What the Hell Happened to Samizdat Chronicles?

Q: What the hell happened to Samizdat Chronicles?

A: Samizdat Chronicles is now The Alternative Left on blogger.  

Q: Why?

A: To make it easier to find, to make it among the search results when "alt left" or "alternative left" is entered into a search engine.  Ultimately, so that it's the Alt-Left itself that defines itself, since there's a lot of confusion in the media about exactly what the Alt-Left is.

Q: So what's changed?

A: The appearance.  The layout.

Q: What's stayed the same?

A: The content and the author's towering intellect. <grin>  I'd also like to bring additional writers on board, and eventually turn this blog into a sort of news and opinion forum for people with alt-left points of view.  Hard as this may be to believe, I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

Q: You're not?  Who the hell are you, anyway?

A: I get that all the time. <laughs>  My friends know who I am.  It's not hard to figure out.  I came to the Alt-Left in the spring of 2016.  I started the page Alternative Left on Facebook in April of 2016, and launched this blog and its accompanying YouTube channel around the same time.  Plus, I've been in other forums and media that host Alt-Left views.  I blog under the names Agent Commie and Ernest Everhard - if you don't know, he was the main protagonist in Jack London's classic dystopian novel, The Iron Heel.  Think of that book as a Marxist mirror image of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.  Ernest Everhard is to historical materialism what John Galt was to objectivism, just without the huge long author filibuster.  

Q: Is the Alt-Left Marxist?

A: Some Alt-Leftists are.  A good way to think of the Alt-Left is in contrast to the Alt-Right.  If the Alt-Right are race realists, the Alt-Left are class realists.  Meaning that we accept that class differences are real.  

This means that capitalism is a very different system for people who must sell their labor power for a wage in order to survive than it is for people who own capital, meaning productive assets, or shares thereof.  The evidence for this is that since neoliberal globalization triumphed in the 1980s and 90s, incomes and wealth have grown vastly more for high income earners and people with high levels of net worth.  For the middle and working classes, it's been stagnation or decline.  

Most people on the Alt-Left are not full fledged Marxists or communists, though.  The majority favor classic social democracy - a reinvigorated social safety net and regulatory system, modern monetary theory, universal single payer health care, stuff like that.   The Alt-Left was energized quite a bit by Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential bid.  Though he did not win the Democratic Nomination, he showed that there was measurable public support for a candidate running on an economically progressive platform and who even referred to himself as a democratic socialist.  In America.  Imagine that.

Q: This sounds like the Old Left.  Is that what the Alt-Left is?

A: Kind of.  The Alt-Left's ultimate aim is to push back against neoliberal dominance in political, economic and social spheres.  This puts the Alt-Left outside the mainstream of center left politics, which has almost completely capitulated to the right wing in economic philosophy, especially since the collapse of communism and the waning of organized labor in the wake of neoliberal globalization.  Replacing social democratic economics as the centerpiece of center leftism has been postmodern identity politics and cultural issues.  Terms such as "political correctness", "social justice warrior" and "regressive left" describe a world view and its adherents that attributes power and privilege to race and gender rather than class that has become hegemonic in academia and from there has spread into other cultural spheres.  The Alt-Left thinks this has been very harmful.

Q: The Alt-Left claims to be against identity politics.  Do you deny the existence of discrimination against women, people of color and other marginalized groups?

A: No.  This idea gets advanced by regressive leftists and SJWs, and it misconstrues what we mean when we say identity politics.  Think of Martin Luther King Jr's dream that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.  This is the ultimate repudiation of identity politics, because it claims that identity should not matter compared to personal character.  This is what most Alt-Leftists favor.

Identity politics means making identity - one's race, gender, sexual orientation or whatever - a determinist characteristic.  Influenced by postmodernism, post-structuralism in philosophy and textual criticism and so on, classical liberal approaches to the issues faced by minorities was pushed back in favor of a more aggressively nationalistic approach. So concepts like white privilege, male privilege and so on were applied in a very sweeping and reductionist way, asserting that all whites/males were sexist and racist.  It was asserted that women and people of color couldn't be racist or sexist because these things were defined as power plus prejudice.  

Particularly alarming were the assertions that speech that offended so called marginalized peoples needed to be curtailed, as a necessary means of creating more inclusive and equal environments.  Academic authorities and mainstream media capitulated to this line of reasoning almost completely without question. So you're seeing more and more no-platforming on college campuses, so called safe spaces, the gross misuse of trigger warnings.  Trigger warnings were supposed to be for PTSD sufferers, and applied to very specific things.  This is gravely troubling for most Alt-Leftists.  

On the other hand, we're equally troubled by the right wing, which seems to be capitalizing on public resentment against leftist identity politics to advance reactionary agendas.  We already see this with Donald Trump in the White House, the rise of the Alt-Right, and so on.    

Q: So the Alt-Left is strongly supportive of free speech?

A: Oh, very much so.  Most of us, anyway.  It is vitally important that a segment of the left stand up and speak out in favor of free speech, because the left is in very real danger of ceding the entire issue to the right.  A whole lot of people were left in political limbo, because they support free speech but don't trust conservatives and libertarians on a host of other issues, economic issues especially.  This is devastating for everybody.  Having to choose between free speech and free expression on the one hand, and protections against corporate excess and abuses on the other is an awful choice to force people to make.

Q: Another Alt-Left site calls itself 'The Left Wing of the Alt-Right' and entertains ideas of race realism.  Is the Alt-Left race realist?

A: Many of the early Alt-Leftists were race realists.  The term was first used by bloggers who had defected, or were offshoots from the Alt-Right.  They advocate race realism alongside liberal politics and leftist economics.  A tough circle to square, if you ask me.  The idea is not favored by most Alt-Leftists I've had dealings with.  The problem with it stems from the difficulties in serving two masters, so to speak.  How can we be class realists while supporting one of the harshest ways of stratifying a society that history has yet seen? 

Personally, I have no interest in or use for claims of vast differences in IQ, for example, across racial lines.  These claims are almost always advanced in the interests of puffing up white nationalist egos and the so called "science" backing up the claim is a legitimizing facade for this.  This has been my experience, at any rate.   But a growing problem has been that more and more alienated white youth are becoming receptive to Alt-Right claims.  On the surface, it's easy to be dismissive of 4chan culture, the preoccupation with meme warfare and cartoon frogs and so on.  But don't underestimate it.  It's tailored quite nicely to its target audience.  

And the regressive left doesn't help matters.  They ceaselessly lecture the young white male on his privilege, when he probably doesn't have it that good.  It goes back to what I mentioned above about class.  The regressive left is class-blind.  That's why they conflate being white male with privilege.  So they blame being white where they should blame power.  They blame being male where they should blame greed.  The descent of the mainstream left into this anti-western civilization, anti-white, anti-male hate cult ends up legitimizing the narratives of the macho and racist Alt-Right.  The two sides feed off one another.

Q: Well, that's just about it.  You mentioned earlier about turning this blog into a broader Alt-Left forum?

A: I think so.  There's a lot of ideas and enthusiasm among Alt-Leftists.  If other Alt-Left thinkers are interested in publishing articles on this forum, I'd be happy to accept submissions.  Email them to me or else indicate in the comments section either here or on Facebook, and if the submission is at all cohesive and the feedback is good, the author can become a regular contributor.  

My Own Alt Left Manifesto

Alternative left manifestos are springing up left and right these days.  Let's not forget some of the older mainstays, such as Rabbit's Counter Currents article and Bob Lindsay's definition of the alt left, more based on what it isn't than what it is.  Others abound, amidst a growing bevy of media exposure, most of which is getting us entirely and completely wrong.

I've wandered into these waters myself, on occasion.  Sort of.  But only in a somewhat general sense.  So some clarity then.  What follows is an abbreviated outline of what I call "My own Alt-Left Manifesto.  With Blackjack and Hookers." A treatise on Postmodern Political Economy .  

Prelude

• Since the end of WWII, the American left has been primarily concerned with anti-racism, while the American right has been primarily concerned with anti-communism.  While there are other concerns in both cases, those ones dominate.
• Both sides have therefore been successful.  Not totally successful, but more or less so.  The left has seen the passage of civil rights laws, affirmative action, an anti-racist consensus among the general public and even elected a black man for two consecutive terms in the oval office.  The right has seen the dissolution of the USSR, market reforms in China, and a retreat of ideological socialism in most parts of the world.
• Despite, or possibly because of this success, both sides of the US political spectrum have vocal factions that are more rather than less strident and fanatical, such as the paleo-cons and the Tea Party on the right and Black Lives Matter and the social justice warriors on the left.
• What typifies these strident ideologues is epistemic closure - the ideologies are marked by obsessive preoccupation with issues that are of little relevance to others (microaggressions, democrats coming to take everybody's guns away, safe spaces, tax revolt etc) refuse dialogue and negotiation and are impervious to persuasion.  All liberals are America hating cultural Marxists, all white males are racist and sexist, and so on.
• Epistemic closure and overall ideological excess has been enabled by the rise and spread of postmodern philosophy and thought: first in academia and subsequently throughout popular culture.  Postmodernism isn't an easy thing to pin down, but critical to it is a rejection of philosophical objectivism on all levels.  Postmodernists would not only claim that morality is subjective, but also that very axiomatic concepts: the nature of basic perception of reality and the foundations of thought, are socially constructed.  The resulting denial of a common reality and a common set of moral and philosophical principles binding to all has caused increased political and social fragmentation and divisiveness.
• Alternative politics have arisen out of frustration with the above and with how tepid and unresponsive mainstream centrist politics is.  Alternative politics have been further enabled by the enhanced reach and networking capability of social media.
• In response to the race-obsessed left, the Alternative Right is marked by "race realism", white nationalism and a narrative of white victimhood at the hands of a militant left enabled by a weak state, corporate power and obliviousness on part of a mainstream right too preoccupied with wealth accumulation to be at all concerned with preservation of European cultural and racial heritage.

Class Realism

• In keeping with the above, in response to the wealth and property obsessed right, the Alternative Left is marked by "class realism," working and middle class solidarity and a narrative of class war waged by a greedy right enabled by a weak state, corporate power and obliviousness on part of a mainstream left too preoccupied with identity politics to be at all concerned with the welfare of working and middle class people.
• "Class Realism" is defined as acknowledging the reality of class, in the historical materialist sense of the term.  Meaning that class is marked by relations of production - some people make their living entirely off ownership of capital through rent, interest, dividends and so on, while others make their living only by selling their own labor power, while still others are some combination of the two, with wildly varying income levels all around.  Class is best seen then in terms of income, net worth and relations of production.
• Class realism acknowledges that at least since the elections of Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, western governments have been waging active class war against their own working classes.  This is chiefly marked by the exporting of jobs, importing of mass surplus labor, attacking the unions, deregulation, privatization, and the enabling of large amounts of private and public debt.
• While the right wing has been the main driver in this class warfare, it has been enabled by a regressive left that has displayed neutrality on class and economic issues and defines oppression and marginalization instead in terms of culture and identity, causing socially destructive racial and sexual strife and enabling the right's class warfare.

Manifesto of the Alt Left

• The alt left shall strive to be principled but not dogmatic.  Its primary purpose should be able to passionately and philosophically advocate on behalf of the material needs and interests of the working and middle classes, in favor of policies that materially benefit the broader portion of the population and defend them against rentier policies and economics that would only benefit the few.
• The alt left shall remain committed to full employment and worker's rights at all times.
• The alt left recognizes and opposes all forms bigotry as being socially divisive and undermining working class consciousness and solidarity.  But the alt-left does not recognize any form of systemic racial or sexual oppression as taking place in the western world, and rejects the self serving regressive left dogmas of privilege theory and "power plus prejudice."  
• The alt left recognizes no preferred racial, sexual, gender, ethnic or religious categories, and shall not hinder or oppose free expression thereof or free identification with any of them, subject of course to the laws that govern us all.
• The alt left shall value rationality, reason, free thought and other enlightenment humanist values.  The alt left should eschew dogmatism, fanaticism and be no place for the "true believer."  Conversely, the alt-left should be skeptical of postmodernism and its doctrines of extreme cultural relativism and social constructionism.  Romanticism and religion are important aspects of human nature whose free expression in the private realm should be protected, but are poor guides to governance and public policy.
• The alt left is therefore civilly and culturally libertarian.  The alt left fights for rights, not feelings.  Censorship and penalizing of "offensive" speech is dangerous in light of the fact that what is deemed offensive is subjective.  The alt-left recognizes no special prerogatives (such as past or present marginalized status) on part of any segment of society to censor or penalize expression it deems offensive.
• The Alt Left is gravely concerned about ideological capture of higher education, social media and mass media, and the abuse of organizational structures of these institutions by managerial personnel acting as ideological gatekeepers.  This should be a matter of public concern and corrective measures sought out and taken.
• The alt left believes that questions of human biodiversity across racial and gender lines is a matter best left to scientists rather than politicians, and should no way alter our commitment to the above listed principles.
• The alt left believes that intervention in the affairs of other nations does much more harm than good the vast majority of the time.
• The alt left recognizes that fossil fuels will not last forever and that their ongoing use contributes to climate change, pollution and habitat degradation.  It would well behoove us to research and convert to renewable and clean sources of energy sooner rather than later.

The Other Red Pill: Wake Up! Class is Back in Session!

I mentioned previously that societies that romanticize revolution and demonize capitalists do so at a heavy cost.  But then, so do societies that fail to take materialist definitions of class into account when looking at both economic and social issues.  To say that our society has suffered enormously as a result of a lack of class in its political outlook is an understatement of grand proportions.

Historical materialism was consigned to the dustbin of history very prematurely.  The failure of the USSR was not the failure of this kind of an outlook on political economy.  If anything, we've been failing for a lack of it, as I've tried to demonstrate throughout the Other Red Pill Series.  To address numerous social problems, it must be resurrected and rehabilitated, without a lot of the other Marxist baggage it became burdened with over time.  Let's just pretend that Lenin and everything after in the east and the Frankfurt School and everything after in the west never happened, shall we?

In fact, I would go as far as to say that The resuscitation of economic class, as defined in Marx's materialist conception of history, must be THE central project of alternative-left politics.  This is what the Other Red Pill is ultimately really all about.  What we do with that knowledge, as it becomes more mainstream, is up to us. 

But the truancy of the left must come to an end.  It's time to wake up.  Identitarians of all stripes and neo-liberals have kept the wool over our eyes for far too long now.  It's time for the alt-left to take them back to school: class is back in session!

Alt Left sub types revisited

Of all my blog posts so far, the one that has promoted the most discussion in alt-left circles - such as they are - to date has been my breakdown of sub types on the alt-left.

Just for reference's sake, here are the main ones.  What unites them is a skepticism towards unbridled capitalism.

Left Wing of the Alt Right: Nationalists, open to race realism.
Red Templars: Anti Islamists, oppose mass immigration.
Gamergate Leftists: Cultural libertarians, anti SJW.  Not necessarily into GamerGate itself, these guys are most concerned about censorship, campus speech codes, trigger warnings, safe spaces and the like.
Brocialists: Leftist anti-feminists, pro MRA or even pro MGTOW.
Red Enlightenment: Big on enlightenment values.  Sometimes into transhumanism, technocracy.
True Liberals: Anti-racist, pro-feminist (pro equity feminism, in any event) but put off by SJW extremism.  I've noticed a subcategory of these who are, say, cisgendered gay males or transgender people who've quarreled with trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs.)  I'll call these kinds Equal Rights Advocates.  Perhaps you recognize yourself among them, dear reader?
New Old Left: Predominantly about economics, class, labor, etc.  Disdainful of IdPol.
Christian Left: See Acts 2: 44-46, Catholic Social Teaching, the Social Gospel and Liberation Theology.
Patriotic Socialists: Socially conservative (in some ways at least) and economically leftist.  Okay, I didn't mention this one in the last post.  I am now.

And what of left wing conspiracy theorists?  Think Alex Jones, except for blue rather than red staters?  Who obsess over the New World Order rather than the (((New World Order.)))  Oh yeah, they already exist.  And have for a long time. 

I think I should clarify a few things here.

As a general rule, these are not hard-fast categories.  Please, my dear readers, don't obsess with categorizing yourself.  Not unless one or more really does fit you.  Even then, keep an open mind.  These should best be thought of as general areas of concern and interest, not as ideological straight jackets.  Perhaps they more accurately describe variations of ideas than people.  There's nothing precluding one or more overlapping.

There's also natural tension between some of them.  A Christian Leftist, Alt-Right leftist or a Patriotic Socialist is less likely to see eye to eye with the Red Enlightenment or Equal Rights Advocate sorts.  Being that both are generally anti-feminist, brocialist and patriotic socialists generally get along.  Except when they don't - many MRAs are as sharply critical of the "trad-cons" as the feminists themselves.  I have yet to see the neo/post Keynesian sorts really get into it with the more radical Marxist or anarchists, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.  Liberals disillusioned by SJW excess and nationalists disillusioned by alt-right excess are not naturally going to understand one another.  The differences go beyond different stances on core issues.  These people come from wildly different ideological backgrounds that think and frame issues in very different ways.

So why try to bring such a divergent group together, you might ask.  In answer, I'll quote Saul Alinsky's first rule for radicals: "Power is derived from two main sources: money and people.  Have-nots must built power from flesh and blood."  Or as the great Brian of Nazareth put it, "We should be struggling together.  We mustn't be fighting each other.  Surely we should be united against the common enemy!"

"The Judean People's front!"

"No!  No!  The Romans!"

Stark Truth Interview with mysterious alt-left blogger.

Alt left veterans Robert Stark (no, not THAT Robert Stark), Rabbit, Robert Lindsay and Alex Goldstein interview Alt-Left blogger Ryan England (with an a) who blogs at Samizdat Chronicles.  Which is here.  Which means it was me they interviewed.

The secret's out!

The interview can be heard here.  It's easy to get lost over at The Stark Truth if you're not careful. You can easily lose a LOT of time listening to Mr. Stark interview people with unconventional outlooks on just about any kind of issue or subject you can think of.  Highly recommended for anyone wanting to break out of the red state vs. blue state mold.

Topics for conversation include:

• My unpleasant youthful politicization during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. 
• My subsequent exposure to leftist ideas listening to former Dead Kennedys lead singer Jello Biafra's spoken word tours, and Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky.
• How I lost faith in left wing politics for a time as a result of reading "The Myth of Male Power" by Warren Farrell, as well as the underlying class-based concerns that Dr. Farrell raised that are of concern to the left.
• My loss of faith in right wing politics as a result of how conservatives only ever care about the interests of corporations and high profits, and could really care less about social issues and social cohesion.
• How for a long time I remained left wing on economic issues and labor issues, and even became involved in job action and workplace organizing.  But I hated cultural leftism, but the cultural right didn't do it for me either.
• How I encountered the early alt-right, but was put off by their white nationalism.
• And then wondered if there was an alt-right, could there be a leftist counterpart.  Which led me to the discovery of Rabbit and Robert Lindsay's blogs.  I didn't agree with them on everything, but grasped the overall gist of it.
• My own theory of the alt-left, based on the need to for a restoration of economic class analysis to clear up popular misconceptions around the notions of power and privilege.
• Splintering and factionalism on the alt-left, as with so many political movements.  "Judean People's Front" syndrome.
• How untrammeled capitalism is the force that destroys relations based on nation, family and so forth. Corporations have loyalty only to the bottom line.

Enjoy!

Sub Types on the Alternative Left

Left Wing of the Alt Right?

I’ve come up with colloquial expressions of subtypes I’ve noticed in my short time with this movement. Note that these are not hard fast rules or mutually exclusive categories but rather descriptions of what seem to be motivating passions. Some perhaps approximate the Alt-Leftist ideal better than others:

“The Left Wing of the Alt Right” – Rabbit uses this phrase quite explicitly. They are most open to race realism and most opposed to mass immigration and Islamism but are also inclined towards some kind of economic socialism or social democracy and are otherwise put off the Alt-Right somehow or other. Strasserites might be a more explicitly national socialist variant of this, and National Bolshevism would be even more out there still.  Left wing nationalism would be a softer variant of this.

“Gamergate Leftists” – Named from an article I read a while back claiming that most Gamergaters were left-leaning, these are another type. These types need not be big on Gamergate per-se (the more I studied Gamergate personally, the more lost and confused I got) but being anti-feminist (at least against the kind of PC feminist theory you'd find in a women's studies class or on any left-leaning blog) and anti-SJW is huge with them as is civil and cultural libertarianism.  If Milo Yiannopoulos was a social democrat, this is basically what you'd have.

I found a number of these posting on anti-SJW pages. They come to the Alt-Left usually because of a belief in Leftist economics, though they are usually not that far Left.  Guys who believe in some regulation and a social safety net. Some too get put off by the tendency of anti-SJWs to drift into genuinely misogynistic and racist territory.  Remember kids that SJW and social liberalism are not the same things.  Think YouTubers like Sargon of Akkad or the Amazing Atheist, though they don’t use the term Alt-Left to describe themselves. Not yet, anyway. These kinds are defecting less from Richard Spencer and more from Milo Yiannopoluous.

“Red Enlightenment” – These are most passionate about rationalism, skepticism, empiricism and in some cases, transhumanism and futurism. Generally scientifically minded and technocratic sorts of socialists or social democrats.

“True Liberals” – Antiracist and feminist supporters who think the whole thing has gotten out of hand and are concerned for the SJW’s lifestyle puritanism and opposition to free speech. They are more pro-feminist and pro-social liberal than the Gamergaters though. “The Democratic Party of the 1990s,” someone once remarked to me when I described the alt-left to them, to which I replied, “There were no liberals or Leftists in the 1990’s except myself.”

“Brocialists” – Socialists or social democrats with a penchant for men’s rights and anti-misandry. I seem to have drawn a number of these to my page, and a few of my moderators fall into this category. Hillary Clinton supporters have accused Bernie Sanders of using these as his base of support.  Used as a pejorative by the "Lorettas" of the present day left, I'm a firm proponent that we reclaim the term.

“Red Templars” – Especially and specifically anti-Islamic. We get a lot of these from Sam Harris and Bill Maher’s followings. Unlike the Left Wing of the Alt Right types, these sorts are more standard liberals otherwise.

“The New Old Left” – Would dispense with race, culture and identity all together if they could and make Leftism mostly about economic Leftism. The Realist Left page and the blog Social Democracy for the 21st Century are like this. Farther left you’d find /leftypol/ on 8chan and some Marxist/Anarchist groups that reject IdPol.  A whole separate entry could be made of the economic subtypes one might find on the alt left.  I've also found a lot of labor nationalists and assorted 3rd positionists: mutualists, distributists, market socialists, state capitalists, syndicalism and so on.

 A few types that I have not seen many of and would have expected more are Christian leftists (Catholic Social Teaching, the social gospel and even liberation theology seem especially well suited to alt-leftism) and dissident feminists.  Surely, some feminists must be frustrated with what's happened to their movement.  It's been a long, long time since anything this dogmatic, intolerant, and puritanical has arisen in the western world.  Those well meaning devotees to feminism and social justice time and again are the ones who come under the sternest censure for the most minor of transgressions.  How many women out there, after getting called out one time too many for some sleight micro-aggression or another think "screw this" and drift away from the movement, while still holding to its essential ideals?  Many, I would think.  I would hope.  They can't be that hive-minded, could they?  In any event, if there are, the alt-left must be the port-of-call for women of liberal sentiment overall who reject this 21st century rehash of 16th century puritan culture.

On the other hand, I've noticed more than a few economic libertarians in alt-left circles, which I fail to understand since center to left economics is a pretty big part of this.

There may be more variations on the alt-left theme out there that I have not met yet.