Lessons From The Counterculture Part 1/9: Return To The Vampire Castle
Identity Politics & Its Discontents
Introduction
This is the first in a series of articles looking at the culture wars and current discourses on the political Left, particularly in the United States and Britain. My previous work as a documentary filmmaker has explored aspects of the 1960s Counterculture (and its defeats), and I see many parallels between that period and our contemporary politics. This series is a hopeful effort to revisit some of that work and discuss those parallels.
The 1960s contains both lessons and warnings for those of us who want to see the triumph of progressive politics in an era of increased polarisation and a resurgent populist Right.
This first part sets out the broad political context, part two onwards examines the story of the Counterculture during the 1960s.
Part 1: Return To The Vampire Castle. Identity Politics & Its Discontents
“The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. 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”.
--Mark Fisher, Exiting The Vampire Castle
The late Mark Fisher wrote Exiting The Vampire Castle, an attack on the contemporary Left and its brand of identity politics, while wrapped in shame. “The reason I didn’t speak out [before], I’m ashamed to say, was fear. The bullies were in another part of the playground. I didn’t want to attract their attention to me”. But it’s the shame that charged Fisher’s essay with its moral force, elevated it from the torturous theory and self-satisfied tweeting found in Leftist discourse; it’s the shame, rescued from being used as a tool of humiliation, that justifies Fisher’s assault on the contemporary politics of shame.
Fisher, a brilliant cultural critic and Marxist thinker, published his essay in 2013 and was immediately flayed by critics on the Left, who accused him of having launched a lurid, fratricidal attack on his own side. But Fisher’s shame was a product of his conscience, of self-criticism. It was not shame that others demanded that he feel, nor located in the arbitrary circumstances of his birth. Fisher was ashamed, but he refused to be shamed, ashamed of his actions, but not of who he was or what he thought. His shame was accompanied by anger and sadness, both impulses completely justified.
Exiting The Vampire Castle exposed a tension on the political Left that had until that point lurked in a kind of truculent silence. Fisher’s complaint was aimed at the turn that Leftist discourse had recently taken and the tone in which it was expressed on social media. He thought that the Left was drifting away from its traditional material class analysis and towards politics rooted in identity, in a manner that served its opponents on the Right.
He also didn’t like the face of this new movement, which he found to be ugly and sneering, a narcissistic bully hopped-up on piety and schadenfreude. “The moralising left specialises in making people feel bad”, he wrote, “and is not happy until their heads are bent in guilt and self-loathing”. Over the course of a decade since he published, history has proved him to be amazingly prescient, correct in all respects.
What Fisher had noticed, back there in 2013, were the fetid, primordial stirrings of what we now call the Culture War, and the dismal identity politics that prosecute it. Similarly hideous mutations were also taking place on the political Right: in the Tea Party, on the verminous Chans with their ‘Gamergate’ conspiracy, their doxxing and trolling. All these toxic avengers climbed from the viscous, radioactive wastes left by the 2008 financial crash with a new type of war in mind, a war which by now has had its Waterloos and Gettysburgs, its martyrs and villains: Trump, Brexit, Charlottesville, George Floyd, JK Rowling, Kyle Rittenhouse, The Steal, The Big Lie, Jan 6, Vladimir Putin. This is a war that shows no signs of abating, where it ends is obscure, but every day that it rumbles destructively on is a day that meaningful political progress, a real break with the forty-year-old failed Neoliberal experiment, remains inert, and real answers to the present, serious issues in our societies remain unarticulated.
The Politics of identity
Since 2013 Fisher’s Vampire Castle has clearly metastasized, he was writing, after all, pre-Trump, pre-Brexit, prior to the various flags, symbols and hash-tag slogans that crowd Twitter and Instagram bios, prior to the de-platforming and accusations of fascism, or transphobia, or racism that are regularly flung at anyone who challenges the approved positions of what he called “the identitarian Left”, that part of the Left that sees societies almost exclusively through the prism of identity politics and which currently exercises a significant degree of cultural power, sufficient to end careers.
The political scientist Francis Fukuyama recently talked about the appearance of these tendencies amongst his student group at Stanford University. He described them as the politics of “fixed characteristics”, politics that essentialise a fixed characteristic that an individual has no control over and posit that characteristic as essential to who they are and their credibility. This type of thought diverges, pretty radically, from the traditional Marxist class analysis, in which social stratification and social roles are seen as historically contingent, rather than essential and fixed. Anyone struggling to locate why this concept of essential identity seems dimly familiar from elsewhere might now want to recall distressing, invasive images of flag-waving nationalists, nativist chest-thumpers and cold, bloodless eugenicists on the Far Right. We’ve seen this before and there was nothing “progressive” about it.
Fukuyama describes these new politics of the identitarian Left as leading to a “progressive re-interpretation of inequality in identity terms, so that it isn’t something that applies to a broad working class, but to specific groups: racial minorities, women, LGBTQ+ etc”. As Fisher put it: “rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by the dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group”.
Within this cosmology, it’s not hard to see that the satisfaction of individual desire can easily emerge as an animating political force. What Fisher calls the ‘logic of solipsism’ is something more profound than simply selfishness, or self-interest. People can be self-consciously self-interested, or aware that they are behaving selfishly, but solipsism is a state of pure subjectivity, of overwhelming pre-occupation with one’s own feelings, desires and way of seeing the world.
It can lead to self-interested demands for special treatment, with anyone failing to automatically endorse those demands swiftly finding themselves accused of failing to respect the specificity of the individual subject and their “needs” (often merely desires), or being incapable, through absence of shared identity, of understanding those “needs” in any case.
Libertarianism, desire & the hierarchies of suffering
Where the traditional political conflict between Left and Right had broadly been one of collective, communal interests vs private, individual interests, both sides have now become concerned with the satisfaction of narrow and individual desires. Those observing Right/Left debates online will notice moments at which the discussion spirals off into crazy duplications and the argument devours itself, with each side accusing the other, legitimately, of self-obsession.
In my view these contradictions can be explained by the prevalence of Libertarianism, the ideology of infinite freedom and individualism, across the political spectrum. It is a force that distorts traditional Left/Right positions and that has recently destabilised some of the major political parties in Europe and the US.
Modern Libertarianism gained traction on the Right during the 1970s and was a guiding hand in the Neoliberal reconstruction of contemporary societies. It has re-emerged as a tendency on the Left more recently, as the modern Left is both shaped by the legacy of Neoliberalism and struggles to respond to it, but it has haunted progressive politics at moments in the past, most notably during the 1960s, which is something that we will explore.
All this is not to say that the Right and Left are somehow converging, they’re not. There are of course important differences and the basic oppositions traditional to both sides remain. What I am arguing is that there is a relationship between identity politics, individualism and Libertarianism that is observable on both the Right and the Left and that the Left should be conscious and critical of this phenomenon, it’s important not to mislocate ideology, important to beware the Right in Left’s clothing. “The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything”, Fisher wrote, “while in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour”.
What the identitarian Left has done, by way of structural critique, is to erect hierarchies of suffering, in which “oppression” and “marginalisation” are fetishized and indexes of “privilege” are constantly, often hysterically, assessed. These hierarchies are constructed on the basis of identity and subjectivity, those who play this game are invited to compete in claiming special status or atoning for embodying “privilege”, or put another way, in demanding “legitimate” privileges and denouncing “illegitimate” ones. As with much of the phenomena in the culture war, this has its mirror on the populist Right, with its obsessions over “elites” (although it functions slightly differently).
A good example of the hierarchies exploded into controversy in 2023, when the British Labour MP Diane Abbot wrote to The Observer newspaper to claim that Jewish people, occupying a higher stratum on the hierarchy than black people, had never experienced “racism”, but merely a form of gentle prejudice, analogous to the mocking sometimes endured by people with red hair.
This is the tenor of the discussion on the identitarian Left. The Ad Hominem, a form of debate in which you direct your criticisms at the individual, their status, or motives rather than their actual claims, and in which you appeal to subjective emotions, rather than to reason, has been held since Ancient Greece to be a fallacious, illegitimate form of argument. The Ad Hominem is now the primary mode of discourse (where discussion is permitted at all, “No Debate” being a frequently deployed slogan).
There is an angry insistence on slogans, and ceaseless demands for contrition and sacrifice - not admirable, genuine self-sacrifice, but symbolic sacrifice, couched in the language of sin and redemption that belongs to religion. The brutish phrase “do the work” is emblematic of this latter characteristic, when deployed not as a genuine invitation to undertake personal reflection and enquiry, but simply as a demand to learn the catechism and obey the line, the principle of the re-education camp. In short, this is the ideology of individualism and narcissism, defended through authoritarianism, that traditionally made its home on the Right and has, in my view, absolutely nothing to do with Socialism.
What Fukuyama describes as the “progressive re-interpretation of inequality in identity terms, so that it isn’t something that applies to a broad working class”, is the identitarian Left’s effort to refract class concepts into the hierarchies of suffering. Here, classes are no longer material categories, which describe how societies are organised and function, the suppositions and impositions of which are to be resisted and overcome, but instead take the form of superficial identity groups, groups that affirm and protect class strictures and stereotypes as a means of protecting identities. They are more closely related to sub-cultures than political classes, cousins to the absurd, uniformed, flag-waving pantomimes on the Right. “It’s also alarming, actually distressing”, Fisher said, “that [the Left] seems to think that working class people should remain in poverty, obscurity and impotence lest they lose their ‘authenticity’”. There is no more damning verdict on how identity politics have perverted the mission of Socialism.
Exiting The Vampire Castle identified “left-wing Twitter” as the source of the original identitarian pathogen, but in the intervening years a pandemic has raged in board rooms, in universities and colleges, sports organisations, within media groups and publishing houses, in legislatures and the courts. A giant spectacle has evolved, the scale of which Fisher could have scarcely imagined, people have lost their jobs, been hounded online or subjected to vexatious legal complaints as gaudy examples of the hierarchies of suffering, narcissistic cults of victimhood and inquisitions to purge heretics proliferate everywhere.
In 2021 Fisher’s vampires came for the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, her faultless defence observed the following:
“I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship…People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’… People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks”.
The “flattening of nuance” that Adichie mentions is part of an effort on the identarian Left to destabilise and elide linguistic meaning, with the object of reducing all concepts to the dynamics of identity politics. In this context, the meaning of words like “racism” becomes truncated and contingent, subordinated to conditions of the privilege hierarchies. This is what we saw in Diane Abott’s letter, “prejudice”, she wrote, “is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable”, before going on to imply that the racist murder of six million people was no different to insults directed towards redheads, because the victims were Jewish.
The Left must realise that this is not how most people interpret language, and that this is not how most people experience the world. People instinctively understand class antagonisms and social injustices, but do not conceive of society as a Manichean contest between savage oppressors and blameless victims. A contest in which, on the basis of these tenuous identity categories, some are immunised from the deficiencies found in all humans, while others are steeped in original sin, their deficiencies monstrous, with expiation the only cure. This is not, of course, to dismiss the role of power dynamics within societies, but to say that power dynamics should not be reduced to inane superficialities.
Attending to the rights of minorities and the most disadvantaged in society is absolutely essential, but abandoning contact with how the vast majority experiences the world is a mistake that the British Left made during the 1980s. What followed was a biting Conservative winter that stretched for nearly two decades, deleted the life chances of a whole generation, and raised the rotten edifice that continues to exhaust and impoverish British society. It was a period during which the Left descended into post-structuralist abstractions and haughty moralising, which the Right was easily able to deride - the “Loony Left” was the epithet that it landed upon at the time.
That phrase is back, renovated by the American Right as “The Clown Show”, and applied to describe the circus of specious theory, moralising, and purity tests returned to service by the identitarian Left. “I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote in her essay, “The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene”.
Fisher described a “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”.
Michael Foot, the leader of the British Labour Party during the early 80s, acclaimed Marxism as “the great creed of human liberation. It is the creed which says that when all other empires fade and vanish, our business is to enlarge the empire of the human mind". Liberation, so conceived, means liberty from Fisher’s identi-camps and “bourgeois modes of subjectivity”, it means critical thinking rather than dim obeisance, it means individuality not individualism, liberty not libertarianism, and rejection of the type of identitarian fantasies and projections that pre-occupy the Right, all of which means being able to accurately locate ideology. It means levelling the Vampire Castle and driving a stake through the corpus of identity politics so that the real, urgent tasks facing our societies, including the threat from the populist Right, can be effectively addressed.
Why it matters
The culture war is part of a generational struggle that spills chaotically from the great ideological lacuna that has squatted in the western democracies since the effective collapse of the Neoliberal economic system in 2008. The failure of the political classes to find any meaningful alternative, and instead resurrect a zombie version of Neoliberalism, has led to the dissolution of familiar Left/Right political positions, disorientation, polarisation and radicalism accompanied by extreme distrust.
A survey of the political landscape in 2024 is bewildering:
France - the traditional parties of both Left and Right have collapsed and Neo-Fascism, though temporarily stalled, threatens to become the nation’s most electorally successful political force.
Britain – the governing Conservative party heads into opposition purged of Conservatives, having been captured by an ugly right-wing populism that threatens to become its future; the traditional party of the Left, The Labour Party, has moved to the dispiriting, unambitious centre.
The United States - the Republican Party has been disfigured into an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist cult that is completely unrecognisable from its previous incarnations, the Democratic Party has so far struggled to integrate and reconcile the youthful American Left.
Russia – reheating the Cold War with the first invasion of a European democracy since World War Two.
The EU – rearmament, Germany has begun rebuilding its military for the first time since Adolf Hitler was head of state and now its tanks rumble East once again.
NATO – expanding to confront and contain Russia.
The Middle East – drowning in blood.
These distressing political ructions, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, are either a product of identity politics or are exploiting the anxieties around identity politics. Indeed, Russia is explicitly leveraging the culture war to consolidate domestic support for its invasion of Ukraine, on the first anniversary of the war Vladimir Putin gave a speech warning that transgenderism was a plot by the West to destroy all that is sacred within Russian culture. Far-right movements from Hungary to the United States have exploited the culture war to peddle the unhinged “Great Replacement” theory, in which Liberals and Leftists have a structured plan to erase ethno-national white European identities, and replace them with a multicultural population drawn from Asia and Africa.
Our contemporary political conflicts are not technical differences around economic systems or the scope of government, they are irreconcilable visions of the future, about human life and how it is organised. The phrase “culture war” closely describes the argument but fails to adequately capture its magnitude, after all, this is a conflict in which ontological questions are on the field of battle – abortion, transgenderism.
It's a conflict that in large measure originates from a reinvigorated right-wing attack on the achievements of the ‘60s Counterculture. Although its progress was ultimately arrested by the Right, the Counterculture successfully kicked in the door: it secured civil rights in the US and elsewhere, dismantled reactionary attitudes and shamed their proponents, advanced women’s rights, workers’ rights, minority rights and social justice movements, a profound legacy that has shaped modern societies and a legacy that the Right has been mobilising against ever since.
I am fortunate to have met and spoken with the great, indefatigable socialist Tony Benn several times prior to his death in 2014; he would warn that you can never count on your victories, that the same battles would have to be fought and won repeatedly, that the argument is rarely settled and that your opponents will always return.
It's worth noting that the Left’s victories in the 1960s were the Right’s defeats. The ‘60s is the locus of the Right’s historical grievance, the painful moment at which those on the Right feel that their future was stolen from them, an imagined future of a weird, perpetual past, a permanent 1950s of patriarchal order, status, conformism, immutable gender roles, racial hierarchy, sexual diffidence, religious observance and chauvinistic nationalism. These are their indices of virtue, the ideal Western Polis, in their minds violently supplanted by modernity and a perplexing hellscape in which all that is scared is violated and all that is abject is venerated. Their culture war is a struggle for redress, through which they seek to recover this lost future and their sense of identity. And they have racked up some battlefield successes.
The challenge for the Left is to quickly awaken to its historical purpose and search for unity, for what we have in common, rather than obsess over difference. It must be able to identify where, in the current febrile political debates, Left-wing values are located and find a way to re-articulate and re-assert them as part of a practical vision that can appeal to the majority. Flailing around in the swamps of identity politics, piously obsessing over questions of individual identity, does nothing other than offer up corpses to battlefields chosen by the Right.
The Counterculture of the 1960s fought many of these battles half a century ago, and as much as we can celebrate its successes, we can also learn from its defeats. The author and Counterculturalist Ken Kesey was fond of saying “watch the doughnut, not the hole”, well, there has been far too much hole-watching lately and far, far too little regard for the doughnut.
Next - Lessons From The Counterculture Part 2: The Psychedelic Wave
Reading
Mark Fisher, Exiting The Vampire Castle: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, It Is Obscene: A True Reflection In Three Parts https://www.chimamanda.com/news_items/it-is-obscene-a-true-reflection-in-three-parts/