British fascists online (2022)

From the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few weeks ago, YouTube’s algorithms carried me towards some video essays made by the alternative media commentator known as Morgoth. I’d been vaguely aware of Morgoth and similar reactionaries, such as Richard Spencer, Millennial Woes and Keith Woods, for some time, but hadn’t paid too much attention to them. After all, I knew that they called themselves ‘traditionalists’, ‘racial nationalists’ or ‘third positionists’ – in a word, fascists – and I only have so much time to devote to the ramblings of people who would happily deport or kill my non-white friends and family. On the other hand, it’s good to know your enemies, so I resolved to trawl through some of the videos and livestreams made by Morgoth and his cronies in order to get a sense of what the far right are saying and doing online these days.

Racial nationalists

Morgoth’s worldview is a macabre one. In between garbled references to right-wing philosophers, Morgoth rails against the ‘liberal elites’ and ‘globalist’ technocrats whom he sees as running the world – all controlled and funded, of course, by rootless cosmopolitans like George Soros. According to Morgoth, these elites are set on crushing the ‘Western Spirit’, subjecting the population to their nihilistic ideology of hyper-individualism, hedonistic consumerism and, worst of all, racial diversity. By promoting mass immigration and miscegenation throughout the Western world, the elites, according to Morgoth, want to undermine and ultimately eradicate the white native stock. To stop this from happening, Morgoth proposes that whites should unite to reactivate the Faustian spirit of the West by creating a racially pure ethno-state. As he puts it at the end one of his videos: ‘We’re going to be the masters in our own land again!’ (YouTube, ‘Roger Scruton & Words of Power’).

For obvious reasons, Morgoth never appears on camera. Judging by details contained in his various monologues, he seems to be a Generation X factory worker from North-East England. He has a blog, Morgoth’s Review, and a large number of video essays on YouTube and other digital platforms favoured by the far right, such as BitChute and Odysee. He also occasionally pops up as a guest on other so-called ‘dissident right’ social media channels and has now started to consolidate his oeuvre on his Substack page. His video essays, which are often illustrated by footage or photographs from his countryside walks, address a wide range of topics and Morgoth often sweetens the red pill of ethno-nationalism with discussions of contemporary popular culture. In recent years, far-right organisers have been using online gaming as a recruitment tool, pipelining young men towards racial supremacism during in-game chats and associated livestreams, and Morgoth himself often combines his political rants with analyses of videogames, fantasy novels, television dramas and films.

Many of Morgoth’s videos rhapsodise about the wonders of Nature, although even these are shot through with expressions of hatred towards minority groups. In one video (YouTube, ‘A Tale of Two Country Walks’), for example, Morgoth laments that, on a visit to the Norwegian fjords, he was obliged to share his authentic appreciation of the awe-inspiring landscape with ‘cripples’ and ‘fat slobs’ who were able effortlessly to enjoy the same scenery from the comfort of an adjacent car park. Morgoth’s main business, however, is racial hatred and his regular attacks on racial minorities often contain elements of so-called scientific racism or ‘race realism’. In a 2017 blog post (‘Equality is a Cruel Mistress’), for instance, he cites a table of national IQ rankings to argue that the black Labour politician Diane Abbott, as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, is too unintelligent to be the Shadow Secretary of State.

Morgoth, and the British far right in general, are obsessed with the so-called ‘Asian grooming gangs’ that have come to light in English towns such as Rochdale and Telford in recent years. Research produced by the Home Office suggests that the sexual grooming of young girls in Britain is not a disproportionately ‘Muslim problem’, but Morgoth, like other far-right figures in Britain such as Tommy Robinson, talks exclusively about Pakistani men preying on white English girls and defiling the racial purity of the nation. There’s an all-too-familiar racist fantasy at work here. In his memoir Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote luridly about the ‘satanic joy’ of ‘the black-haired Jewish youth’, who ‘lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people’. The image of a racialised Other who enjoys what is rightfully ‘ours’ and stands in the way of our own satisfaction is deeply imprinted on the fascist imagination.

Paranoid

Indeed, Morgoth, like the rest of the political far-right, is very paranoid. To justify his sense of victimhood, he conflates completely different traditions of political and philosophical thought into a single straw-man enemy. Liberalism, leftism, postmodernism, neo-liberalism and socialism are lumped together and presented as the more or less interchangeable snares of the Machiavellian globalists. Unsurprisingly, this leads Morgoth into incoherence and self-contradiction; in one video he even makes the bizarre claim that socialists have been responsible for ushering in ’a globalist, capitalist society’ (YouTube, ‘The Good, the Bragg and the Stormzy’).

The question therefore arises: why should we pay any attention to confused bigots like Morgoth? One reason is that there is clearly a receptive audience for their ideas. Research findings published by the organisation Cybersecurity for Democracy last year showed that far-right news stories produce far more user engagement, in the form of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, than other types of online content. Some of the key figures on the far right, meanwhile, have significant numbers of followers. At the time of writing, Morgoth himself has nearly 50,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. He has also been given mainstream credibility – if that is the right word for it – by featuring as a guest on the podcast of the British conservative hack James Delingpole. In 2019 the singer Morrissey even shared a Morgoth video on his website. All in all, it’s a level of exposure that socialists could only dream of. It’s therefore worth considering the reasons for the popularity of this type of content.

It has to be said that some of Morgoth’s material is quite entertaining. Morgoth can turn a good phrase and knows how to appeal to his listeners’ interest in popular culture. In one video, for example, he indulges in a fairly amusing rant against the 90s television chef Jamie Oliver, suggesting that the ‘middle-class’ neo-liberal multiculturalism that arose in the New Labour years was ‘forged in the basket of Jamie Oliver’s moped, alongside the quail eggs and Japanese lager’ (YouTube, ‘Do Millennials Dream of Jamie Oliver’s Moped’). This combination of comedic sarcasm and pop-culture awareness gives Morgoth’s content a certain piquancy.

Phoney radicalism

Another dangerous aspect of Morgoth’s work is its phoney radicalism. Morgoth’s philosophical touchstones are the fascist favourites Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Evola, Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger. But he is canny enough to acknowledge some leftist thinkers, too. In one video (YouTube, ‘My Trip Down South’) he alludes to Jacques (sic) Deleuze and he often refers to the leftist philosopher Mark Fisher. For example, to support his own critique of cultural decline under neo-liberalism, he draws on Fisher’s concept of the ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ – the interesting claim that cultural innovation has stagnated since the 1990s and that popular culture today is merely recycling the themes and styles of earlier periods.

In fact, like so many fascist writings, Morgoth’s musings often appear to be consistent with socialist understandings. For example, he attacks the commodification of human life that capitalism produces (although he contradicts himself by warning white women to be mindful of their declining ‘sexual market value’, which sounds pretty commodifying to us). He is also critical of contemporary liberal catchwords such as ‘white privilege’ – as are socialists, since such notions tend to undermine working-class solidarity. Morgoth’s critique of Extinction Rebellion (YouTube, ‘Extinction Rebellion: Worst Controlled Opposition EVER!’), meanwhile, also has a superficial affinity with socialist arguments. Morgoth makes the point that XR are not a truly radical group and that their demands essentially amount to a call for working-class austerity; again, socialists would be inclined to agree. But Morgoth predictably blames the environmental crisis on overpopulation and ignores the fundamental role of capitalist production and over-production in generating global heating and other environmental threats. In fact, it’s not clear whether he even accepts the reality of human-made global heating, as he seems to reject the notion of scientific consensus; when it comes to understanding the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, he places his faith in the mumbo jumbo of the discredited scientific crank Dolores Cahill (YouTube, ‘A Letter From The NHS’). As always, the fascist mind rejects the scientific, materialist analyses of social phenomena in favour of scapegoating and irrational conspiracy-mongering.

As already noted, Morgoth is far from the only racial nationalist at work on the internet today and regular debates among nationalists of various stripes sometimes attract thousands of viewers. And while these men sometimes trade in outright lies and misrepresentations – for example, Morgoth suggests in one video that Marx and Engels might have been funded by the Rothschild banking family (YouTube, ‘The People vs The Gammon’) – their ideas are often couched in radical-sounding language, providing critiques of capitalism, ‘neo-liberalism’, consumerism and commodification. This is, of course, the socialism of fools. But what gives far-right ideas their traction and plausibility – at least among some white working-class people – is that they identify and seem to provide an explanation for real problems affecting our class, such as declining living standards and the lack of stable, full-time jobs and affordable housing.

How much of a political threat the far right pose today is another question. On the one hand, as we know, fascism is always over-diagnosed by left-wing commentators. While recent years have seen the establishment of neo-Nazi political organisations in Britain such as Patriotic Alternative, such groups often have a relatively short shelf-life – for example, the English Defence League, which sprang to life in 2009, has been relatively inactive for the last ten years – and some more recent groups, like National Action, have been banned by the state and forced underground. On the other hand, right-wing, authoritarian and often explicitly racist governments have come to power in recent years in several countries around the world. Then there is the question of far-right violence. Across the world, far-right terrorist attacks have become more common in recent years and are notoriously hard to predict, because their perpetrators have often been ‘radicalised’ online and are not part of any monitored group.

In recent years, the far right have largely been purged from mainstream tech platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. But it’s not clear how effective the censorship of far-right ideologues has really been: it has arguably only pushed them towards the more loosely-regulated ‘alt-tech’ platforms and handed them a propaganda advantage by allowing them to pose as victims. What we can say for sure is that, from the socialist point of view, far-right arguments need to be combated with better ones. Like all reactionaries, Morgoth is disdainful towards the academic subject of Media Studies (YouTube, ‘Clapping for Stalin and The Burnley Banner’); but the popularity of his ideas suggests a need for robust media literacy and political clarity.

Racial nationalism needs to be exposed for the nonsense it is and anybody attracted to it should know that whatever they may claim, Morgoth and his fellow Aryans don’t represent the interests of workers in Britain or anywhere else. They claim to be ‘traditionalists’, but their right-wing brand of identity politics is completely at odds with the working-class traditions of mutual aid and solidarity and with the history of working-class struggle against wage slavery. They also describe themselves as politically incorrect ‘dissidents’ or the ‘dissident right’, but in fact they are defenders of the status quo. They reproduce the dominant ideology, dividing humanity along national and racial lines and obscuring what almost all of us have in common: our membership of the exploited class.

SH

Socialism, Free Speech and ‘Cancel Culture’ (2021)

From the April 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ten years ago, I found myself the recipient of several angry emails, all sent to my work email address. My crime had been to write a letter to a student newspaper in which I criticised a student’s proposal to make it compulsory for university staff to wear a red poppy. The details of this affair aren’t relevant here and my opinions about the red poppy are easy to find elsewhere (in summary: no communist or socialist should have anything to do with the thing). Presumably unaware of the irony, one outraged nationalist emailed me to say that the Second World War was justified, since it guaranteed ‘the freedoms that we enjoy today’, and also wrote to my line manager recommending that I be disciplined for asserting otherwise. For many on the right, this is what free speech really means: freedom of speech for me and for the people who agree with me.

But some – perhaps an increasing number – of those on the left of politics are also eager to no-platform or ‘cancel’ their real or supposed ideological opponents. Weaker manifestations of cancel culture include ostracism, blanking, ghosting and gossip-mongering – the tactics of an online left that often seems hellbent on plumbing the depths of infantilism, narcissism and moralism. Sometimes leftists go even further, attacking the validity of free expression itself and seeking to curtail it. In the ‘wokest’ corners of the web today, appeals to the principle of free discourse are often mockingly parsed as ‘muh freeze peach’ and the essential foundation of radical political debate – being able to write or say what you think in dialogue with (or opposition to) others – is more and more ridiculed as the outdated obsession of centrist squares, out-of-touch boomers, or, to use the argot, ‘literal fascists’.

Left-wing suspicion of free speech is nothing new. To cite a classic example, Herbert Marcuse’s essay on ‘Repressive Tolerance’ (1965) attempted to justify the denial of freedom of speech and organisation to ‘groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race or religion’. Such groups and movements are still with us, of course, and they should be countered at every turn. But we would argue that for socialists, it doesn’t make sense to suppress repellent social and political views – something Marcuse himself recognised would be ‘undemocratic’ (albeit, in his view, a necessary step towards achieving a more genuine democracy). In general terms, expressions of prejudice and hatred should be permitted, not because there exists some ideal ‘free market of ideas’, but because it is only by discussing and debating them that their vile nature can be exposed. As John Milton famously put it in his Areopagitica ‘Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing’.

We understand the appeal of cancel culture. After all, many of the most prominent free speech advocates in today’s public sphere are unpleasant conservatives such as Toby Young, who seems to pop up every five minutes on a British television channel to complain that you can’t say anything these days. But we should not embrace cancel culture just because right wingers oppose it. For one thing, free speech, as Thomas Scanlon argued long ago, is a good in itself, regardless of any consequences its exercise might have: this is because freedom of expression – including the freedom to hear others’ speech and make judgements about it – is important to us as rational, autonomous persons who can and should be able to make up our own minds about particular issues.

Moreover, it’s not clear that cancelling even works very well. The conservative and alt-right wingnuts and hatemongers who complain the loudest about being no-platformed – we’re thinking here of Young, Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson – are actually well-connected and powerful operators who, when cancelled, usually have little difficulty in finding alternative outlets for their opinions. Depriving such characters of their platforms is therefore generally counter-productive: all too often, it only allows them (and their deluded working-class supporters) to posture as the victims of a left-wing PC purge before trotting off to their next lucrative media gig. Cancellation does not starve these toxic edgelords of the oxygen of publicity; quite the opposite, in fact.

And what about the less elevated targets of cancel culture? Cancellation can be devastating for the less well-connected. It is becoming quite commonplace for ordinary people who offend against dominant public opinion on issues such as trans rights or Brexit to suffer reputational damage or to lose work and income . And there is little doubt that such personal and financial ruination is often intended by the cancellers. Indeed, the hostile environment created by cancellation aligns perfectly with the individualist, aggressive, competitive dynamics of contemporary capitalism – the ‘abyss of failed sociality’ as Axel Honneth has so cheerily put it – and the social sadism and ‘humilitainment’ that now mars large parts of mainstream media culture.

On social media, cancel culture often involves the vicious policing of speech, pile-ons and denials-of-service for the most minor of offences against political orthodoxy by relatively powerless individuals. As Kristina Harrison has put it , cancel culture, in its dismissal of nuance and dissent, tends to elevate ‘not debate and politics but moral absolutism, authoritarianism and hysteria, the tools of the witch-hunter’. Like the witch-hunter, the canceller moves readily between criticising the ambiguous behaviours or statements of her targets to making essentialist assertions about them, so that public figures or social media influencers who make misguided, ambiguous or problematic remarks about, say, racial or trans issues automatically become racists or transphobes. This point was made well by the late Mark Fisher in his critique of left-wing call-out culture, ‘Exiting the Vampire’s Castle ‘. Veteran BreadTuber Natalie Wynn (aka. Contrapoints), herself a prominent cancellee, makes the same and many other points in her far-reaching critique of the same.

And it should go without saying that Karl Marx himself would not have been impressed by no-platforming and cancel culture, although some leftists seem to be confused about this. A meme recently on Facebook consists of a four-panel cartoon depicting alt-lite rent-a-gob Milo Yiannopoulos moaning to Karl Marx about violations of his freedom of speech. In the final panel of the sketch, Marx silently picks up Milo and throws him over a clifftop. It’s a fun image, to be sure; but it’s also misleading. In reality, Marx fiercely defended freedom of speech. In ‘On the Freedom of the Press‘ (1842), for example, Marx, with his usual sarcasm, ventriloquised the Prussian press censors of his day, mocking their hypocrisy: ‘Freedom of the press is a fine thing. But there are also bad persons, who misuse speech to tell lies and the brain to plot. Speech and thought would be fine things if only there were no bad persons to misuse them!’ In fact, Marx opposed censorship throughout his life. And anybody suspecting Marx of capitulating to liberalism in this regard should think again. As Eric Heinze argues, Marx defended free speech not as a bourgeois right, but as something more fundamental: a foundational philosophical praxis that makes possible the very discussion of rights.

Today, we socialists make up a tiny minority of the population and we have very little political and social clout. To change this situation, we need to be able to explain to other members of the working class what socialism is and why everybody will benefit from it. Sometimes this seems like an impossible task: even in relatively ‘open’, liberal societies, the major media organisations, as well as all the other institutions of capitalism, are overwhelmingly ranged against us and communist ideas are vilified, marginalised and misrepresented in both right- and left-wing media. But we must make use of whatever relatively democratic spaces and opportunities do exist to shout about socialism. To attempt to deny free speech to our opponents simply on the grounds that they hold repellent or false views, meanwhile, would be unprincipled and counter-productive; ultimately, it would only make it even easier than it already is for those in power to silence us.

S.H.

Is there an alternative? (2010)

Book Review from the July 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Mark Fisher, Zero Books, 2010

Mark Fisher’s very short book is a quick and entertaining read and makes a good companion to David Harvey (see above/last month). Where Harvey focuses mostly on the how and why of the capitalist crisis, exploring its historical, geographical and economic aspects, Fisher instead looks at how recent developments have impacted on the cultural and psychological spheres. It has led us to a situation where, he argues, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. The deathly legacy of Thatcher’s insistence that “there is no alternative’ lingers on.

Fisher’s insights are drawn partly from the heads of philosophers and partly from his own personal experience. The philosophers he quotes are famous for their obscurity and difficulty, but Fisher does a good job of making their ideas accessible for the general reader. That will put readers in a better position to decide for themselves whether the obscurity is worth penetrating.

Fisher is more interesting and amusing when he turns to his personal experience in Britain’s education system. It’s hard not to sympathise with him as he does his best to inspire dozing teenagers with learned cultural-studies discourses on Doctor Who while they slouch across their desks, plugged into their iPods, snacking on crisps. And that’s the most rewarding part of Fisher’s job. The rest of it is spent filling out forms trying to convince bureaucrats that what he has just done is of some worth in the capitalist market place.

But I’ll counter Fisher’s personal experience with my own. I, too, was once a teenage student, dozing on my desk while a professor tried his best to knock some education into me. But outside of the classroom, I was enjoying and making the most of a period of never-to-be-repeated freedom (from parental control, from capitalist work, from the responsibilities of adult and family life), and pursuing my own interests, including educating myself in socialist politics. Of course I’m not suggesting that all Fisher’s students are doing likewise. But the point is that he doesn’t know what they are doing. At a minimum, you’d have to ask them to find out.

A study of history and the social sciences, particularly anthropology, consistently reveals that things are rarely quite as they seem. Workers are never quite as oppressed and docile as they figure in the imaginations of Marxist professors. Management control is never as total as the managers and bosses dream. We are never as lost in the unrealities of television and the spectacle as French philosophers imagine. There’s always a hidden undercurrent of imaginative engagement and resistance. It’s always much more rewarding when an author has gone to the trouble of finding it and encouraging its development than denying its existence and wallowing in gloom.

Fisher concludes with some political proposals that he dresses up as exciting and new, but is mostly old fare – for example, the reinvigoration of the left, the awakening of a ‘public’ consciousness, more worker control over the labour process, popular control over the state, and so on. But to end on a positive note of agreement, Fisher at least points in vaguely the right direction if you’re after a convincing answer to the question in the subtitle of the book. Yes, there is an alternative, he says, but the working class will have to organise politically if it ever wants to see it.

Stuart Watkins