James Mealey

Fisher treated class as a vibe. He conflated class and cultural signifiers stemming from class. Fisher put culture where class ought to be: the accent you hear before you see the person, the confidence a private school gives you, how clean the house is, what's on television, what time the shops open. He wrote that class is a sense of inferiority no amount of money can cure, so once you're working class you stay working class, however rich you become. And so a millionaire comedian, just weeks after buying a house in the Hollywood Hills for $2.2 million, becomes the voice of the working class, and any criticism against him becomes an attack to the working class. The same Brand that was then taken up and promoted by the liberal media themselves. Owen Jones fails the same test; in the essay, Fisher wrote off Brand's critics for having been to private schools, and in the same essay he called Jones "the person most responsible for raising class consciousness in the UK in the last few years". Two weeks earlier, in his column in The Independent, Jones had written that he grew up in a middle-class family, with a white-collar council worker for a father and an IT lecturer for a mother. He then went to Oxford and got a newspaper column talking to other middle class folk, squarely inside the so called neoliberal left. If background decides who counts as working class and who has the right to speak for it, Fisher's own pick fails his own test. If it doesn't, his case against Brand's critics falls apart. Class is your relation to the means of production: whether you own and hire, or sell your labour to survive. For Fisher, a man who owns three houses and lives off the rent is still working class if he grew up on an estate and has an accent. He refuses to class as a relation to the means of production and to capital. In Capitalist Realism he writes that antagonism is no longer between class blocs but inside "the psychology of the worker", torn between wanting class conflict and wanting a good return on his pension fund, and that "there is no longer an identifiable external enemy". Class conflict isn't in anyone's head. It's in wages, rents and waiting lists. A man who thinks the enemy has disappeared won't understand how workers fight back, and he didn't. When students and public-sector unions filled the streets of France in 2006, Fisher quoted The Economist calling them "on the side of conservatism" and said its mockery "had a point". He told lecturers that strikes and marking bans "should be abandoned" and wanted unions to move away from their traditional focus on pay. Fisher aimed the Vampire Castle at identity politics and cancel culture, particularly the way they show up online. He was wrong on both counts. He fought identity politics with identity politics, throwing out class as a relation to the means of production and putting an identity in its place. And the online style he loathed is just the latest form of something as old as the workers' movement itself: step out of line and you're out. No strike, no uprising, no serious movement and no revolution has ever put up with conduct or views it judged beyond the line, and societies have drawn those lines since ancient times. Fisher wanted a left that felt like Brand, who he said "makes people feel good about themselves", while the moralising left makes them feel bad. Movements don't exist to make anyone feel good. They decide what they stand for and who speaks for them, and anyone who crosses the line is out. That's all the Vampire Castle ever was. Fisher's take is textbook postmodern identity politics void of any materialist class analysis, and it's much closer to neoliberalism than to socialism.