Episode 34 is a conversation with former activist Kier Adrian Gray, author of the Substack blog Recovering Anarchist, an essay series and podcast that explores ideology, morality and social norms on the left.
Kier’s history and motivations for writing are best explained by Kier, so I’ll quote here from the ‘About’ section of Recovering Anarchist:
I entered adulthood already an activist, who was quickly radicalized by an encounter with police violence at the age of 20. Convinced I knew how to fix a broken world, I dove headfirst into anarchism, sacrificing health, relationships and career along the way.
Then, a personal catastrophe forced me to question everything. I had to choose: stay loyal to total rebellion or build a life I wouldn’t need to run from.
For a long time, I avoided writing about my political disillusionment, fearing judgement and loss. But when I finally pressed “publish”, I was overwhelmed by messages of support from friends and strangers who shared my concerns but felt they had too much to lose to speak out.
That moment made me realize I wasn’t the only one who’d lost my footing, and was no longer certain about how to make the world a better place—there are many people out there who are starting over from scratch, and it’s a process worth documenting.
We had a wide-ranging conversation covering everything from the history of anti-capitalist activism, to the notoriously authoritarian crackdown on G20 protestors in Toronto, to the mores of identity politics in slam poetry, and more.
Recommendations from Kier Adrian Gray
Three key essays of Kier’s to read before you listen to our conversation are all over on the Recovering Anarchist blog. Read them in the following order:
More recently, Kier’s written about neopronouns, the differences between left and right-coded posting online, and the anarchist movement in Torornto. All of these are well worth a read. Recovering Anarchist is also a podcast, where Kier explores some of the themes in the essays above in a more conversational format.
We talked a lot about anarchism and anti-capitalism, and I mentioned Noam Chomsky’s position, which is that anarchism is self-evidently correct. Here’s an interview that goes into Chomsky’s ideas on anarchism, and its opposition to libertarianism.
In the passage I paraphrased, Chomsky writes for New Statesman:
We have to ask what we mean by ‘anarchist’. In my view everybody, if they stop to think about it, is an anarchist, except the people who are pathological. The core principle of anarchism, from its origins, has been that authority and domination and hegemony have a burden of proof to bear, they have to prove that they’re legitimate. Sometimes they are, sometimes you can give an argument. If you can’t, they should be dismantled.
Here’s Marina Hyde in The Guardian, rightly slagging off Kier Starmer for echoing Trumpian rhetoric. I try and steer clear of party politics, because I am more interested in ideology — but I feel entirely comfortable saying that the very last thing Britain needs from the Labour party is pound-shop Trump impressions.
Here’s Ben Burgis on progressive politics for Current Affairs, where he mentions the ‘circular firing squad of the left’. This is the theme he explores in depth in his excellent book, Cancelling Comedians While The World Burns.
We briefly mentioned the concept of the simulacra, as elucidated by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, among other works. Baudrillard’s theory that the more something is copied, the less able we are to tell whether we are dealing with the original or its simulacra has a direct bearing on the notion of ‘authenticity’ which is so key to understanding identity politics.
Kier’s remarks about writing fiction, and the complexity of finding an authentic voice while respecting the strictures and dogma embedded in social justice culture, reflect some of the same controversies as the #ownvoices conversation which dominated YA and other literary spaces in the early 2020s. The trajectory of that movement is summed up neatly by the disclaimers on this piece for Little Feminist by Shuli de la Fuente-Lau. The article asks What Does Own Voices Mean? And Why It Matters, but was later updated to state:
As of 2021, We Need Diverse Books (WNDB), a non-profit that advocates for diverse children’s literature, no longer uses the term “#own voices”. WNDB believed “#own voices” became a vague marketing term and created potentially unsafe situations for authors and illustrators who chose not to share parts of their identities. Here, at Little Feminist, we use the term “#own voices” internally, as a shortcut to understand that the author or illustrator matches the identity of the main character. We support all authors and illustrators, and their decision to share or not share with the public, the expansiveness of their identity.
While the hashtag and movement followed the trajectory of a Milkshake Duck, going from right-on to problematic in the space of a few years, a rigid form of dogmatic intersectionality still absolutely dominates the world of publishing. Here’s a piece from FIRE on why that’s a problem, and if you missed it at the cinema, American Fiction is a very funny and poignant movie exploring some of the same issues from the perspective of a black writer.
Next we got into talking about books and theory — for me, getting free of identity politics as a totalising thought system came through the work of Slavoj Žižek, particularly The Sublime Object of Ideology. In that book, he unpacks his position that it is the most fervently disavowed ideologies which are the most ideological. If something masquerades as non-ideological, apolitical, or as ‘common sense’, then it is ideology at its purest.
Žižek writes:
“This is probably the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’: ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already conceived as ‘ideological’ — ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence.”
The other key piece of the puzzle for me was Mark Fisher’s essay ‘Exiting the vampire castle’, which drew fire from intersectional theorists when it was published in 2013. It remains a hotly-debated essay, with many on the left arguing that it sits oddly alongside Fisher’s more directly socialist writing. However, the essay’s stated aim is the re-learning of comradeship and solidarity, which for many decades was the foundational principal of left-wing organising. I am firmly in the camp that believes this essay to be a key Fisher text. If it is not considered, we fail to understand some of the operating conditions on the left in the years leading up to Fisher’s tragic death.
Obviously, the essay can’t help but be coloured now by Fisher’s full-throated endorsement of and praise for Russell Brand — but at the time, he was widely seen as an impassioned and articulate working class voice. Helen Lewis, who was editor of The New Statesman in 2013, hired him as a guest editor. His confrontation with Jeremy Paxman briefly made him a folk hero on the left.
Leaving Brand aside, it’s fair to say that in the decade and more since it was written Fisher’s insight into the deficiencies of intersectionality when combined with socialism have only gained more force and relevance.
In the essay, Fisher writes:
… the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender. In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class. In all of the absurd and traumatic twitterstorms about privilege earlier this year it was noticeable that the discussion of class privilege was entirely absent. The task, as ever, remains the articulation of class, gender and race — but the founding move of the Vampires’ Castle is the dis-articulation of class from other categories.
Kier mentions a handful of names, most of whom I haven’t checked out — so I’m adding these to the ‘must read’ pile. Touré Reed is the author of Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields are the authors of Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Asad Haider is the author of Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology. Kwame Anthony Appiah is the author of The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. Each addresses identitarian politics, the misuse of intersectional theory, and the need for a return to class analysis.
Kier also mentions the feminist writer Clementine Morrigan and anti-capitalist agitator Jay LeSoleil as some of the first people in Montreal to rail against identity politics, and the more Machiavellian tendencies in left-wing and anarchist circles, via their podcast Fucking Cancelled. Clementine and Jay are both terrific writers, and FC is up there with my favourite shows.
Bebe Montoya also gets a shout out for some hilarious critiques of the excesses of social justice culture; as does liberal journalist and author John McWhorter, and Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, authors of The Coddling of the American Mind. Finally, I mention Yascha Mounk’s theory of the ‘identity synthesis’, which he outlines in The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. We also briefly discuss Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, a book I absolutely love, which has been sorely abused by those seeking to turn its creative theoretical disruptions into a new orthodoxy.
We finish by talking a little more about Substack itself, and I give a little plug for one of the blogs I pay for, which is ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS. I love reading Žižek’s early drafts and first-thought essays, and I’m absolutely happy to pay $5 a month for the privilege. That’s the essence of why this site works for me, as a creator and as a customer.
Up next…
We’ll be back with another episode or two in March, so watch this space. Have you been enjoying the video episodes so far? Anyone miss the old audio format?
Our next guest is a cult podcaster, author, musician and zine maker who does a mean line in video essays… that’s all your clues for now. Wait, one more!
Until next time… take care of each other.
-Bram, Glasgow, February 2025
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