard Seymour
Book Reviews of "The Liberal Defence of Murder" and "UnHitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchen" by Richard Seymour
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2013
The books of Richard Seymour skewer the predictable platitudes and puncture the sanctimonious pretensions of the "Pro-War Left," what was a transatlantic confederacy of journalists, public intellectuals, and bloggers that championed the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as a "humanitarian intervention."
- Political Correctness: Handle with Care
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Racial, gender, and ethnic diversity matters, of course, but political correctness (PC) tied to bourgeois identity politics can be deadly to left thinkers and activists and to the causes of peace and social justice.
- The politics of rebranding
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2021
How politics and social activism have too often become exercises in rebranding not material change.
- The Postmodern Left and the success of neoliberalism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The international Left promotes its own image rather than engaging in the bitter reality of resistance against neoliberalism. It does not need to believe in postmodernism because it is postmodernism.
- The postmodern left and the success of neoliberalism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The rise of neoliberalism across the globe for decades, and its continued resilience since the 2007-2008 financial crisis in particular, forces us to ask why there has not been a more successful resistance against it.
- Progressives shouldn't be begging the police to take more power
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1984
The last thing we need is to hand the police even more power to decide what we are allowed to see or read.
- Race v. Class? More Brilliant Bourgeois Bullshit from Ta-Nehesi Coates
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
Coates is either flat-out lying or woefully ignorant when he argues that "the left" is disinterested in the big and significant problems of racial identity and racial justice. The longstanding legitimately Left progressive agenda addresses both race and class at one and the time. It does not accept Coates' false dichotomy between class and race.
- Radical Digressions
Resource Type: Website
Published: 2017
Ulli Diemer's website/blog featuring comment from a radical left-libertarian Marxist perspective.
- The right-wing, racialist attacks on the film Free State of Jones
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
The new film written and directed by Gary Ross, Free State of Jones, about a white farmer in Mississippi, Newton Knight, who led an insurrection against the Confederacy from 1863 to 1865, has come under sharp attack by right-wing elements in the American media. By right-wing elements, we mean the "new right" of identity politics advocates.
- The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2018
Offers a new framework for understanding the kind of cultural work neoliberal feminism carries out. Examines the high-powered women and celebrities who are embracing this new variant of feminism.
- Splendors and Miseries of the Antiracist 'Left'
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
- Ta-Nehisi Coates is the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2018
Coates represents the neoliberal wing of the black freedom struggle that sounds militant about white supremacy but renders black fightback invisible. This wing reaps the benefits of the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people. The disagreement between Coates and me is clear: any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, US military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading. So it is with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ worldview.
- The tribal left's a mirror image of the tribal right
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2021
- The truckers' revolt has exposed the left's class hatred
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2022
- Victimhood has become a cult that wants you to suffer forever
I know because I broke free of its grasp.
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2020
Victim culture is pervasive. From gaming to politics, an endless cycle of hurt feelings has tainted all it touches. But in a society where depression is skyrocketing, it’s time to call out a mindset that is ruining people’s lives.
- We Need to Talk about Women: The Problem with Western Liberal 'Feminists'
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
Western women have fought hard and bravely for rights and privileges that were denied to generations of women before them and have made vast strides towards greater equality and representation in society. For this, western women and traditional feminism should be applauded. At the same time, the version of feminism that presently functions in the west -- liberal, consumer, mainstream feminism -- has become problematic.
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