Propaganda With Paws

Part 1: Commentary On The Cultural Barxist.

The Furry Fandom has enjoyed an unexpected benefit from its bad sexual reputation. It was able to use that obscurity to engage in radical rhetoric and radicalize each other. Fuscience.com has this to say about the political makeup of the fandom.

Many furries would prefer to just go along to get along. Most of them just want to be here and enjoy each other’s company. Most of them want to be left alone.

But given the makeup of the fandom there will always be asymmetric sympathies toward radical politics. This is very reflective of the general Moderate Left Democrat who believes in a big tent. I have seen many of them excuse radical politics and give those who espouse it more leeway than most mainstream conservatives give our prospective extremists. The overall liberal dominance ensures that Radical Leftists and Anarchists are given safe quarters.

This is evidenced by the creation of this website/zine and the ensuing distribution of propaganda like this. I have no idea who published this, I do know it is published and that should be sufficient.

This is not as much of a joke as you would assume. I assure you this is very much not parody but is assimilation of Communist ideals into a furry form. If we are a fandom with individuals that won’t bat an eye at spending $200 for an art commission, well above $10,000 for a fursuit, and $3,000 for a VR avatar, we are well beyond seeing this as a joke.

Remember what I wrote about Furry Identity. We may want our fursonas connected to real life as much as we want them to be representative of our internal fantasy. Well, that is also reflected in our politics.

Many of us see to it that our fursonas are in line with our own personal convictions like our faith. The visual statement can be as important to us as our worldview. Our personal epistemology can sometimes be gleaned by looking at our art.

To make this as much real life as it is fantasy is very appealing.

I have no idea where this propaganda publication came from, but I know it exists and has been distributed at conventions. I have a physical copt of the second edition beside me as I write this.

This is the first in a series. As a person who has spent 20 years in this fandom interacting with people I will tell you that this is not comedy, it is reality. I will prove that to you by going through and breaking apart every essay in both volumes of The Cultural Barxist. I will also be taking apart many of the comics and artistic contributions to this publication. Whenever possible I will be giving brief background reports on each contributor,

On June 29, 2017 The Cultural Barxist published this article entitled “Furries, Queer Subculture, And the Myth Of Being Ostracised.”, under a pseudonym (I can’t fault them there, there is a lot of that going around.)

This introduction does quite a bit of heavy lifting. The quote immediately establishes an oppressed/oppressor dynamic. It also illustrates a point I made in an earlier essay, Brexit and the 2016 election of Donald Trump were two major blows to their movement that severely upset them and made them feel less in control.

This also illustrates who they see as exemplars of their movement. Fixating on Bernie, Jean-Luc(Whose name they manage to misspell), and Jeremy, they are aligning themselves with some of the most radical candidates available in three major western nations.

One important subtle implication that their version of history is inevitable and Brexit and Trump’s 2016 election were just setbacks. History has a trajectory toward a postmodern end and they have a special revelation that is the ultimate destination.

Here they throw down the gauntlet. Michele Foucault said that “Power is everywhere’ and ‘comes from everywhere.” If power comes from everywhere and hierarchies are themselves a sinful fallen nature of being then everywhere and everything must be made political.

The general regard that things can and should be apolitical is an anathema to them. They must make it political and must take it upon themselves to define a power structure so they can take power over it. If they don’t make people aware of the disparity then they will never become politicized to the level they need to be.

This is the shadow version of Christianity making people aware of their sinful fallen nature so they are ready to receive salvation and be born again.

Things must be political because without it, the wise people with special knowledge can’t pervert and invert the Christian faith and guide people along the different path they are prescribing for them.

The line about “white middle-class suburbia.”, could be argued that it is being used in the same way the Bible refers to Samaria or Egypt to me. Somewhere undesirable to emerge from, an unwanted place.

They mention the growing free-market nature of furry cons and economic factors associated with them.

Marxist-Leninism and Maosim held that every nation needed to go through two stages of development, the first is pure Capitalism in which the people would build up their society with free markets.

The second was pure Communism, when they rise above their backward Capitalist nature and effect a revolution to redistribute the means of production that were created. The first stage is essential but disposable like a booster rocket just designed to get people to orbit.

This comes up later in my paper.

The author of this paper seems to be assuming that as a fact. A Capitalist fandom has emerged and is in the first stage but that will be a temporary state and it it unnatural.

This expands on this by implying that the city’s financial windfall is “Pinkwashing” and is an implied cash grab rather than an agreed upon equal exchange of value.

The authors have to divide people up into groups, the “banks and corporations” vs. “the people and grassroots community.” They are bringing a critical Marxist theory and setting it against the local tourist industry. It is the business owners of Pittsburgh, PA who have and the individual furries who have not.

The claim of “pinkwashing” is trying to add a grievance layer onto this. By trying to welcome and accommodate the influx of Furries, the city of Pittsburgh is not really with the agenda and has to be accused of being apart from it. Their profit motive isn’t altruistic enough and is itself a sinful act.

Pinkwashing is not ok because it is a way for people to make a profit and that is an example of greed and a need for personal financial gain. Any gain is a loss for someone else so that creates victims.

Notice too, the insistence that people have broader political ideas. It is not ok for the animal welfare charities to do the work they do, they need to be engaged at all levels and be made to make statements in which they denounce the type of animal cruelty the author dictates they should. By avoiding this they are engaging in creating a hierarchy and any time someone has more power than another that dynamic creates a victim and abuser. In this case the animals that are being ignored are the abused and the charity’s ignorance or apathy is the abuse.

(This could also go past that into the need for the money to fight all oppression, not just against animals, but this is begging a lot more speculation than I am willing to engage in, I just felt it useful to mention.)

The movement uses the word “Dialogue” in a Paulo Freierian way. In “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” Freire has this to say:

They don’t want a true dialogue, they want a dialogue that leads to radical interaction and transforms the world. Transform it where?

This is further evidence that the author sees Capitalism as the first stage of growth. The words “emerged’ and “maintained” do all the heavy lifting in the first part of this paragraph.

Notice how they move toward trying to force a “Conversation.” They are always wanting to force one because they have an agenda. They want it to be an activist dialogue that goes their way. They have to cast the idea that avoiding it is a reactionary standpoint. They have to define the battlefield beforehand so that any criticism is seen as backwards and serving the old order.

This also tries to invoke another dialectic, class struggle. They are talking past the sale and indicating that the fandom itself is another avenue of class based oppression. There will always be people who are selling things at conventions, but they are also taking advantage of the consumer because they have the power to set prices on their labor and some charge more. The more important and in demand an artist is, the more they make.

By ending this paragraph with a call for discussions, they again, are not using the word like we are. It has a secret gnostic meaning that really indicates a struggle session. They want to link modern day politically Queer movements to the Lion Man statue. There has been a recent movement to redefine it as a symbol of Genderqueerness or to argue it is female rather than male.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-man

This paragraph could be seen as a prime example of wound collecting, that is faking an emotional injury and source of said injury in order to garner sympathy. The author has to claim that by giving the “far-right” and “fascistic” people a voice they are being harmed just by the act of allowing them to speak.

The need for a “Queer” space and “Queer” consciousness seems to work like the Christian admonishment to be “In the world but not of the world.”

It also hearkens back to the safe-space language. By casting this fandom as a safe space they intend to set the fandom apart, to live in a world removed from society. They don’t see a need to participate in the market and norms because they are awoken to their “Queer” nature which is implied to be the true nature.

Their space is intentionally and uniquely political. Right wingers and people like them are not allowed in because they are a threat to their furry identity.

My essay on furry identity went into this, but, I will summarize that here. As a furry our fursona can be an avatar for us. We are our character to some extent. As such this act of excluding other furries from the fandom and defining the fandom as a “Queer” space for “Queer” people they ignore both parts of our identity and get to cut both ways.

They have become political and “aware” of their own oppressed truth and see it as it is, a place apart from their perceived oppression. They are politically conscious. This operates very much like a Christian becoming aware of their sinful nature and can be argued is an exact inversion of that realization.

They end with two important concepts. The first is that the fandom needs to let them in with the sole purpose to spread their Queer awareness. They need to make people politically aware of the great sin of being unwilling to address their natural Queerness and understand the need to create a Queer space apart from their normal life. They need to be made to be politically awoken to this Queer nature and need to be politically activated.

This reminds me of the way that Christians refer to this verse in the Gospel Of Matthew.

Christians call this The Great Commission. This doctrine states that Christians have a duty to go forth and teach people to follow the faith and offer them salvation.

Notice how the author of the paper implies some level of doubt about the outside world allowing the fandom to reflect normal society, letting traditional values in, and uses that doubt to inspire people to make the fandom itself a Queer space. If the Fandom is a space impressed upon by a Non-Queer reality then people who are inside have to doubt if Fandom space is sufficiently Queer.

Expressing that concern really betrays what the writer values, that is an upside down reality, backward to our own. They see the battlefield as defending a space outside normal society.

In this sense making people “Aware” and to start being “Politically Queer” could operate as an exact parallel and inversion of The Great Commission.

The Pink Pound is a concept I will explain later when after the next paragraph.

The first part of this massive paragraph makes a huge assumption, that right wing voices are in the minority and are just the loudest ones. While that may be true in the UK, and that is a big may, it is definitely not the demographic reality in America.

The so-called “Pink Pound” carries a lot of water here too. That is the idea that gay money, the collective money of the LBGT movement, carries with it a special authority. Because most gay and lesbian couples were childless they have extra money and can use that to support places that support them or that they can collectively boycott those that go against them.

The author assumes that it is the power of the purse at play. That may be the case but that also begs the question as to if it is pure profit. That is a massive ask, everyone may assume they are the main character, few realize that we are all supporting cast for a very few protagonists. I know the same restaurant that caters to furries one week may cater to a football tournament the next and a Lamborghini meet the next.

They again poke at the need for everything to be very political, by following a paragraph that mentions the “Pink Pound” and being included in a paragraph that mentions it again that reads more like a desperate plea to possess a fake reality rather than to accept someone’s free will. Either a person is politically active and “awoken” to their own oppression and on board the feminist train in the way they themselves and only they can define.

By having a queer standpoint they can define the space as default amenable to right-wing banter and exclusionary to their need for an oppression narrative.

They seem to confuse a need for an egalitarian space to mix and mingle with people of different classes with that space being “Queer.” By mentioning the different classes and vocations meeting in a common space in the context of class awareness they inevitably impress a sense of othering on them.

Pandering to a metaphor, if I, a furry playing a deer, am having a conversation on equal terms with a guy playing a wolf and they come in and force us into their social fanfic that is on them. I may be aware of the prey and predator dynamic but I also don’t care and I know the wolf doesn’t either. What if the wolf is female? Do I suddenly have male privilege that supersedes my symbolic station lower in the food chain?

So far the author is too narrowly focused.

They also mention an intelligence gap. Well, firstly, they assume that because most furries are into technology in some manner that the act of talking about it means they are expressing more power over other people in the room. That may be the case in one dynamic, but, I guarantee someone who can program in Java may not be good at pouring his own driveway or may be clueless about how to fix their car’s transmission. They may not have a clue how to identify a heart attack or argue their way out of a conviction.

Almost everyone has power in some arena. Almost everyone has extremely varied experiences. Does that mean they are expressing their power over someone else.

It is also notable that they fixate on STEM jobs and ignore the trades, like welding and plumbing, which make just as much but aren’t conveniently white-collar enough to nail to the wall as the elite class.

If a trucker becomes a multimillionaire at the same level as a tech entrepreneur and employs the same amount of people and pays them the exact same amount he makes, would the author be more amenable to the trucker? Did the trucker work as hard for his company as the tech worker for his job?

If a trucker entrepreneur uses his money to go to a furry con and takes his STEM degree holding buddy, sharing the travel, hotel, and meal expenses, does that still make them part of different classes? If they spend exactly the same amount at the con with the same artists, and experience exactly the same things, is the STEM degree holder still taking advantage of the trucker?

What if the trucker is a perfectly healthy man and the STEM degree holder is a multiethnic female blind amputee who got there through adversity? What if she struggled to get there and became the best at her job through grit and determination?

The entire second half of that paragraph is profoundly myopic. (I wonder if the author wrote this after a bad breakup.)

The idea that the fandom needs to be open and embrace new ideas and new members is an anathema to this author. His ideology can’t allow or go forward with a pluralistic view because totalitarian ideologies only work if there are no alternatives.

This is important though. It illustrates how we let in extremist politics. If there is a GSFT1 and furries were one of the biggest adherents to that, they wouldn’t have seen a need to develop any organizational immune system to people who want to come in and reinvent the fandom to their own will. If Ostraciszers are evil, being one is a sin.

Notice how the quoted paragraph has to use the worst possible example, the so-called “Cat Piss Man” to put an image and smell in the reader’s eye and nose. Congrats, Right-Wing people, you disgust him just as much as a guy with B.O. He may be unaware that he is this person to other furries.

A pluralistic fandom or organization allows the oppressed masses too much agency to return to the oppression and de-liberate themselves. By being open to right wing ideas we are allowing the “wrong kind” of people in.

Here he goes on with his criticism. The excuse that people were cast aside in their youth and are allergic to drama makes them unwilling allies in their own liberation because they won’t engage in the labor to expel the people who joined and are exactly like those who oppressed them.

Despite most furries just wanting to enjoy playing fake animal people on the internet the author sees a need to ascribe his own motives onto it. If it is not politically Queer, then people haven’t been made aware of the dynamic and they need to be made aware so they can be made to involve themselves in their own liberation.

The way this paper addresses the “average Tory voter” in a manner that makes me feel like they see the right wing as barbarians in their midst. Assuming this is a rough inversion of a Christian faith infrastructure, they may perceive conservatives as engaging as their version of Pagans. If people aren’t “Woke” a.k.a. “Born-Again” and are actively worshipping an inverse to them god, then they need to be ministered to.

This is a very interesting paragraph and it further illustrates my argument that this essay is Christianity in Marxist drag(pun intended).

If we replace the words and phrases “queer subculture” with “Christian”, “safe-space” with “church”, “fascistic” with “Pagan”, and “capitalist and patriarchal norms of cis/hetro normativity” with “sinful nature” it suddenly reads like a standard appeal for a virtuous society.

Similarly, the way the word “nerd” in the last sentence is used here makes me feel like the author means something akin to “Bible Believers.”

Here, in the conclusion, he is again casting a group as a villain. The “‘bullied white outcast loner’” and acts as if the marginalized people didn’t have access to the same economy and fandom that white, straight, cis people had. This is another example of wound collecting, acting like a kicked dog.

Then the author ends where he began, the need to be political.

To conclude my paper, this is very representative of what I have had to deal with in the fandom. Most furries have leftist sympathies and enable people like this to get away with their naked ahistorical readings and socialist/communist propaganda. They may not be a socialist or communist but they are open to letting them into the tent as fellow travellers against the right.

This is the first in many many commentary articles I will be writing reacting to this zine. There is a LOT more to analyze and react to. I am glad to have you along for this journey.