Read on Twitter
Ok , now incels https://twitter.com/kategrif/status/1307888892352385024
First, incels are described in the blurb as a “subculture.”
This is interesting. In part because this is coming from a strain of socialist thought that routinely mocks “subculture” categorically as the antithesis of mass-movement organizing and a barrier to it.
But that’s not the approach to the incel subculture here—as we will see.
I’m on record arguing that subcultures, while almost always politically mixed and contradictory, can play a role in the radicalization of the working class as a whole. (Depends, ofc, on who is in them and what the politics are.)
I made this point in defense, largely, of queer subculture and pro-queer, anti-racist anti-ableist etc left norms. These are the two things typically mocked by right wing socialists as ‘merely’ or toxically subcultural.
I made the same point about the Juggalo subculture organized around the very strange band, Insane Clown Posse, but also oriented towards poor pride and a certain universalism of solidarity and care among Juggalos.
But when it comes to incels, for the author of this piece, the incel subculture is seen not as an obstacle to class politics, but as a good start toward socialism , in precisely the same way I might talk about any of the above. Why?
(And —whats wrong with that? )
Well let’s dig in...
The first three paragraphs are pretty descriptive and, I think, largely accurate :
But then after detailing the highly politicized —and organized -nature of this subculture, toward misogynistic and racist action and propaganda-of-the-very-far-right-deed, in the form of mass shootings, often specifically of women, and now, anti-lockdown protests...
The next line is “The Left tends to have a difficult time talking about incels.”
This is a cowards move, in terms of writing. What it means is more clear in the next bit, but this line if it was written by someone with more verve would read “the left is wrong about incels; they shouldn’t be simply dismissed because they are violent misogynists.”
The actual article explains: “The often-reactionary rhetoric that can tend to real violence means that the subculture more broadly is readily dismissed rather than constructively engaged with.“
Again : the real punch is pulled here—there is no explicit thesis in the piece. This is as close as it gets. The implicit these is “ incels should be constructively engaged with by the left.”
This would be more easy to evaluate or debate if it was said outright, ofc, but we’re going to do it anyway.
The next bit is just as revealing and sort of poses as the thesis of the review “Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies is a notable contribution to the debate,..”
“although it tended to overdetermine the role of political correctness in producing a set of violent and reactionary online groups. A new documentary, TFW No GF ...is poised to become another touchpoint, cautiously taken up by critics as definitive cinema of the incel.”
What this bit of “background”
Does is 1) acknowledge that Angela Nagel’s “work” on the online far-right has been discredited
Does is 1) acknowledge that Angela Nagel’s “work” on the online far-right has been discredited
2) recuperate it anyway
3) and in so doing, recognize that incels are, in fact, part of the online far-right not simply a subculture of (mostly) men who “can’t” get laid
4) reprise Nagels thesis—that their existence is a product of toxic liberal/left online subculture—without offering an alternative possible explanation, even as the author wants us to know that they’ve read that Nagel isn’t right about this, at least, as a matter of emphasis.
(Side note if all of this re Nagel Is new to you here’s some shit : jordy Cummings http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/nagle-review
@libcomorg I can’t link to/load to these right now but, especially the “nonsense” one
And @socialrepro on her anti-trans politics especially https://newsocialist.org.uk/normietivity-a-review-of-angela-nagles-kill-all-normies/)
Anyway Nagel used to write for @jacobinmag but seems not to be back lately, probably because she’s too embarrassing or too busy writing for far right magazines, agreeing with Tucker Carlson on his show about the dangers represented by immigrants and Queers...
.. and carrying on a public flirtation with well-known public white supremacist Richard Spencer.
So it’s notable that she makes this awkward and hedged Jaco come-back in the opening of this piece.
Next, we go “inside the the incel bedroom.” Why we are doing this is not much explained, but I’m an anthropologist and ethnographer, curiosity, for me, often overwhelms good sense:
There, we are made aware that the director Is a woman -this ofc validates her impressions as not only those of an outsider but those of a person who would normally be hated or possibly harassed ,attacked and murdered by incels, for being either too attractive and sexual or ...
As a woman so unattractive as to be beneath the standards of men who see themselves as involuntarily shut out of the markets of sex and romance. For these women —too fat, ugly, etc —to be hated objects of desire,
Incels hate them (us) for imagining we have any purpose on earth aside from being desirable enough to fulfill their thwarted desires.
So, a woman director who can look past all that to “get” what is “really” going on with incels has a special authority on the subject
The meat of the film is described thusly “It follows five disaffected young men connected by the incel subculture and the adjacent “Frogtwitter,” the irony-laden online community best known for its associations with the trolling icon Pepe,...
“... as they struggle with their own feelings of withdrawal, as well as the toxic community they encounter online.”
So 1) it goes unmentioned that frogtwitter is an explicitly fascist scene
And 2) nagels thesis that toxic online community produces these fascist milieu is reprised, now, without qualification. Neat trick.
I gotta wonder, at this point, as a serviceable native informant of the online myself...where and why exactly are these guys forced to deal with “toxic” online liberal and left space and conversations?
I haven’t seen the film so I don’t know how that’s presented. But idk about you-im pretty aware when im leaving left-land online and heading into enemy territory.
How do these guys, years, if not decades, into their social-media defined lives continuously accidentally find themselves being tormented by women and libs?
These are the guys
“Rather than focus on the most notorious aspects of incel life, Moyer looks toward some of the more intimate and altogether less angry parts of the incel world, seeking to understand rather than to cast out..”
Things like target practice in the Pacific Northwest , the region with the most public active white supremacist organization, and where multiple leftists have lately been murdered in cold blood.
But also; “The title of the film refers to a meme that originated on the 4chan messageboard /r9k/, a highly confessional space where posters share anonymous “greentext” — personal moments that usually fall into the categories of humiliation, general suffering, and ..beauty”
According to the review the dudes are “alienated men trying, and ultimately succeeding, to overcome the resentment and aimlessness of inceldom.”
Let me make here a brief interjection
I think, as most leftists do, that it’s quite important for us (the left) to understand the ways that liberalism has failed, and in failing, created fertile ground for fascist ideas and recruitment.
That is important because, yes, we want to spread left rather than right-wing solutions to the problems people experience every day.
Of course that doesn’t just apply to White cishet men, but it does also apply to them.
The question (that should be explicitly) raised by this review is whether the incel subculture represents something general about this alienation, or even something general to white men or men in particular
Or us it, on the contrary, already a formation of those organized against the left? Can we or should we “productively engage” as the review suggests? If so, how? And how does that relate to productively engaging the much larger group that are alienated, not incels, and not left?
The review suggests that the film is even more dismissive of racist and sexist terrorism as central to the subculture than the review itself—nevertheless the moments depicting these are “uncomfortable.”
Moyer—the director—instead emphasizes the way that these men are products of liberalism’s failure to provide career or even job prospects for this swath of men who’s expectations were once much higher.
Neoliberalism, not incels or misogyny is the enemy. That for the reviewer is the films contribution.
That notion is actually presented by the reviewer as an improvement on nagles explanation, but in reality that is also a central part of her narrative. Again, this is a restatement of her work not a repudiation.
But of course, it’s sort of true. That’s her best point. Capitalism is absolutely failing to provide enough jobs or well-paid enough jobs get all kinds of people out of basements let alone shelters and tent cities.
But what goes unmentioned in the review -whether it is or not in the film—of any real explanation of how that truth translates into an ideology that celebrates mass femicide.
Or why that and how that ideology appeals to some and not others, or any investigation of the assumptions or assertions that might connect the two things, the no-jobs and the woman-murder
That’s unfortunate, because that’s exactly what we need to know to assess the “productive engagement” argument.
And because without anything better articulated to replace it, we are left with the incel self-narrative of this process, not as data/description, but as a simple truth. Similar, again, to Nagels treatment.
Those assumptions include that men without jobs cannot afford intimacy (with attractive heterosexual women.) what’s left out of this ofc is any assessment of whether a system based on that exchange was ever unalienated or not lonely.
And what sort of relations are being refused through the incel approach; commitment to a violent masculine resentment not of the sexual market they obsessively analyze ..
But resentment very specifically of their own place within it.
In fact the find intimacy in online incel consciousnesses raising sessions that hone these commitments, and entail others—where incels double down on failked/wounded/entitled masculinity,
They have to reject any alternatives to the harshest and most alienated standards of the market in sex and intimacy. This is why they loathe average-to-ugly women, disabled and fat people, queer and transness..
.. and why even (especially) POC incels are negatively obsessed with race-mixing.
It definitely doesn’t explain how people are getting from negative experiences of austerity to shooting up sororities or car attacks on BLM protestors.
So we are left again to assume as true a very specific (Nagleish) implication —not only has liberalism failed in terms of jobs and housing..
But specifically by imposing liberal feminism anti racism and “idpol” on underserving men
(That immigrants Queers women and Black people also suffer under austerity, often, more, through these forms of oppression is inconvenient to, ignored and often outright denied in this framework)
Instead, for the film and this review, liberalism’s failure really resides primarily in multicultural feminism —and these men are its true and specific victims.
This explains why, for incels and their “socialist” admirers, some “subcultures” are more equal than others.
Liberal “idpol” and any left form of analysis that mentions race or gender etc are utterly conflated.
And so it’s not just that queer subculture and others are rejected as an obstacle to incorporating the men like those described in the film, since..
..that encounter might reprise their existing experiences of victimization at the hands of professional managerial types (never actual business owners, except for vague references to Bezos ...or financiers)
The left itself becomes an obstacle subculture to incel liberation moving from subculture to mass counterculture.
At the end of the review, the hope for /evidence for incels overcoming and transcending the imitations of subculture is painted this way :
“In full cowboy attire, Kyle recounts the late-night Greyhound bus trip he took to get to the interview, “everyone tired and miserable,” and finding communion with the passenger sitting next to him over how bad the bus trip is — a metaphor..
... that extends nicely to the camaraderie of the incel community, who find solace with one another in the miserable bus trip of American life post-crash.”
The overcoming here has nothing to do with countering or combatting any previously described unfortunate tendency toward mass murder of women (or other oppressed groups, or the left.)
The hope is that the dude left the house and the vision offered is a generalization of online incel comradeship to a fully nationalist, IRL one.
Yeah.
So instead of seeing hope in the solidarity of millions hitting the streets to oppose state muder and defund police, we should look to the greater self assertion and collective action by a group who is already occasionally successfully killing us as it’s main political expression
Even though it’s certainly the case that more disaffected young men —even just white men —are involved in the protests than those boarding the metaphorical incel bus.
And even though those protests are demanding exactly the sort of redistribution proposed (in a pretty half-assed way, it must be said) in the review.
(How those protests happened might be a different more useful investigation)
But even if we just take seriously the question of how to “engage” potential incels —nothing here in the @jacobinmag bit answers that question in the slightest.
And, obviously, nothing is offered about how to combat (or even simply defend ourselves against) those already too far gone.
Despite all the caveats, it amounts to a defense of right terror and propaganda for its inevitablity.
Not surprising, I suppose, given the public fascist sympathies of several key players in the making of the film
(That a few of y’all helpfully pointed out!)
But it should be surprising that @jacobinmag would publish this barely, (and I gotta say) disingenuously critical review.
I do wish for more and better not just non-fascist but genuinely Marxist (actual) ethnographies of far right subculture and organization,
That does what this review claims for the film, both in terms of a providing insight into how to prevent future incel and other fascist recruitment, but also how best to take down the existing organized far-right.
