The Coalition of Chaos

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Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

6 Comments

  1. Jane
    July 2, 2020 @ 7:06 pm

    So, is Identitarian politics a reactionary counter to class analysis, or a gateway to it, and why?

    Reply

    • Austin George Loomis
      July 2, 2020 @ 9:44 pm

      “It is actually both. I’m really very mistrustful.”
      — Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

      Reply

    • sophiskiai
      July 4, 2020 @ 4:07 am

      To paraphrase a famous quote, “my socialism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit”. To which I’d add, as the other reply does, “why not both?”.

      Non-intersectional “identity politics” (a term I find viscerally uncomfortable, as although it was coined by the Combahee River Collective I mainly see it employed these days to minimise the concerns of marginalised folks) can be used (as Jack notes in the essay) to divide and undermine class socialism, while intersectional idpol can be used to build solidarity by finding common cause among oppressed groups. For a great example of the latter, see the LGSM in the mid 80s (as shown in the 2014 movie “Pride”).

      Reply

  2. Christopher Brown
    July 5, 2020 @ 6:28 am

    Waking up to find a new Jack Graham essay the other day was like Nick Frost’s Santa Claus dropping off a gift.

    Reply

  3. Stidus
    July 15, 2020 @ 9:38 pm

    Hi! Just found this, and I already know I’m going to be linking a lot of other people to it. Still:

    ideologically, fascism views everything through the prism of race

    Is this not a bit of a generalization? Obviously Nazism does, but while it certainly incorporated racism I never got the impression that, for example, Italian Fascism was ‘about’ race in the same way as the Nazis (Neo- and otherwise).

    I’m no expert, though. If you can point me to any existing online essays on the subject — of about equal legibility-to-a relative-ignorant as this one — that’d be highly appreciated.

    Also, the bit about ‘the racial view having been disproved ontologically by its own consequences’ is a clever bit of rhetoric, but in my humble opinion kind of undersells the horribleness of racists and fascists. To wit: there is still a massive chasm of moral indecency between the basic idea ‘some people are born mentally and physically lesser than others’, and the Nazis’ conclusion of ‘therefore those people should be exterminated to the last’.

    Scientific racism also happens to be nonsense on the factual level, but I feel like to debate the issue of fact with these people is already granting their bafflingly wrong premise that if there were weaker humans and stronger humans, the stronger humans would have a moral right, or even a moral duty, to oppress and kill the weaker ones. I can fathom a human being who buys into a racist worldview coming up with “White Man’s Burden”-type ideologies, but there’s still a missing component of moral bankruptcy between that and the Holocaust that shouldn’t be underestimated — and which, whatever it is, must, I think, surely have something to do with the nature of fascism itself, as distinct from general racism or classism.

    Reply

  4. Smokey and the Bandit Jacket
    July 23, 2020 @ 7:24 am

    Good article, but it would be better if in future you can share more about this subject. Keep posting.

    Reply

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