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“founded on supremacist Enlightenment values”
“In the end, our entire species capitulates to European values and ‘cultures of whiteness’”

So the source of social problems is... VALUES and CULTURE?

If we have the RIGHT VALUES then we'll have a fair society?

What a load of idealist bullshit.

Agreed on these points: the global system of colonialism/neocolonialism is coextensive with capitalism; capitalism and nation-state are coextensive; fascism is a mass psychology and is encouraged (sometimes ambivalently) by capitalism and the nation-state; projects which use the state for radical reforms are not radical enough because they don't challenge the basic logic of the state (though I would add: some have more damaging effects, some more helpful ones); liberal identity politics is part of capitalist legitimation (this article is also idpol IMO).

Where I disagree is the alternative which is offered.

This is by now a depressingly familiar vision. Buzzwords. “Values” as the problem. Fixation on categories of people. Reduction of people to positionalities (not unique individuals). Exaggeration of the power of ALL white people, without class distinction. Responsibility, not rights or will. Humiliation/humility of individuals. No outside of the system. Identity politics which claims it is not identity politics but something else (yet keeps quacking like identity politics). Vague targeting of ontologically unspecifiable spook-enemies like “modernity” and “cisheteronormativity”. Derridean/Levinasian ethics (“hospitality”, non-self-sufficiency, etc). Glorification of lack, vulnerability, powerlessness. No individual will or ethos – instead, an outsourcing of moral agency to systemic-level categories. A sadistic desire to knock down others' “fragile egos” in the imagination that this is somehow knocking down the social system. A “mass psychology”, a politics of desire, in which the only libidinal hooks are either masochistic (performances of humility, awe at “something greater”...) or sadistic (the endless bashing-down of others' egos; the unproductive acting-out of anger against whichever random white people or slightly-differently-oriented radicals get in your way). An exercise in sado-masochistic power-play, disguised as radical politics.

The entire perspective is lifted DIRECTLY from EUROPEAN philosophical writings such as Derrida, Levinas and Lacan, filtered through the homogenising meat-grinder of American cultural studies departments, and repackaged as several dozen “different” theories which just happen to have THE SAME ROOT ASSUMPTIONS and THE SAME POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS.

And this entire pseudo-radical perspective plays the vital counterinsurgency role for capital, of BLOCKING the emergence of any really threatening radical position, or any position which even marginally challenges capital's hold on power – whether this be anarchy, left-anarchism, Marxism, social-democracy, deep ecology, “hippy tree-hugging”, or even “purist” versions of identity politics.

Hence the energy which is constantly expanded ATTACKING anything which emerges “to the left” of such perspectives – or, alternatively, recuperating it into the empty-signifiers of academic poststructuralism itself (“what we're doing is anarchism because we're subverting the state, even though we don't believe the state can be overthrown or destroyed and we think it's dangerous and arrogant to even try...”)

First public secret: THE PROBLEMS OF CAPITALISM HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH VALUES OR CULTURE.

Put people in miserable conditions, like rats in a cage, of course they will not show “values”. People start showing “values” only once they're living autonomously.

Capitalism has been dressing up socioeconomic problems as problems of “values” for centuries. The hegemony of capitalism in India and China rests on the illusion that they can defy “the west” by clinging to “values” while adopting “modern” economics and politics. The New Right has always blamed the problems of capitalism on “culture” (dependency culture, gun culture, culture of entitlement, cultures of crime...) to evade structural causes and blame individuals. Before that, there was Puritanism, the Protestant Ethic, the temperance movement...

Capitalism evolves hand-in-hand with a kind of self-critique which attacks people for not being austere, productive, exploitable enough – and thus not part of the elect chosen few who will save the world. This trend coexists with the need to stimulate hedonistic consumption to generate market demand, and the two bounce off each other as the consumption and production ends of capitalism. When capitalism is in crisis and pushing austerity, the “moral” wing becomes particularly strong. Now actually, in an overproduction crisis (like we're in today), this isn't even the best approach from the system's point of view, because it continues depressing demand. But from a human point of view – it is nothing but sacrificing real people to the system's profits.

Values are only meaningful if they are part of an ethos which stems from desire, and which is actualised in material forms of life.

Communitarianism is a dangerous attack on individual freedom. Blair, Macron, Xi, Lee Kuan Yew are communitarians. Communitarianism means that nobody matters and anyone can be sacrificed for the common good. Most often, it is people who are different, who deviate from the norm, who are sacrificed. This is why communitarians have to attack the “ego”, favour “responsibilities” over “rights”, and seek to induce “humility” rather than assertiveness. Sheep can be slaughtered more easily if they're... well, sheepish.

Individual responsibility is nearly always a reactionary idea which blocks 1) real awareness of social causes of social problems and 2) the Stirnerian/Nietzschean critique of transcendent values. The only valid “responsibility” is existential, inner.

Look at historically, how Reagan and Thatcher blamed the poor for poverty, how neoliberals push “interventionist” homelessness policies which blame homelessness on lifestyle (drugs, transience, resistance to mental health treatment...) and deny support and attack groups like FNB because they want to “de-incentivise” homelessness; how invested the neoliberal project is in denying any relationship between poverty and crime (and how this denial fuels the prison-industrial complex and the re-enslavement of African-Americans); how everyone from the Trilateral Commission onwards blames the systemic failures of capitalism on bad values, “cultures of entitlement”... Is this not EXACTLY THE SAME attack on egos and individual freedom, in the name of “culture”, “values” and “communitarianism”, that the idpols are now pushing? Don't we also find EXACTLY THE SAME moralisation of social problems in alt-right attacks on liberalism, redistribution, multiculturalism and so on?

Even if we want these values – which I, for one, don't – then they only become possible once an appropriate political economy is in place. They have to be actualised through seizing the material possibilities to live by these values.

Vague talk of “decolonisation” is dangerous if it can't articulate a vision of an emancipated, non-colonised world. It too easily degenerates back into idpol and empty unprincipled side-taking.

Second public secret: THERE IS AN OUTSIDE.

The only thing stopping people from living in non-capitalist spaces is the system. Individuals are NOT responsible for this. Ought implies can.

The system is primarily socioeconomic and political. It does not exist in the depths of language. It does not shape people's subjectivities at such a level that their very identities are effects of the system. If it did, then change would most likely be impossible.

No, we are not all “capitalists” and “authoritarians”. Speak for yourself. Radicalism consists in creating an outside and speaking from it, as something else – not reducing everything to the same night where all cows are black.

Most likely, the outsides we build in practice are partial, incomplete. Better to focus on their status as prefigurations of another world, and not focus on their imperfections. The more we focus on imperfections, the more we convince ourselves that the problems are just too big to be overcome.

Third public secret: COUNTER-POWER IS EGO-ASSERTION.

Capitalism is not the same as ego.

Capitalism is “possessive individualism”. There are many other forms of ego (and of id, or desire – which Derrideans lump into ego). Ask yourself what you desire, how you'd like to live if there were no barriers. Is it compatible with capitalism? Is capitalism the main barrier to it?

The holist/Derridean/Buddhist style of anti-egoism actually uses the superego (guilt, “responsibility”, vulnerability, the “call of the Other”...) against the ego and the id. But the superego is just a part of the ego turned against itself. It is not something more basic. In fact – reading Reich closely – one finds the superego is part of the mass psychology of fascism.

Weakness is not strength. Even for “subalterns” (see James Scott for example – the performance of humility and internal subversion of dominant scripts is superficial; the offstage script is assertive, desire-led).

Counter-power comes from empowering, assertive agency. Not humility and passivity.

People who spend most of their time attacking their own or one another's egos, don't have the time or energy left to attack the system.

The Derridean cult of “disposability, finiteness and insignificance” is disempowering and quietistic. It repeats the know-your-place humility of religious forms of social control, from Catholicism to Buddhism. And it ignores the fact that every ethos, every value, is rooted in the self – because the world contains facts, not values.

Overcoming oppression is about overcoming lack. Not glorifying and absolutising it.

Oppression is about adapting people (and animals, ecologies, lifeworlds...) to systems. Liberation is about adapting systems to people (and animals, etc). Liberation is therefore about the ASSERTION of the id, and the mobilisation of the ego in support of the id – AGAINST the superego. THE OPPOSITE of the idpol approach.

Fourth public secret: EVERYONE IS MISERABLE, OPPRESSED, AND ALIENATED.

There are gross inequalities between bosses and workers, between workers and excluded “surplus population”, and among different groups within the division of labour (e.g. primary and secondary labour markets). Some of these inequalities are systemic. Others are forms of divide-and-rule. Still others, reflect concessions made to powerful social movements, or market advantages of certain sectors of workers.

But everyone living in capitalism – except for those who manage to seize back autonomy – is miserable, oppressed and alienated. Often, even the elite are miserable. Certainly the overwhelming majority are.

Telling miserable, oppressed, alienated people, some of whom are also materially very poor, that they are empowered and privileged, that they deserve to be made WORSE-off than they are, and that they need to feel very guilty about supposed advantages over which they have no control... is political suicide. Not to mention just plain factually wrong.

“Whiteness” is not some magic barrier which wards off the misery caused by the system. At most it's a structural distribution of risks and opportunities which are also partly random.

“Europeans” don't possess anything like as much “power and privilege” as these morons imagine. Most Europeans and white Americans feel just as disempowered as they do, and the more they insist that white people are only welcome in progressive spaces provided they start from guilt and self-abasement, the more they push the justified grievances of working-class white people in Nazi directions.

Colonisation is effect, not cause. Capitalism is about commodifying, before it is about “settler” versus “indigenous”. Most of the “settlers” were people driven from lands in countries like Ireland and Italy, by capitalists and landlords, or who fled poverty and unemployment, or political or racial persecution (e.g. Jews). Historically, indigenous paths are similar to deep ecology. Stateless societies, subsistence/needs-led and gift economies, ecological sustainability, intense practices including altered consciousness. Capitalism strips meaning from life, steals land, breaks down social connections, commodifies economies. Neo-indigeneity would have to involve rebuilding local networks of stateless living, non-capitalist economies (subsistence, gift, solidarity, petty commodity even), mutual aid networks, ways of meeting basic needs without using the market or state. The point is to rebuild indigeneity in this sense – regardless of the skin colour or origins of the people concerned.

Why does capital encourage idpol? Because idpol serves to channel radical energies in such a way as to KEEP THE PUBLIC SECRETS SECRET – and this is also why capital encourages the alt-right.

So basically – this looks like a radical critique of reformist democratic-socialism, but in reality, it's functionally part of the counterinsurgency project. It's a sectarian attack on a position MORE radical than its own, designed to bring the focus back to “values”, “culture” and ego-bashing, and thus to responses SAFE FOR CAPITAL.

Sanders and AOC are actually more progressive than this lack-fetishising, sectarian, idpol bullshit. They have the wrong ideas how to do things and what they want is nowhere near as radical as my own commitments, but at least they have visions for changing the world, they can speak to the alienation and oppression of the majority, they're proposing concrete changes which might make a difference.

Finally. Is Islamic liberation politics possible? Yes, go read Hakim Bey, and unread whichever Derrida clones you've been regurgitating.