Exiting the Vampire Castle
www.opendemocracy.net
We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication.

I was reading "Exiting the Vampire Castle" by Mark Fisher and came across this passage

Where to go from here? It is first of all necessary to identify the features of the discourses and the desires which have led us to this grim and demoralising pass, where class has disappeared, but moralism is everywhere, where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent – and not because we are terrorised by the right, but because we have allowed bourgeois modes of subjectivity to contaminate our movement.

I don't think I quite understand why current "modes of subjectivity" are "bourgeois" to him. Is this the same thing as

The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.

He also says our current state is an "ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender" - why is that? Thanks in advance

edit: I also remembered this passage, which says "there are no identities" which I think is the crux of what I don't understand

First of all, it is imperative to reject identitarianism, and to recognise that there are no identities, only desires, interests and identifications....The bourgeois-identitarian left knows how to propagate guilt and conduct a witch hunt, but it doesn’t know how to make converts. But that, after all, is not the point. The aim is not to popularise a leftist position, or to win people over to it, but to remain in a position of elite superiority, but now with class superiority redoubled by moral superiority too. ‘How dare you talk – it’s we who speak for those who suffer!'

  • ButtBidet [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    This was Fisher's most controversial piece ever, and it's been taken apart quite thoroughly by other leftist writers. Honestly my advice would be to respect Fisher in other places, but to give this particular article a pass.

    • shiny [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Could you point me to the critiques you're referring to?

        • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I'm not British so I don't really care about Brand, but here is the interview referenced by Fisher. To ventriloquize a bit, I think Fisher would argue that Brand's turn to antivax false consciousness was the natural consequence of the left being uninterested in welcoming him for relatively petty reasons, and that this is true of working class reaction more broadly. Moral political factions will always find that they're proven correct to reject allies and isolate themselves from any mass support, because no one is fully Good.

      • ButtBidet [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/b-grade-politics-6c5c9f48bf00

        I fell down the rabbit hole of getting into this article. I think the best way to summarise it is that Fisher goofed but that's OK because he's usually on the right side.

  • VeganVelveeta [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    He also says our current state is an “ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender” - why is that?

    Because Mark Fisher was a white cishet male and mistook his privilege for insight.

    Shit like this makes it impossible for me to take his other writing seriously.

  • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Fisher was demonstrating that he's a good Marxist by calling things he doesn't like bourgeois, as is tradition. I think he's pretty much accurate in his description of a moralist left which has as its first priority to identify and then cast out (or imagine it can cast out) all the Bad People, and only after that's done set about building a movement out of whoever's left. He might overstate how much of an issue this tendency is, but it's something we have to address.

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I'm always referred to this essay as a very serious and dire examination of cancel culture and why it's so bad. When I read it I'm more convinced of my stance the people most outraged about supposed cancel culture are university professors.