Warhammers and Sickles: Violence and Imagination Beyond the Culture War
- N. A. Dawn
- Sep 4, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 11, 2020
"Who's a very proud boy? Who's my very proudest-woudest of baby-waby booooys!? Yes! It's you, my darling! Yes, it is you! Mnaaaawww!"
A Preface for the Precipice
Welcome, comrades, to the beginning.
Allow me to introduce you to a four-part walkthrough of the current condition of cultural criticism, including all its aspirations and recurrent lamentations, as exemplified by the way we tend to engage with the popular miniature hobby, Warhammer 40'000 (i.e. 40k).
Before we roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty, I ask you to humour my two caveats:
1. A Disclaimer: I actually consider myself a fan of Warhammer 40’000, all things considered. So for all intents and purposes, this is a critique from within the community, and if you can believe it, from a place of love for the fiction, the game and the hobby. If you can’t believe that, maybe just read something else.
2. A Warning: I’m going to say the word ‘fascist’ a lot. I’ll qualify my usage, by detailing precisely what I mean. So if you think that’s an Argument ad Hitlerum, you can wake yourself up with a milkshake to the face.
Right then:
On your Marx... Get wrecked... Flow!
Good day, ma’am.
Yes, thanks so much: I’d like to order one post-scarcity ecotopia of the commons. Same! It's my favourite too.
I hate to be a pain, but could I just ensure that you're happy to swap out the corporations for cooperatives, and add a robust welfare state to support all members of society, including and especially the most vulnerable (including but not limited to the young, the elderly, the poor, immigrants and people with disabilities)? In fact, make that renewable energy-driven too – I’m allergic to the fossil fuel industry. You know, apparently we all are? Even polar bears.
I’ve gotta say, I love coming to the Communist Café. Truly, it’s a really special place for me. Nothing makes my day like a seething zero-waste infrastructure of solar, hydro- and wind-based technologies (and maaaaaybe nuclear too), degrowth economic policy and global federated network of autonomous, directly democratic communes which embrace the full spectrum of ethnicities, neurotypes, body types, gender expressions and sexual identities.
I simply adore forging harmonious collectives that allow individuals to pursue their own conceptions of the good life, while protecting those most susceptible to antisocial tendencies from one another and themselves, using predominantly noncoercive interventions, culminating in a holistic social order predicated on consent and consensus, unity and diversity, universal compassion, solidarity, community and free-to-play couch co-op video games with no online purchases or downloadable content. Ya know what I mean?
Wait, what do you mean none of this is actually on the menu yet? ‘A work in progress’? What’s that supposed to mean? Oh, that’s right. I totally forgot! I’m still in the 2020s! How silly of me! We’re still only two thousand years into cisheteropatriarchy, five-hundred years into white supremacist colonisation, two-hundred and fifty years into capitalism and four decades into neoliberal ecocide. Gosh, all that mass movement-building and intersectional class-struggle must have totally slipped my mind again.
Oh, shit... 2020? That means oligarchic police states, doesn't it? Jesus, and we still have to figure out what to do about the goddamn culture war!
Ah, for fuck’s sake! Get Foucault on the line from Academic Afterlife; I’ve got a bone to pick with him. And I don’t care if he’s still hiding from the guys (he assumes are) in the panopticon – the millennials back home have just discovered Tik Tok!
Warhammers and Sickles
Part Three: Throwing the Toys Out of the Cot (Monday, 14 September 2020)
Part Four: A Call to Arts for Anti-fascist Imaginologues (Friday, 19 September 2020)
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