Doug Lain and the history of Zero Books
Around 2018, I discovered an interesting YouTube channel called Zero Books. It presented provocative video essays, backed by well put together slideshows of pop culture and vintage historical imagery, narrated by a fellow named Doug Lain. There were also a share of group discussions featuring Doug Lain and others, and other intellectual figures were frequent guests or had their own video spots on the channel.
The general narrative bent of Zero Books favored Marxism and Critical Theory, and they doubled as a publisher and seller of various alternative left political books. I generally found the content at Zero Books to be informative, even if I wasn’t sure I 100% agreed with all of it. It was good food for thought at the very least. I was feeling disillusioned with the anarchist movement because I saw it as either being co-opted by the libertarian capitalist right or people resigning themselves to just being regular liberal Democrats (see the Vaush pipeline), and I was catching up more on Marxism.
It was not long, however, before I noticed that the narrative bent of the channel was actually veering into what I’d consider a post-left direction, or at least, contrarian towards the left to a point of sensationalized absurdity. This especially became noticeable starting around the time of the pandemic shutdown, the BLM protests, the 2nd loss of Bernie Sanders and the inauguration of Joe Biden’s presidency. I’d occasionally give a dissenting comment and Doug would play coy or snark in response, and he was quite sensitive to people calling him out on right-drift.
If you were to sideline the Marxist theory at the base of the rationalizations, from what I saw, a chunk of what was coming out of Zero Books could just be seen as anti-leftism or inadvertently agreeing with the alt-right, even if that’s not what was intended. That was the upshot. You’re often taken on an esoteric journey through Marxist and Critical Theory jargon to reach a conclusion that’s conciliatory to the right or the inversion of common leftist positions, issue by issue. The line between reasonable leftist criticism of identity politics and right-contrarianism blurred.
Furthermore, both Doug Lain and frequent guest Chris Cutrone made explicit in their video discussions at some point that they are not just Marxists, but Leninists, and I tend to think that being a dogmatic Leninist today is a losing proposition. And they uniquely positioned themselves as the final frontier of the “true left”, while spending virtually all of their energy being contrarian towards currents on the left and having virtually nothing critical to say about the right at all. A purely contrarian style that started to look like a nihilistic black hole of intellectual masturbation, and with Doug providing sweeping armchair psychologizations of the left.
I saw this cross over into territory of apologetics for Trumpism, anti-anti-fascism, anti-anti-racism, anti-anti-colonialism, anti-trans positions, anti-vax stuff, law and order conservatism; people taking positions that effectively just chooses the right-wing side of the culture war in the name of opposing the culture war, and floating the idea that conservatives might make better allies than liberals through appeals to populism. I was far from alone in this perception of right-wing hijinks, and it’s not surprising that some people wondered if there was some sort of dark money funding going on in the background. Even parts of Jacobin Magazine engage in this trend.
Unbeknownst to me, Doug Lain was not the original owner of Zero Books, and there ended up being a controversy around 2021 in which the original group that started Zero Books bought the rights to it back and Lain was effectively booted. And as part of the controversy, there were apparently insiders who indeed thought that Zero Books had pretty much been taken over by reactionary edge lords. Of course, from the opposite perspective of Doug’s camp, they had just been ousted by radlibs. I have no dog in that fight. Here’s a clarification from another angle.
As a result, Doug Lain and his milieu ended up migrating to a new YouTube channel called Sublation Media, which I proceeded to lightly follow as well. His new main sidekick was Ashley Frawley, who struck me as being one of those token “sane leftists” who pop up on right wing talk shows and who sometimes seems half-way in the door towards being like Aimee Terese - a post-left reactionary. No doubt, she has some valid things to say sometimes, but she follows the model and trajectory of academic/media careerist leftists who grift rightward in this scene. You should naturally be skeptical of self-proclaimed leftists whose main work is actually to work for right-wing think tanks and publications. Anyways, Doug Lain produced the following gem at Sublation the other day that I feel compelled to address:
Abusing the word Fascism to make it Meaningless
In usual fashion, Doug Lain click baits (though he admits it with tongue in cheek). In such a case as this, the click bait title is an ironic statement that he obviously does not believe. And his video is partly informative and agreeable, partly questionable contrarian stuff (including spinning egalitarianism negatively as mere status quo ideology; this is an example of conflating the co-optation of something with the thing itself, a move that Doug makes with other things too). At 3/4 through the video, we finally actually discuss fascism, which is what the title initially provokes us about.
Lain gives a simple summary of Trotsky's definition of fascism (or what he says is Trotsky’s definition of fascism; it’s actually more like The Platypus Society’s definition of fascism being grafted onto Trotsky ex post facto) - as a society in which worker organization has been destroyed and there is an all-pervasive administrative state that penetrates public psychology as to preclude independent resistance - and proceeds to argue that by this definition, most of the world already is fascist. This is a nice way to neutralize or bomb the whole topic, isn’t it? If we can define fascism in such a way that it’s everything and nothing, we can safely disarm anti-fascism.
Fascism certainly is a much-contested term, especially these days. It’s absolutely true that liberals can often throw the word around too indiscriminately to refer to “everything on the right I don’t like”, or with pithy epithets like “Christo-Fascism”. It’s also true that the Democratic Party establishment effectively co-opted anti-fascism for its own purposes lately. Even conservatives abuse the term fascism against the left and have been known to make the misleading argument that historical fascism was “a leftist philosophy, actually”, contrary to commonly known historical evidence. That said, it must also be noted that fascism is somewhat problematized by the fact that Stalinism in particular as an actual practice had a hell of a lot in common with it (of course, the proper leftist reading of this, IMO, is that Stalinism is right-wing).
Fascism is also problematized by the fact that, because of how historically taboo it is, especially after the defeat of the Nazis, hardly anyone actually calls themselves that. I can think of only one anecdotical experience in my life where a few people I knew in online political dialogue did, in fact, outright say they are fascists now (ironically, they were people who started out in the anarchist scene). By nature, then, fascism after WWII had to seek out other labels and rationalizations or reformulate itself under the rubric of something else, such as “3rd positionism” or “white national socialism”.
The contemporary trend of Duginism, of course, merges remnants of fascism with Stalinism, in an accelerated version of the old opportunistic tendency fascism always had to use things associated with the left for its own purposes. And there is an obvious connection and interaction between Trumpism and Duginism. Entryism is also an age-old tactic of fascism, and both the libertarian movement and segments of the left are targets for entryism. As a former libertarian, I saw it first-hand.
When I used to argue with white nationalists as a libertarian, I also encountered a rhetorical sleight of hand of “anti-racists are the real racists” and tortured arguments trying to say that the concept of “racism” itself is meaningless. Which is similar to what Doug is doing in this video regarding fascism - anti-fascists can be regarded as fascists too, and fascism can be deflated into meaninglessness by being characterized as ubiquitous. This doesn’t mean I think Lain is a fascist. It means I think he’s intellectually dishonest and abusing language in the service of trying to make a point.
Taking Lain’s definition of fascism at face value - which I’m not even sure does full justice to Trotsky's writings on fascism - it’s a reductive definition that is, at the very least, insufficient, if not inaccurate. It’s a purely economic definition of fascism that amounts to little more than “late capitalism” + “authoritarian deep state”. If we look at either Italian fascism under Mussolini or fascism as Hitler’s Nazi Germany, how does that really suffice as a description? Was Nazi Germany just an authoritarian state that smashed the worker’s movement? That’s why I say this is reductive.
This leaves out any mention of a lot of the traits commonly associated with fascism: ultra-nationalism, an instrumentalist view of truth that allows for noble lies, scapegoating of Jews and cultural outsiders, social engineering in the service of machismo and purity of bloodlines, opportunistic use of populism and socialist imagery and jargon, a rejection of egalitarianism (except for perhaps a measure of egalitarianism within the select group of “true nationals”, but certainly not for anyone else), opportunistic use of traditional conservatives and the religious as foot soldiers by a leadership that is secular, anti-communism mixed with a defensive posture towards international capitalism, in favor instead of a nationalist capitalism.
It most certainly is valid to point out that mainstream liberal Democrats can be authoritarian and nationalist themselves, that even they too play a game of noble lies and can appeal to socialistic sentimentality without actually being socialist, and to argue that liberalism, in its own way, adds fuel to the fire of fascism or is unable to properly oppose it. But it also is incongruous to act like a multicultural society with relatively liberal license (precisely of the kind the right rejects) is fascist, and it is playing coy to ignore or downplay the rhetoric of the reactionary right as being “fascistic” in a way specific to itself and not the whole of society or politics.
Even if one does not think that Trump or Trumpism is fascist per se, one should not be surprised that fascism is on the tip of people’s tongues in an environment in which there has been a revitalization of old anti-Jewish canards, open pining for a leader to be a dictator, notions of socially engineering masculinity, a major wave of anti-immigration sentiment and protectionism, nationalism trumpeted against “globalism”. Since it’s a century later from historical fascism and America is a different beast than a European nation, it may be more appropriate to use the term neo-fascism for what these general trends on the right coalesce into.
To just sweep all of that aside and say everyone or the world is already fascist because late capitalism has destroyed anything resembling an independent worker’s movement and there’s a deep state seems like an obscurantist rhetorical game, and this is exactly the sort of thing that makes people question Lain’s intellectual honesty. It’s as if we are unable to critically discuss the reactionary right without the script always being flipped to equivocate it with liberalism or turn the narrative on its head back towards a critique of the left. I see the upshot of Lain’s video as just bombing the topic of fascism with obscurantism. We’re left with a nihilistic nothing burger.
This is not by any means a defense of Joe Biden or the Democrats at all. I’ve been consistently cynical about them for 20 years and I have been on the anti-electoral/non-electoral side of the fence of political strategy for a long time. No doubt, they present a shit sandwich, and, in their way, they get pulled to the right themselves in this grotesque political process. But it seems all too convenient and misleading to deflect the topic of fascism, during a time of the looming controversy of Trump and Trumpism, into a narrative of “centrist liberal Democrats represent fascism too”.
Of course, Lain’s other big sidekick next to Frawley, Chris Cutrone, literally has made what amounts to an accelerationist, tailist argument for Trump for 3 election cycles in a row. It should be no surprise that most of the left looks at this quite skeptically and wonders “whose side are you on really?”. Apparently in Cutrone’s world, if you can’t beat them, join them. Cutrone also takes what are flatly neoconservative positions on Israel and foreign policy. All while proclaiming “The Left Is Dead!” and calling himself “The Last Marxist”. Cutrone and Lain are peas in a pod as far as favoring a provocative style that click baits and trolls you with counter-intuitive pronouncements, then plays coy or shrinks back when called out on what they clearly are actually saying or the implications thereof. Fire in a bottle.
Historical Progress and Egalitarianism
It may seem like I’ve spent all of my time only addressing what is really the last 1/4 of Lain’s video, leaving me open to being accused of ignoring the bulk of the substance of it. As I stated though, I found the video, as I often find much of Lain’s content, to be partly informative and agreeable, partly objectionable. The beginning of the video is unobjectionable and sets up a social psychological narrative drawing on critical theory that actually makes a lot of sense to me: it’s true that the conditions of hyper-capitalism, especially in America, have psychologically conditioned us into not even being able to imagine an alternative. I’m familiar with the discourse around this. The metaphor of paralysis that Lain uses works. Modern politics does feel like paralysis.
But there is some objectionable stuff earlier in the video regarding what Lain has to say about egalitarianism and historical progress, which echoes things he has stated on earlier videos. Lain objects to “the whigish view of history” or the notion of linear historical progress, and it definitely is true that the old progressive assumption that the 20th century is or will be a trajectory of continual improvement is fallacious. The two world wars and that fascism happened itself attests to that, and there certainly have been a lot of things in the post-WWII age that can be seen as making things worse. That said, some things that happened in the 20th century were, in fact, good.
As much as we can look back and easily criticize the 1960’s/1970’s New Left and the Hippies of being utopian idealists and hedonistic bohemians, the civil rights movement was a good thing. Getting rid of legal discrimination based on race and sex was a good thing. You can make the pessimistic cynical argument that this integrated everyone into the capitalist order until you are blue in the face. You can lament race and gender identity being exploited politically after this all you want. But hyperbolically poo-pooing it just puts one on “the wrong side of history”, and the position that there “is no such thing as progress” is actually a postmodern view.
Doug also refers to the history of Woodrow Wilson, who definitely merits quite a bit of criticism, as part of a narrative implying that egalitarianism was basically ushered in during the 20th century as mere hegemonic control. This is the kind of thing where I think Doug leans into the counter-intuitive to a fault. I could be misreading Doug, but this wouldn’t be the first time he appears to be needlessly contrarian about egalitarianism. Of course, a lot hinges on what we mean by egalitarianism. It’s an oft straw manned concept by the right, usually reduced to the bugaboo of true “equality of ability” or “equality of traits”, which is of course impossible.
But what Doug actually seems to be describing is not egalitarianism, but the co-optation of egalitarianism by a ruling elite. Perhaps this is really what he means to say, but he makes it difficult to untangle that and we are still left with the implication that well-meaning regular people who promote egalitarianism are reducible to tools of the elite and that their notions of justice are not authentically their own. This is a pattern that I see the “anti-woke left” types repeat a lot: conflating anyone and everyone who has so-called “woke” concerns with the most superficial liberal reading, I.E. for example anti-racism / you-name-it just *is* corporate PR speak. Misleading.
I would suggest that when a self-proclaimed leftist’s position on egalitarianism is, perhaps inadvertently, on a similar page as Murray Rothbard's position, or at least something that feeds into such a position, something has gone wrong. Matt McManus correctly identifies anti-egalitarianism as a main pillar of what constitutes right-wing thought, and socialism and communism are inherently leveling philosophies. Of course, presumably Doug Lain does support a type of leveling regarding economics and class in his commitment to Marxism. But because the mantle of egalitarianism has been claimed by liberalism, he leans a bit much into contrarianism about it.
While some people may have scruples with his “liberal socialism”, Matt McManus does appear to be the main contemporary intellectual associated with a Marxist milieu who actually takes fascism seriously as something of contemporary relevance, without whitewashing the concept or playing the card of dismissing anti-fascism with a heavy hand. Doug Lain, on the other hand, digs hard into anti-anti-fascism and in the case of this video, abuses a definition of fascism in order to deflate anti-fascism.
Lain’s first mistake is being a Leninist, which is a right-wing deviation from Marx. More heterodox Marxism is much more reasonable to me than Leninism, and I think the council communists were mostly correct in their criticisms of Lenin. Lain’s second mistake is in taking the more nihilistic path that critical theory can potentially lead to, I.E. a skeptical cul-de-sac that ends up just being self-defeating. While there is a need for left critique of the left and while critical theory presents some interesting and useful insights about just how fucked we probably actually are due to capitalism’s entrenchment in society, without care this can lead to self-immolation.
I see the upshot of Lain’s video here as an example of that, problematizing the concept of fascism to a fault, to a point where he’s pretty much bombed the concept. The most charitable reading I can give of him is that he’s just blind about the problem of fascism because he’s a Leninist with an esoteric understanding of what fascism is. And while I don’t think that Lain is so far off the path of reason as the likes of Aimee Terese, he does half-way wade in that kind of water. He is part of a milieu of "Anti-PMC" PMC that clings to left identity while dismantling the left, gives the right the benefit of the doubt too much, and monetizes edgelordism and provoked outrage.
This actually segues nicely into my next article, which will be the Part 2 of my Specter of Alternative Politics series, on alternative left media. Stay tuned.