The Virtual Labor Leftist In My Skull Is Noticing Things About the UK Riots

There's plenty o' ethnic slurs, but look a little closer: It's a class issue.

What the people who hate me because I used to work for Taki’s* don’t know is that they might hate me even more if they knew that before that, I worked for much longer at the Chicago Reader—

—Oh, sure, they might love me at first: the Reader is a good lefty rag.

Following every trend, if a day late and a dollar short. These days, they’re dutifully, if blandly, woke; we were the first people to tout Barack Obama’s budding political career back in Chicago.

But they might not love us so much if they learned to read, and then dug into the backlog of long-form articles many of our old hippie journalists used to write, because they were the work of a dying breed:

The labor leftist.

Yeah, remember those? We haven’t heard from them in a while.

I didn’t really notice when they disappeared. I think it was around the time the Democrats decided that “working-class” was a dogwhistle for “white people.” Which points out the great weakness that labor leftism has in the minds of leftists today: It isn’t racist enough.

There are too many white people working shitty jobs for low pay; it does not compute. White people are the oppressor; and therefore, those assholes doing shitty jobs for low pay are all kinda tainted. We can’t advocate for them anymore, it’s like… weird.

Some people inherit money; I got a John Wayne Gacey

You don’t believe me? You think this sounds a little goofy? Isn’t it taking guilt by association across some Rubicon of absurdity past which language no longer baldachin trampling golden fealty, noodle?

I mean, yeah, it is goofy… but when was the last time you turned on CNN and heard from a reasonable, old-school leftist who’s in there fighting for the working people?

Sorry, poors; you’re the oppressors now.

And although I didn’t really notice as the noble, no-chinned, man-ponytailed guild of labor-leftist scribes who had never done an honest day’s labor in their lives were slowly trampled into the clay of fragmented and weaponized identities, I have lately come to feel their absence, almost as a character in its own right, rising up over the landscape like a lugubrious prairie dog, and whimpering in wage-frozen, tax-hiked dismay.

What am I to do?, wonders the ghost of the old labor leftist. I believe in the holiness of every oppressed international superprole… but the Evil Rich are using them to game the labor market! I… deeply love them all, every single one of these abstract Oppressed People, more than my own children, but I have an equal abstract adoration for the Oppressed Laborer… (looks at supply and demand curve for the labor market; it’s a near-perpendicular line, falling)… oh… oh dear…

And the poor ponytailed labor leftist, trapped between two religious tenets, has sunk back into the collective consciousness, like an ugly Ophelia in dead leaves and dollar bills…

At first, this felt absence was a mere rustling in the underbrush of my psyche. Until the other week, when the UK EXPLODED into immigration-based riots after a second-generation knifed a bunch of innocent kids, and nobody seemed to notice it was a class conflict.

Everybody is arguing against which ethnic group deserves to receive benefits out of the tax money that workers in the UK are forced to pay to the government. They seem to have forgotten that the ethnic conflicts occurring on the ground—between the white working class and the economic migrants who have come to share the bounty of the Magical Cracker society fallacy (an idea which I will at last explain at length in another venue, hopefully, before it is plagiarized, but I am too trusting) all serve to benefit the authoritarian hopes and dreams of a non-combatant:

That good old English aristocracy.

A ruling class which is still alive and well, even if postwar democracy has proved to be quite the annoyance. Not as annoying as the labor leftist, though; the rats are playing now, but back in the day, they couldn’t have put the yobs and the Muslims at each other’s throats without some ponytailed scribe noticing:

“Heyyyy, this is CLASSIC divide and conquer by the ruling class—you guys have pitted these groups against each other in the hopes an excuse to claw back the stranglehold over wealth, power, and rewards that you used to enjoy under the old feudal spirit in the UK!”

I mean, I don’t even know if I agree with it, but it’s a balancing viewpoint, which you don’t hear articulated anymore—and annoying as those guys might have been, they did have their place in the intellectual ecosystem.

That big, empty space in the debate began to echo the other dumb arguments around the place so loudly, the emptiness began to congeal, as it always does in the beginning, into cold, slimy verbiage…

… until at last, around Wedsnesday, I actually began to hear it, the reasoning of the Labor Leftist, like a demented daemon in my ear: Part of my brain to so sick of the silence that it decided to turn all those hours and weeks I spent editing those old Reader Writers into a new internal self-state.

At its best, it’s like reading a really interesting article whose premises I don’t quite agree with, but it’s interesting in the way it follows from them anyway.

And I don’t know whether its absence is a contributor or a symptom of the howling paucity of our debates, but we’ve tried listening to everything else, haven’t we?

I call it ASSP — Ann Sterzinger’s Shadow Personality. Even though that’s really not what it/he/she is. ‘Fred’ was my first impulse, but that sounds even more off (even if I still occasionally think it).

Have you ever had one of those hacker friends who’s so paranoid about Interpol overhearing your conversation that he makes you install a “virtual computer” on your laptop or PC? It’s like a second little computer within your big computer, and it can have its own whole little world of processes, completely separate from the bigger computer, although you can see what it’s doing via the same screen.

That’s what ASSP feels like.

When it started talking last week, it sounded a little something like this:

Yeah, this magical cracker fallacy—the idea that whites, and Jews and Asians too, in Europe and the United States, are capable of magically providing infinite wealth, food, housing, Xboxes, juice boxes, ethnically appropriate free gourmet meals for everyone who shows up, and are not harmed by things like rape or murder, or at least we don’t count enough as human beings that this should be a factor that matters.

That’s the Justification on the surface, or rather just below the surface, for why it’s a Good Thing we are bringing this ethnic conflict here:

We are magic, so we have an obligation to spread our magic. It’s not culture or hard work that makes societies successful, it is imperialism, particularly in the case of whites… but why were we able to inflict all this imperialism when we’re actually kind of worse than other people?

Magic! Just like the magic that is behind the Japanese economic success, it had nothing to do with anything but magic. So magic must be shared.

But behind this there is some nefarious shit and I’m starting to think it’s ‘let’s have you and him fight.’ The upper classes are deliberately importing conflict. (Remember, the human who is typing this is not sure if this is the case, BUT if this happened in 1999 there would be newsrooms fulla labor leftists trying to argue that this is so.)

I think it’s because the racial rhetoric back then was not that white people bad and that explains everything. White people were actually good then, because you know, we gave the whole world civilisation; the multicultural rhetoric then was yes, and EVERYBODY is good, just bring everyone together and there won’t be actual ethnic conflict, because people are too good for that, it must be capitalism or the ruling class putting us at each other’s throats as usual, just like when they used to pit the newly liberated black slaves against the poor white trash to try to keep all of us down.

Well, now it’s pretty clear that if you put two groups together and do not ask the newcomers to assimilate there will be conflict.

So when the government dumps 400 immigrants on your town of 1200 and gives them free money whether they can even basically speak the language or not, they cn point and grunt and buy all your stuff out from you with new government printed money, OK.

THEY WANT CONFLICT.

Now! With all these hundreds of poor white English quote-unquote rioters that they are actually slapping in jail for three years—what do they think is going to happen?

Our old-leftist reasoning for why we wanted to let actual violent criminals, rapists and murderers and kiddy fiddlers, out of jail in Europe after 2-3 years, which is madness—if you rape or kill, you should be in there till you’re too fuckin old to repeat the behavior, shithead—is that if you lock criminals up, it does not reform them.

SO—if you’re unjustly locking up otherwise law abiding citizens for the crime of racism, and you’re locking them up together, and you’re taking out the muslim majority that currently rules the prisons, ironically depriving them of the one place besides their occupied zones where the poor little dears are the majority—

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MORONS THINK IS GOING TO HAPPEN ???

They’re only going to come out more racist, and angrier, and more professional about it all! (—per your own bass-ackwards “reasoning” which, when applied to ACTUAL FUCKING CRIMINALS tends to only lead to people like me losing ten years of our lives to being attacked in our homes but I digress… —ed)

You’re creating more ethnic conflict at every step so you have an excuse to go back to a completely class-based society with you at the pinnacle.

And I may be a poor avatar for these sentiments. But, since the labor leftists have all disappeared into your—I hate to use a phrase that was satirised by the Young Ones but it’s the only one that works—your CRYPTO-FASCIST drone stamping mill—I have come to feel, since I really don’t have a political team, and writers are now required to play your fucking game, that I suppose I can kind of pinch-hit for them.

Like we’re lacking a third baseman, so I feel curiously compelled to go over there and play third base.

I used to think people did this kind of thing out of sheer opportunism, but now that the impulse is occurring to me, it’s so disembodied, I suspect it might have something to do with symmetry and OCD.

*I wouldn’t say I subscribed to most of the house ideology at Taki’s OR the Reader—there were reasonable and silly points in both; I probably have a virtual Taki’s writer living somewhere in my skull as well, waiting for the right moment to come out and play—but the Taki’s audience was far more tolerant of alternate viewpoints.