An abbreviated conversation about not getting cancelled in the meta crisis
S: Dharma_Bum and I were having a conversation about getting ‘cancelled’ in the context of a book we were reading, ‘Minority Rule’ by Ash Sarkar.
Sarkar starts the book with an anecdote about being in an environmental action community meeting, filled with well-meaning, left-leaning, do-gooder ‘wokerati’ trying to talk about sustainability. After being asked where the Left is going wrong, the much respected, grumpy, socialistic, farmer turned revolutionary, Roger Hallam answered that it’s because most people on the Left are ‘a bunch of fucking cunts’.
Everyone of course gets offended, cancels this guy, decries a feeling of being unsafe, and disengages from any further conversation. Her argument from there is about how the focus of the liberal woke Left on victimhood and grievance has undermined the agency of the Left. They can no longer change any of the broken systems because they’ve unwittingly opened themselves up to attack through their constant and sole engagement with politics of identity and culture.
And I totally agree with her, there’s a massive lack of material analysis in most of the Left’s philosophising. Because if this was actually about social change, then success shouldn’t feel like people shutting each other down over phrasing. It just seems like that is where all the energy is currently going. So I guess the question is how do we move everyone to the collective goal of change if the Left won’t go beyond the most basic cultural critique?
D: Well, it’s somewhat understandable… people are focusing their energy there because it’s one of the few places where people still feel they have agency aye? In a sense, identity politics has become the only form of engaging with social change. If you can’t reshape and revolutionise economic systems, people hyper correct language because it’s an immediate and visible show of morality. You get to do something over nothing.
S: But it feels like a strange inversion. Instead of asking, “How do I talk to my racist uncle?”, it’s become, “How do I talk to my politically aligned friend who might turn on me if my wording is wrong?”
D: Yea and that inversion matters. The solidarity that might come from social context in terms of negotiating, for example, ecological destruction around capitalism doesn’t happen. It signals a shift from confronting power to managing proximity.
S: So the new transactions for the Left are entirely cultural capital rather than material or economic capital. Which makes it feel… almost parasitic? Like the system is feeding on itself?
D: It’s like what Rorty said back in 1998 – that one day something will crack. After neoliberalism took off, there was no alternative way of running a government in the capitalist West, and everything else was negotiated in a cultural sphere. What you’re seeing is a kind of cultural compression and war in the name of righteousness, and a middle class one at that. The idea that ‘poor’ people (not the top 1%) might be rescued from globalisation was lost in the acceptance of the neoliberal and capitalist inequalities and structures that put bunches of people who are not tertiary educated into a marginal status.
S: So cancel culture is more akin to displacement? How did we get to this point though where the liberal Left forgot the working class in their conversation around actual structure and strata of society?
D: Well again in the same piece Rorty has a comment about the intellectual left abandoning the economic or material critique of capitalism and negotiating social systems.
S: Which they abandoned because they weren’t making headway?
D: Right, because neoliberalism and liberalism took economic critique off the table. The ‘academic’ elite were able to treat language as if it were the root, rather than one expression of deeper structures. Which isn’t to say language doesn’t matter. It does. But it doesn’t redistribute wealth. It doesn’t reorganise production. It doesn’t halt ecological overshoot.
S: And yet people defend it with incredible intensity, but there seems to be this blanket acknowledgement that we won’t delve into how utterly absurd the times we are living in are, perhaps still trying to present a rationality to some of this absurdity we’re experiencing? Which we know doesn’t work, you can’t rationalise your way out of chaos…
D: Yea because, for these people, it is the front line. You have to remember many of these practices come out of real histories of harm. For marginalised groups, language has been a vehicle of violence. And in the liberal worldview the idea that we’re able to solve problems on our own, use rational thought, that there shouldn’t be barriers in the way of freedom, brings up the other side of the coin of neoliberalism which taps into the idea that people are inherently selfish bastards.
S: So subjectivity of a person or what the self should be is kind of crucial to formulating this discussion.
D: Yea so when I read Sarkar’s book there’s still at least one aspect missing from these discussions. It’s the complexity of the economic and material structures that create our cultural conditions. What we know from Foucault is that power – and who we are constructed as people – is more than a linear response to economic or cultural structures.
Sarkar as a proclaimed Communist can go ahead and say there’s economic analysis loss and it’s what’s needed to understand the damage capitalism does, but communism as a narrative can often lean too heavily on an economic analysis. But we know there’s never one solution, we’re operating in a complex set of ecologies that cannot be explained by the ‘rise and triumph’ history rules of explaining progress. We need to be deeply skeptical of these massive structures.
But what this skepticism has done is chucked out the economic analysis in favour of the culture war and we end up talking about power at such a micro level that people have forgotten that economic power is actually really important.
S: That’s what makes it complicated. There’s a rationale there but something shifts when that vigilance becomes universal and everyone begins to think of themselves as individuals on that micro scale, and when every interaction is treated as if it carries the same level of threat.
D: Yea. The scale collapses. You lose the ability to distinguish between different orders of harm. You end up responding to minor symbolic missteps with the same intensity as structural violence. And that misallocation of attention has consequences.
S: Like what?
D: Like missing the fact that entire populations have been economically abandoned. While we argue about terminology, inequality deepens, ecosystems degrade, and large groups of people, often working class, drop out of the political imagination entirely.
S: And those people don’t disappear. They just… reappear elsewhere.
D: Yep and the seductive smoke screen of progress for these groups is partially keeping these structures in place. Especially in a system that offers very few real levers for change.
S: That’s the part I find hardest, how do you talk about this without triggering a defensive reflex. Because the moment you critique this dynamic, it sounds like you’re dismissing racism, sexism, all of it.
D: Well that’s where tone and framing matter, so if you frame it as negation “this doesn’t matter” you’ll get resistance. Because it does matter. But if you frame it as context “this matters, but it sits within a larger system we’re neglecting” you open space.
S: So you’re not rejecting the focus on language. You’re rescaling it.
D: Exactly. Re-situating it. Think of it like this: if you have a leaking boat, you don’t ignore the small holes. But you also don’t fixate on them while a massive rupture opens below the waterline.
S: And right now, the rupture is the whole mess of economic inequality, ecological collapse, and a growth-based system that is overshooting planetary limits. So when people hyper-correct language, they’re patching surface leaks while the hull is splitting.
D: Yea. And sometimes, in doing so, they alienate potential allies. Which further fragments any collective response to the larger crisis.
S: That fragmentation feels so central. Like, we’ve lost the ability to build solidarity across difference, but also solidarity when we’re on the same side. Crucially the culture war is most often fought by the Left against the Left.
D: Because solidarity requires humility. And humility is difficult in a culture that rewards moral certainty and individual righteousness alongside this Western notion of mastery.
S: So what replaces that? Because “just be humble” isn’t exactly a strategy.
D: Well no, but it’s a starting condition. Ask what someone is trying to say before deciding what they’ve done wrong. And keep redirecting attention back to structures.
S: Even in casual conversation?
D: Especially there. Not by lecturing because we don’t want to enforce compliance, but by gently widening the frame. Connecting the immediate issue to broader economic, ecological, historical systems etc.
S: And what about the idea of minority rule in all this? Because it does feel like a relatively small group is shaping the norms of discourse.
D: That’s always been the case, to some extent. Norms are rarely set by majorities. The question is which minority, and toward what ends? If a minority is steering attention toward symbolic purity while material conditions deteriorate, then their influence, however well-intentioned, can drift away from broader needs.
S: So the problem isn’t minority influence itself. It’s what it’s oriented toward.
D: Yea, right? An ecological perspective doesn’t ask, “Who is right?” in isolation. It asks, “What sustains the system? What restores balance? What reduces harm at scale?”
S: And by that measure, we’re misallocating effort on a massive scale.
D: In many cases, yes. But not maliciously. Often out of a genuine desire to do good, shaped by a system that channels that desire into narrow forms.
S: Which brings us back to the beginning, of what are we trying to achieve?
D: If we answer ecologically, a society that is materially just, ecologically viable, and socially humane. And that requires more than correct language. It requires confronting the structures that shape how we live, produce, and relate.
S: And talking about them in a way that doesn’t shut people down.
D: Exactly. Because if the conversation collapses, so does the possibility of change.
You’re such a cunt.
S: You too.
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