What is it like to be a bat?

I don´t know exactly who Rhyd Wildermuth is, since I don´t follow his blog with any regularity. I think he is a leftist Neo-Pagan, or perhaps an ex-leftist Neo-Pagan, who wrote several well known attacks (at least in the relevant milieux) on right-wing, racist and nationalist paganism a couple of years ago. He used to live in the United States, but seems to have relocated to Brittany in France. I recently read, or in one case re-read, his blog posts "Good White Men", "Notes on the Latest Crusade" and "Here Be Monsters". I´m trying very hard to break with leftism, at least of the "official" or "regular" variety, but I must say that these essays give me some kind of flashbacks to my younger radical days, especially "Here Be Monsters", in which Wildermuth seems to be breaking with leftism himself...but for all the wrong reasons!

The two earlier posts are written from an almost Marxist perspective, in which Wildermuth tries - apparently in vain - to school the California SJWs on the need for workers´ or people unity against Capital, mass struggle, class struggle, real organization, and the fact that "identity politics" are just an individualist-capitalist ploy in the first place. He also criticizes the sectarian purism common in such circles. The posts created quite a stir, since Wildermuth framed it as an explicit criticism of reverse racism or White self-hate in the SJW milieu. 

"Here Be Monsters", written three years later, is strikingly different in tone from the two earlier ones. It sounds as if the author is leaving the left altogether. But in what direction? He seems to be suggesting that "oppression" isn´t real, or at any rate inconsequential. So is the dichotomy between left and right, classes and genders, indeed so are all politics. The polis, after all, is an entirely human construct. But humans are just specks of dust in a vast, weird, proto-Lovecraftian cosmos, which couldn´t care less about our coming and goings. This cosmos is filled with spiritual forces and does carry some kind of deeper meaning, but it´s probably not about ourselves. Our "identities" and ideas about "oppression" are just fantasies, created as psychological self-defense mechanism against the terrifying Real. 

Hold on there!

Who´s "we", sucker?

Maybe to a privileged White middle-class person in California, "oppression" isn´t really real, but just another White middle-class person (insert preferred pronoun here) neurosis. Like the guy mentioned in the first part of the essay, the poor guy who imagined himself to be a bat (what a pity Thomas Nagel never met him) and therefore "oppressed" by the invisible "structures". Indeed, I suspect one of the reasons why privileged White folk invent new "identities" and claim to be "oppressed" on their basis, is precisely because they want to LARP as a civil rights movement. They can, of course, go fuck themselves. That doesn´t mean the divisions between right and left, classes, genders, or sexualities are "false", "fantasies" or "mere orientations on a map", as provocatively suggested by Wildermuth. What about Capital and the labor movement? Fascism and Social Democracy? Races, ethnic groups or nations aren´t "fantasies" either. What about Blacks and Whites in the Deep South? Yes, that´s an uber-obvious example, but that´s just the point...

To those who are *really* oppressed, oppression isn´t a fantasy, and the fact that the polis is a mere dust particle in an infinite universe is, of course, irrelevant. Our survival as dust-mites depends on our inclusion in that very polis... 

The argument that the real-world oppression (or real-world ethnic conflict, if you´re more on the nationalist side) is inconsequential in the bigger scheme of things is the old conceit of Deep Ecology, which was mostly based among privileged White people, some of them probably millionaires. But even the relation between the polis and Nature is mediated by social relations *within* it. Are there material constraints on the polis, imposed from the outside by the Real? Of course there are, but once again, how these material constraints affect various groups in society, say various genders or classes, is a political question. The Irish potato blight may have been caused by the Lovecraftian Wyrms. The *famine*, alas, was not. It was caused by the British polis... 

I´m starting to sound like good ol´ Murray Bookchin!

It´s almost as if Rhyd Wyldermuth should have stayed a Marxist pagan. 

Good White Men

Notes on the Latest Crusade

Here Be Monsters