Towards a dialectical synthesis of hate

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that your vibes are putrid

Every morning, I am violently awakened from my precious slumber by the worst people in the world. In New York, we know them as “people who drive cars around”. Because I am a person who is immune to most of life’s fortunes, I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn before congestion pricing could ease my suffering. But now I live in a small two-story brownstone on a quiet, residential street in—it bears repeating—Brooklyn. Why is this happening to me, of all people? It turns out these wretched little souls migrate from a major throughway one block down to my street every single morning at 7 am to spread their filthy plague in the form of incessant honking.

I understand why they are frustrated: the cars in front of them aren’t moving forward. What I don’t understand is how even a kindergarten-level critical thought would enlighten them to the fact that actually, every single dolt in front of them shares the exact same frustration and if they could, in fact, move forward, they would. In other words, there is a reason why the cars aren’t moving forward: they can’t.

This is a truly revolutionary insight, but it is not one I have the ability to spread to these pitifully ignorant creatures. So instead I lie in bed fantasizing about all of the things I could and will do to them. These fantasies first led to an almost real plan to buy golf balls in bulk and throw them at the windows of every single car, honker or not, that passed my apartment. They have since progressed to much more violent and debased visions of torture and mayhem. In short, I am becoming just like them.

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Bosch’s “the extraction of the stone of madness/cutting the stone/the cure of folly”

I have always been a political person, but I also grew up where there is no radical political infrastructure whatsoever, and very few seem interested in those things anyway. It was very alienating, and when I moved to DC to get more involved, academically and organizationally, I was surprised at how awful liberals and leftists were. They were obsessed with their careers and grand-standing, their political commitments seemed vague, and not being in their social or professional groups was enough to raise their suspicions. These people also weren’t “cool” at all, which was surprising to me for some reason. I had aesthetic interests and didn’t see any need for my whole life to revolve around my political engagements, but their politics were one with their tastes. I also just wanted everyone to be nice to each other, and they weren’t, at all. So I was still alienated, but this time from people who grew up much better off than me, in places that were not nearly as conservative from whence I came.

Letting go of my political commitments after the Bernie campaign and following a personally harrowing experience with the “left” coincided with the so-called vibe shift. It seems like this was the case for a lot of other people too. I left the left¹ not in the sense that I stopped having political preferences, but because I don’t think you can call yourself a leftist when all you do is look at a Twitter feed and shitpost. I saw a lot of magazines and media outlets be born during this time, with very confused commitments to “left” politics that did not seem to extend beyond it being the right thing to do to attract an appropriate audience and investment situation. “Left” became a lifestyle, which didn’t surprise me at this point, but it was still upsetting.

So I don’t think it should shock anyone on the left to learn that their complete cultural alignment with the liberal consensus has caused a widespread reaction that we are now broadly defining as a “vibe shift.” I don’t think it’s even remotely a mystery why this happened, either. I remember the squabbles when Bernie threw his hat in the races in 2015 and 2019 between people who wanted split hairs about identity and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Bros; I was taking notes and I don’t forgive or forget². I remember the DSA purges and the complete rejection of “orthodox Marxism” and more. I remember being called a fascist because someone tried and failed to psychoanalyze a retweet I made. Their case wasn’t helped when after the murder of George Floyd, they all marched in lock-step behind the DNC to get Biden-Harris and their PMC platform elected.

I go forward trepidatiously into the vibes discourse, not because I don’t have thoughts about it, but because it’s silly and implicates very little in terms of the “real world”. Of course media personalities and academics (who are media personalities at this point if they know what’s good for them) are so out of touch with the “real world” that they think a so-called vibe shift is worth commenting on. It’s entertainment for the most part, and to the extent that it can really affect anything outside of these people’s social and professional lives depends on whether or not they learn from it and incorporate that new knowledge into a change in their behavior or strategy. They won’t do this, though, and in many ways my writing this is an exercise in the same masturbatory practice. Some are lucky enough to get a paycheck to participate in this navel-gazing. Not me, though. I am just a masochist.

And so, because of my masochism and that I am of the same class as everyone else who has opined on this, if only barely, I will proceed.

A lot of the vibes discourse is simply a contemporary iteration of much older, more sophisticated debates that have been endemic within the left since Marx wrote about the True Socialists—which, combined with the hyper-individualist orientation of every downwardly mobile subject of the early 21st century, has mutated into a vicious culture war with literally no hope of dying down. The question of vibes is more of a stand-in question in a long history of theory that may have started with Hegel or Plato or Kant or Rousseau but is now in the hands of Bannon, Dugin, Yarvin, Yglesias, and Klein. The other problem is that everyone who should be trying to develop smarter “political theory” is completely—to borrow a phrase from zoomers—cooked. They can’t see outside of their own zeitgeist and any attempts to do so are denounced on site by their deeply unserious peers, or they have to find more right-wing outlets to make these inquiries because, I’m sorry, the left does not have a culture of free speech³. They are all a part of an astonishingly embarrassing “vanguard”, and as long as they can continue to do whatever they want, undisciplined by a genuine working class movement—one with real stakes that have nothing to do with a podcast or literary audience or an academic career—they’ll be about as useful to the left as a bullet in the head.

john nada

This culture we’ve created isn’t just distracting and divisive, it is entirely—and I mean this only in the truest possible sense of the word—meaningless. It simply doesn’t matter what anyone in the media-intelligentsia class thinks about phenomena that is endemic to it, even when it spills out and infects the masses. The ouroboros of vibes can’t be stopped by anyone whose subsistence is a part of the loop; the motor of the system is not dynamic with any other systems. Everyone will stay locked in place because, whether they want to admit it or not, their livelihoods depend on it. It reaches a fever pitch when someone tries to break out of it and says: hey guys, I think I know why people hate us so much. Their feelings get hurt if you dare to imply that they’re unlikeable, or that their efforts towards the “left” aren’t affecting anyone but themselves. It’s because they don’t actually care about anyone “out there”, in the “real world”, even though it’s literally their job.

wake up neo

I read this report a few days ago of a panel that included Chris Smalls, Josh Citarella, and a few other people I’ve never heard of that I think is very informative about the current state of vibes. It’s not an indictment of one side of the vibe shift, even though the target is one side, it’s an indictment of the whole of the discourse.

Some of the words, phrases, and even sentences that came out of Citarella’s mouth are not incorrect. But his inability to talk to Smalls—the exact type of person any so-called Marxist or leftist concerned even loosely with “strategy” should be able to talk to—is telling. Smalls is sharing an actually fairly harmless preference concerning consumerism as an ideology and practice, which he acquired from observing people’s consumer behaviors, his experience working for Amazon, having to actually provide for his family, and more generally, watching market dynamics play out over a long period of (his life) time. Citarella, however, sees an opportunity to (poorly) make the case for leftist pro-growthism or anti-degrowthism⁴, for some reason. He stops listening to Smalls, even though Smalls goes directly from stating his ideological/lifestyle preference to making an extremely salient point about the nature of late capitalism: that it has a profoundly atomizing effect on people, that everyone is becoming more and more pulled apart, and that this is happening everywhere from workplaces to malls. Spaces that once brought people together don’t exist anymore, or are completely empty, and this is a direct result of the autochthonous capitalist processes he refers to as “desires” of the system. What an astonishing insight that Citarella can’t even register because he’s so preoccupied with finding an opening for a potential provocation that he misses a perfect opportunity to connect with Smalls—to cultivate common ground. It is, of course, only through common ground that we can actually build a movement⁵. Any leftist propagandist should not only know that but turn it into a creed.

This is a common problem for people on all flanks of the left and right who think it’s fun or are maybe sadomasochistically addicted to engaging in the culture war. The vibe is a battlefield; the battlefield is about vibes. More often than not they’re just responding to aesthetics and discourses rather than actual arguments, which is why it all rings so shallow. They see something they have already decided, before it was even out there, that they don’t like. So they blast off a response talking about how deeply bad things are, how their opinion is actually the most “left”, or maybe about how they’re actually so, so busy helping save the world by writing books, protecting their students from all the evil other less perfect people don’t take seriously, and so on that they don’t have time to read something that rubs them the wrong way. Who do they think they’re kidding? They are a part of the military industrial complex of the vibe war, and it is their job to engage with it. It is what they get paid to do, and what they have explicitly chosen to do with their lives.

But the irony of the situation is that the debates about what the vibe shift is come out of this culture and finds very little outside of it. People don’t like it; it’s unpleasant to be subjected to intra-elite ideological warfare, and a lot of people are just going to choose the more conservative side because they don’t really understand why we’re talking about this stuff when there are so many other things wrecking people’s lives. This isn’t a one-track analysis, and it doesn’t occur in a simple, cyclical motion⁶. Some people really do become radicalized or bigoted, especially when their more material concerns are left repeatedly unaddressed and all they see are hysterics on Fox News and MSNBC, so they’re just going to choose to stay put or go back to more familiar ground. That there has only been one project that speaks to these concerns since 1984, Bernie’s democratic socialism, and that it was and still is rife with disagreements and confused objects of focus is proof. To turn that once-in-a-generation project into a real movement requires a lot more than one person and one campaign—it demands a culture that has a real and sustained interest in doing whatever it can to foster coalition building capable of actually winning a political battle or two (a hundred years ago, the way to do this was to tie media output to movements directly—unfortunately the state of media production doesn’t really allow that anymore, the fact that there’s no movement worth propagandizing is just icing on the cake).

removing the rocks in the head

So where does all this leave us? As you can see I came at this topic from a particular normative standpoint: I expect to see socialism in my lifetime. My boyfriend regularly says this, and I reflexively laugh every time because I guess I think that’s ridiculous. I can’t help that I feel that way, but I’ve decided to, in true dialectical fashion, embrace the fact that I clearly think it’s absurd but also hope against hope that it’s entirely possible. If I don’t, what’s the alternative? To become a miserable fuck like every other miserable fuck? If there’s anything redeemable about the vibe shift discourse it’s that I genuinely believe the participants are trying to figure out exactly why vibes are important, and what kind of project could even manipulate them.

Beyond the question of vibes is the question of hate, and I am, like everyone else, filled with hate and rage right now. I just started the new translation of Capital, and in the Introduction, written by German scholar Paul North, he frames the motivation for writing Capital as a product of the transformation of Marx’s hate. He argues that Marx realized as a young journalist that his hate would have to find an object other than those who commit injustices if he was to really contribute to the project of socialism. He would have to identify the structure beyond the individuals that is producing such debased compulsions and outcomes. How difficult this is, but if he had not done it, then we might not have ever had a scientific argument for socialism, and would still be arguing for a utopia⁷. Alexander Cockburn’s famous question, “is your hate pure?”, is similar. Ask yourself this question, and honestly answer it. Do you like the answer? Is your hate directed at the structure that produces injustice, or is it for your comrades and potential comrades, even if you disagree so fundamentally on something you think is important? Do you attack the powerful from a place of morality, or because their interests are opposite of yours? Does it enrage you when someone expresses a different opinion, or a fact that is not true? Do you speak every time you feel the rage?

Here is the unadulterated truth: everyone’s vibes are bad. Putrid, even. Anywhere you go where politics are being spoken, you will be standing in a gigantic pile of shit. The only solution to this problem is not to think in terms of vibes at all. Don’t even try to identify what yours or your enemy’s vibes are; place them in the coconut tree context and turn it into an object to be scientifically and rigorously scrutinized. No one should know where you personally stand on the vast majority of issues. It’s not about you, and it’s not about your enemies. To do this, you will need help, because you cannot go at this alone, with only your rage fueling you. You will have to discipline the hate and rage in service of a higher power. Otherwise, you will just be another psycho throwing golf balls at automobiles.

1. but have since returned

2. unfortunately I have absolutely no power to do anything about this.

3. I’m not the first and certainly not the last to say this.

4. which I agree with by the way.

5. I’d like to invite you to really hear me when I say this; it’s not a platitude.

6. this is the dialectical part

7. some of you still are and that’s my point!