"Identitarian Realism"

It struck me today that the ongoing campaign of "left" identitarian authoritarians (sometimes called "social justice warriors" or SJWs) to infiltrate and take over various geek subcultures and then try to drive out anyone who doesn't conform to their agenda, is analogous to the "socialist realist" school promoted as the only valid form of art and literature in Stalinist Russia.

Socialist realism insisted that art had to portray class struggle along the lines of a simplistic, vulgarized kind of Marxism. While this was ostensibly supposed to advance the interests of the workers, its real function was to allow the Stalinist bureaucracy to maintain an iron grip on thought within the USSR and prevent the appearance of any independent working-class politics.

Similarly, SJWdom is ostensibly about advancing the interests of various "marginalized" groups as defined by postmodernism-inspired identity politics, but its actual function is to help a section of the Western intelligentsia maintain its grip on a section of the academy and to further extend it by taking over one area after another. This campaign isn't limited to geek subcultures, but a lot of the effort has gone there first, probably because these are seen as smaller and easier targets than some other aspects of society.

It should be noted that there's an intellectual confusion, promoted by the Right, that tries to conflate this sort of identity politics with Marxism, often by calling it "cultural Marxism." This is quite inaccurate, since IDpol is neither class-centered nor, in the last analysis, even materialist -- both essential features of Marxism. To be sure, identitarians will occasionally reference class -- usually as part of the stock phrase "race, class, and gender." But it's interesting that, of all the categories of "marginality," this is the one that they most often omit to mention -- probably because the working class is the only such group to which none of the core SJWs belong, a fact to which it wouldn't serve their interest (or self-image) to draw attention.

The implicit rationale for calling IDpol "Marxist" would seem to be nothing more than its totalistic character -- combined with a false of equation of Stalinism to Marxism -- but by that reasoning one might just as well call Christian fundamentalist politics "Marxist," which would be manifestly ridiculous.

In fact, as others have argued, postmodernism and its political offshoots are better seen as a stratagem whereby capital, expressing itself through corporatized universities, has seduced many intellectuals who like to see themselves as radical to abandon any effective kind of radicalism by replacing the materialist focus on class, and the concrete institutions that maintain class, with a semantics-obsessed preoccupation with the abstraction of "marginality." This leads to a politics that is more interested in symbolism than substance and, to the extent it has a practical effect, is about advancing a layer of "marginal" people within the structures of the academy and other institutions. Or, as Chris Hedges has put it, "It was always about patronage, not revolution."

Far from undermining capitalism, this performs the function of reinvigorating it by co-opting "the best and brightest" from various demographic groups, giving them a stake in the present system, while splintering the working class.

P.S. On Twitter, where I've posted a link to this piece, Hannah Wallen (@oneiorosgrip) suggests the focus on geek subcultures is because this is where the most creative activity occurs, and totalitarians can't allow creativity.