I have been reading the “debates” between the Zero Degree Collective and Matt Colquhoun. I do not know the identity of the Zero Degree Collective, but I can attest to my knowledge that their presentation of the situation is similar to my own with one exception: Watkins Media, the owner of Repeater, reportedly sold the rights not just to the imprint but to the channel and Patreon feed in the acquisition of John Hunt, and John Hunt Publications had not worked out rights agreements for all media published on the channel nor was clear about ownership of the channel established under either US or UK law. In many respects, gentlemen’s agreements were maintained with massively different understandings, and the purchase of John Hunt Publishing highlighted the legal ambiguity involved. Watkins Media and Repeater Books inherited much of this situation, but in the changeups with new ownership, the situation became acute. However, their portrayal of this as a political issue, however sincerely felt by new editorial staff, has not aided the situation, and their handling of public relations has been profoundly wrongheaded. Why fight so hard for an audience while you are also calling that audience tacitly fascist-adjacent? How could you not see how angry that audience might become while you are also courting it?
How do I know this? I worked as a contractor for Zero Books for seven years, leaving the media team only a month before the buyout. One of the few full-time staff members of John Hunt Publications (that I believe has been maintained by Watkins Media) also reached out to me about the possibility of future freelance work. I was not interested. Beyond this, I am a friend of Douglas Lain and have worked with him sporadically, though not uncomplicatedly, for the last decade. I was a regular guest on his prior podcast, Diet Soap, and formed Pop the Left with him in the year 2012. In 2016, when my podcast, Symptomatic Redness, was fading due to my inability to continue producing it (as my then-spouse had cancer and my unpaid producer was going through a similar life crisis in her own life) he reached out to publish it in the newly launched Zero Book Club to increase media content. This stabilized my income stream in a way that allowed the formation of a small production team and a shared fee. Rights for the ownership of this material were not worked out, and, while some marketing was paid for by John Publishing as a freelance contractor at a fair rate, the assumption was that creators of all materials were their owners, and much of the archive released to Zero Book Club subscribers (and later the Patreon) were made by freelancers, without any compensation and with no ownership from Zero.
I recount this to be fair as possible to all involved as I have rarely seen a business dispute portrayed in such political terms. After all, both Watkins Media and John Hunt Publishing are boutique publishers who specialize in creating niche imprints, and the legacy was established before either company began a political imprint. Furthermore, it is the case that many of the writers that were seen as problematic had a long history with both publications. In fact, Sp!ked associate James Hartfield not only wrote for both Repeater and Zero but moved to be more critical of Zero precisely because of Douglas Lain’s mild critique of Angela Nagle. So how much difference there is politically between the two groups will be made clear by the future projects, not their current or past ones.
Rarely in my life have I seen people fool themselves into believing that a petty proprietor dispute involving contractors holds such political importance—even if it was a media controversy. Indeed, these are the gasps of people who view themselves as left but for whom political identity is an extension of personal identity and thus personal morality. Saying that this is imposed upon us by the bourgeoisie makes it seem as if the bourgeoisie have knowingly thought this out. No wonder so much of the media-influenced left has tried to justify its media consumption habits by moving from Bernie Sanders to “materialist conspiracies.”
Sad.
You may be reading this going, “That’s a big leap to make.” That is fair but recounting the details of informal business deals should strike you as boring. This gets to why I left Zero “2.0” a month before the acquisition by Watkins Media. It was similar to the reason I stepped down as managing editor of the North Star after a shadow dispute with its unbeknownst-to-me funder, the late Louis Proyect. Ironically, given how much of the debate around Zero 2.0 and Repeater is about the legacy of Mark Fisher, Fisher as at the core of both. The Vampire Castle essay oft referred to online has long lost its publication context, and while Matt Colquhoun (in my only exchange with him in my life in the Twitter feed of this publication) has told me he didn’t find the other responses all that relevant to Fisher, as one of the five people who pushed for the publication of Vampire Castle piece, I can speak to the significance.
Fisher, at the time, was near-universally damned. There were thousands of comments on his piece at the North Star within hours. Sadly, with these publications fading from the internet, this discussion has been lost. Pieces arguing against Fisher were published, most notably by Sam Kriss, who retracted his criticism years later in a more high-profile piece. Jodi Dean and Micheal Rechtenwald defended the piece. I tried to contextualize it. For example, I found the view that the Vampire Castle was just a posh attack on working-class politics to be false—I laid out the case that liberal versions of standpoint epistemology developed as a response to post-Marxism, and while intersectionality was strongly built on making modern identity categories transhistorical, the basic framework for understanding the overlapping development of class and race in the early modern transitions to capitalism was far better than trying to reduce it to category. I pointed out that the tensions of the US left, from the decline of the SPA to the growth of the CPUSA to its historical subsumption into the Democratic Party under the popular front, had all played into the situation that led to the new left trying to produce new frameworks from both the liberal and frankly the Marxist traditions. From standpoint epistemology to post-structuralism to post-Marxism, these idea sets weren’t just betrayals—even if some were betrayals—but responses to an everchanging situation and the stagnation of the socialist project in the “developed” world. Lastly, I found and still find the politics around Fisher’s defense of Russel Brand to be, frankly, simplistic. Something that I have felt since I read Capitalist Realism, which I took as a popularization of the theories of Frederic Jameson and others that posited that neoliberalism has collapsed the imagination of the political actors and the left, was that the conditions that led to neoliberalism also led to the collapse of socialism—reformist or revolutionary—is a given, but how is never answered and who becomes a redundant question.
Fine, I said, but one does not merely think oneself out of a problem one did not think oneself into. After prompting Douglas Lain to have a discussion with Mark Fisher about his views on class at Diet Soap, I let it lie. Fisher was kind to me in correspondences, and the Vampire Castle essay grew in stature as the other figures around it had their controversies. It was not surprising to me that the “dirtbag” left picked it up years later. People like simple histories, simple villains, and hagiographies.
It should be obvious now that I find all this debate over the late Mark Fisher’s legacy ironic. Fisher was a major figure in the combination of the ideas of Deleuze and Marx in the context of aughts blogging culture and a fascinating popularizer of their work. But capitalist realism was not a thesis—it was a description. The Vampire Castle was not a thesis—it was a metaphor, and not an entirely critical or historically-rooted one at that.
It is tempting to settle scores as two flashpoints in my life involved Mark Fisher, and I am an obscure figure in the history of these debates. I have preferred, in general, to let others argue and promote others from the sidelines as an obscure comrade. But the Vampire Castle fallout pushed several of my friends into more and more intransigent politics: anti-left Marxism emerges as Marxists try to transcend the spectrum of liberal bourgeois politics and quickly morphs into something that cuts against both the “left” and the workers. Any significant understanding of Italian Marxism and Italian fascism would make that clear. This emerges in the debates around Vampire Castle at the time. Another late editor at North Star who published under the pseudonym Pavel (who was often wrongly assumed to be me) abandoned the left in a series of editorials—first supporting Ba’athists and then publishing a figure called Red De Maistre. This individual later became a consultant to both the Australian and UK governments, expatriating himself from his native-born United States and making some effort to repatriate himself after the election of Trump. Another, Michael Rectenwald, had a complete fallout with the left and became a minor right-wing media figure. Indeed, when Angela Nagle was fighting with the left and Douglas Lain defending her, it was two people from the first round of the Vampire Castle that I invoked in warning about this “post-left” then “anti-left” turn.
What I said then is what I say now and was the reason I left Zero’s media team. Trying to invoke against the culture wars by focusing on purely cultural issues grants legitimacy to the most ephemeral of its frameworks. The reason why battles about political correctness, call-out culture, and cancel culture (to name its many incarnations) seem key is that they are a sign of a left without a movement or a program. Furthermore, it is not just political will why such a program does not exist. Without this, distinctions emerge, and mutual constitutive feedback loops emerge—it is not a neoliberal conspiracy that creates it, although corporations and politicians are ready to capitalize on the disorder that emerges. Without a program that is in dialogue with and emergent from the social base of Marxian socialism—the proletariat and those who are proletarianized—the focus on consumption and self-identity is what follows.
I left North Star and Zero for this reason: I saw neither as trying to understand Marxists’ historical contribution to liberal problems (which were due to Marxist political groupings, research programs, and political programs stagnating in the middle of the twentieth century). The reasons for that are beyond the scope of this one letter and has been my own research focus for at least five years. Moral panics and five-minute hates are inevitable in this environment as one’s politics cannot be manifested as part of a larger movement but only as an assertion of one’s priorities. I have seen this in the debates about the Democratic Socialists of America trying to form anything like a coherent program to which it could bind members, seeing the continual re-emergence of sectarian consciousness, even within the new Democratic Socialist left, that has become increasingly important to its internal functioning. The fact so much hay has been made about the true political character of small business transactions by people who identify as socialists illustrates that people are either profoundly confused or that the political mission seems profoundly stalled. To engage in the debates about “wokeness” or “anti-wokeness” is to grant the dominant narrative legitimacy—if you want to undermine this impasse, one must expose historical and material origins, not merely by asserting its intellectual genealogy, but looking at what the causal matrix is behind the genealogy.
I have not come to praise Mark Fisher or Zero 2.0 nor to condemn Repeater. I have come to point to the deeper pathologies to which we could not escape and hopefully bury them. If you found much of this letter boring, this is a good sign. What was important is the inability of any involved to look at what led to the kinds of dysfunctions of the left today, not merely to condemn them as if it were just political bad faith or a capitalist conspiracy that leads to these breakdowns. I have felt that continuing my role in publications and institutions that get caught in this cul-de-sac—however well-meaning—would be to grant the debate itself legitimacy.
I miss Mark Fisher and several of the other people I have mentioned in this letter—whatever my disagreements with them. You may have noticed how much I have used the adjective “late.” Many of the people involved did not live to see this impasse and were involved for decades, and their deaths come from varied reasons: age, cancer, strokes, depression. Many involved in these debates have died and died young. Let us honor them, not by hagiography, but by doing what they tried to do and could not finish: understanding why we got here so one day we can see a way out beyond merely pointing to the mote in someone else’s eye. I wish the new Zero team and Douglas Lain’s new project, Diet Soap Media, well. I have worked with people on both sides of this debate as I have worked with people on both sides of many debates. While political betrayal and ideological bad faith are real things and should be monitored against, there are times where one should hate the game and not the players. Obsessions with political errors as a proof of a capitalist conspiracy to suppress some supposedly socialist truths are not just a simpleton’s understanding history, but they cut against the Marxist tradition of analysis to which many of us claim a commitment.
C. Derick Varn
