In the immortal words of @austin_walker: you ever see a take so bad that you're forced to immediately go to sleep? newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…
I get that "anti-identity-politics" hitpieces are the hot new thing this season, but Jon Cruddas MP pulls some avant-garde abstract expressionist bullshit with this piece that is monumentally staggering to anyone familiar with his academic sources or the Left.
To wit, Cruddas identifies the transhumanist movement with the left and calls it profoundly influential on socialism, saying it helped "define today’s left." Which... lol? I mean, what do you even say about category errors of this magnitude?
All that being said, I identify as a cyborg socialist now. So cheers for that much, Mr. Cruddas.
Okay, that New Statesman article fucked me up. Seriously, NS, the regular transphobic concern-trolling wasn't enough? You had to publish this academic scat?
What's striking is that, despite the novel "cyborg socialism" bogeyman, this is a pretty boilerplate piece.
Whining about "identity politics"?✔️
Using "liberal" and "left" interchangably?✔️
Uses "virtue signalling" unironically?✔️
Complains about "fashionable" ideas?✔️
Whining about "identity politics"?✔️
Using "liberal" and "left" interchangably?✔️
Uses "virtue signalling" unironically?✔️
Complains about "fashionable" ideas?✔️
The usual complaints about postmodernism are there too, as is the assertion that "the left" is wholly given over to vulgar "identity politics"--despite the fact that some of IDpol's most vituperative opponents are movement Marxists and socialists.
It's a chronic problem with these "what's wrong with the left?" thinkpieces. The authors don't know what the left *is*. Our factional bullshit is impenetrable even to us, but I'm not asking these writers to become masters of that particular nonsense.
I'm asking them to recognise 101-level points about what Marxism even is, and the even more obvious point that Marxism and The Left are not synonyms for each other. And to recognise that a huge swath of that left vituperates anything that smacks of "identity politics" to them.
But the larger point that Cruddas makes, that the left is now anti-humanist and pro...robot? ...is absurd. He even cites "humanist" as an insult used by this new left and, well, I don't know who he's talking to but I've never accused my ideological foes of being *too* humanist.
"As with ... Marxism, there is little role for actual struggle - for politics. Sit back, relax and enjoy the ride as the laws of history unfold and take us to 'postcapitalism'. Resistance is conservative."
Literally no one says this. This is catastrophically wrong.
Literally no one says this. This is catastrophically wrong.
Also, as some of my followers have already pointed out, how the hell do you discuss cyborg-anything, identity politics, and socialism without talking about Donna Haraway? She actually *did* influence the left. Her theories, however, would expose Cruddas' shallowness.
Speaking as a technophile leftist, the politics we pursue are not deterministic, but *anti*-deterministic. We believe technology is another means of production to be seized, that can produce a variety of outcomes depending on who controls it and for what ends.
The argument he credits to Fukuyama--that vulgar transhumanism threatens to create a vast, new class divide between those with augments and those without--is one that has been made *by leftists like me* in criticising transhumanism.
Hell, there's even a roleplaying game about it, made by a bunch of lefty anarchists who adore probing those questions with a depth Fukuyama and Cruddas could only dream of. eclipsephase.com
Technology is not inherently oppressive; the form it takes now is not its inevitable form; the inequalities it creates are not our destiny; we can have a true post-scarcity world. *This* is the credo, and it's now my cyborg socialism. So, kindly stuff it, Mr. Cruddas.
