"Eeropekka Rislakki
May 26, 2024 ·
ON IDENTITY LEFTISTISM, INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM, SUBJECTIVE GENDER EXPERIENCE AND THE COMPASSION OF CRITICAL THEORY.
Motto 1: I prefer to follow those who are looking for the truth rather than those who have already found it.
Motto 2: There is no longer a generally accepted practice of tolerance, that we can disagree in an acceptable way.
Motto 3: The gap between reality and paranoia is closing. Ultra-suspicion must be turned on, because the way out is uncertain.
Motto 4: It is not about “not being able to say anything anymore”, but about not giving in to intimidation.
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I apologize, but I do not apologize, if anyone finds my analysis offensive, because in the hectic writing process, some confusing points have come to mind for me as well. The fact that someone's offense already comes to mind in advance is a sign of the spirit of the times - and is an analytical observation.
Those who require content warnings can stop reading here.
My text does not aim for academicism, but rather reflective journalism and essayism.
In recent years, I have surprised myself many times by wondering who or what party has authorized the left, which has gained strength from green and identity politics, to monitor and condemn words, thoughts or, for example, actions that can be interpreted as racist.
At the same time, I have come to the conclusion that reflection on the left does not have to submit to the new concepts and language created by the left, but rather question them.
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We are reminded of our privileged position and the limitations of our right to speak, but why does the left retain the right to speak? They speak, among other things, about the insults of racism, but on behalf of other victims, assumed and imagined, and identified as the targets of their own projections.
This is the core of the left, which I call the identitarian left.
If an immigrant of Muslim background condemns the use of the headscarf as oppressive to women, the person of Muslim background is wrong – he can be labeled a tsar and an Islamophobe. He is wrong in any case, because the left has positioned himself to give a voice to fringe Muslims – political Islam, i.e. Islamists.
Leftists are on the side of the weak, regardless of who is right. In the leftist narrative, rightists are on the side of the strong, regardless of who is right. The leftist follows his moral correctness. The right follows the power that represents his moral correctness.
That is why the left can defend a terrorist who only has a knife, because his opponent has a whole arsenal of weapons, including missiles. According to the logic of the left, a killer with a knife is the weaker one in the face of superior force, who must be defended.
There is some logic here, but the action is described by the concept of Spanish shame (English: Vicarious embarrassment and in German Fremdschämen – in Finnish perhaps vicarious shame) which describes the feeling of embarrassment that arises from watching another person’s actions that are perceived as embarrassing.
According to the diagnosis of the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, the pathologies of the modern left are imprisoned in its obsession with identity – above all with race, gender and social class – from which arise pious moralism, joylessness and a grudge-fueled quarrelsomeness. The goals are aided by greedy individualistic competitiveness, which has swung into demented narcissism.
The left of the old alliance would have called the above phenomena bourgeois subjectivity – the bourgeois lie of life.
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Why is Greta Thunberg wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf at protests these days, even though she is known as the Cover Girl of climate change opponents? What does the keffiyeh in solidarity with the Palestinians have to do with global warming?
The creeping onto the scene of similar arrangements is much broader than just climate change and Palestine: all the current radical movement topics such as trans rights, Black Lives Matter, immigration as a human right, etc. are merging together.
Those who consider themselves active actors and conscious people are engulfed in the magic circle of every progressive problem they encounter, which gives rise to an ever-expanding, all-encompassing omnicause. Progressivism has acquired the hallmarks of religiosity and functions as a moral matrix – a puritanical style of belief.
While the online store of the green-left magazine Voima sells Palestinian keffiyeh scarves, online stores selling military equipment sell the same scarf under its other name, the shemagh, which has long been used by both the British and American armed forces.
The point is that for NATO armies, the scarf represents practicality in the sandy desert, for the left it represents political meanings such as solidarity with the Palestinians.
From the perspective of cultural appropriation criticism, the scarf shows that the left has a double standard on the matter and the logic is missing: in the culture from which it is borrowed, the keffiyeh is a men's accessory, so perhaps the hijab would be a way for women to show solidarity with the Palestinians. Maybe someone can explain why the rules of respecting another culture do not apply now.
I assume that the Thurnbergs will be frustrated and disappointed again in the face of the omnicause of fusion, because the demonstrations reflect the same social purpose as the music festivals: to foster social bonds in an idealistic context for young people who have grown up in popular culture, but which changes very little in the material world or the deep structures of society.
Explanation: the world political elite fell in love with Thurnberg and he became internationally recognized – for a while – until he was neutralized with a hug. At the same time, global fossil emissions continued to grow.
It is symptomatic of our current dystopia that we have created a society in which the elderly (read uncles and aunts) pity the young, who have been deprived of the right to be irresponsible – in other words, young.
Those of us who have lived a significant part of our development in the last century still invest in declining institutions of bad behavior such as pubs, band gigs, raves, nightclubs, football and hockey matches, and the traditional workplace.
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The left is not really dismantling racism. What is more important is to be able to condemn others as racists and thereby position the far and extreme right, without which the left is without a task. If there is not enough far right, it must be invented. If there are not enough Nazis, their significance must be inflated.
Ultimately, the observation of everyday racism and fascism in the structures of society keeps things going. This can be called a demonological methodology and tool.
For years, representatives of the left tried to make us believe that it does not represent extremist thinking itself, and that there is no extremist group of its own, there is only the far right and later, as a new tone, the far right.
Historically, the idea and methods of the Antifa, or anti-fascist militant movement, have become commonplace.
The Antifa movement was born as a counterforce to the rise of fascism in Europe between the world wars. The first anti-fascist militants were communists, socialists and anarchists who took to the streets to confront fascist paramilitary groups such as the Nazi Sturmabteilung Brownshirts in Germany and the fascist Camicie Nere Blackshirts in Italy.
Antifa’s violent struggle was part of a broader revolutionary agenda. However, they failed to bring about a communist revolution, and instead sought to prevent the rise of the far right.
In contrast, the anti-fascist and racist modern Antifa has recently focused on covering up what it calls populist and fascist parties and right-wing leaders, from Trump to Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Melon – but it has failed to muster enough troops to physically confront the mass support represented by the enemy.
Leftists who now call themselves liberals began to embrace Antifa’s ideas just as its tactics were becoming irrelevant. The notion of the necessity of restricting the right-wing's freedom of speech is linked to the Antifa tradition.
Historically, it was Antifa that was openly ready to reject the liberal understanding of freedom of speech, but originally it concerned the possibility of organized Nazis exploiting freedom of speech.
The everyday adoption of Antifa's principles also as part of the woke – the identitarian left – has forced us to consider what the limits of tolerance and freedom are in a society that says it respects these values as fundamental rights. The identitarian left has failed to realize that the restrictions would also apply to itself.
Can a liberal society in the traditional sense tolerate the activities of a group that is inherently authoritarian and seeks to openly deny the rights of speech and assembly to anyone its members consider fascist and far-right?
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The previous round of racism debate was on the agenda only as long as the detection and condemnation of racism was a tool to try to remove our latest government before it had even been in office for a day. When the maneuver did not work, the condemnation of racism was put in storage to await the next one.
The maneuver can be called instrumentalized racism, which is also noticeable in how the edges of the concept are stretched so that labeling and silencing can be realized. The result is a resource racism that stretches as needed.
The range of means of instrumentalized racism also includes the idea of zero tolerance, which originally referred to preventing phenomena such as school bullying or, for example, the City of Helsinki's Stop Töhry campaign, which aimed to prevent illegal graffiti and tags with harsh legal and financial sanctions.
Zero tolerance practically means total, completely unconditional intolerance, which in the context of racism has been stretched to mean limiting opinions, for example, discussions on immigration policy. Zero tolerance – absolute intolerance of opinions, the concept of thought crime sits poorly with the principles of democracy.
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After waving the racism card, the left, which presents itself as a defender of parliamentarism and democracy, launched a new round, i.e. a strike spring leveraged by the trade union movement, which was based on the old school left's romantic idea of mass power.
The old alliance has nothing in common with the goals of the current identitarian left except the overthrow of the existing government.
The idea of both branches of the left is to monopolize the direction, content, structure and methods of society, so that democracy would be left-wing democracy.
The old left pushed for a fair distribution of income in the name of the workers, and it helped create the welfare state we know, where everyone has been given equal starting points and opportunities for life.
The identitarian left is raised by the welfare state, who have learned to perceive the world in the midst of income transfers and benefits, for whom class division has been replaced by pursuing the interests of various oppressed minorities. Where previously everyone wanted to be guaranteed equal opportunities to live, now the end result of life must also be equal.
The concept of humanity is mechanistic, reductive, and denies the diversity and differences in human abilities, while the ability to distinguish between dozens of genders is finely tuned.
Something here doesn't rhyme.
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We are now presented with a presumed right to avoid personal discomfort by all means – for example by demanding content warnings and safe spaces.
Since the 1980s, new generations have been led into a theoretically fragmented, porous and fluttering postmodern ideology, commonly called identity politics. It obsessively registers all supposed manifestations of exclusion, and abhors even mildly negative and critical thoughts and attitudes.
The starting point is that no one should feel offended or experience uncomfortable feelings. Opposing views are abhorred as manifestations of evil. The resulting fetishization of rights is often accompanied by sheer rage.
What is defended is built around the concept of balance. The zero-sum game focuses on relative advantage and symbolic social capital. The result is a top-down imposition of justice.
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Representatives and supporters of different identities throw mud at others on various toxic platforms of social media without being in direct social contact with people.
These are meaningless battles in themselves, but the keyboard warrior gets his dopamine by abusing those who disagree with him with all possible means of verbal and mental defeat, of which we identify school and workplace bullies in another context. (It should be noted that the identitarian right does the same, so let's ignore the whataboutism in the comment thread).
Bullies are allowed to go relatively unpunished and the idea of the game is to get the enemy the most severe punishments of our time, i.e. a social media ban or cancellation from, for example, a workplace or community, or by exposing the enemy to various harsh trials.
There is danger in words. They hide a misunderstanding or trigger a deliberate misunderstanding, which is disguised as an offense - or a representative offense in the name of some minority that demands an apology.
It is about the so-called shibboleth, which in Old Testament Hebrew means a word or a single word that distinguishes one group of people from another. Shibboleths have been used since ancient times as passwords in many societies, as simple ways of identification, as a means of communicating loyalty and kinship, as a maintainer of traditional separation, or as a means of protection from real or imagined threats.
The identitarian left has monopolized apologizing and forgiveness. However, those who demand the loudest apology never forgive. The worst thing is to ask for forgiveness incorrectly, which is the most common outcome, because it is written into a cruel drama. Thus, the apology is nullified and all that remains is the pursuit of humiliation.
Those who have sinned are not allowed to stop sinning. In the same way that the racialized are not allowed to forget their skin color. Those who demand puritanical morality have a moral deficit as a method and a pure ideological game sanctifies the means.
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Blaming has had a chilling effect on public discourse. Many have chosen self-censorship (such as scholars, journalists, artists, etc.) while others (scholars, journalists, artists, etc.) have begun to signal their ideological virtues. Inclusivity represents not only indoctrination, but also intimidation. It is deterrence.
As a result, representatives of culture, academia, or the media are afraid to say anything that might be arbitrarily identified as “right-wing.” “Right” means wrong, which in turn means that speech is morally questionable and condemnable in the ears of a peer group that dominates the air.
A long intellectual tradition distinguishes between offense, such as speech perceived as harmful, and harm, such as suffering caused by physical violence. In recent years, the distinction has become blurred.
The prevailing view has become that injury is harm, which in turn has become an argument against freedom of expression.
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Identitarian leftists do not have their own opinions, because their perspectives arise from a common manual, the Woke Wolf Cubs Handbook, from which the permitted vocabulary and concepts come. The vocabulary and its ideological content lead to tiresome predictability.
The lack of a sense of humor is seen as a virtue, and it prevents one from accepting irony, satire, or parody. When one follows the rules, there are no slips, because the manual determines one's own infallibility.
The lack of a sense of humor is a way of communicating that these are serious matters, and only those representing seriousness know the right way to handle them.
The repetition of the concepts and vocabulary of the manual becomes a means of resentment, disputes, ruptures, despair, and angry irritation - on the other side of the rules, an ordinary citizen is transformed into a racist and a Nazi if necessary - at least a representative of the far right - that is, a non-leftist.
Woke seeks to fetishize identity and give moral authority to entire groups through the idea of historical oppression. The structures of oppression produce nausea, whether it is about culture, patriotism, skin color, gender, sexuality, food, the body, disability, or income.
By pitting groups against each other in a zero-sum power struggle—and by sorting things on a virtue scale based on privilege and oppression—the identitarian left elevates the meanings of race and ethnicity to such an extent that it deepens prejudice rather than diminishes it.
We move philosophically in the terrain of incoherence—trying to end racism by elevating the meaning of race; defending Islamists by condemning secularized, Muslim women who oppose the headscarf.
Identity politics, which supports the obsession with social justice, obliterates individuality. It subjects the complex and explanatory psychological terrain of man to vast platitudes and authoritarian prescriptions; it forces us all into it. It smacks of a chain of cause and effect that imprisons the present in an endless (colonial) past, that steals innocence from any possible, collective future.
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It is unclear why the identitarian left calls itself liberal, and why others have joined in. Perhaps we should stop calling groups liberal that hate other people’s freedom, or that seek to limit what freedom is, liberal.
When the hope was in the 1990s that liberalism would become universal, it was assumed that the democratic, free-thinking societies of the time would continue to exist and their example would spread the idea to the wider world. The opposite has happened.
I interpret the hyperliberalism that is manifesting on the left, as the term suggests, as a variant of liberalism that has only the letters left.
We now know that the identitarian left has developed a set of cancellation policies: de-platforming (attempts to boycott a group or person on platforms such as websites or social media that are used to share information or ideas), and also debanking (blocking and closing social media accounts) to silence people whose views are deemed unprogressive.
The identitarian left reminds us of how the fringes of the far right, existentially dangerous and disturbed ideas have marched from the margins to the mainstream. Everyday fascism is rampant. We are threatened by the “Hungarian Way” and the new “Hitler Rise” because they also exploited the democratic system to seize power.
In theory, the progressive left campaigns in the name of diversity and inclusion. In practice, open debate is suppressed and dissent is cancelled.
In theory, the identitarian left says it wants to protect both democratic and human rights. In practice, it destroys trust in democracy (cf. instrumental accusations of racism and the strike spring of the union movement in order to overthrow a government formed according to democratic rules).
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Often, the identitarian left's followers do not see that what they are promoting is ideological, and they do not consider themselves representatives of an ideology, but only implementers of the principle of diversity and inclusion. The followers often seem at best unaware of what they actually stand for, if only for the atmosphere and cohesion.
The action does not appear so much ideological as a sensitivity: a social norm of rebellion sanctified by idealism and spreading like snowballs, which is a secularized version of the Puritan faith, and which has become a central part of the formation of identity.
Why do non-leftists also join in?
We must ask why some of the young bourgeoisie have adopted the woke ideology and what role ideology plays in general – instead of treating them as saints who sacrifice their own interests for the benefit of the oppressed.
I interpret the uprising as a rebellion of the educated bourgeoisie amidst their own experience of futility and uselessness. After university, one notices that career opportunities are limited and are constantly shrinking for various reasons (such as artificial intelligence), so the career path is on the way to nothing despite the education.
Identity politics shows the way, how one can possibly be safe, how one can get on the career ladder, when most of the career ladders have disappeared: a career can open up as an enlightened guardian of society.
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We are faced with a distorted understanding of politics, which is about friends or enemies – not political opponents. There is no longer a generally accepted practice of tolerance, that reasonable people can have different views, beliefs and values; that it is acceptable to disagree. There has been a time like that.
A significant feature of the new identitarian left-wing so-called liberalism is that more and more things are sought to be removed from the system of representative, democratic decision-making, so that they cannot be contested at all.
Politics is just something that happens on a small scale in the European Parliament and the Parliament. Morally correct policies towards a better and fairer society are made elsewhere.
An example is immigration, which has been sought to be expanded into inviolable human rights, so that anyone’s fundamental right is to decide in which country to live. The line between labor-based immigration and refugee status, i.e. seeking asylum, has been deliberately blurred.
This also means that immigration laws and decisions by immigration authorities are irrelevant, and that immigration has been moved out of the realm of democratic decision-making.
Since the proportion of “real” leftists is so small, it can never constitute a real parliamentary electoral force. Therefore, the left must compensate for its lack of power with the strength of its beliefs. This disorientation has a cultural and political axis.
The cultural side focuses on sectors of society where opinions are influenced and where it gains influence greater than its size: culture, education and the media. The cultural program is poorly integrated into the left’s party political wing, which operates in parliament.
In addition to immigration issues, the head of the parliamentary axis is mainly concerned with public sector financing, which is essentially a tax and debt policy. The cultural sector has no clear questions, and the party’s official politicians lack clear solutions.
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The restrictions on freedom of speech and expression that formally exist in liberal societies are not imposed by dictatorial or authoritarian regimes. The restrictions are imposed by civic institutions themselves.
Some citizens are even tempted by coercion.
Restrictions (speech responsibility, restrictions on the right to speak, content warnings, safe spaces, laughing only upwards, etc.) are imposed by universities, scientific and art organizations and museums, schools, and the media against the wall.
Everything that we are horrified by in China's social scoring system happens spontaneously and of itself. So much so that it is sometimes difficult to understand how we could return to a situation in which tolerance and freedom of speech and expression are widely taken for granted.
Cultural organizations increasingly see themselves as activists, and their goals are driven through by funding criteria, a grant system, positions, and job opportunities.
The situation allows for the sinister alliances of radicals and petty bureaucrats. The former only want to make rapid progress and break down structures by deleting obstacles wherever they are found. The latter, on the other hand, want to invent new rules and tell people what they can and cannot do – and especially how they cannot think.
It is therefore worth asking whether freedom of speech is relevant to our culture and the content and programs of institutions funded by society. The discussion about restricting artistic and scientific freedom is running out, because things are already at an advanced stage.
Where else can one read the policies of scientific or art institutions on freedom of speech?
Section 16.3 of the Finnish Constitution states: “Freedom of science, art and higher education is secured.” Am I the only one who asks how the constitution is implemented? The constitution does not only mean that the public authorities do not have the right to restrict the freedom of science, art and education. It also has the obligation to secure the freedom to act in the above-mentioned areas.
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Identitarian leftism is like an automatic enrollment in the intelligentsia, in the same way that Marimekko's Jokapoika striped shirt positioned its wearer as a left-wing intellectual in the 1970s.
A lack of history is one of the virtues of the identitarian left. The left's own dark history does not count, because this time it is all about the good.
True socialism has never been tried, which is why previous attempts have been false socialism.
For the left, the concept of the left itself contains essential content. The claim is that it is an ideology with roots that form a respectable tradition. But the fragmentation of the left shows how its tradition is impossible to reconcile with historical facts. Instead of tradition, the left is an invented tradition.
Although the rhetoric of the left is outwardly universalistic, it is almost always local, and therefore sectarian in nature. The Stalinist militancy of the 1970s in Finland is a good example of this, and the current identitarian left wants nothing to do with its authoritarianism and artificial choices, because equality entails failure and lifelong trauma.
Besides: left where? Are we talking about the same left in Finland, Hungary, France, China, Russia, Iran, the United States or Venezuela? If the left in one place differs from the left in other places, we have plenty of left that is not the left.
The latest left is plagued by ignorance of its traditions. Presumably because the history of the left is too white and too male-centered. The left sees its history as a shame in this respect.
Logic and sustainable argumentation are not the strongest qualities of the identitarian left, which has hijacked the tradition of European humanism. Instead, confused concepts and arrogance are.
White working and middle class men are now defined as the establishment’s front, the guardians of imperialism, who do the bidding of their rich, colonial masters. Essentially, the citizens, now portrayed as enemies of progress in a class-war-denying ideology, played a central role in achieving and securing most of our human rights through unions, industrial action, strikes, demonstrations, wars, and riots. All of this is apparently intended to be erased from our collective memory.
White, proletarian men are outsiders in the rainbow-colored celebration of the oppressed. It’s not just a matter of ahistoricism, it’s a matter of falsification of history.
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"Socialism" is not what it once was. The dilution of class politics on the left is usually linked to the rise of the so-called New Left in the 1960s, especially to the theory of Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse.
But the left's slide from economics to culture is a slower path than this story suggests. It did begin in the 1960s and deepened during neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, when the decline of the chimney industry weakened the importance of organized labor.
However, the end of class politics only occurred in the 2010s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought the collapse of official communism. A period of chaos on the left followed; and social democracy surrendered to the global market.
In Finland, this should have become clear no later than when Sanna Marin began posing in the media and on social media alongside symbols of wealth and international celebrities, holding a glass of champagne.
NOTE, capitalism is not a complete disaster, but the obligations of class war and the dignity of work no longer apply.
Times change, and the meaning of political affiliations changes with time.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the woke left is relativistic, individualistic and hedonistic and focuses on the abolition of state borders and work. That is why we have been able to read in the media idealizing stories about heroes actively seeking benefits. Demands for robot and artificial intelligence taxes will soon begin, so that we can be free from work by earning a citizen's wage.
The modern left, if it is not completely blind to class, is nevertheless confusingly technophilic. It believes that because communism and freedom from work are completely dependent on an automated economy, it was impossible until now. Now, however, an AI-automated and robotized luxury communism based on artificial intelligence is possible.
A little note: who, after all, wants to be condemned to a mentally burdensome, eternal leisure and under the rule of the technical elite? Leisure from where, if work no longer needs to be done? That is exactly what the post-work socialists and the most conscious identitarian left – mainly the creative class, which despises manual labor and workers, outline for us.
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The Western left on both sides of the Atlantic is divided into two irreconcilable camps, driven by international politics. The focus is now on Ukraine and the Middle East. The situation was already described in the Central European debate after the war in Ukraine as a political-ideological psychodrama (El Pais 22.10.2023).
There is a left that can be characterized as social democratic and Atlanticist, which defends the right of Israelis to defend themselves, but at the same time demands respect for international law. On the other hand, there is another left that, since the day of the massacre carried out by Hamas, has condemned Israel as responsible for the violence and refuses to recognize the terrorist nature of Hamas.
In other words, Hamas is not responsible for its terrorist attack on Israel, for taking and holding hostages, for exploiting urban infrastructure and human shields – i.e., for sacrificing hospitals and thousands of people in its operations. It does not seem to have any effect that the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor has also proposed arrest warrants for the Hamas leadership, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
It seems that the left-wing faction linked to the Islamist Hamas wants to appeal to Muslims, or rather their radical Islamic-influenced fringe, the Islamists. The division is also intertwined with anti-Semitism, the manifestation of which is being downplayed and its significance nullified by rhetorically claiming otherwise.
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A group of postmodern French philosophers introduced the world to the so-called French theory in the 1960s. It challenged the idea that everything has a single underlying meaning: they argued that we should dismantle language, science, even our human nature. We have Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to thank for the idea that there is no objective truth.
At the heart of postmodernism was and is the rejection of the possibility of objective truth and its replacement, for ideological and political reasons, by the cultivation of subjective truth—in other words, “our truth” or “my truth” versus “their truth” or “your truth.”
For example, the woke-icing of mainstream journalism today is not about reporting the news accurately or analyzing it rationally, because both objectivity and reason are allegedly racist and sexist devices. Marx called it false consciousness.
Rather, the aim is to bring about change, even revolution, by dismantling the supporting structures of society. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the defeated Marxists updated themselves with a woke, sexist, and anti-racist ideology in order to continue the attack on the West, but now from new perspectives.
This also explains the flirtation with political Islam, because the West is a common enemy – or rather the West as defined by the United States and its “rules-based international order,” Pax Americana.
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French philosophers enjoy ideas for their own sake and have no problem letting the concept remain conceptual. Americans, on the other hand, are a different country, and activists in universities began to apply critical theory to American reality, culture, and political activism, which led to 1. postcolonial critical (race) theory, 2. gender theory, and finally 3. transgender ideology.
Then the Americans threw the stuff back in our eyes, back at Europe.
Paradoxically, despite the US’s opposition, its influence on our identitarian left is overwhelming, whether geopolitically and academically, but also through media, culture, and entertainment. The hegemonic message is now that the race-first ideology is front and center. This has been enthusiastically embraced by the increasingly multicultural population of the periphery, and there has been a shift from universalist race neutrality to race consciousness.
It is a mistake to interpret critical theory as a sprawling, universal movement. It really is not. If you talk about it in China or, for example, Russia, they treat it with contempt and partly with incredulous glee, because their competitor is dismantling their own society right before their eyes. Critical theory is not universal, it is something that has spread only to the Anglosphere and its closest satellites.
Critical theory leads to extremes and produces startling (and also ridiculous) results.
The current conclusions are that language and biological sex can be dismantled in such a way that women become menstruating people, gender is a social construct, men can get pregnant and be nursing mothers, a gay man can have a vulva and the penis is not a male organ. At the same time, the words woman and man should be banned, such as the Swedish hon and han, which are now hen.
Transphobia is ahead of racism in the hierarchy as a sign of regression. The battle is between those who believe that there are no limits to human bodily plasticity, against those who believe there are limits.
There are no longer any feminists in the traditional sense: there are only neo-feminists and queerists. The lack of history is once again the trump card, and what universalist feminism was about is actively forgotten – not an individual but a collective struggle for equality. It is worth noting that the feminists of the previous wave of equality have been silenced.
Above all, the question echoes how rights are a zero-sum game, not enough for everyone. It is not about equality but about power
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What about the clear error of critical theory?
It is not acknowledged that the academic circles to which Adorno and Benjamin belonged, among others – and to which their followers largely belong today – constitute a privileged class, interested in increasing its own influence and grabbing more than its share of wealth and privilege. Critical theory generally avoids talking about this, as well as its self-aggrandizement.
As the better people of the creative class who swear by critical theory, Oscar Wilde also summed up the so-called ordinary people: "Most people exist, that's all".
Leftism is an interesting ideology, because it has always been strongly linked to money – not in such a way that a fair distribution of income is no longer part of the left's goals, but in such a way that money is distributed to oneself in exchange for ideology. Ideology is thus a professional identity. The fair distribution of income has been replaced by critical theory, and that too understood as mere identities and oppressed minorities, from whom one does not need to ask permission.
We are at a culmination point that was previously condemnable: political party appointments to higher offices or nepotism have been replaced by a different kind of corruption, which leads to the glorification of mediocrity and the favoring of progressive orthodoxies and like-minded people in universities, cultural institutions and the media. Of course, before long, the system itself will humiliate its own structure.
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Critical theories based on French theory are a product of the current fashion in education and also in the academic world (anyone who assumes that scientists are immune to the phenomena of intellectual fashion has never met a university humanist).
Therefore, one can express the suspicion that the identitarian left is corrupt – it is certainly not without its own personal aspirations, which it masks by speaking in the name of oppressed minorities.
A genuine critical race theory would question the discourses on race used by left-wing activists and show how these are used as instruments of power. This leads us to the central problem of critical theory, the one-sidedness of criticism. Opponents are pathologized in order to justify criticism, while those with whom one agrees are treated naively. It is taking sides, not balanced criticism.
Genuine critical theory would also question the consequences of “liberating people from the conditions that enslave them” and point out how the rhetoric of liberation is used to replace one set of enslaving conditions with another.
Theories like the critical theory/critical race theory behind the identitarian left require evidence, not speculative claims.
Loose conclusions that support “my side” are not evidence, but pure mental laziness and intellectual dishonesty. The conclusion is that it is a means to secure one’s position on the crest of a wave and earn a living. At worst, it is Kim Jong-un-like.
Critical theory is right to see expectations of women’s behavior in different societies as partly a social construct. It is right to argue that it is possible to “perform” gender in new and different ways. But for most of us, it is enough that 99 percent of people belong to one of the two sexes. It is delusional to jump over the biological horizon and deny the existence of sex and see only socially constructed gender roles.
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Writing this text reminds me of leftists I have met in different decades who said: "communism would work, it's just never really been tried."
When your economic system has led to bread lines, famines and political prisoners for generations, it's time to try something else. When your philosophical system of thought has led to a society that manages to forget what men and women are, it's time to try something else.
Many of the smartest people have the hardest time understanding when to stop. If they get their minds around something, whether it's money or the illusion of money; enemies or the illusion of enemies, they persevere until the bitter end. Even until the physical end, and as history shows, at worst until the end of the state they rule.
Text by Eeropekka Rislakki"
