I’m against it.
Groucho Marx as Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff
“I’m Against It,” Horse Feathers
I’m against it.
The Ramones, “I’m Against It,” Road to Ruin
I’m against it.
Capitalism that is. I’m against capitalism because it prioritizes profit over human need, exploits workers, engenders economic instability through overproduction and underconsumption, promotes social inequalities, degrades human community, destroys the environment, and encourages short term thinking at the expense of longterm planning. There is a vastly better alternative to capitalism in the form of socialism.
My antagonism toward capitalism is a standard, rational form of opposition. “A” is bad while “B” is good, so here is why I oppose “A.” I’ll call this vanilla opposition.
Then there’s contrarianism. It’s the opposition of that Beatles song “Hello Goodbye” the lyrics of which proclaim: “You say ‘Yes,’ but I say ‘No’.” It’s a reflexive, unconscious form of opposition. It’s actually a very punk form of opposition. In Anarchy Comics #3, published in 1981, Paul Mavrides and Jay Kinney penned the comic “No Exit” about hardcore punk rocker and visceral anarchist Jean-Paul Sartre, Jr., who gets transported 3000 years into the future when anarchism has finally prevailed and where “There’s no more war, oppression, sexism, racism, ageism, shapeism, sizeism!” Needless to say, J-P doesn’t react well. At one point he freaks and starts to “fuck shit up.” J-P’s future hosts admonish him: “Really J-P! There’s no need for this alienated behavior!! Since all property belongs to everyone, you’re only hurting yourself!!” To which J-P responds: “Yeah? Well, if it’s all mine too, I can wreck it if I want to, right?”
Such is the essence of this form of opposition, which I’ll call reactive opposition. MRR once had a columnist who specialized in this type of opposition and routinely played Devil’s Advocate in the pages of the magazine. If Tim Yo or other MRR coordinators insisted there be no racism, sexism, or homophobia this columnist would go out of his way to defend sex with children or call gays “homos.” I hung out with him a couple of times and whenever people reacted angrily to his antics a sly smile would cross his face. Ultimately, he was fired when his column was rejected for calling women who had survived sexual assault “cry babies” suffering from “survivoritis” in letting themselves remain victims. Ironically, he whined he was a victim of MRR’s anti-free speech PC attitude. In this era of Trump and Kavanaugh, he’s on Facebook writing post-MRR columns in which he regularly defends Trump and the horrors of Trumpism. As a dutiful contrarian, of course.
Finally, there’s what I call dark opposition. Dark opposition stems from the seductive charms of the transgressive. The English Puritan John Milton wrote an epic poem intended to exalt his Christian faith by retelling the Genesis story of the fall of man. Called Paradise Lost, its main problem was that the figure of Satan, as evil incarnate, came off as way too charismatic and downright noble. So attractive was Milton’s portrait of the devil that Paradise Lost was a best seller in its day while his sequel of the story of that goody two-shoes Jesus, Paradise Regained, was a flop. Every modern rebel, whether adolescent or political, identifies with Satan when he declared “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” I’ll spend the rest of my time discussing dark opposition based on the appeal of transgression, or what in Star Wars lingo is called the “power of the dark side.”
BBC-TV did a movie, Longford, about the 1960s moors murders and the English aristocrat and prison reformer who became involved with one of Britain’s most notorious criminals, child-killer Myra Hindley. Hindley gets one of the film’s better lines when her character says “Evil can be a spiritual experience too.” The draw of transgressive evil is never to be underestimated. Numerous books have been written on the subject and several youthful subcultures have actively embraced the dark side of things, the most prominent being Goth.
But the appeal of the left-hand path goes back all the way to Vedic Vāmācāra practice and Tantrism which eventually entered Western spirituality through Madame Blavatsky, Theosophy, and Aleister Crowley. The latter couched it in terms of the occult and ceremonial magic where the right-hand path equated to benevolent white magic while the left-hand path meant malevolent black magic. Magick if you will. This distinction is common with occultists, among them parafascist Julius Evola who emphasized that those pursuing the right-hand path worked selflessly for the glorification of the divine while those on the left-hand path worked egocentrically for the glorification of the self. After the second World War, esoteric Nazism and Hitler worship emerged in various forms of völkisch spirituality in neo-völkisch movements, pioneered by such individuals as Savitri Devi, Robert Charroux, and Miguel Serrano. This is paralleled in the revival of anti-modern elements of tribalism, paganism, Traditionalism, and mysticism in everything from right wing politics (Alain de Benoist’s Nouvelle Droite) to music (industrial, black metal, neo-folk), terms often preceded with the combining form neo- (as in neo-tribal, neo-pagan, etc.) This is part of an opposition to modernism, of a revolt against the modern world.
Rarely has this amounted to a conscious embrace of the power of evil however. More often, and especially among the young, this has meant flirting with the devil, being naughty, getting an adrenaline rush, emotional thrill, or sexual charge from teasing the dark side. Sometimes it’s conveyed as a conscious provocation, the deliberate use of highly charged language and symbols to outrage those who are invariably labeled “squares.” This is the calculated method of musicians and bands like Boyd Rice and Death in June in the industrial and neo-folk genres who dress fash and talk fash but never actually claim fascism as an up front affiliation. In the end, a small percentage consider their embrace of the left-hand and the right-wing a positive good. That’s the stance of most involved in the ultranationalist Patriot movement because isn’t patriotism a good thing after all? Robert Anton LeVey defined his Satanism as a Nietzschean übermensch philosophy in opposition to the prevailing Christian herd mentality of society at large. And the virulently anti-semitic, Hitler-worshipping murderers of the neo-nazi Atomwaffen Division death squad believe that a new, expanded Holocaust—in which not just Jews and Leftists, but the immoral, degenerate and weak will be exterminated—is a positive, healthy social good.
These diehard characters are downright proud of their badass transgressive Nazi selves, unlike assclown Gavin McInnes and his ilk on the ultra-right who, when called out for throwing a Roman salute or reveling in racial slurs, disguise their dark shit with their disingenuous reactive crap. “Can’t you take a joke?” is their common refrain. Occasionally those who are in dark opposition are actively aided by those who are in reactive opposition. The Elbo Room, a long-standing San Francisco dive bar, recently closed its doors due to lease/landlord issues. In December, 2015, the Elbo Room gained notoriety by proudly hosting a show for the band Death in June and co-owner Matt Shapiro said: Death In June is not a Nazi band, nor a group that preaches hate. While they use controversial imagery and have songs with subject matter that some may find challenging, they are definitely not Nazis, nor hateful. I come from many generations of Jews. Do you think I could look my mother in the eye after booking a Nazi act? Shapiro wasn’t dissembling, he actually believes DiJ aren’t fascist, let alone Nazi or white supremacist. He called out the police against protesters he falsely claimed were wielding knives. “These folks were menacing and looking for trouble.” We have to take Shapiro’s word that DiJ are not fascist and that protesters threatened violence in this prime example of reactive opposition. Had it been the former MRR columnist mentioned above, he would have defended DiJ because they are fascists, in deference to his free speech absolutism. How punk.
Not.
Luis Buñuel once said: “Sex without sin is like an egg without salt,” implying a measured application of transgression to life. I’ll be the first to admit my vanilla opposition is neither aggro enough nor sexy enough for most rebels-in-waiting. Yet reactive opposition and dark opposition are so fraught with problems I’ve barely scratched the surface here. I’ll readily admit having started out in reactive opposition in my youth and I’m sure some would argue that my present vanilla opposition is a sorry climb down from those heady days. But I’m quite proud never to have entertained any dark oppositional tendencies beyond faking Nazi mannerisms with a tiny group of friends taking German in high school. Now that Kavanaugh has been confirmed to the Supreme Court, I can sincerely call that a “youthful indiscretion.”
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