My Comrade In Fur

By Attica Fox

Desperate times are ahead no matter what immediate political course of action is taken. The current administration has merely become a hyper-focal point of all the dysfunction of current world economics funneled down into one repugnant man. That man is but a symptom. He is not the problem but merely a repercussion of the cancerous economic system of wealth extraction that has been allowed through our inaction to become malignant and attack its host. Once this man is gone troubled times are still ahead, though better masked under a veneer of convincing smiles and flashy products, as the Spectacle of society has many many ways to dazzle us back into a slumber. But while that Spectacle dazzles more resource wars will be fought, money will concentrate in just a few families, laws will subvert the will of the people in favor of the profits of companies, and all normal people will struggle to survive. To survive the coming instability and poverty that will be visited upon the world by growth for the mere sake of growth we as a Fandom must recognize our communal values, collectivize our efforts, and give no quarter to those who would put them in jeopardy, especially those of our own. Our Fandom is situated perfectly to form a grand levee against the coming political and economic crises the liberal world is about to face. We must come together like we have proven we can do in the past and now think of ourselves as one whole, a collective culture, or we shall be torn asunder. We shall be divided and turned into a commodified consumable market for the world to exploit at the expense of every indigenously furry artist, writer, craftsman, and performer.

‘Fandom’ is inherently a marketing term. It the definition of a market. It designates a specific population who is readily receiving of a good whom may be sold to. It is therefore more by tradition and familiarity that Furries take on the namesake, as there is nothing “fandom” about us. We are the only fandom which can claim ownership of its own ways and means from top to bottom along all aspects of our culture. We as a people craft our own suits, produce our own likenesses in art, organize our own communities, sell each other our own produce, and just about the only thing we lack direct control over are the production of the raw materials; the thread and graphite and silicon, and the venues in which we celebrate our culture. The ownership of our venues would be remedied shortly in the best of all possible worlds. It is this unique ownership of our community which liberates us from the woes and manipulations of faced by all market fandoms, and which gives us our inherent Socialist furry values of self-exploration, integration, liberation, cooperation, independence, and artistic development; values which in the coming times must be vigorously defended by giving no quarter or ground to those who call these values trash, above all those who share our namesake!

A “market fandom”, as I’m sure those of us with intersecting interests in other communities, is a fandom which was either created for the sole purpose of selling a product of a company to a population (like pop music) or was ‘discovered’ and appropriated into a product that appeals to a much larger population thus destroying and mutating the original concept of creation (Like Dubstep when it was used in a Carl’s Jr. Ad). Sometimes the product created does not even end up acquiring its target market and instead finds itself appropriating an entirely different market for its product (like My Little Pony). The producer does not even have to appropriate a fandom. It can appropriate an entire culture or civilization and destroy it in the process of creating a sellable facsimile (like every damn tiki trinket in every hawaiian souvenir shop) and it is this culturally destructive property of production that is the most dangerous. I can see a world in which in desperation for spectacle our Fandom is appropriated by corporate interests, gutted of all its honesty and originality, cast aside like an empty shell for the purpose of popularizing ‘Furries’ in web videos, boy bands, and video games and having cheap ears and tails to sell to pre-teens in Hot Topic. Ironically I believe the rampant porn for which we feel we must explain away to the outside world is the sole reason that every attempt by that outside world to do this has failed miserably. It makes us difficult to co opt and sanitize for sale to the most natural market giant talking animals has… but the corporate world could do it if they really needed to. For 40 years we have been lucky, but markets are carnivorous and will devour our culture, destroy our home industries, sanitize and commodify our art, run the fad through its course, make maybe 5 of us temporarily wealthy, and then discard us when the market they create is saturated and leave us to pick up the shambles. We are lucky even more that such a D-list company as IMVU was the one who bit when Dragoneer decided to sell out. That betrayal of the center of our commerce and all its users should never be forgotten, and when the time is right the full power of this Fandom should be brought to weight against IMVU to reclaim Fur Affinity for our own. Keep drawing dicks. Our independence depends on it.

Now to our Fandom, the one Fandom created by it own, for its own, about its own. Unequivocally whole and equal, with no pretense of ulterior motive behind its actions, each any every Furry has equal ownership and derives equal value from the performance of our craft and culture. It is a true Meritocracy. There is no corporate entity which crafts and selects from a boardroom chair the species of the month with which we are all to be obsessed with and consume. The trends in Furry are all organic and are without subversive drives of exploitation. When something becomes popular it enriches the entirety of the Fandom rather than cheapens it because that creation is proliferated around the whole of the Fandom, not sold down to it with profits extracted out of it. The only comparable power within our Fandom in terms of what power is held over the individuals from which it is drawn can be said to lie in the organization of our conventions and the administrators of the hosts of our crafts like sites such as E621 and regrettably Fur Affinity. But the administrators of those hosts of production and performance are ever changing and most importantly there is no barrier to entry. In market fandoms which via tradition, need for material to appropriate, or lack of outright power to stamp out, allow for a section of independent creation, such as comics, anime, video games you find a bridge which lies between the ‘independent’ producer and his end goal of ‘becoming big’ meaning to take his place among the producers who have control of the market. This independent ‘amateur’, as there really is no practical difference, only political, must fight tooth and nail to cross this bridge fighting constantly against the downward pressure from the ‘professionals’ who seek his product to exploit at the expense of his control over it. When an amateur loses the will to keep up the fight to cross this bridge and trades his control of his creation in exchange for an undervalued payment he is said to have ‘sold out’. In the Furry Fandom there is no need for this compromise. As we communally own the market in near totality there is no bridge between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’. We are all equal producers and practitioners of the culture. Any fur may take up the torch of administration and production in this Fandom. Should a geography be lacking of a convention then any fur may create one. Should that con grow to endanger the will and safety of its people then RMFC has shown that all power forever lies in the Furries of this Fandom, so long as it retains its consciousness of its unique class. It is no coincidence that the person responsible for exposing the criminality of RMFC’s administration was a Communist, who by nature are very class conscious people.

It is precisely this communal structure of the Fandom which imbues it with its socialist values. When there is no power or class distinction between Furries there is no true contention between Furries. All conflict becomes arbitrary and based in the realm of personal dispute. That is a godsend, as personal dispute, rather than systemic dispute, is the easiest to set aside in times of crisis. As our current form of economics causes more and more destabilization in the world and its resources become slimmer and farther apart, yet the social priority of growth for the mere sake of growth continues will continue onward ruining more lives with more recessions until eventually our community will fall in the crosshairs to be exploited for all its value by that all-consuming drive of ‘progress’. At stake is our artistic integrity, the control of our production, and above all our ability to explore and discover ourselves through uninterrupted experimentation and reinvention of our person as is present in every single fursona and fursuit walking the con floor. The entire purpose of our Fandom, the whole reason we are here, is to discover ourselves and express what we have discovered! It is present in every artwork, letter, and thread that composes the fabric of the Furry! If this is coopted by an outside pathological corporate interest our ability to discover ourselves will be destroyed. We shall be dictated who we are and what we are supposed to be and supposed to like and then given things to buy that match. However the closest danger comes not from an intrusive outside corporate entity but from among our own people who would sell out to them.

As global economics become more unstable and exploitation leads to crisis which leads to more exploitation and more crisis it won’t just be companies that get more and more desperate. That old economy we were lucky enough to grow up with is never coming back like it did before. The crashes get worse and worse and people will end up poorer and poorer. The 85 richest people own as much wealth as the 3.5 million poorest people combined. 20 years ago it was three times as many owning that same wealth. Wealth condenses and without the political will to redistribute it which the world is vitally lacking it will condense more and more. This is not the result of a change in government but rather a lack of change from a predatory economic foundation to one which uplifts those who struggle. This means that without a change you can expect to get poorer and poorer and live shorter and more desperate lives. And environment such as this is ripe for creating desperate sell outs, who, by the way, will be compensated almost nothing and consider it a great treasure. This will open cracks and fissures to the exploitation of our Fandom. If these economic conditions become reality it will be easily to sympathize with these sell outs… but what if we collectivized? The greatest enemy of corporate interest is when their target market is both conscious and collectivized. When it cooperates with each other and shares in the bounty of each others produce and happiness it defends its integrity and independence from both without and within. It can not be appropriated. This is why the AltRight has done such a fantastically miserable job at appropriating Furry culture to be twisted to their devices. In order to co opt a resistant culture and turn it into a market the industry must create cracks in its unity via bribes and offers. The more unity in the culture the harder it is to create those cracks. The more Furries know they can rely on each other in their troubles the less appealing the trade of control for payoff is to any Furry approached by a speculating company. But even this is not enough.

Years ago a kernel of a parasite was planted in the mind of some in our Fandom that originated in the edgy crypto-fascist depths of Channer culture. A vicious and self destructive form of nihilistic pathology and rejection of reason for base feeling took root in some minds and grew and grew until it convinced them to hate the very thing they are and love their destroyer. What, at the time, seemed pointless was poignant. “For the lulz” meant “In all seriousness”. It was the same old reactionary call for death couched in being ‘just a joke’ that became the rebirth of a petulant and putrid political ideology. It adopted Anime with ease, subverted the values of MLP with rapid speed, and wore them as a mask to make its sick and racist ideology palatable and spreadable to the mainstream. But they didn’t get Furry yet! If it were not for our inherently socialist nature that committed ourselves to each other and the bulwark defense of Deo and her comrades then our beautiful culture would currently be being worn as a mask as well. But still they try to take what we have built and shred any and all decency out of it. The ‘Kekers’ and the Baphomet channers and AltFurry hate every one of our inherent values of inclusiveness and self discovery with a passion. They say they love the Fandom and their country above all, but they hate almost everything about it! They hate its ideals, its politics, and all the people in it they think shouldn’t belong! They only love a rose-tinted romanticized version in their heads of a country or a Fandom that never ever existed in reality. They make no art, they write no literature, they craft no value into this Fandom. They only ever siphon off the efforts of others and if they had their way they would shred the Fandom to bits and turn it into the same useless permanent petulant adolescent rage drowning in the same pool of venomous contempt that they are. This would be an even more tragic end for our Fandom than corporate appropriation and exploitation. These parasitic hangers-on must be pushed back to the bottom shadows they crawled out of. They have risen in our Fandom before under the name of The Burned Furs. They were shunned then and will be shunned again.

Only via simultaneous rejection of this ‘ironic’ reactionist rhetoric and increased collectivism can these threats be overcome to see this Fandom through to a future without these dangers both intact and free. Our Fandom and its inherent economic and social qualities stands to become more than just a collection of artists and enthusiasts. We have the opportunity to build ourselves a social safety net out of our culture! Start to think of all Furries as brothers and sisters. As comrades in fur. Start to live closer together, then in together, and contribute towards furthering the life and creativity of each other. Never be afraid to give. Continually ask our conventions to serve a purpose beyond an organized celebration and begin to facilitate community organizing services and help settle disputes among its local Furry populace. Ask the organizers of your furmeets to readily help in all areas of a Furries life. Do not deride each other for the quality of our crafts but rather support each other’s efforts to contribute to the Fandom. We must envision a grand Fandom that sees itself not only as a channel through which to explore ourselves but as a liberator and protector of our ways, means, and culture. Become conscious of your uniqueness and the power waiting to be grasped! We stand as an anomaly in the world of industry-driven antagony and must become aware of such. We must seek to move ourselves beyond our current self imposed limitations and think of what more our conventions could be, what our homes could be, and what we could be to our Fandom. If we can unite in this goal of awakening ourselves to consciousness of the collective nature of our Fandom and then further it and build upon it then as the world becomes darker, poorer, and more violent, then we will have nothing to fear and everything to be.