As is so often the case, “the left” has a problem with division and internal conflict. In today’s “very online left”, that division and conflict can be read as centering on one young woman from Ireland, Angela Nagle.

Since the publication of Kill All Normies, Nagle has been the target of relentless attacks from one large, very vocal part of that online “left”. Her suggestion that the rise to prominence of the so-called ‘alt-right’ was in part an online reaction to “leftist” absurdity in the realm of online identity politics sent whole divisions of Twitter ragebots into action, calling her a fascist, thus indicating disagreement in the argot of this particular “left”.

This is part of the struggle between what are best described as radical liberals, whose whole sense of the “left” project revolves around issues of identity — race, gender, sexual orientation — and a socialist left that sees class and economic issues as the proper concern of left organizing and theorizing.

The main impact of this liberal-socialist divide has been to cripple the left. Since the election of Donald Trump, we have heard again and again that there is a “resurgent left”, that socialism is “no longer a dirty word” and that the era of untrammeled neoliberalism is over. The element of wish-fulfillment is overwhelming in these proclamations. Nathan Robinson, in a typical puff piece about the “rise of millennial socialism” put it most poignantly when he said:

The millennial embrace of socialism, then, does not mean that millennials are trying to implement some complicated new economic system that they do not understand. It means that they measure any economic system by the degree to which it is humane and democratic, and they are angered by the degree to which our current one fails people. It means that they reject selfishness and believe in solidarity. And it means that they are determined to help each other build something better, whatever that may be.

Notice that socialism as construed here has nothing to do with the radical reorganization of economic life or the empowerment of the working class. It is about being “nice”. There is an element of “everything I need to know about politics I learned in kindergarden” in this avoidance of associating anything historically socialist with “millennial socialism”. This is Robinson, who as far as I can tell is probably far more genuinely socialist than this quote would suggest, bending over backwards not to offend those who want “socialism” to mean all the things that Nagle satirized under the rubric “Tumblr liberalism”.

In other words, this “rise of the left” is in fact a so-far successful deflection of any possibility of a revivified socialist movement in the US, and by extension the “west”. As long as “the left” is understood to refer to trans activists supporting pussy-hatted women marching on airports to oppose racist immigration restrictions and support programs to ensure that 13% of all software engineers at Google are black and 52% of those people are women, then neoliberal capital can breathe a sigh of relief. They may have pushed things too far in recent decades but there is no one out there with any heft actually pushing back. Let them eat quotas and sensitivity training workshops.

Nagle’s latest offense is to have suggested that there is a left argument against open borders. She has done this in response to the odd situation of a broad-based call on the “left” for an implementation of the long-sought libertarian capitalist dream of unrestricted immigration into the US.

As Nagle points out, a call for open borders is a de facto call for the liquidation of the nation state as it exists today. Her critics would like to pretend that that sounds like a very good idea indeed, but in fact, as Slavoj Zizek quoting George Orwell has pointed out recently:

We rail against class-distinctions, but very few people seriously want to abolish them. Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.

Not one of the people ostensibly defending a call for “open borders” believes for a minute that any such thing is likely to happen within an imaginable future. I mean you can’t seriously call for medicare for all, a $15/hr minimum wage AND the dissolution of the nation state whose governments would be responsible for implementing said state-based programs.

The people attacking Nagle on Twitter and Reddit of course don’t see it that way. For the most part, these people are Americans whose conception of the world is binary — there is America and then there is this foggy region where the EU is similar and everything else is not. Poor people come from the “not similar” and need to be identified as “ethnic” or “racialized” so that they can be categorized as victims and therefore worthy of the sympathy and support of “the left”.

The suggestion that these people have countries of their own, with customs and cultures and economies, that they have family and friends and political relationships that are intimately entwined with their geospatial location in a place that to Twitter “leftists” is nothing more than “not the US”, amounts to less than nothing for these radical liberals. If global southerners want work and relative comfort and security, let them abandon everything and everyone they have ever known and come to the US to mow the lawns of the petit bourgeoise. The “left” will guarantee they get the same minimums as the native poor, so what’s to lose? Who wouldn’t trade in family, friends and familiar places for $15/hr?

And Nagle is a “blood and soil” nationalist for daring to even propose that emigrating to the land of the free and home of the hip anti-racists may not be the socialist alternative of choice.

Because these people are neither socialists nor serious about their apparent concern for “the global south”, their solution to everything is to open the borders of the US, shove all the “poor people” into steerage on the Titanic, and enact minimum wage legislation in Washington and declare victory. Their “socialism” gives off a distinct odor of White Saviour Barbie plastic.

In opposition to capitalist globalization, socialists need to develop a program of internationalization. We need to re-establish connections between labor organizations and leftist political organizations across the world. Solidarity amongst working classes in the nations of the world is a real first step toward the borderless world that radical liberals only give lip-service to in order to stroke their own virtue pleasure centers.

But in order to do so, a rather dispiritingly large number of Anglosphere “leftists” need to look at a map of the world and try to imagine what all those countries and cities might actually mean to the people who live in them. Other, that is, than as places to escape so that Americans can pat themselves on the back rather than punch capital in the face.