By David Futrelle
The last time we checked in on the Skidmarxists — which is what I’m now calling the post-Dirtbag-Left collection of faux leftists who use Marxian verbiage to defend Nazis, attack feminists, and justify slur-filled shitposts — one of their own, Aimee Terese, was attacking lefty writer and podcaster Jamie Peck as an “ageing starfucker” for coming forward to talk about the predatory behavior of now-disgraced photographer Terry Richardson.
Now Terese and her shitposting Skidmarxist comrades are going after comedian Kath Barbadoro for committing the apparently counterrevolutionary act of … speaking up against comedy clubs that have resumed booking the unredeemed and apparently irredeemable comedian Louie CK, who in 2017 admitted to being a sex pest who used his power in the business to compel much-less-powerful female comedians to watch him masturbate.
This was the Tweet that set the Skidmarxists off:
An assortment of Skidmarxist influencers decided to weigh in on this with the absolute worst takes possible. On Instagram, Red Scare podcast co-cost Anna Khachiyan responded to Barbadoro with these garbage thoughts:
NARRATOR: Louis CK had in fact done something wrong … repeatedly.
On Twitter, she offered this bit of mockery:
Amber A’Lee Frost, a semi-regular on Chapo Trap House (and, ironically, the inventor of the “Dirtbag Left” moniker) offered up a virtual garbage dump of thoughts, also on Instagram.
In fact, sexual harassment and worse is common in the food service industry; it is neither “paranoid” nor “hysterical” to worry about it.
On Twitter, meanwhile, our old new friend fiend Aimee Terese offered up this baffling take:
After I spent a while trying to figure out how a comedian could possibly be extracting surplus value from audience members who voluntarily pay money to see her, several Twitterers helped me to see that Aimee was actually trying to speak from the point of view of a comedian talking about a “petty bourgeoise” [sic] club owner.
As best as I can figure it, she’s saying that the interests of workers and their “bourgeoise” are so fundamentally opposed that we can only truly solve the problem of sexual harassment after the revolution – so why bring it up now?
Of course, by that logic, virtually any kind of labor organizing around working conditions — or even just for higher wages or minimal worker safety improvements — rather than immediate general strike and socialist revolution is a waste of time. Anyone who thinks that’s a Marxist position clearly hasn’t read Marx very carefully.
Then again, Terese also habitually spells “bourgeois” as “bourgeoise,” with that extra “e” at the end. (“Bourgeoise,” not to be confused with either “bourgeois” or “bourgeoisie,” means “a female member of the bourgeoisie.”)
In any case, this weird and muddled and decidedly un-Marxian argument — that it’s somehow self-indulgent to bring up the issue of sexual harassment before some imagined future revolution — helps to clarify what’s wrong with the whole Skidmarxist approach.
On the one hand, Terese is advancing an ultraleftist argument — that the only sort of labor organizing that counts is organizing for revolution now. But the practical effect of this rhetorical ultraleftism is that she ends up supporting a millionaire sex pest and his “petty bourgeoise” enablers (the club owners and festival organizers that book him) and trashing a working comedian.
Others in the Skidmarxist milieu, meanwhile, refuse to see sexual harassment in comedy as a workplace issue at all, most notably Nick Mullen, the alleged leftist co-host of the unfortunate and unfortunately named Cum Town podcast.
He was responding to this (obviously quite sensible) tweet from Barbadoro:
Mullen, who makes an extreeeeemely comfortable living doing a comedy podcast, replied by more or less declaring that comedy isn’t a job and that comedy clubs are not workplaces, at least not for the comics who appear at them. (It’s not clear if he thinks that they’re workplaces for the waitstaff.)
Never mind that comedy clubs are workplaces and that comedians are workers — and that only a few of them make as much as Mullen does from comedy, even fewer as much as Louis CK has. Never mind that there is no good reason to assume that there’s zero chance he’d at some point re-offend (perhaps not immediately, but later, after the heat dies down).
The real issue here goes way beyond Louis CK. Comedy has been rife with sexual harassment and worse for decades; female comedians put up with an astonishing level of shit. Any club owner who hires the largely unrepentant Louis CK, as Barbadoro suggested in her original tweet, is publicly announcing they don’t give a shit about the safety of female performers.
If they let Louis CK get away with it, why wouldn’t they also let other comics get away with it? The issue isn’t Louis CK jumping from the bushes; it’s a lesser-known comedian preying on some even-lesser known comedian backstage.
The ultimate irony here is that, for all the outrage they’ve directed at Barbadaro — and at other women complaining of sexual harassment- – some of the Skidmarxists have been remarkably quick to accuse others of sexual harassment and worse, often with no evidence at all.
Only a few days ago, in fact, the Skidmarxists and their allies from the Stupidpol subreddit were heading up a Twitter harassment campaign against democratic socialist politician Lee J. Carter, currently running for re-election to the Virginia House of Delegates, after he declared on Twitter he was “FINALLY officially divorced from my abuser.”
One particularly unethical Skidmarxist troll photoshopped some tweets by Carter, who served in Afghanistan, to make it look like he was admitting to sexually abusing Afghan boys.
Here’s a more readable version of the faked screeenshot; I took the liberty of adding the word “FAKE” in huge letters.
This is literally no different from the alt-right and alt-lite trolls — I’m looking at you, Mike Cernovich — who regularly smear people they disagree with as “pedoes” based on no evidence.
Along with telling Wilson to “shut the fuck up,” Terese also offered these thoughts on abuse in general that more than a few observers saw as a not-very-carefully disguised bit of innuendo directed at Wilson.
Terese, for her part, insists that the tweet had nothing to do with Wilson. I guess you’ll have to decide for yourself whether you believe her.
At this point I think we need to accept that the Skidmarxists, whatever their ideological claims, are not in any real sense leftists at all.
While most of them, I suspect, would insist they have nothing in common ideologically with the alt-right, in practice they have come down on the wrong side of issue after issue — attacking liberals, leftists, and feminists and siding, again and again, with antifeminists and reactionaries of all stripes. Their language echoes the worst misogynists (“starfuckers”) and retrograde assholes (“cuck,” “soy boy,” “shitlib,” “degenerate”). In their trolling campaigns, they are virtually indistinguishable from alt-right and alt-lite trolls — and the A Voice for Men flying monkey squad, back when that site was a going concern.
At this point the only genuinely leftist things that the Skidmarxists seem to support are Medicare for All and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. As writer Nina Illingworth put it on Twitter, these people are basically “just doing fascism with fucking healthcare.”
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Lady needs to pop off the rb and take a nap or a bubble bath.
There’s something really depressing about the performative podcast left. I’ve unfollowed a lot of people who, despite having lots of interesting stuff to say about labour rights, couldn’t keep from joining in on this toxic behaviour. I guess we can add “not graciously accepting sexual harassment from a millionaire” to this list of things that make women neoliberal wallstreet shills, now.
I think she was reaching for “bourgeoisie, but is not as good a speller as she fancies herself.
Of course, when the revolution comes, we won’t need spelling.
Ahem: Bourgeoise is the feminine form of bourgeois. French is gendered, and contains no gender-neutral noun forms.
This concludes today’s language lesson.
Also, all Skidmarxists and nazbols can go fuck themselves. (Which may be as close as any of them come to committing, heaven forfend, an actual fucking praxis.)
What Bina said. So she’s not a bad speller, just a pretentious jackoff.
Google is not helping me out with what Louis here did. I’m sorry to ask, I know it was sexual harassment but what did he do? If it’s really gross I might not want to know.
@Lainy
Had a minute – it’s the New York Times, so safe enough to read:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/arts/television/louis-ck-sexual-misconduct.html
I hate to gatekeep leftism, but if you always, always side with the rich white guy over the people with less power that they’re abusing, you aren’t a fucking leftist.
Every time I think maybe I should give Chapo Trap House a try, I hear something like this. Thanks for saving my time, I guess.
@Lainy:
Basically, he jacked off in front of an unwilling audience of aspiring female comedians in his dressing room. He’d lure them in on a pretext of talking business with them, then ask if they wanted to watch him masturbate. Even if they demurred (however politely), he still whipped it out and whacked it in front of them. And he gave hints of all his grossness in his actual, on-stage (and on-screen) performances, too. He’s just a skeevy, skeevy man who pretended to be progressive for years, and whose true ugly nature came out when he was exposed. He’s since basically gone over to the Roseanne Barr/Andrew Dice Clay school of sorehead unfunny people. He’s spiteful as hell, as well as gross.
Providing living proof that no, identity politics are not a distraction from class struggle, they’re a necessary addition because it’s perfectly possible for socialism to be prejudiced.
Russian trollbots at it again…..
And yes, you heard me right. These tweets are such an asinine perversion of Marxist ideology for usage in reactionary politics only a bot could be this idiotic.
Though yes, there very likely is a pernicious humanoid carbon unit behind these bots attempting to troll us lefties with botched Marxism.
@Pyxxxie
You must not have spent much time on Twitter threads about sexual harassment and assault of women, especially by well-liked men, if you go straight to the assumption these accounts are all bots.
@Kupo:
Perhaps not all of them. But I suspect more of them than you think. This person is a fucking idiot with her incoherent Marxist babblings.
Yes I’m calling her a troll cuz that’s precisely what she does.
Ever heard of botnets BTW?
@Pyxxxie
Going to gently suggest you really should find out something about a person before you question their knowledge.
Kupo knows more about coding and networking than you, me, and any ten others here (Scild excepted) combined.
Now, as to your assertion that only a bot could be so stupid …
HAVE YOU MET PEOPLE?!
I love the totally predictable hypocrisy.
You’re a comedian who tells rape jokes? Everyone else should get over it snowflakes.
You’re a comedian who doesn’t and think it is shitty? Fuck your opinion, I’m a snowflake.
Andrew Dice Clay and Roseanne Barr are doing an anti-PC comedy tour. Will they come out and say “Hey, another comedian disagrees with us, that’s their speech and let’s not stifle it?” Of course not.
And if I just don’t find your shitty stereotype comedy funny because its lazy and actually untrue? Fuck my opinion!
The only interesting thing is seeing the sectarian Marxists on this side. They’re usually assholes but they’re usually not fighting right wing culture wars. But 4chan got to them too I guess.
@bina
A bit of nitpicking: in French you can also use the word “bourgeoisie” to identify a group of people “the bourgeois”
But I agree, th spelling is almost as bad as the message
@Bina
And Roseanne Barr (the housewife-comedian who preferred to be called a domestic goddess because she felt it was more descriptive of the job) used to be funny and speak up for women.
Was Marx himself a Marxist?
WHAT MARX HID
By RALPH BUULTJENS
MARCH 14, 1983
On March 14, 1883, Karl Marx died in London. Today, a century later, the man and his ideas continue to arouse intense passions. . . .
The focus of most advocacy and antagonism has been on Marx’s ideas. There has been a cascade of biography describing his life and times, yet all this effort and analysis discloses very little about his human side. Haunted by poverty, irascible, but a kind and loving parent, he was a paradoxical, tormented character. He was a seminal thinker and an impractical man anxiously seeking recognition in a world that to him seemed unaffected by his theories.
A large part of his torment – tensions that possibly affected his work – was lodged in a part of his life that Marx desperately sought to hide. Even today, this secret, which he successfully concealed during his lifetime, is not well known. In 1851, while living in London, Marx fathered an illegitimate son by Helen Demuth, the longtime family maid. Fearing that this indiscretion would destroy his marriage and damage his public image, he organized an effective cover-up, whose participants were Marx’s friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels and Helen Demuth.
Engels pretended he was the father and Miss Demuth confirmed the deception. The infant, Fredrick Demuth, was given away to be brought up by a working-class family in London. The secret was preserved for more than four decades. In 1895, on his deathbed, Engels confessed to Eleanor Marx -one of Marx’s two surviving daughters. She was shattered by the revelation. Three years later, she committed suicide. In 1911, Marx’s other daughter, Laura, killed herself. Freddy Demuth grew up a neglected, lonely child. Marx could not afford any support. Engels, on whom Marx depended financially, sent small, infrequent remittances. Both Marx and Engels distanced themselves from Freddy. Marx never saw the boy. Freddy Demuth was poorly educated. For most of his life, he worked as a laborer and toolmaker. After Marx’s death, he established closer contact with his mother, who had then become Engels’s housekeeper. Freddy visited her weekly but was allowed only into the kitchen and servants’ rooms through the back door. Engels, like Marx, shunned him. After his mother’s death in 1890, Freddy hardly ever saw Engels. Neither Marx nor Engels provided a legacy for him. However, Marx’s daughters did give Freddy some money from their share of both estates. In 1929, after a hard, obscure life, Freddy died at 78 in a poor section of London. Nobody, not even his mother, told him the truth about his paternity and he died believing he was Engels’s bastard child. Marx’s secret was well-concealed. In his lifetime, only Helen and Engels shared in this confidence. On his death, they screened his papers to eliminate references to Freddy. . . . While researching this part of Marx’s life, a part that contains many clues to the development of his ideas, I became convinced that many Marxists had built a wall of silence around this secret. No major Soviet biographical material about Marx mentions Freddy. Other Marxists brush it off as irrelevant gossip. It is clear that to the Marxist world, Fredrick Demuth did not exist, or that the subject is taboo. The heroic proletarian image of the father of the revolution must not be tarnished by evidence of his duplicity, hypocrisy, frailty. The episode shows us how essentially human Marx was. He had the same fears, despairs and guilts that afflicted other conventional citizens of Victorian Britain. These traumas and their impact on his life and thought suggest that Marx’s own strictly economic interpretation of history is an insufficient instrument for explaining human motivation and the evolution of society. His life confounded his theories. This irony would not have been lost on the highly intelligent Marx, and perhaps this is why his work appears incomplete and inconclusive. Marx’s stature justifies commemoration of his death. But in doing so, we must remember the whole man, his humanity, his vulnerability – and not abstract or suppress segments of his life to fit our own mythology.
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/14/opinion/what-marx-hid.html
Hello.
On the word “bourgeoise”, as Bina said (and maybe Ohlmann in a former post with Therese in it), it is the feminine of “bourgeois”, which, i suppose, Therese aimed to apply to Barbadoro.
As you know, the first meaning of the word was to designate people living “in a village” (village also exist in french, but depending on the size and its location, it can also be called a bourg, mainly when closed to castles. You can find that in the term “faubourg”, suburb, former bourgs which have been integrated in a growing city). In bourgs were living mainly tradespeople and artisans, whom, by comparison to peasants and laborers, were earning better their life. Thus the association of the term “bourgeoisie” to “middle-class” (I have made a big generalization, i am sure more knowledgeable persons would be happy to give you an extended and detailed explanation and correct me if i am wrong).
Now, the term get a pejorative connotation, not only when used by richer of poorer persons in a “class” view of the thing. As an example, qualifying someone as a “petit bourgeois” is a way to mean the person like (or is supposed to like) to make display of its wealthiness / easy living. It is close to the “nouveau riche” (i do not know if the concept of “new rich” also exist in english ?) term. You kind also find this connotation in the abbreviation “bobo”, which means “bourgois-bohème”. “bohème” is used here in the “free, artistic, close to the nature, etc…” meaning, close to the hippy meaning. The “bohème” way of life is not supposed to be a well earning way, and coupling it with the “bourgeois” term could seem a bit antithetical, but that is the goal. So, the term “bobo” aims at designate people who try to appear as living and thinking themselves as “bohème”, but with enough money to back them to not have the worries which come with the “bohème” way of life. Thus, the pejorative connotation. Oh, and it is also mainly associated to left-leaning persons (thus the expression “bobo gauchiste”), collating them a bit with the expression “gauche caviar” (“caviar leftwing”, rich person with left-leaning opinions, or supposed so, like DSK, if you remember him), in babacool wears for the first, in business suit for the second.
Finally, another main meaning of “bourgeoise”, or so it was some decades ago (as trends tend to shift) : it is a slang word to designate the wife of someone, even your own when you are an asshole. It is not exceptionnaly rude, but it keeps the connotation of someone which is not “working a lot”, if you get the meaning. Unsuprisingly, the term was often used in porno titles of those times.
All in all, i think the use of this term, currently (and not just by Therese), is just a disparaging way to designate someone you did not like, outside of historical topics.
Expect that niche to continue visibly veering to the right – they might, at some point, start calling themselves nationalists and deny that there’s anything wrong with the term, for example.
I know because, well, for once the US isn’t diving in first and leading the rest of the world there. See shitstains like Alain Soral, Robert Ménard, etc. France has metric shitloads of such cases, and we’ve had them long enough that they’re a pretty accurate description of what Terese will sound like maybe half a decade from now.
Maybe its because I only ever studied Marxism in Canada, but I’ve always seen it written as “bourgeoisie”.
I don’t know if its the French influence or not, but I’ve also noticed that I’m more likely to see “petite bourgeoisie” than I am to see “petty bourgeoisie”.
“petty bourgeois” just looks really wrong to me.
Shorter Frost: “I work with convicted rapists, but I’m not so silly as to think they would actually rape anyone”
@Amtep
Right. Because they already did that.
Just wanted to say that Skidmarxists is genius.