Though perhaps the term “de-platformed’ is a touch too histrionic, I have nevertheless had my status as a contributor to one of my outlets, the UK-based music criticism publication The Quietus, revoked. Though I was positively gutted when I first received the email by my now former editor John Doran, I quickly couldn’t help but shake my head in astonishment at the baseless accusation leveled at me in justification of the severed relationship.
Now, it could be possible that Doran had had additional issues with me other than the specific charge leveled against me in the email. For example, I tend to over-write and get lost in long chains of thought while producing content. However much I try to self-edit and condense my work for clarity, I admittedly benefit from an editor’s second opinion, a second draft, and typically a third draft (I am nostalgic for the rigorous editing process and firmly believe that great editors make great writers). There was once a time in publishing that this would have been the essential relationship between writer and editor, but in the precarious media economy of late capitalism, that relationship has been lost as editors and publishers are forced to over-work and take on larger managerial responsibilities to keep their publications alive. This often leaves the job of editor to the writer in question, and self-editing is an area of content production that I struggle with.
Doran and I have also bucked heads over my tendency towards mediating my thought with the other writers, philosophers, and theorists that I read. This is a perfectly fair criticism given that the publication is geared towards music fans and not philosophy students and political scientists. It is also a tendency that I was more than happy to self-censor in interest of meeting the site’s readers where they are.
Ultimately, I did not have a contract. And Doran, as the editor of the publication, is more than free to alleviate me of my position for any reason that he likes, and the aforementioned reasons could be as strong a justification as any given the limited resources of independent publishers.
But this wasn’t the reason that Doran specified in his email that he sent to me. Allegedly, Doran’s choice to sever ties with me stems from an article that I shared on my twitter last week that was written by one DC Miller. DC Miller became a figure of controversy when he defended the now defunct British art gallery LD50’s right to host a series of talks by other controversial figures; some of these figures are most likely accurately categorized as right wing, like Brett Stephens, while others are a bit more ideologically idiosyncratic, like Nick Land (whose politics I don’t agree with although I still hold immense respect for his thought and in particular his analysis of Bataille in his now infamous philosophical text A Thirst for Annihilation).
To my knowledge, Miller had not argued in favor of or against a specific political theory, but just defended the gallery’s right to produce intellectual debate. His choice to do so was met with the vitriolic response of one performance artist Luke Turner (not to be confused with The Quietus’ own Luke Turner, who I can verify is indeed a very swell, kind person who was both incredibly helpful and encouraging of my work in music criticism). Turner had turned cancel culture into an art world subculture of its own, “doxxing” and ruining the careers of young artists like Deanna Havas, academics like Miller, and even important leftwing intellectuals like Nina Power, the author of One-Dimensional Woman and a comrade of none other than the late Mark Fisher, who all but pioneered the criticism of cancel culture on the left with his brilliant essay Exiting the Vampire Castle. Turner, an heir to a sizable family fortune (the flagrant inequality between Turner’s boogeymen and Turner in terms of access to wealth and resources should be noted here), didn’t just terrorize thinkers and artists not associated with the left, but was often particularly vitriolic towards leftists who might now be described as “class reductionists,” the anti-communist smear of the day. It should also be noted that both Miller and Power are currently in litigation with Turner to claim damages in restitution for the fallouts of his libelous smear campaigns.
Over the last few years, Miller has been self-publishing essays about the anti-debate and anti-speech sentiments within not just the left, but the broader cultural mainstream. Though Miller and I probably do have real political differences, I can’t help but find some fascination in his critiques. They poetically deconstruct the atmosphere of paranoia that has been constructed around political discourse in digital capitalism. One common misunderstanding of Marxism is that it demands ideological hegemony, when in fact it is less a rejection of liberal values like free speech and free debate than an embracing of those concepts; its rejection of liberal capitalism largely stems from liberalism’s inability to deliver those liberties to the masses. In my ideal world, we would all be taken care of materially, there would be no class and no hierarchy, and with that material security we would be able to engage in broader cultural debate and exchange ideas and disagree with one another in good faith.
Doran writes in the email: “I cannot employ someone who shows any kind of public support for DC Miller - a potentially dangerous alt-right philosopher/agitator and supporter of conspiracy theory etc. And I have little time for the 'Well, I don't agree with everything he says but he is refreshing...' school of thought which is just, 'Hitler did wonders for employment and public transport' but with a hipster's record collection.”
Think of all the layers of wrong embedded into this sentiment. Doran correctly points out that Miller might “potentially” be dangerous. This of course means that we don’t know enough about him to make this claim, but nevertheless that there is a vocal contingent of people who have leveled that accusation. Personally, Miller has struck me as something of a Schopenhauerian liberal. A liberal pessimist of sorts, one who isn’t engaged with politics all that deeply but does adamantly believe that the right to free debate is an important one. He certainly doesn’t seem invested in silencing his critics beyond those who have forced him out of his livelihood. It’s hard to see how a critic whose one political position is the protection of free speech is a Nazi, but that’s where we are today. Even more outrageous is his Hitler comparison. Somehow Miller, a writer of provocative texts that contradict the constructed taboos in our discourse, is comparable to the most prolific mass murderer in the recent history of our species. And not only that, but by tweeting admiration for Miller’s prose (I also love Lovecraft and Céline without condoning their abhorrent views on race and Judaism), however soft or noncommittal, I am also somehow Hitler, “but with a hipster’s record collection,” (the dismissive tone of that line is astonishingly petty, is it not?), despite being: A. Jewish (not that that should even matter), and B. a longtime vocal advocate of leftist, socialist, and emancipatory principles. But that also isn’t the point.
The second implication here is that by tweeting a sentence that I found to be both provocative and insightful, I become immediately and directly associated with Miller, or even worse, that my politics must also be a reflection of his politics. If I had tweeted a quote of Heidegger, would I be advocating for his turn towards Nazism? If I were to quote Mark E. Smith (a hero of mine and Doran’s), would I be implicitly endorsing the “problematic” remarks made by Smith throughout his entire career? Of course not, I would simply be expressing admiration for a thoughtful work of art or prose. One can’t help but point out that the only difference here seems to be in institutional support. Few philosophy programs on Earth would think it was wise to totally remove Heidegger’s thought from their courses, despite the grotesqueness of his politics during the second world war. Miller, though, has been de-platformed, which gives free rein to anyone to smear him from all angles.
The irony here should be lost on no one: Miller’s article is about this very tendency towards “guilt by association” narratives that has been woven into the fabric of cancel culture on the left. Somehow, my entire life’s dedication to left politics, working class reforms, two Bernie Sanders campaigns, and other left political engagements is negated by my interest in, at the very least, this one article written by a writer who has been deemed to be “problematic.”
Perhaps the most stunning line is the final one in the email, when Doran flatly tells me that “he will not discuss this issue with me further.” I find this to be the most troublesome sentiment. It’s not like Doran and I are strangers to each other, we’ve exchanged emails about music and writing for upwards of a year now. But now I am unworthy of even being able to explain my position? All the work that I had done for The Quietus, often produced without expectation of pay because I was happy to have an outlet that I admired give me the chance to share my passions in music with an audience, now means nothing? I caught myself thinking, “Fuck, if I had known this would be the fallout of posting that tweet I wouldn’t have don’t it, this isn’t worth it.” But I quickly reassessed this position as one of moral cowardice. I truly have nothing to apologize for.
I am hardly the internet’s most transgressive figure. I am just another disaffected leftist, depressed and dejected at what passes for progressive politics in 2020. I also can’t say that I didn’t see this coming. I had mentioned to my fiancé weeks ago that cultural liberalism was supplanting socialist politics, and that The Quietus’ recent turn towards more identitarian content would put me ideologically at odds with the publication. Clearly, I am deeply critical of identity politics and especially of its manifestations within today’s left. It was just a few months ago that Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn seemed like they were about to pull off the impossible: winning on a left political program that brought together vastly diverse people around shared class interests. But with those movements crushed, culture war has washed away all substantive left critique of political economy.
Culture war is what remains when politics have eroded, when hope for real change has died. As journalist Lee Fang, himself the subject of recent targeted smear campaigns with similar accusations, coincidentally tweeted shortly after I received Doran’s email: “There’s mass withdrawal from meaningful engagement around health care reform, inequality or scaling back the military. Too difficult. Much more satisfying to constantly police language, denounce romantic relationships, join woke mobs over trial disagreements.” It is not atypical to have this intra-left chaos following a crushing defeat, but the speed (post-Bernie and post-Corbyn) at which the left has reverted back to reactionary culture war and retreated from substantive material demands and political economic critique is shocking.
My firing from The Quietus is indicative of this culture of fear that has risen to the surface of the discourse. My twitter account can be rather flagrant and provocative (a little, sometimes, I’ve been edgy since Joe Biden won the nomination), and I often criticize some of the left’s most beloved figures. I don’t criticize these figures from the right, I criticize them specifically because their politics have functionally little to do with real socialism or they misunderstand the core of left politics in specific ways. These are radical liberals (“radlibs”), and a radical liberal is merely a reactionary. I am critiquing these figures FROM THE LEFT, for their inability to pose a challenge to the capitalist parties that they are institutionally embedded within, and for the abject disappointments that have defined their careers so far (for example, AOC’s rise as the “new socialist democrat” has proven farcical since she seemed to become a democrat loyalist from very early on in her governance, all while pushing the most toxic aspects of woke culture into her political brand, alienating actually working class people from the socialist project we want them to be a part of).
To be clear: my politics are emancipatory, The abolition of hierarchy and class is my project. I just don’t see how emancipatory politics can be enacted by a left that is this quick to silence, shame, and yes, fire its own radical thinkers. Did my broader politics impact Doran’s quick to judge reaction to my posting of Miller’s article? There’s no way to know. But the implication here is rather damning. Doran knows my politics; I know he knows them because of the times he complained about my references to my favorite leftist theorists in articles that I wrote for The Quietus; but somehow my appreciation of certain aspects of Miller’s thought and writing has erased any good will that I may have accumulated.
Now ask yourselves: if a self-avowed Marxist like me, a staunch advocate for a world without class-based or racial division, is too right wing for The Quietus, what do these types think of ordinary working people who often have infinitely more right leaning views than I have? If I am a reactionary, what are the guys that I used to work in kitchens with throughout my teens and twenties? The logic here is devastating: the identitarian leftists who claim to speak on behalf of the marginalized effectively have nothing but contempt for them (and that isn’t just white working class people, polls have shown consistently that working POCs also hold little agreement with some of the activist left’s slogans, a majority of black Americans support MORE funding of police, for instance, despite believing that yes, American police has a race problem, but the reactionary tendencies of the progressives make it impossible for them to understand nuance and contradiction, also a problem). I’ve been very forthright about my political goals. I am absolutely disgusted by poverty, by real marginalization. NO ONE, black, white, asian, latino, or otherwise, should struggle to survive in a society this rich. You would think this would be a noble goal, but my rejection of identity politics has put a target on my head, or so it would appear (again, this is conjecture).
It has to be one of capitalism’s most diabolical achievements yet. The cancel culture logic of radlibs and woke ideology is functionally indistinguishable from that which was practiced by Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare. But the old fashioned right wing “they are all communists!” smears aren’t all that convincing anymore, largely because the right wing’s logic is no longer interwoven into the monoculture. To effectively smear communists now, capital has realized that it needs to do so “from the left.” Thus, while right wing figures smear the entire left (all the way from liberal NGO organizations through the proudly neoconservative democratic nominee Joe Biden) as “socialist,” dulling the affect of whatever dim-witted points that they’re attempting to make (“Venezuela!”), the most effective silencing of Marxist thought comes from within the left itself.
Marxism is, regardless of what so many leftists think today, inherently an anti-identity political project (there is no bigger “class reductionist” than Karl Marx). It builds its critique upon the foundational concept that solidarity is a condition of shared material interests. We are all equal, we all deserve lives of dignity, period. A purist left movement would be able to bring together white working class people who voted for Trump AND Middle Eastern immigrants around basic working class demands: better wages, free healthcare, affordable housing, etc. This is the political project that I dream of, and it will never happen as long as identitarianism remains at the center of the discourse.
Today, Marxists aren’t smeared as “dangerous radicals” who threaten the American way of life by right wingers. We are smeared by allegedly progressive leftists (wielding a specifically commodified brand of faux moralism) for: not being “intersectional” enough (a smear constantly weaponized against Bernie Sanders himself), being “too white” or “too male” to understand the struggles of those different from us (this works less when the class reductionist in question is Adolph Reed or Cedrick Johnson), or that we are functionally racist and unconcerned with racial disparities. I am concerned with racial disparities, I just see very clearly that universal redistribution would help ALL of the people who need help, regardless of their race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.
There is no need to atomize working class people by identity. Working class people of all races need radical changes to the political economy desperately, rich people of all races benefit from the political economy as it is now. To be even more specific, a poor black man benefits from a tax increase on the rich to fund single payer healthcare, while that same structural change is manifestly detrimental to a black man who is rich. Thus, working class people of different races near unanimously share political interests, while people of the same race but of a different class are fundamentally at odds with and antagonistic towards one another structurally. This is not complicated, and yet I’ve heard self-described leftists actually attack the premises of this concept. You see, most of the rose emoji socialists on Twitter aren’t “socialists,” or they don’t understand socialism enough to make that proclamation. They still view history as a battle of moral will, while socialism demands we view history as a material struggle. Why would a left project be focused on helping those who are already in control of mass amounts of resources?
By using leftists to de-platform Marxists, capitalists have found an incredibly useful method of silencing radical critics whose political proscriptions could actually pose a structural threat to the logic of late capitalist political economy. The left has tragically become a kind of moral laundromat for the ruling elite. At this moment, the majority of Americans are just two paychecks away from bankruptcy, and yet “leftists” are more concerned with waging culture war, getting people fired, complaining that Netflix has contracts with alleged “transphobes” like Dave Chapelle, ruining male artists and young leftist political hopefuls for totally normative and non-criminal sex lives, and terrorizing people online. So ask yourself, is this really what you thought a “left movement” would look like?
I don’t mean to suggest that Doran had all of this in his mind when he shit canned me Sunday. But I do mean to point out that this hegemonic thought has become increasingly disturbing. If Doran had other issues with me as a contributor, that’s fine, but he rationalized his choice with my interest in some aspects of another writer’s work. It’s hard to wrap my head around how this is just. How do I know that I simply am not the victim of hearsay? Literally anyone online could see my tweet, google “DC Miller”, find the accusations around Miller, and then just level those accusations at me, despite all other indicators of my political orientation.
As stated above, the Quietus, like most independent publications, is precarious, and perhaps any controversy I might create could be just not worth the risk. Again, I don’t know if this is really about my tweeting of Miller’s article, a larger indictment of my online presence, or just about me being difficult to edit at times. I don’t know, but this experience has resulted in an explosion of thought concerning things that have been on my mind for years...
Am I “cancelled?” No, not really. I still have other outlets that seem interested in what I have to say, and it’s not like I earn enough writing to quit my day job anyways. But when I hear young leftists justify these punitive actions with statements such as “oh what do you care you’re middle class” or “you can just go write for right wing publications now,” I think a few things must be stated. First of all, yes. My loss of title at the Quietus will not plunge me into poverty. I was a precarious downwardly mobile middle class citizen yesterday, and I remain as one today. I keep a regular day job (well, at least before the pandemic) and these gigs aren’t lucrative in the first place.
But it’s not about money. When you cancel someone based on such questionable and ambiguous grounds, you are disconnecting that person from their passion. From the thing they love to do. This is my creative expression: sharing my interests and fascinations. Experimental music is one of my fascinations, and one of the few publications dedicated to experimental music has deemed me too problematic for the site, allegedly. However small this might seem in the grand scheme, I assure you getting cut off from an audience in any way, shape, or form, is painful.
Two: I am not a right winger. Why should I have to write for right wing publications when that has never been a theory of politics that I have subscribed to or endorsed? I think of Angela Nagle, one of the sharpest left political critics of our epoch, being ostracized from almost all of left media for publishing an article that offered a Marxist analysis of the fallacies surrounding “open borders” as “left” political ideology. Nagle should be one of the writers we are engaging with right now, given that the warnings she has heeded about the self defeating tendencies of the left couldn’t have come more true in both of the failures of our great leftist hopes of recent history: Sanders and Corbyn. I don’t want to be relegated to a strictly right wing audience solely for rejecting some of the more illiberal tendencies of the contemporary left, I want a leftist (and otherwise, diverse) audience that might engage with the substance of my ideas in good faith.
I assume my content published by The Quietus will be visible for the time being, though I don’t know. I’ve already been blocked from the site’s twitter page. As far as the column that I started to discuss the inherent “genrelessness” of much of contemporary noise music, my hope is that The Quietus will disband it all together. It is something I’d like to continue to pursue in the form of self-publishing.
Though I am hurt, I am not angry. On some level, I understand the pressure that independent publishers are under to avoid any associations or controversies that the status quo orthodoxies of contemporary left liberalism might find unsavory or questionable. I also learned a lot from Doran, who was incredibly helpful in getting me to get at the root of what I’m trying to say as a writer without the additional fluff and adjective peddling that can characterize much of the criticism in contemporary art publishing (the publishing world where I spent most of my early career working within). I apologize to the artists and musicians whose work I had written about recently, as I do not know if these articles will see the light of day.
I’m writing about this not so much in defense of myself (very few people in my life mistake my politics as anything less than dedicated to the emancipation of materially deprived working class people), but as a way of emphasizing: this is a problem. The woke ideology is one that is totally embraced by and consistent with market capitalism, and with less and less Marxists empowered to challenge neoliberal ideology critically, the logic of capital grows further entrenched.
Beyond that, what is the point of art, philosophy, and criticism if not to deconstruct the hegemonic ideology of the world we live in? What is the point if not to critique the world we inhabit? There is none. Without free thought, there is no art. Creativity can’t flourish in a world where only one ideology is deemed acceptable and ethical.
The Tweet in Question