this is the best answer. It's a toy for some academics to play around with because they want to seem cool and punk in comparison to their normal anarchist or Marxist peers. It's not a functional organizational strategy anywhere.
They're utopians who don't believe in organizing to achieve political goals, they think that's boring. Instead they think liberation can be an outward aesthetic you adopt and that's indistinct from genuine liberation. I think they're convinced most power in society comes from control over one's thoughts, so they're often not concerned with advocating for social causes. Their main political strategy is refusing to work and refusing to be defined. Their main ideology is based around refusing to believe in anything and denying they have an ideology. Ideology is something you move beyond so you can start thinking for yourself, basically
Bob Black and Peter Lamborn Wilson are the two post-left authors I've read the most. Black has this one quote I think really encapsulates the post-leftist anarchist thing, from "Feminism as Fascism" (yes that's the title):
Possibly the ideology I’ve excoriated is something that people had to work through in order to free themselves to the extent necessary to venture upon a project of collective liberation. Already alumnae of feminism have moved on to the common quest for freedom, and some are the better for what they’ve been through. We all have our antecedent embarrassments (Marxism, libertarianism, syndicalism, Objectivism, etc.) to put behind us: had we not thought in ideological terms it’s hard to believe we’d ever get to the point where we could think for ourselves. To be a Trotskyist or a Jesuit is, in itself, to be a believer, that is to say, a chump. And yet a rigorous romp through any system might show the way out of the master-System itself.
Also the other guy I mentioned was a pedophile who wrote for NAMBLA
Seen it described as an anarchist variant critical of ancom & ansyn, rooted in egoism :stirner-cool: , individualism, and an overall rejection of organised long-term action.
personally I'm less fair and don't even regard them as anarchist comrades, their entire ideology exists because of how unfortunately small and irrelevant North American leftist organizing has been since the 1980s. I see post-leftism as a kind of frustrated defeat. Taking their ball and going home. The adherents got bored of how little ground leftists have been able to take in America, so they decided they were at least free inside their own heads or free enough to write journal articles, which is tantamount to liberation in reality for them. "Just stop working and stop believing in gender. It's easy." So they're post-left, they're done with being leftists and want to skip to the point where we're already liberated from everything.
Basically it's for those who break from old school communist thought and reject old school Soviet era hard line Marxist-Leninists like Obama and Biden and their cold war manifestos like 'audacity of hope', and try to fight the modern fascist communists like Ted Cruz and Marxist-AynRandists like Trump and his 'art of the deal' which was basically a modern 'Das Kapital' but without the virtue signalling, with a more educated stance on left wing social and economic viewpoint and among the most philosophical and well written of these are the boogaloo boys and the Maoist-Reaganist branch of the proud boys.
post-leftism
n.
- A broad anarchist tendency which seeks in various ways to break from the leftist milieu which developed under the conditions of the cold war. See also: post-left anarchism
- Some twitter power-users who found a reliable way to get attention.
It's what we do on Hexbear every day.
We post leftism
When you give up on socialism in america and decide to cryptically tail the right on all cultural issues.
Well, the :reddit-logo: for it is full of anti-communists and anti-lockdown people, so that doesn't bode well.
Edit: recurring sentiment is "the left was mean to me so I had no choice but to be a reactionary"
I've never read post-leftism, but I've got the posts of leftism all over my account
