In early November, we wrote an article for Cosmonaut expressing concern with the takeover of Zer0 Books by Repeater Books. Repeater, we observed, seemed to be in the throes of removing all of Zer0’s editorial staff while simultaneously evading responsibility on the grounds that they were not really “fired” (as they were technically freelance contractors). Moreover, Repeater was giving tacit assent to the dissemination of a narrative according to which the Zer0 Books of 2014-21 was in fact “fascist,” being no different than Spiked Online. In our piece we pushed back against this latter claim, noting that Zer0’s publication of “problematic” authors stretches back to the 2008-14 period—ironically, when it was run by much of the current staff at Repeater. And that if the Zer0 of 2014-21 often eschewed “cancel culture” or “political correctness” this was part of an imperfect attempt to—in light of the sociologically demonstrable discomfort of the working class with these —expand the demographic basis of the left (in contradistinction to the more left-liberal culture which prevails at Repeater).
As regards Repeater’s business dealings the last few weeks have done little to assuage these concerns. Repeater has replaced all of Zer0’s former editorial staff. They have also used a fusillade of legal threats to strip the former freelance publishing manager of a YouTube channel and Patreon that he built up—and that under UK law he should have the rights to as a contractor in lieu of an extant agreement (though the fact the Zer0 name was used extensively by him may complicate this somewhat). It is easy to detect the basic paradox of Repeater’s position. On one hand, the company claims that it did not “fire” anyone—Zer0’s staff were just contractors, after all. But on the other it refuses to respect the rights typically allotted to freelance contractors, who retain copyright for work products created under contract.
Still, “reacquired” assets or no, not all is well in the Repeater camp. Their first video for the YouTube channel they successfully annexed was an obvious PR bungle, with wall-to-wall responses criticizing their actions and calling for the reinstatement of former publishing manager Douglas Lain. And many—from Marxists to partisans of the populist left to those simply put off by anti-worker actions—have elected to support the erstwhile Zer0 2.0 set. Amidst all this Repeater’s decisions—such as publishing a (grammatically erroneous!) statement by new manuscript editor that redoubled as a condemnation of Zer0 2.0, or cribbing art assets from Lain in the same video in which they unceremoniously announced his exit—have smacked of a certain amateurism. The staff at Repeater are no doubt competent, and have seven years of publishing success to show for it (and more, if we count their time at Zer0 1.0). But they seem to have been caught badly off guard by the blowback that ensued from their reconquest of Zer0. Who knows? Perhaps they were so stuck in their UK literati bubble that they assumed Zer0’s transgression of liberal dogmas would insure they’d be lauded as liberators. Regardless though, it’s not hard not to think this episode risks permanently blemishing their credibility on the left—even if they’re likely to publish valuable works in the future.
One might hope that Repeater’s actions would give its most ardent supporters pause. But alas, no: many of them have continued to bang out dizzyingly biased tweets and polemics, seemingly unconcerned that their charges of fascism are being used to whitewash an anti-worker agenda. One of these supporters is Matt Colquhoun, who—in response to our last article for Cosmonaut—issued not one but two responses on his blog Xenogothic (the first of which Cosmonaut graciously elected to publish). Colquhoun’s (somewhat revised) argument boils down to two essential points. The first of these is that we did not grasp the fundamental nature of the charge leveled at Zer0 2.0. We can debate about whether Zer0 1.0 publishing Gilad Atzmon is worse than Zer0 2.0 publishing Angela Nagle, or whether the name “Zer0” was inspired by the work of Nick Land (or Sadie Plant, or Alain Badiou, as Colquhoun contends is possible). But what this ignores is that Zer0 2.0, unlike 1.0 or Repeater, was at core reactionary, being more concerned with fanning the flames of a played-out culture war with its contrarian opinions than advancing the left (a disposition Colquhoun sees as indistinguishable from that of Spiked Online—and, by extension, the Johnson government, whose media representatives deftly exploit the wincing of the “anti-woke left” for political gain). The second is that, while we defended Zer0’s “anti-woke” position on the grounds that it represented an attempt to reconnect the left with the working class skeptical of liberal positions, this is in reality a false dilemma. Our image of the “working class” is an imagined one, and—should we just broaden our minds a little bit—we’ll realize that there is no incompatibility between supporting e.g. cancel culture and appealing to the rainbow coalition that is the working class.
It is worth dwelling a little bit upon the way Colquhoun frames his first argument. We are “petty,” he contends, for having raised the issue of which authors were published by Zer0 1.0 and Zer0 2.0 respectively. For the question, Colquhoun tells us, has “never been about who has clocked up the most faux pas.” Given that this is coming from a guy who regularly assails the tweets of Zer0 2.0 authors with adjective-laden tirades, and who has professed disdain for Mike Watson’s book because its cover channels a popular meme (?), it seems unlikely that pettiness is the real cause of his frustration. The more likely source of annoyance is that our pointing out that Zer0 1.0 published several ideologically dubious authors, and that Zer0 2.0 was no worse in this respect, undercuts his initial argumentative strategy—essentially, the same kind of “guilt-by-association” tact he here decries. So, Colquhoun pivots. Our argument may “sound reasonable.” But what it ignores is that Zer0’s essence, above and beyond anything it actually published, is symmetrical with that of Spiked Online. The proof? A video of a lecture from this year’s Historical Materialism conference, in which Evan Smith explains how the left-libertarian nucleus behind the (small, British, Trotskyite) Revolutionary Communist Party in the 1980s eventually came to found the notorious tabloid. Followed by the observation that, if the right is keen to exploit the fissure between the “woke” and “anti-woke” left, this proves that the latter are in fact the right.
We should be clear about what Colquhoun has done here: he has sidestepped a discussion about the actual books published by Zer0 2.0 with a sweeping generalization about its ideological character. “I’ve found it!,” our avowed anti-essentialist shouts out from the wilderness of his personal blog. “I’ve found the essence of Zer0 2.0!” Of course, it is true that four or so Spiked contributors published with Zer0 1.0. Just as it is true that Spiked contributor James Heartfield wrote for both Zer0 1.0 and Repeater (and this is not to discuss the likes of Atzmon or Nina Power). It is even possible that the “anti-woke” positions of Spiked had some influence upon Zer0 2.0, given the importance of Nagle to it (Zer0 1.0 seemed to rely on the CCRU for these). But Zer0 2.0 was—at least for a Marxian press—highly ideologically amorphous. Is it worth noting that Doug Lain was involved in the Marxist Humanist Initiative, and has a penchant for Jappe’s synthesis of situationism and value-theory? That Ben Burgis is a Trotskyist who once voted for Ralph Nader? That Conrad Hamilton is as much an apologist for actually existing socialism as he is for anorak Marxist philosophy? All that really unites these diverse socialist commitments is a belief in the primacy of class struggle. And so if “anti-woke” positions resonated at Zer0 2.0, they did so in a particular way. The RCP-Spiked shift, as Smith points out in the presentation Colquhoun linked to, was marked by the idea that “the class struggle was over”—that it was more important circa the nineties to win “the battle of ideas.” It’s this change that made it particularly germane to the right, who were quite content to offered qualified support to “left” rabble-rousers who had little or nothing to say on the subject of revolutionary strategy. Yet if Zer0 2.0 leaned into anti-woke positioning, it did so precisely in order to advance the class struggle. Political correctness and cancel culture lack popularity amongst the working class. This is, as we see it, not a coincidence: movements like BLM or #MeToo, while not necessarily bad, are defined by a petit-bourgeois disposition according to which it is race and gender particularity, not the racializing and genderizing effects of capital, which function as the object of critique. In a bid to re-connect the left with the working class, Zer0 2.0 narrowed in on this lack of structural critique, reading Mark Fisher as an invaluable harbinger of a Marxist revival that his fashionable post-Marxism prevented him from fully realizing. This Marxist turn is not merely conjectural. It is attested to by hundreds of books, and thousands of hours of videos, which engage with political economy more seriously than Zer0 1.0 or Repeater—let alone Spiked.
For Colquhoun, this palpable commitment to class struggle is not enough. For in his view it would seem that—quite ironically for someone who decries Zer0 2.0’s preoccupation with the “culture war”— agreement with woke ideas is the sine qua non of authentic socialism. Indeed, this is why for Colquhoun the populist right cheers on, or is even influenced by, “left” anti-woke outlets like Spiked: because they see in them their mirror image. Yet while Spiked’s eschewal of class struggle likely increased its palatability for the populist right, the fact reactionaries occasionally puff up even veritably socialist outfits like Zer0 2.0 proves very little. Amidst the ongoing left civil war, the socialist left is undeniably the weaker faction. It is only natural for the right to exploit this, attempting to sow discord by tossing table scraps to it. But this does not prove that socialists who object to woke ideas are right-wing, any more than Žižek writing for RT proves he’s pro-Putin, or Lenin taking a German chartered train back to Russia proves he’s pro-Kaiser (if you’ll pardon the esoteric reference). And it is very telling that—in the battle between an anti-woke socialist left and a pro-woke liberal one—it is the former that Colquhoun sees as obstructing class solidarity.
Colquhoun, to be fair, would not accept the need to choose between these two extremities. For him there is no contradiction between proselytizing political correctness and cancel culture and appealing to the working class. This brings us to his second argument—that the working class Zer0 attempted to connect with was an imagined one. This charge is repeated mantra-like across Colquhoun’s two responses to our initial article: Zer0 2.0’s working class, we are told, is “reactionary,” “idealized,” “received,” and “fictional.” It is, moreover a “neoliberal spectre,” “handed down over decades by the ruling class.” Of course, one could point out here that the working class is always in a sense handed down by the ruling class, in so far as it is constituted by capital so as to reproduce value. But to focus too much on this would be to distract from the gist of Colquhoun’s charge—that Zer0 2.0 was narrowly interested in stumping for the “white working class,” and by extension “contributed nothing to working-class solidarity over the course of its lifetime.”
If it were true that Zer0 2.0 had positioned itself in favor of the “white working class” at the expense of its other constituents, Colquhoun would be quite correct to accuse it of cozying up to the populist right. Yet we should ask: where is the proof of this allegation? Obviously, no one at Zer0 2.0 ever said they support the “white working class”—to the contrary, authors like Matthew McManus and Ben Burgis attacked the essentialism of the far-right more prolifically and frontally than their counterparts at Repeater (take the sustained campaign waged against Jordan Peterson by Zer0 2.0, or McManus’ critique of right-wing identity politics). Therefore Colquhoun’s claim is essentially this: that anything other than an unqualified endorsement of woke ideas is tantamount to a reactionary defense of the “white working class.” For this argument to hold, it must be the case that upholding political correctness and cancel culture are indispensable to the “working-class solidarity” Colquhoun purports to want to bring about. But Colquhoun does not actually offer anything resembling proof for this claim—it is merely asserted. And the closest thing we do have to proof of the demographic popularity of political correctness—the studies cited in our initial article—suggest a starkly different reality: that it is not whites in the U.S. who oppose political correctness, but the poorer and less educated of all races. Clearly, if it was the goal of Zer0 2.0 to endear itself to the white working class, it had a pretty bad strategy for doing so. And ironically, if we heed the conclusions of the study in question it is Colquhoun’s position, not Zer0 2.0’s, that would be more likely to attract the support of a white demographic in so far as wealth and education are racialized.
One suspects Colquhoun’s theoretical error is down to a lack of material analysis. He accuses Zer0 2.0 of “tailism”—of failing to align itself with the most progressive elements of the working class. Perhaps we should be grateful that he was able to pull himself away from his dog-eared copy of K-Punk long enough to run a Google search on Lenin. But this does not change the fact that the way Colquhoun is using this term—to justify uncritical advocacy of politically correct dogmas—is distinctly unsatisfying. For Lenin, “tailism” was a term of reproach leveled against the “Economists”—those who believed that the socialist left should not take the lead but allow economic events to unfold on their own, picking up the tail of the revolutionary impulse that arises therefrom. While Colquhoun seems to rely on a strange reading of tailism by Raymond Ó Dubhghaill that conflates it with refusing to support e.g. BLM, Lenin’s point was in fact different: that communists must not expect the workers’ movement will achieve the requirements of revolutionary social democracy by itself, but should seek to impose political unity upon it, struggling “against all attempts to entrench non-socialist ideology.” Of course, the sort of right-wing workerism that has become ubiquitous over the past few years—and that Trump pitched to during the pandemic in order to stave off the kyboshing of the reproduction of capital—is an example of a non-socialist ideology that ought to be opposed. But so too is the pedagogic anti-discrimination paradigm favored in the professional-managerial citadels of Oxford or Apple Park, remote as it is from core political questions—of socially reproductive labor, or of the centrality of the black sub-proletarian to capitalism. In which respect it would be Colquhoun picking up the tail: by sidling up to workers in the advanced sectors of capital, rather than attempting to synthesize the more correct (as opposed to politically correct) opinions of the working class rank and file.
We should not pretend that formalizing an ideology worthy of the present-day class struggle is an easy task. Indeed, when Zer0 2.0 took this on, it often stumbled, producing results that were decidedly unsatisfactory. But Zer0 2.0 at least acknowledged the fissured character of our class landscape, the way one cannot ‘unify’ the working class with petit-bourgeois ideology. Colquhoun by contrast is foremostly interested—like all bourgeois thinkers—in unity. There is a working-class, he tells us, which exists—though we do not know where—that’s politics are in perfect conformance with his left-liberal worldview. As such, there is no need to for political choice: the way to overcome capitalism is to support movements that have no critique of capital. As well as to read Mark Fisher, whose work shows us how to overcome fatal obstruction of class solidarity like that which occurred between “workers” and “hippies” (?). The issue is that Colquhoun’s is not a real unity of the type supported by Lenin but a unity that exists only in the mind. It’s for this reason why he’s unable to understand why we would acknowledge the philosophical limitations of Fisher’s work while simultaneously defending Zer0 2.0’s political use of it: because he looks for answers in the text, in the mental realm, rather than on a terrain of class struggle in which philosophy must strategically bow to politics.
To see how Colquhoun’s false unity is politically deployed, it will be helpful to examine how he responds to our joke about Liara Roux’s new Repeater-published book, Whore of New York (that its celebration of “the spiritual nature of sex work” attests to the publisher’s left-liberal drift). For Colquhoun, that we would make even a passing, parenthetical remark at Roux’s expense shows that we are “SWERFs”: sex worker exclusionary radical feminists. What never occurs to Colquhoun is that our (light) mocking of Roux may have something to do with the fact she is a—relatively speaking—highly privileged sex worker, whose account of prostitution as an empowering odyssey of self-discovery has little to do with the violence and hardship experienced by women in this trade, particularly those from the Global South. Of course, it would not be right to present prostitution as an undifferentiated field of moral emptiness. Just as it would be not right to think that its criminalization will be adequate to bring about the end of these exploitative conditions, or that sex workers have it harder than workers in the most grueling capitalist sectors. But this does not change the fact that, when compared to more sophisticated work of theoretical fiction tackling sexuality—say, Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie—Roux’s book is sorely lacking in class consciousness. Nor that it is rife with liberal-humanist platitudes: the problem with capitalism, Roux informs us, is that it “restrict[s] or prevent[s] the flow of capital” to “women, to people of color […] specifically Black and Indigenous peoples.” But do not be too troubled by this, for “Love always prevails. Not just romantic love, but Love in the religious sense.” As this sounds suspiciously like the refrain of a ‘60s pop song, one is tempted to paraphrase Voltaire: that anything too stupid to be said (or written) should be instead sung.
Roux’s “Love” is no more real a unity than Colquhoun’s imaginary working class. And given that Roux “like[s] to think of [herself] as a hippy,” we perhaps know why Colquhoun finds her politics so (relatively) compelling. But isn’t this strategy—of declaring the need for unity, then aggressively attempting to impose left-liberal hegemony upon it—really that of Repeater as a whole? In a statement published on 27 November, Repeater boss Tariq Goddard claims that Doug Lain “falsely reported being fired” after he found out about the sale of Repeater Books—as if some sort of rapprochement would’ve been possible. Elsewhere in the statement, he describes Zer0 2.0 as “opportunistically benefitting from [1.0’s] brand,” as posing “an existential threat to our project,” and as being “beyond the pale” (just for kicks, he also accuses Zer0 2.0 of having a “struggling frontlist” supported by a “successful backlist”—which is funny, considering that Zer0 2.0 came closer to meeting the sales watersheds of Zer0 1.0 than Repeater did). Do these really sound like the words of someone who doesn’t want another “internecine left-wing squabble”? Or who would’ve done anything other than remove all of the existing staff? “We want unity,” Repeater says. But on our unconditional terms—or else we’ll keep shelling away.
– Zero-Degree Collective
