A review by jamrock
Canceling Comedians While the World Burns by Ben Burgis
5.0
I needed this book so much and can’t believe how many of my IRL and Online friends have high-fived over the content, heck, even over the just the intent stated in the Blurb. I recently finished Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher and I don’t think I consciously realised the connection between these two authors and their work or that the books were both published by ZerO Books.
Burgis’ work is an intra-Left critique and draws on many of the topics covered in Capitalist Realism and could almost be read as an expansion, or bringing up to date of Fisher’s essay Exiting The Vampire Castle. If you are a Leftist it’s also a mirror you should take a long hard look into. In Vampire Castle, Fisher argues “that a largely online style of identity-based leftist discourse grounded in “witch-hunting moralism” halts productive leftist discourse and undermines class politics.” (and it’s worth reading João Fazenda article which sits between Fisher’s essay and Burgis’ book). Fisher was hounded — to death, if you believe that his suicide was part of the despair over neoliberalism and the Left’s seeming inability to mount an attack on anything other than itself — for these views. If Fisher’s essay was more despair than critique, then this reads more like a practical handbook.
If you are uncomfortable, at the very least, with the behaviour of the Very Online Left then you won’t take much persuading by this book that the cancel culture “super-woke SJWs” brigade, much derided by the right, is actually a Leftist-pathology that alienates many that would otherwise identify as left/socialist or at least turn out at elections. The fact that the Very Online Left often cancels Leftists, including a Black Marxist professor (on the grounds of racism!) should be warning enough but Burgis, rather than taking cheap shots or simply levelling criticism, explains how the culture is self-defeating to the aims of the Left in general and he makes a very compelling case.
In many ways, Burgis is sympathetic to a group of people who have grown up only knowing Late Capitalism and never been even close to the levers of power thinking that only the battleground of the Internet and the ability to censor people for incorrect opinions is the closest they can get to having some sense of power to change outcomes. Burgis’ calls this “the pathology of Powerlessness” but makes clear the disutility of these actions, relative to the urgent need to create a broad church of working-class, working middle-class, small-c conservatives and the politically apathetic, many of whom have turned away from the Left exactly for the reasons Burgis lays out (proving that Fisher was incredibly prescient to have written about this in 2013).
Burgis gently reminds his readers why “tankies” continue to be a problem by defending Stalinist-communism or any other authoritarian faux-communism including Cuba which he argues can, by any intelligent Leftist, be praised for it’s social care systems *and* critiqued for single-party approach, lack of free media, etc. All this does is cements in the minds of people who are slightly detached from politics that socialism = communism = Stalinism therefore Left = Bad. It’s a striking point that makes complete sense and it’s something that people really need to take notice of. It was a bit of a wake-up call to me.
Chapter six is a slightly-excoriating discussion on neo-anarchists and armchair-socialists who do nothing but loudly complain about “politics” then don’t actively politic other than A to B marches and socialising. Burgis says that if that is all you are doing then you are a “social club not a socialist organisation”. Ouch. Burgis states that if people are just “resisting” i.e. protesting but not running candidates or organising unions then they see “politics as a symbolic performance of [their] personal opposition to injustice. Ouch again. This is the point that Burgis then develops into a brutal examination of people “proving their personal virtue by examining the virtue of others.”
As Burgis laments:
“Think not just about the positive utility of whatever you hope to accomplish but of the high probability of outcomes with extreme disutility to left-wing goals. If we denounce “problematic” comedians, [we] make ourselves look like some secular version of evangelical preachers”
I will conclude this half-baked review with the iciest of lines from the book:
"When the Committee on Public Safety in the French Revolution got so paranoid it started executing good revolutionaries like Danton, or when Stalin started filling his gulags with Old Bolsheviks, it was fair to describe what had happened as “the revolution eating its children.” . . . The Very Online Left isn’t eating its children. It’s just sort of gnawing on them in a sad, toothless way that makes most onlookers look away with disgust."
I finished this book feeling that, as a Leftist, I could hold my head up high, that I no longer needed to stay quiet about the problematic Very Online Left and that, hearteningly, this resistance is a movement that is starting to grow, not to resist our comrades but to help them understand the disutility of their actions.
Burgis’ work is an intra-Left critique and draws on many of the topics covered in Capitalist Realism and could almost be read as an expansion, or bringing up to date of Fisher’s essay Exiting The Vampire Castle. If you are a Leftist it’s also a mirror you should take a long hard look into. In Vampire Castle, Fisher argues “that a largely online style of identity-based leftist discourse grounded in “witch-hunting moralism” halts productive leftist discourse and undermines class politics.” (and it’s worth reading João Fazenda article which sits between Fisher’s essay and Burgis’ book). Fisher was hounded — to death, if you believe that his suicide was part of the despair over neoliberalism and the Left’s seeming inability to mount an attack on anything other than itself — for these views. If Fisher’s essay was more despair than critique, then this reads more like a practical handbook.
If you are uncomfortable, at the very least, with the behaviour of the Very Online Left then you won’t take much persuading by this book that the cancel culture “super-woke SJWs” brigade, much derided by the right, is actually a Leftist-pathology that alienates many that would otherwise identify as left/socialist or at least turn out at elections. The fact that the Very Online Left often cancels Leftists, including a Black Marxist professor (on the grounds of racism!) should be warning enough but Burgis, rather than taking cheap shots or simply levelling criticism, explains how the culture is self-defeating to the aims of the Left in general and he makes a very compelling case.
In many ways, Burgis is sympathetic to a group of people who have grown up only knowing Late Capitalism and never been even close to the levers of power thinking that only the battleground of the Internet and the ability to censor people for incorrect opinions is the closest they can get to having some sense of power to change outcomes. Burgis’ calls this “the pathology of Powerlessness” but makes clear the disutility of these actions, relative to the urgent need to create a broad church of working-class, working middle-class, small-c conservatives and the politically apathetic, many of whom have turned away from the Left exactly for the reasons Burgis lays out (proving that Fisher was incredibly prescient to have written about this in 2013).
Burgis gently reminds his readers why “tankies” continue to be a problem by defending Stalinist-communism or any other authoritarian faux-communism including Cuba which he argues can, by any intelligent Leftist, be praised for it’s social care systems *and* critiqued for single-party approach, lack of free media, etc. All this does is cements in the minds of people who are slightly detached from politics that socialism = communism = Stalinism therefore Left = Bad. It’s a striking point that makes complete sense and it’s something that people really need to take notice of. It was a bit of a wake-up call to me.
Chapter six is a slightly-excoriating discussion on neo-anarchists and armchair-socialists who do nothing but loudly complain about “politics” then don’t actively politic other than A to B marches and socialising. Burgis says that if that is all you are doing then you are a “social club not a socialist organisation”. Ouch. Burgis states that if people are just “resisting” i.e. protesting but not running candidates or organising unions then they see “politics as a symbolic performance of [their] personal opposition to injustice. Ouch again. This is the point that Burgis then develops into a brutal examination of people “proving their personal virtue by examining the virtue of others.”
As Burgis laments:
“Think not just about the positive utility of whatever you hope to accomplish but of the high probability of outcomes with extreme disutility to left-wing goals. If we denounce “problematic” comedians, [we] make ourselves look like some secular version of evangelical preachers”
I will conclude this half-baked review with the iciest of lines from the book:
"When the Committee on Public Safety in the French Revolution got so paranoid it started executing good revolutionaries like Danton, or when Stalin started filling his gulags with Old Bolsheviks, it was fair to describe what had happened as “the revolution eating its children.” . . . The Very Online Left isn’t eating its children. It’s just sort of gnawing on them in a sad, toothless way that makes most onlookers look away with disgust."
I finished this book feeling that, as a Leftist, I could hold my head up high, that I no longer needed to stay quiet about the problematic Very Online Left and that, hearteningly, this resistance is a movement that is starting to grow, not to resist our comrades but to help them understand the disutility of their actions.