Performative Axisship, Part IV

Part I
Part II
Part III

So we can definitely say that performative axisship helps socialists win, in completely different times and ways. So if we truly want socialism to win, we ought to apply it to our own. Interestingly enough, a group of people who increasingly agree with us are black and Hispanic men and women, who exit polls tell us backed Trump by larger margins in 2020 than 2016. This is still not a majority, but it's more blacks than have voted Republican than anytime in the last century, and about as many Hispanics as the immigration reform-minded Dubya got. They aren't stupid, they can see the performative axisship aimed against them by Trump as well as anyone else can. But they can see the actual axisship of the Dymocrites much more clearly, because they suffer under it every day. Words hurt their communities a lot less than jail sentences for drug crimes.

But how we perform axisship matters: because of the hyped up demands of performative allyship, literally anything we say that doesn't conform to those exacting standards will be Exhibit A in our cancellation. So we don't even have to say anything ugly to pursue this strategy, we just have to act like decent people who never took a single gender studies class. The shitlibs will take it from there, gleefully jumping at the chance to let everyone know how much better people they are than us, how much smarter and nicer. They will tell their friends all about the stupid things we said/did when we Problematics acted like normal decent people. As always, they will be ignorant of the workers overhearing them and silently agreeing with what they hear about us while the shitlibs, getting no pushback, assume that everyone agrees with them and so they will become our unwitting propagandists, our useful smertysmerts. Something like this is how Trump got $2 billion in free press by saying outrageous things that false consciousness nonetheless gets millions of workers to believe. We should have no trouble assuming state power by doing it too.

The Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek demonstrated how this strategy might look in practice. During Syria's refugee crisis, he publicly demanded a "militarized response" to the refugees. In reality, it doesn't matter which uniform a state employee handing out supplies and tents and processing paperwork wears, and having the military let people in and give them aid is just as good as having civilian government employees do it. But it sounds nasty, which is the point, so racists might actually vote for it despite it running contrary to their interests.

We could easily copy and paste this, but swap "Hispanics" out for "Syrians." Say Trump's wall was blocked by the Dems, so we'll just have to bring the troops back from around the world to "secure the border." We just won't mention that "the troops" will be providing humanitarian assistance. After we get elected and deploy the troops to the border by ending imperialism, and word starts getting out that the troops are mostly just humanitarian assistance, we can spin it that the good the troops are doing isn't mentioned in the liberal media, and the conservative working class voters will defend it anyway, the way they defended this exact trope when they were deployed to Iraq. The smartest fascists will still attack it, at which point we will say they're attacking the troops and hate America. Meanwhile the only Mexicans getting tossed out will be the narcofash, a tiny fraction of the migrant flow whose cases we'll play up in the media so the conservative workers will feel like they're getting their way.

In other spheres, performative axisship might look like purposely abandoning gender studies for gender abolitionism. There are literally dozens of genders someone can choose from on Facebook. But gender is not the reality of a person, but the particular social expectations they decide publicly to live up to. Since we live in a capitalist society, those expectations are capitalist expectations. But we truly owe capitalists nothing, especially nothing whatsoever about our personalities. They have no right to define the social expectations we are to meet. Gender is, as the shitlibs say, a social construct, made by capitalists for capitalists. All that really exists is male biology and female biology, both external (sexual differences) and internal (hormones, feelings), and those on a spectrum that encompasses those with both biologies and neither. So in accordance with the traditional sexual teachings of many societies around the world that persist through imperialism, and in accordance with century-old queer socialist theory on the subject; there are no genders, but there are three sexes: male, female, and nonbinary.

"Nonbinary" or some equivalent term is more convenient for the people who are neither male not female (and trans men are men, trans women are women, so I don't count them) than forty-seven goddamn genders, and this isn't just a matter of convenience. Rights exist because everyone in a society understands them and agrees to them. So according to the traditional conservative teachings of cultures that aren't Western capitalist, civil rights are best secured by keeping them as simple as possible for everyone else to understand. And "everyone else" includes people with learning difficulties, not just because they have rights too, but will eventually disregard others' if theirs are disregarded.

There: in two paragraphs, I explained the need for gender abolitionism, and why I support it. But I guarandamntee you that any shitlibs that just read that passage are salivating at the opportunity to be morally outraged by it. Not because I said anything outrageous to morality; I specifically upheld all relevant queer rights. (Oh yeah, if you say "queer" instead of the ever-evolving alphabet soup they invented, the shitlibs will cancel you for that too.) But I upheld queer rights outside of the framework of gender, and they are more invested in that framework than they are in queer rights. Every single one of those genders has people hoping to ride it idpolistically to fame and fortune, by using their gender studies degrees to be "advocates" or whatever shitlibs are calling college kids with sinecures these days. There are a lot of gender studies degrees out there absolutely relying on the continued existence of gender as a concept to justify their worth. Think of all the professors who would be out of work if we just... stopped expecting people to behave a certain way based on how they look, which is all gender abolitionism is. It's egalitarianism simple enough that it can hand queer rights down through the generations. This goodness and light is a mortal threat to their careers and must be stopped at all cost. So just by adopting a truly revolutionary and emancipatory gender politics, we can get the shitlibs to disingenuously call us Hitler to save their own careers.

Another example of performative axisship is using the dictionary definition of racism. It's true that in college, racism is generally taught to be bigotry plus structural power; without the structural power, it can't be racism. So by that given definition it is technically true (every shitlib's favorite kind of truth) that black people (or any other oppressed nationality) can't be racist to white people. But the workers didn't go to college, use "racism" and "bigotry" interchangeably, and when they're uncertain about the meaning of a word they consult the dictionary. If your leftist argument relies on "But I went to moar college than u!!!1!" then you're a fucking poser, Poindexter, and you're alienating the workers with your academic arrogance. We benefit more by using words like "racist" in the common working class sense, and taking our lumps for it just like they do from the useful smertysmerts, and so demonstrating that we are a vessel for workers' interests. Just representing worker ethics in the press will get us called Nazis by self serving middle class posers.

The end results of our performative axisship will be twofold. First off, we'll gather a bunch of racist votes in exchange for nothing. Second off, we will force these two-faced shitlibs to outbid us with real axisship, which we of course cannot and will not match. The second effect may be the more determinative, because it will force liberals to take off their masks and choose which part of the middle class they want to appeal to. At the end of the day, they don't like to admit it, but they'll choose the fascists to defend their means of production over the demsocs every time. This will then force any remotely honest class traitors into our ranks as they see what liberalism really is.

You will likely live to see the day when Dems openly court the fash, but they will only do it to outbid our performative axisship. But they will eventually do it in the most dramatic way possible, and it will seal their fate. The day they decide that capital must rise again, and the Constitution must be rent asunder, they will step outside of its protections and we will be fully justified in burning down their mansions and ending capitalism forever.

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