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Sadly, last Friday Mark Fisher took his own life "The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. 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....
Against liberal nostalgia "[T]he neoliberal variant of capitalism was not the result of a a “corporate coup.” It is the result of the familiar, systematic workings of a capitalist state seeking to resolve a crisis and restore the system to 'health'... ... to say that the last thirty years of neoliberal policy were not simply the result of a “corporate coup” does not mean that Donald Trump is simply a “boilerplate” Republican. If he were, how could we explain the tremendous fight the GOP establishment waged against him? Trump did   not receive a single donation   from a Fortune 100 CEO, while a broad range of top military brass and   establishment Republicans  — including George Bush, Mitt Romney, Colin Powell, Paul Ryan, Hank Paulson, Bill Kristol, and others — either endorsed Clinton or suggested they couldn’t support Trump. All this indicated a wide-ranging consensus among the capitalist class behind Clinton, founded upon maintaining the status quo abroad (“fre...
A clarification by Richard Seymour " When a wing of the left criticises "identity politics", they usually mean the kind of politics that reduces oppression to representation and that, as such, is apt to celebrate the inclusion of a right-wing fundamentalist woman in Trump's team because she is a woman and hence "diversification". They want a more substantive attack on racism, sexism, oppression of all kinds. When a wing of the liberal centre criticises "identity politics", they usually m ean to criticise what they think of as the overly clamorous and over-hasty demands of women, gays, African Americans, migrants and others for justice. This, they claim, puts 'progressives' in a difficult position when it comes to building coalitions (with racists, homophobes, etc) and achieving real reforms. When the Right attacks "identity politics", they mean any concession whatsoever to the idea that anyone other than white bourgeois me...