Mark Fisher on Russel Brand in 2013:
It is right that Brand, like any of us, should answer for his behaviour and the language that he uses. But such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance – although when Brand was questioned about sexism by Mehdi Hasan, he displayed exactly the kind of good-humoured humility that was entirely lacking in the stony faces of those who had judged him. “I don’t think I’m sexist, But I remember my grandmother, the loveliest person I‘ve ever known, but she was racist, but I don’t think she knew. I don’t know if I have some cultural hangover, I know that I have a great love of proletariat linguistics, like ‘darling’ and ‘bird’, so if women think I’m sexist they’re in a better position to judge than I am, so I’ll work on that.”
Russell Brand has been accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse over a seven-year period at the height of his fame.
The allegations between 2006 and 2013 were the result of a joint investigation by the Sunday Times, the Times and Channel 4 Dispatches. Brand denies the allegations.
Five alleged victims, four of them anonymous, were interviewed in the Dispatches documentary aired on Saturday night.
That first extract is from Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle, a 2013 essay denouncing “callout culture” and arguing for leftist solidarity with people like Russel Brand and Owen Jones. Looking at it ten years after, it’s clear how pointless this investment in either was. Jones is just the liberal media’s punching bag and enforcer of the outer limits of acceptable left wing opinions and Brand is a scumbag rapist who rapidly descended into conspiracy thinking.
2013 was also the year that the rape accusations against a high ranking member of the SWP, “Comrade Delta”, later known to be Martin Smith, came to light. This is never mentioned; instead we get paragraphs like this:
‘Left-wing’ Twitter can often be a miserable, dispiriting zone. Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism. The reason I didn’t speak out on any of these incidents, I’m ashamed to say, was fear. The bullies were in another part of the playground. I didn’t want to attract their attention to me.
Much of Exiting the Vampire’s Castle is like this. It reads like a generic “political correctness gone mad” rant, just from a lefist angle. If you don’t know the background against which it was published, you cannot know from reading it that it is indeed partially a response to those rape allegations against Smith, or the similar rumours about Brand. It’s thin gruel reading it from a 2023 perspective and it was thin gruel back then as well. It doesn’t engage with the criticism it is a response to. It never names the people it’s arguing against, nor makes concrete any of the criticism in the first place. It rejects it as wholly illegitimate instead and the people involved as (unwilling) tools of the ruling classes.
Exiting the Vampire’s Castle isn’t bad because it champions a man who a decade later is accused of multiple sexual assaults, but because it argues for a strain of reactionary leftism in which criticism is disallowed, especially if that criticism touches on issues of sexuality, race and gender. It aruges that as long as somebody is willing to make the right noises, their actions in their personal lives don’t matter. That’s why bringing it up in the context of the revelations about Russel Brand is justified, because it shows it does matter. You cannot argue for allowing a Brand a voice on the left without rejecting his victims and that’s what Fisher did, wittingly or unwittingly.